Introduction Pinball add-ons, mods and toppers are increasingly popular ways to customise your machine, enhancing their appearance or adding features not included by the manufacturer. While static add-ons can sometimes work perfectly well, creating something which interacts with the gameplay takes things to a whole new level. If, for example, you have an animated toy [...]
Introduction In the first part of this article, Todd Andersen showed us how to create a programmable pinball ball detector which can power an add-on or topper so that it reacts when a ball is sensed in a particular location. This operates using an infrared (IR) module to sense the ball, an Arduino Uno microcontroller, and [...]
Introduction In his new two-part article (Part One, Part Two), Todd Andersen shows us how to build a microcontroller-based pinball ball detector to trigger add-ons such as toppers or enhanced lighting effects. His article focuses on building a system around an Arduino Uno microcontroller but, as he explains, other microcontrollers can be used instead. In [...]
In his recent two-part article about making your own infra-red testers, Todd Andersen introduced the use of cheap microcontrollers to replace the discrete components used in his earlier design. He showed how microcontrollers can be programmed to provide more flexibility and more inputs/outputs than using discrete components. This led to the idea of using microcontrollers [...]
First-person shooters owe a lot to DOOM, but you probably don’t need another lecture on how it revolutionized gaming, entertained millions of players around the world, and is still being modded to oblivion after well over two decades. When its level editor was distributed to fans in 1994, one company decided to cash in on [...]
Weapons are a vital inclusion for many combat-centric games. Some allow you to duke it out with guns, axes and special powers. Although, not all titles stick with a conventional arsenal made up of generic assault rifles or samey melee weapons… From exploding sheep to severed body parts, these are five more goofy video game [...]
Weapons are pretty important in video games. While most games let you fight battles with guns, blades and magic – which is a lot more fun than fixing your problems with dialogue – there are other titles that have a not-so-conventional arsenal. Even the most serious ones may have some goofy weapons of war shoved [...]