A good question to ask is why would I, someone with no electronics experience, try to build something as maddening as a pinball machine? In short, sheer boredom. To give you a little context, I had recently graduated from university as a mechanical engineer. I was stuck in a IT job with no work to do despite persistent begging on my part. No, it's not the ideal job just twiddling your thumbs all day and attempting to memorize the entirety of Wikipedia and getting paid for it. It is incredibly stressful and degrading. You get stressed out from being expected to be busy by others yet you have nothing to do. Well, at least you have the perception of that expectation. Also, you feel worthless because you accomplish nothing. I'd rather be drowning in work than experience that again. And I'm in the military so I could not just quit my job and I was highly visible in the workplace. But, that's all in the past! I now have a fantastic new mechanical engineering job that is extremely interesting.
Ok, back to pinball madness! Essentially what happened was that I became ever more bored at exploring the restricted interwebs at work. Youtube, for instance, was a criminally blocked by the web filter. So I turned to the Microsoft Space Cadet Pinball game that came with Windows. Sick and tired of solitare and minesweeper since Windows 95, possibly 3.1 (can't remember), this was my only hope to escape from boredom. I always enjoyed playing pinball in the arcades, mainly because it was the best bang for the buck, but alas, none of my old millenia era pinball skills did not translate to the PC. Frustrations from sewering out too many times and the looming fear of sheer boredom once again slipped me away into a moment of madness. And thus, I decided to make my own pinball machine.
Ok, back to pinball madness! Essentially what happened was that I became ever more bored at exploring the restricted interwebs at work. Youtube, for instance, was a criminally blocked by the web filter. So I turned to the Microsoft Space Cadet Pinball game that came with Windows. Sick and tired of solitare and minesweeper since Windows 95, possibly 3.1 (can't remember), this was my only hope to escape from boredom. I always enjoyed playing pinball in the arcades, mainly because it was the best bang for the buck, but alas, none of my old millenia era pinball skills did not translate to the PC. Frustrations from sewering out too many times and the looming fear of sheer boredom once again slipped me away into a moment of madness. And thus, I decided to make my own pinball machine.
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