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In the beginning…

 Yep, I’ve started down the rabbit hole.  Actually, I’m so far down I can no longer see daylight.  What am I talking about?  Pinball.  The virtual kind.  

About 4 months ago, while randomly perusing YouTube, I came across a video about pinball.  Visions of my teenage years plunking quarter after quarter into Hi-Speed, Pinbot, and the like popped into my head.  Of course my next thought was wouldn’t it be nice to have a real pinball machine in my house that I could play anytime I want?  As a 50-something with grown kids and a modicum of disposable income, why not?

Let me count the ways why not:  How expensive is it really (VERY)?  Would it be worth the maintenance frustrations (NOPE)?  Where would the wife let me put it (basement)?  Also, I know myself pretty well.  I’d get bored with one machine after a while and it would wind up gathering dust.

So, I watched a few more videos and came across virtual pinball.  I was hooked.  The technology has advanced to the point where the realism is amazing.  I could build my own as a project and be way more vested in the machine.  Potentially hundreds of tables.  And cheaper, to boot.  Not cheap, but cheaper.

Off I went doing research.  LOTS of research.  For 4 months.  A pincab (as a virtual pinball cabinet is known) is not a small weekend project.  It takes a lot of time and effort.  There’s woodworking, software installs and tweaking, electrical wiring work, and planning, planning, planning.  Oh, and fixing things that inevitably go wrong the first time.

At the beginning of November, I made the decision.  Go for it!  A few important decisions needed to be made first:  What size and specification for the playfield and backglass?  This drives pretty much everything.  And how will I build the physical cabinet?

Those decisions, and more, in the next episode of… The Pincab Files. Well, the next blog post anyway.

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