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Complete Making my own dream theme

Long day been working on this since about 9am.

Glad to have the cabinet done and the playfield harness is 80% on.

Need to sort out some of the coils and wire routes.

PXL_20231118_221741560.jpg
 
Really good Scott, I can't claim to know the theme but it really makes me want to do a retheme actually.
 
These posts were truly tarnished.


Left is unpolished, right side is 'under way' polished.

PXL_20231122_150434078.jpg

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Ramps are still being made in Australia so I'll finish up what I can and leave it for now.
 
Just got news that the ramps are nearly done. For those not in the know the plastic ramps are notorious for breaking.

The ramps on this game when I got it were ropey at best.

To make matters worse no one makes the ramps currently.

So I enlisted the help of David in Australia. He's known for creating custom wire forms for games such as DE JP or Addams Family.

I shipped him off my old ramps.

The ramps have been in design phase for a few months.
The nutter decided to go one step further later in the process and get his own JM just to ensure everything lines up!

Here's an early peek.

View attachment 1000047310.mp4
 
My ramps are stuck in Adalade airport.

So I've decided to proceed with building 'mods' (not sure if it counts as a mod if i'm building the theme and decided on what goes in it lol) for the game.

First up is Silverhands car.

Hotwheels did a limited run back in 2022 so I had to buy from a scalper, cough I mean collector. Was funny to see all the care and attention packing the box just to have me rip open the box and begin drilling into the car 🤣.

Unmodded Car.jpg

Opening the car up was pretty easy, drill through the rivets underneath channel some pico LED's (12v) and repurpose a lamp that was used on JM to light up the car lights.

Job done.

Modded Cart.jpg
 
My ramps are stuck in Adalade airport.

So I've decided to proceed with building 'mods' (not sure if it counts as a mod if i'm building the theme and decided on what goes in it lol) for the game.

First up is Silverhands car.

Hotwheels did a limited run back in 2022 so I had to buy from a scalper, cough I mean collector. Was funny to see all the care and attention packing the box just to have me rip open the box and begin drilling into the car 🤣.

View attachment 239321

Opening the car up was pretty easy, drill through the rivets underneath channel some pico LED's (12v) and repurpose a lamp that was used on JM to light up the car lights.

Job done.

View attachment 239320
Nice mod Scott. 42 to go lol
 
That's very impressive, was the playfield all hand drawn (computer)? As in the main character was it redrawn or taken from existing artwork? More curious than anything 😄 I can see serious money went into this, 😔 it's making me curious about the game, ps5 or Xbox x version that's the question...🤔 (Gave up on pc gaming 20 years ago got sick of having to buy a new graphics card every time a game came out although to be honest that's probably now changed)
 
That's very impressive, was the playfield all hand drawn (computer)? As in the main character was it redrawn or taken from existing artwork? More curious than anything 😄 I can see serious money went into this, 😔 it's making me curious about the game, ps5 or Xbox x version that's the question...🤔 (Gave up on pc gaming 20 years ago got sick of having to buy a new graphics card every time a game came out although to be honest that's probably now changed)
Hey,

So Holly has a 27" Wacom Tablet. She pulls inspiration from in game art and assets supplied by CD Projeck Red (the game designers). She learnt alot of drawing through a Wacom from personal training from Aaron Blaize (ex Disney 2D Artist/Director). Drag and drop wouldn't really work here as we're working in the confines of the existing playfield design.

Some drawings from JM I asked to remain such as the lady throwing the Ninja star as its a nod to the original design, whilst other elements have been built to fit around the world building. The top left Arasaka for instance is a pivotal point in the game so I wanted that represented somewhere.

The game has had an effective re-release quite recently, when the time is right i'll present this all to CD Projeck Red, hopefully they like the results.

I'd get it on PS5 over Xbox.

Some part of the struggle for Holly was realising what's in my head to end up on the playfield. I have great idea's but translating them all to paper with my stick diagrams is a nightmare. You should have seen my early drawings for my Creech topper ><
 
So I'm still waiting on the ramps.There stuck in some customs hell at the moment.

I originally was hitting a bit of brick wall with my DMD animations. No one really has tried to do it the way I'm doing it. Most people would either use a P-ROC or FAST Pinball and build the Code, Animations, Call outs and Music from scratch.

For me I wanted to re-use the existing code as there's nothing wrong with it.

Call outs and Music can be easily handled through Pinsound and I have those already completed.

That left the animations.

Pinball Browser exists for Stern machines but unfourtunately there's no progress on a WPC variant.

Someone has made a program that lifts images out of the ROM code, but has no editor to amend or input new frames. This is known as WPC Edit.

This left me with Pin2DMD editor. There's very little in the way of knowledge transfer on how to get the most out of Pin2DMD Editor. Its usually designed to act as a colour editor so you can take standard DMD animation and convert it into colour.

It does however have the ability to 'replace scene's' this effectively allows me to replace a scene with my own when a keyframe is displayed in the hash of the code.

After a lot of experimentation I finally got myself into a position where I had built out the title and some other key animation.

However it wasn't loaded into my Pin2DMD. After talking to @slippifishi it dawned on me that my Firmware on the Pin2DMD was heavily out of date (3.5 when the latest firmware is 4.25).

Once I finally knew my animations would work I got to work on some scene's. My wife keeps pulling faces at my artistic skills but at the same time she refuses to draw them soooo...


View attachment PXL_20231211_130627113.mp4


View attachment PXL_20231211_105843962.mp4

I won't spoil the rest. I'll save them for the final reveal.
 
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