That seems like a lot of work. I suggest starting with pinball restoration. I bought and restored a Creature From the Black Lagoon [1] which took about six weeks work. There's a very active restoration community and lots of parts suppliers, and just getting inside a real machine will give you lots of experience if you want to make your own.
Pinball restoration is a hoot, just make sure you get someone to show you the ropes. Start with a flipper rebuild - don't attempt to do a play-field swap without someone who has done it before. There is a very active international hobby community over at [1] Pinside who will be eager to show to the ropes. There's plenty of mod options available, such as [2] replacement of all globes with LEDs, [3] replacement of the plasma DMD to full color LCD DMD's, [4] to playfield swaps to brand new reproduction playfields.
Very nice work. Now that you have a platform, you can start on the next mountain: making a fun game. =)
Here's an old presentation I did on designing the MONOPOLY pinball machine for Stern back in 2001. (so old I had to dig it out of the Internet Archive)
Thanks Louis :) I've put so many hours on NGG it's ridiculous. Childhood and current favorite, great full-package game at its best. Set it at a steep pitch with no outlane post and Fire Down Middle on. Full throttle, ignore the wall!
About that last line. It actually has a double meaning. I don't think Pat has ever discussed it.
First one was that Pat is a big NASCAR fan (we were trying to get that license even back in the Williams days). So that's an obvious one. Pedal down and turn left!
The second one was a dig at Williams management. Pat had tried to reason with them to not overproduce games and/or stuff them down the throats of distributors. Forcing weak games on customers and stuffing the pipe was bad for business and things had already taken a serious turn for the worse business-wise (and we were still a full 2 years before shutdown).
IIRC, the conversation with management was "if you don't slow down we're gonna hit the wall" and the reply was "f* it, full throttle!" This is why Pat hid that text in the back loop where nobody would really see it.
So, flippers are more complicated than I thought; they have a microswitch and two coils in the solenoid for quick impulse response with low holding current. That's fascinating!
Also, flipper EOS switches are leaf switches, not microswitches.
Through the early 90s the flipper button switches were also leaf switches. In the early 90s some time after the introduction of the Fliptronics system by Williams/Bally, they switched to using a plastic opto-interrupter and U-shaped opto(s) rather than a leaf switch.
Games with upper flippers often used ganged leaf switches and later dual optos to allow independent "staged" control of lower and upper flippers on the same side of the machine. That allows you to press the flipper button in half way to engage only the lower flipper, and then all the way to also engage the upper flipper(s).
Flipper solenoids are way overloaded for the first 100ms or so. To be strong enough to kick steel balls around, they have to be. So you need some way to turn the current down after the initial kick. Today this usually involves turning down the duty cycle for the coil power after the first 100ms or so. Older setups with dual coils and switches are mostly for repair work.
There are lots of good solenoid driver ICs around, but they're mostly sized for automotive applications. Pinball flippers typically need 5A at 50V, which is a lot to ask of an IC but no problem with an external power MOSFET. There are pinball boards for this. (http://www.allteksystems.com/products-mpu-replacements.html#...) No need to use electromechanical relays and put up with burned contacts any more.
(I'm interested in this problem because I restore old Teletype machines, which have similar electromagnet drive problems. The classical solutions are huge and inefficient by modern standards.)
The recent pinball machine 'Wizard of Oz' by Jersey Jack under the hood runs Ubuntu and the recovery image is available at http://www.jerseyjackpinball.com/game-specific-downloads/ and it works quite well under VMware. If ever wanted dig deeper software wise into what goes into a modern pinball machine this is the place to start. Boot the image with 'init=/bin/bash' and your in.
[1]http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=588