i just cant wait to see a pinball finally made in Australia
well done guys on all the hard work
how long has it taken so far ? and this is all from nothing right ?
Thought I should answer this in the latest official thread, so as not to detract from the side art discussion.
Work in earnest can be dated back to 24 March 2007, which was the day the web site went on line. Up to that point the ideas had been discussed by nug and I, but to date nug had not been able to gain much interest from RGP, where the only real gathering of pinheads existed (that is until AP came on line!).
Nug had come across a driver board design on a web site, intended to be used with pinmame. The idea behind the board was that it could be used with a PC to run the pinmame version of an existing game, and then drive a real cabinet in circumstances where the CPU for that particular game was no longer available. I suspect things like Pascal Jannin's Gottlieb CPU's dried up any potential demand for the product, and it disappeared. While nug could recreate a similar board, or design one from scratch, being able to secure one "off the shelf" would save a major amount of time in the early stages. But his emails to the designers went unanswered.
I suggested to nug that I believed I could garner some interest, and maybe get the designers of that board to contact us, so I posted this to RGP -
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.pinball/browse_thread/thread/853870abe6b34134/63b44a35fad367d1?q=aussies+race+to+produce&lnk=ol&#You can see from the level of the responses that we got the interest! Out of that thread came:
- the web site made for us;
- parts;
- most importantly - emails from the guys who designed the boards, and shortly after, the last two of the proto boards.
The "Contributors" area highlights some of what was given to us.
http://www.users.on.net/~spaners/Coconut%20Island/contrib.htmlNow, from that March 2007 date it seems that it's almost two years. But you need to bear in mind that not only was a game being built, the whole basis for the system to drive the game - hardware, software and the mechanics themselves were all being built and tested as the game was developed. Even learning to paint a playfield and apply clear is a new endeavor full of learning, so over a year of that time should be allocated to "R&D" and will not need to be repeated. Also bear in mind nug built a new house and established the gardens etc all during the same period, and he does have a full time job too!
The next game, working as we do for the fun of it as a hobby, will probably take six months. Nothing needs to be invented this time, it's just a matter of building the physical side, writing the game specific code, and nailing it all together!
