The step-by-step, mechanical logic of old pinball machines

What people said

brewdad · 2024-01 · Recommendation

I've been watching his videos on a 1970s pinball machine. It goes horribly in-depth (in a good way). Fascinating how much complexity could be managed with the simplest of interfaces. [LINK] [VIDEO]

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matheusmoreira · 2025-05 · Reference

I think it's pretty charming. Games have so much abstraction these days it feels like there's no way to truly understand what it is they're even doing. One can spend months agonizing over the true nature of things and how ideas and concepts relate to each other and eventually distill it all into some object oriented organization that implements not just your game but all possible games. One can also just cycle the game's state machine in a big function, haha switch statement go brrr. Reminds me of the old NES games which would statically allocate memory for game objects, very much in the "structure of arrays" style, they too had game logic just like that. Also reminds me of old electromechanical pinball machines. You can literally see the machine cycle. [LINK] [VIDEO]

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wgrover · 2024-10 · Reference

Yup - the first few minutes of one of Technology Connections' videos on electromechanical pinball machines shows this mechanism in action: [VIDEO]

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