How many hours went into your cabinet ?

[Fildron]

I've never built one before so I wondered about this from a time management point of view.

How many hours did you spend on planning, construction, adjustment, etc. ?
I'm also curious about work in progress - in that case just append a 'so far' to the question.

Thanks for your replies.

[insx]

I'm going to throw out a figure of 20 hours for my mini cabinet but I really didn't document it. That is not counting the hours that I have messed around trying to get Visual Pinball to run smoothly since I upgraded it

[Fildron]

Thanks for the info

20 hours is really fast. I'm going to need much more than that. There are some plans and drawings on the internet for cabinets but I'm going to make my own (due to my lack of craftsmanship. If it doesn't turn out exactly as on the paper I have an excuse ).

I'm also not going to install VP. Too much fiddling around. They made some unfortunate decisions in regard to technology used.
It's hard to get it woring at all - let alone smooth - and that's true for all software using this technology.
This will most likely be a dedicated Pro Pinball cabinet.

[insx]

My VP experience has been a bit tortured. Better hardware is actually working much worse in VP, it all seems a bit random. I've managed to get it quite playable but not great. There is light at the end of the tunnel though as it looks like it will get updated soon to use DX9.

Pro Pinball with proper cabinet support ought to be a thing of beauty.

[Pinball999]

Much less than waiting for the alpha version..
(sorry, I had too..)

[Fildron]

Hmm it appears I only clicked on preview and forgot to submit.

I've only tried VP briefly because on neither machine it would run at all.There are other issues that prevent me from doing a serious effort to get VP up an running.
But I hope you'll get your setup working smoothly

[insx]

Now that I know what I'm doing, I can probably get a VP installation working within 1 hour with one or two tables. The real annoyance with VP is that it seems to be completely random whether it will run smoothly or not on a particular setup. My cabinet is crying out for Timeshock!

[Fildron]

There are some really nice recreations of real pinball games available for VP. Since I could never play a game on VP I'm not sure if the user inventions are worth the effort of getting VP up and running.

The legal aspect is more of a show stopper than anything else. I have no idea where I could legally get my hands on a ROM for one of those recreated games, for example, appart from buying a used machine - and then I would still not know for sure if I could download that ROM and use it in a simulaton. My web search didn't reveal anything usefull. The cost of the ROM licence would probably be very pricey, too.

[cottonm4]

[quote="Fildron"]There are some really nice recreations of real pinball games available for VP. Since I could never play a game on VP I'm not sure if the user inventions are worth the effort of getting VP up and running.

The legal aspect is more of a show stopper than anything else. I have no idea where I could legally get my hands on a ROM for one of those recreated games, for example, appart from buying a used machine - and then I would still not know for sure if I could download that ROM and use it in a simulaton. My web search didn't reveal anything usefull. The cost of the ROM licence would probably be very pricey, too.[/quote]


All the ROMs needed to play any recreation on VP are available at the VP Forums website. The VP tables and the ROMs are free to use. You just can't sell them.


I probably have about 80 hours in building my mini-cab. I have some minor work left to do on the cabinet and I am going to paint it a different color.

I had a bit of a learning curve to getting going in VP and I still don't know very much and get help from other members when I need it. If you are going to build mini-cab for Pro Pinball, you might as well set it up for VP, too. There are some nice tables there that are real fun to play.

[Fildron]