Looking For Some Developers To Write a Pinball 200 Emulator

I am apart of a development team forming to write an open-source Pinball 2000 emulator. Pinball 2000 was a pinball system that combined a commercial PC and a arcade monitor with a regular pinball machine to create a holographic effect on top of the machine.

Everything in the game was pretty reliable other than the PC itself. The computer was low end and out of date at the time of release. It was a Cyrix Media GX CPU based computer and dependent specifically on the CX5520 bridge. The software depends on the integrated graphics in the Media GX CPU to operate.

The game code was not the usual i386 based game. It used what was called the PRISM card. It was a proprietary piece of hardware that held the game code, a battery to hold audits, and a few other minor things. The PRISM card was read as a video card to the PC, giving the software a very low-level access to the computer to take over. The ROMS on the card held the entire boot process for the game. The system the game was built on top of was XINA, a branch of XINU.

All control from the PC goes to a driver board that is in the cabinet through a parallel port. There has already been code written prior to now to control the power driver board from a linux PC. I have the link I can PM to anyone interested, but I can't post it because of my low post count.

The current plan is to write a emulator that can run on linux. The first part of the project would most likely be to get the CX5520 bridge emulated. Then the PRISM card would have to handled, but several subsystems can be branched off of that. The first system would be to handle getting the actual game code running. Beyond that, the sound controller is a custom chip known as DCS2. This hardware will have to be emulated, but is the same chip in the Midway Zues hardware that is already emulated in MAME. Lastly, the PRISM card handles the bookkeeping, audits, settings, etc and that will need to be handled. After we can get the PRISM card emulated and running, the final step will be to get the communication between the emulator and the parallel port.

Video display originally was at a CGA size, but would need to be scaled up to fit on modern day display. My understanding is that the graphics are already of at least VGA quality, but scaled down on the original hardware.


Anyone interested in the project?