My family was spending the day at the Electromagnetic Pinball Museum in Pawtucket, RI, and stumbled across an Atari Pinball Machine. Yes, Atari made pinball machines for a brief, unsuccessful spell. Atari launched the career of the most prolific pinball game designer, Steve Ritchie. Steve is still designing pinball machines 50 years later, with his most recent game, Sonic the Hedgehog from Jersey Jack Pinball. One of the people working there took me around and showed me all of the things that have been donated to the museum… just rooms and rooms of arcade machines, CRTs, and pinball parts. The Superman pinball machine was not in great shape, but looking at the classic art got me thinking about my yesteryear and sparked an idea… what if I turned it into some wall art for my game room? The guys said if I made a donation, the pinball playfield for Atari Superman is mine. That night I started my research. I actually didn’t find too much detail on Atari pinball machines, so I posted on the pinball forums and quickly got connected to people who knew something about it. The main thing was figuring out how far I needed to go to give this a second life, and I am glad that I didn’t know how much work it was going to be. I just took little steps, learned, shared, engaged with lots of new people, and plodded along. It took a month, but George and I got it done.
The results are gorgeous! I learned a lot and will share more of the detail when I get time. You can follow the live build here: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/atari-superman-playfield-wall-art
Of course, it is connected to the CheerLights project. This was going to happen 100% of the time when ever I connected 150 LEDs to something. I used WS2811 bullet-style LEDs that you can control one at a time. They fit perfectly in the 12.5mm general illumination holes in the playfield. I used a WLED controller and a 3A power supply to control the colors, animations, and synchronization with the CheerLights MQTT server.
The insert near the flippers stays in sync with the latest CheerLights color while the rest of the inserts can have their own color or visual effects.
Out of the box, the best animation effect was Stream 2. This very much looks like an attract mode on a pinball machine.
