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VPcabs Mini Pin prototype first glimpse


shakenbake

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UPDATE:

The Mini is now in full production we have MANY units in stock and ready to ship. Order at VPcabs.com

Key Features:

29" Toshiba LED TV

23" Acer Backglass Monitor

10" DMD

Intel Unlocked i3

GTX 650ti playfield video card

GT 210 backglass & DMD video card

128GB Samsung SSD

4GB RAM

Uhid-G nudge board

Working coin door

Black powder coated hardware

Stern Legs included

Some things may change along the way but VP and FP play fantastic on the current setup.

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  • 3 months later...

I took delivery of one of these VPCab Minis a couple weeks ago. I haven't been able to stop playing with it!

The build quality is excellent. Everything is clean and professionally put together. Mine came with a very tasteful, game-neutral "VPCabs" artwork as seen on the vpcabs site, which I like a lot! The size of the mini is absolutely terrific for home use. I have a real Family Guy pinball. As much as I love it, a full size pin is REALLY large when you bring it into a residence! The VPCab Mini is still plenty big to get an immersive playing experience without being excessive. The whole system powers up and down easily from a button where you'd expect to find it underneath the unit. There are some really nice touches - the buttons in front all light up. The included SSD / Win7 OS install boots up and is ready to go at lightning speed. It has a real, working coin door, and inside is a female USB cable attachment which makes it easy to attach a keyboard or other device in a pinch.

It's a 3-monitor system, driven from two video cards (GeForce GTX 650ti & GeForce 210). The backglass and playfield displays are not de-cased. The playfield TV just slides into place from the rear. The backglass has a slight reveal to the monitor's built-in bezel, which looks good.

The displays themselves are a mixed bag, but they work well enough. The backglass display is perfection. It's a small high resolution 1080p display that pulls off the look of backlit artwork very convincingly. The DMD display is a great size, but it has a very "bright" black, which gives it a bit of a washed-out appearance, but it works for displaying scores. The Toshiba playfield monitor is a bright colorful display with deep blacks. It looks more like a plasma TV than a LCD, which is fantastic for the "light shows" that you get from pinball tables. It took some adjustment out of the box, but I'm reasonably happy with it now. The bummer here is that it's 720p (1366x768). I did find that feeding it a 1080p signal instead of its native 1366x768 resolution makes an incredible improvement with Visual Pinball tables.

I opted to pay extra for the same sound system used in Brad's larger cabs. I think this was well worth the investment. The subwoofer is powerful enough to shake the cab, giving it some "kick" which for me is critical since I don't plan to go down the mechanical feedback route. The speakers in the backglass are pretty good too. They reproduce bells and knocker sounds very clearly and realistically. Overall I'm extremely pleased. System is very stable, friends and family beat up on it all thanksgiving and it never skipped a beat. I always wanted to build a cab, but knew I'd never have time, and don't really have the skills for it. I would never have been able to build anything close to this in quality.

My only real wishes are more buttons. Magna-saves and some sort of method to change the volume (map to Windows volume keys). I can probably add these on myself at some point.

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I added magna-saves to it yesterday. Because the monitor is immediately behind the left and right flipper buttons, they had to be positioned lower than the flipper buttons, but it actually feels pretty ergonomic with the angle that your hands are at when playing. It's definitely great being able to skip to the next letter when flipping through HyperPin. :)

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Sorry I'm late to the party, what a great machine!! Love the cab and the graphics aren't bad either ;) The planet pin does really give it a modern feel with a little bit of 70's whimsy!! Thanks for the work Brad. Your machines are top notch professional quality. Each time your tackle another project something special comes out of the work. Really impressive, keep that going. All the best!!

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