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Pinball 2000 Complete Cabinet $3999 Grand Opening Special


shakenbake

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Next set of cab art!!!!

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Love the flaming pinballs! Though I personally think the astronaut & asteroids an all look a little photoshopped together with the drop shadow. Takes away from the professional look a bit in my opinion.

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Hehe, well, I always have my opinion ready :D

Another thing, the astronaut and asteroids have a cutout style, whilst the rest does not, which makes it a bit inconsistent.

On the zombie theme I have no comments other than that it looks awesome.

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Thanks Thk. Art is subject to interpretation so no worries, to each his own. I welcome all comments and appreciate the forum members take on my design concepts.

With GP I was going for an 80's retro feel. I'm really diggin the layout and love the logo treatment. These are a labor of love so I appreciate the comments and know it's not an easy task to design for the masses.

Zombies was fun as well but I understand my take on Zombie world might not be to everyone's tastes. I try to research best I can and make something everyone can enjoy.

I just love seeing these ideas skinned and ready for primetime. VPcabs is really making some killer cabs - great gig, thanks Brad!!

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  • 1 month later...

Hi, I'm a happy customer's of VPcabs and I wanted to relay my experiences. I bought a P2k style cab during the grand opening promo (which is why I'm resurrecting this thread). I was planning to build my own, but given the quality of the design and build from shakenbake's projects presented here and the great grand opening price, I went ahead and took the plunge. Turns out because of illness in my family that I didn't have a lot of spare time to work on a project of my own. I know I would still be very early in the build at this point. More likely the project would be at a standstill never to be completed. Instead I'm playing pinball!

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Arrival day!

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Production number 3

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Installing legs.

The machine came with plastic leg protectors and a wireless keyboard and mouse. Very convenient. The cabinet comes from mameman. Although the design is based on the Bally/Williams Pinball 2000 the lower cabinet is a standard Bally/Williams length and width, that is, a little longer than the original Pinball 2000 cabinet. It seems huge in a good way. It's put together very well. Survived shipping ok. No Ikea-like looseness or creaking.

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I've enjoyed the machine for several weeks now. Here, I've wired the coin door lights for power, and I installed coin mechs. The coin switches were already wired and working correctly on arrival. A 5 LED light bar came installed. It is mounted in the head between the playfield and the 3rd display monitor so that you get the lightshow directly as well as reflected on the playfield. I have the basic configuration similar to what is offered at VPcab.com; the LEDs are not ROM controlled but use a sound sensitive LED controller:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sound-Sensitive-Music-IR-Controller-12V-for-LED-RGB-Strip-Light-Remote10A-120W-/110961124219

In the pictures, I just have the LED rotating through seven colors, but the unit has a program that can flash the set of LEDs random colors in response to sound. It's a good compromise, but I will be ordering an LEDWiz very soon.

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The playfield monitor is a Westinghouse EW39T6MZ 1080p backlit LED installed with the case still on. The bezel is thin and black and disappears into the playfield area. It's a budget TV, but it is working well for this application. The computer and TV are wired so that all monitors power up or power down if the PC is powered on or shutdown. All this happens through a single switch located under the cabinet.

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The backglass screen is an AOC E2460SWD 24" 1080p backlit LED.

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The 3rd display monitor (DMD) is an Acer G206HL 20" backlit LED installed in the head. The image is flipped and projected down on the playfield. Here, I've maximized the display field using VPinMAME registry keys and tweaked the brightness settings to enhance contrast. The image is larger than a standard DMD, and you can use any color you want.

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Here, I'm using B2S screenres.txt to display the Jackpot lights from Earthshaker using the 3rd monitor.

For analog nudging and button inputs, the machine uses a UHID-G. The machine arrived with the inputs set and the accelerometer already calibrated. The unit auto-calibrates on boot-up so one should not have to use Windows calibration or the U-HID configuration software. It's just a matter then of setting gains and deadzone in VP. I simply did some nudging on a zero slope table using the VP default keys and examined the behavior on the pinball. Then I adjusted the VP analog settings so that I could match the behavior with analog nudging. Finally, I fine tuned on some familiar tables until the nudging behavior felt realistic to me.

That said, I do lose calibration during sessions sometimes leading to weird ball behavior. Rebooting corrects it but it is annoying. If I have guests I would probably turn off analog nudging. I'm not convinced that this is strictly a hardware issue as losing the nudging calibration seems to happen consistently with certain tables.

The sound system uses a Lepai 2.1 mini amp matched with Lanzar speakers. It is true that the subwoofer crossover on the amp simply doesn't work. That's an issue with the amp. However, the machine arrived with volume maxed out. I live in a pier-and-beam house and TAF Showtime multi-ball makes the floors shake. And the resonances in RS makes me question if I'm going to gain much by adding force feedback over just using the speaker system. So the sound system will definitely get your attention. I intend on doing some EQ calibration to try to tweak the sound output, and I may look into adding an inline passive crossover for the subwoofer.

The PC itself is plenty powerful. I've experienced no stuttering or dropped frames even on five ball multi-ball on MB, Tommy, AFM, and so on.

Brad (shakenbake) was responsive and easy to work with. He communicated with me after hours and helped take my order when I was having trouble with Paypal. He's usually more responsive on the phone than by email. I tend to use email. At one point when I did call and I left a message, he responded within a few minutes even though he was working a pinball show. There was a mistake in my order (the machine arrived with the wrong color T-molding), but Brad shipped out some chrome T-molding when he had some in stock.

So, it was a good experience all around. I know that I will be enjoying the machine for many years.

I'm sure that by now the promo is long gone, but given that VPcabs has free shipping for finished machines now, getting a basic p2k style cabinet isn't a whole lot more than what I paid. Everyone should build their own. That way you get exactly what you want. But if you are like me, and have perhaps a little more money than time, having a machine built for you is a great service. I've got a lot going on at home at the moment, and I wouldn't be able to make any progress on my own project. Now I have a machine that's pretty close to what I wanted. I can enjoy it now, and install a few toys as I find some time to do it. Oh, and come up with some artwork.

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