/vr/ - Retro Games

Those hologram effect games that don't really translate to a 2D computer well like Time Traveler.

Virtually all light gun games can be emulated but the experience is very poor and makes the games feel aged much more than they probably should be without an actual light gun accessory.

I know up until recently rogue squadron was unplayable on most 64 emulators, same with Goemon.

Also, the Atari Jaguar has no good emulators, so most of the gems on the console are only playable on hardware.

Laser disc and even film games can be digitized and the DAPHNE project has done this with many of the traditional laserdisc games. There was a guy that was supposedly dumping the laseractive library including the roms but that hasn't been in my radar in years, I don't know if there's been any progress.

"Discrete circuit boards" are what games have instead of ROMs. Games like that have to be recreated more or less from scratch. and since they're often using black magic with their CRTs you can't really "emulate" them per se.

Still other electromechanical games use such novel mechanisms that they would require their mechanical elements to be 3D modeled and the entire machine to be recreated virtually. Maybe this is something that people will do someday but not today

>Show me your power level on this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1WSYdn1b8I

>>6414242
My power of being unable to do things is very low. If "you can't emulate" means "(You) can't playin retroarch" or if hardware emulation doesn't exist in your "reality" then yes, there's a buttload of stuff. If you mean can't be emulated for science based reasons, not so much.

>>6414272
Not true, Phoenix plays Atari Jaguar games pretty much flawlessly
Now the Jaguar CD, that's unemulated as far as I know

>>6414242
Isn't OP picture one of those discrete games?

The fact that they could put an entire game on hardware is kinda nuts.
It would be like if they implemented unity onto an ASIC or something.

>>6414242
Those discrete games don't have CPU or ROM chips, so there's nothing to dump because it was all circuit to circuit; the entire board was the game, like Pong.

>>6414912
>Isn't OP picture one of those discrete games?
Not OP, but yeah, you can't emulate Fonz.

A fun thing I like to do is play the equivalent to the games that are practically off-limits for 99% of people, like Space War which was originally Spacewar! on a PDP-1 supercomputer at MIT (for 1962).

>>6414864
Try to emulate arcade games from 1974 and before, I dare ya.

>>6415089
you can emulate spacewar though
PDP-1 is piss

>>6415102
>you can emulate spacewar though
How?

>>6415108
https://spacewar.oversigma.com/

>>6415110
Wow, that's as original as one can get without actually getting to a real PDP-1. Thanks. The game would be fun with two players, but sharing the same keyboard? Yikes.

>>6415098
they are so simple you can just recreate them to be indistinguishable from the originals

>>6415132
lol sure I'll just build myself a recreation of Pong;et al when I want to play them.

>>6414242
Does anyone know if Zaku for Atari Lynx works on MAME of all things? I've read thing that lead to me believe that it's true, but I would like some confirmation before I download another version of MAME.

>>6414242
>I also remember some arcade shmup (Raiden?) being impossible to dump properly because some of the sprites were encrypted.
It was Raiden II and it's been fully cracked, thank God.
Does anyone know if Fireshark is working with sound on MAME now?

>>6414274
The LD digitizer is called the Domesday Duplicator

>>6414274
Why is this ban evader still here?
>>6415098
The only arcade game back then was Pong.
>>6415227
Neck yourself namefag.

>>6415260
>The only arcade game back then was Pong.
Not sure if trolling.

>>6415127
>The game would be fun with two players, but sharing the same keyboard? Yikes.
You can plug in two keyboards and do it that way. I've done that a few times for 2 player flash games and stuff back in the day.

>>6415297
He's clearly trolling. He doesn't even try to be subtle about it anymore. The lack of effort is more insulting than the content desu.

>>6415098
Oh damn! Double dog dared by a zoomer. I suppose I should be shaking in my boots.
Back when you were still in your dads ball sack Pong was supported by MAME. It was removed because someone felt it wasn't possible to emulate it accurately enough on PC hardware. Emulating it on other hardware isn't a problem. MiSTer emulates the digital logic perfectly and simulates the analog components with a very high degree of accuracy. If it had an FGAA it could emulate the entire board perfectly. And a below average toaster could do what you call emulation easily and more accurately than you could measure so it's all irrelevant unless you actually know what any of that means.

>>6415139
Just delete the ROM within 24 hours and download it again brah

it's not quite /vr/ yet but I fucking want to play panzer dragoon orta but can't because nobody gives a shit about OG xbox emulation

>>6415401
>It was removed because someone felt it wasn't possible to emulate it accurately
You can't fucking emulate a non-existent CPU, so they made the right decision, meathead. Not a zoomer either, you Millennial.
I suppose you want MAME to emulate gumball machines as well.

I mean Pong is one of those games that is literally a exercise for beginner programmers.
It can't be that insane to reverse engineer the logic and implement said logic perfectly and completely in a computer program.

>>6415494
Of course you can simulate an electronic circuit.

>>6415547
Ugh yeah, but take Computer Space for instance...the board itself has the outlines for the ships..so you'd need to replicate a CS cab from scratch to achieve the desired exact effect, along with the exact same resistors and capacitors which change the values.
I know what I'm talking about, man.

>>6415537
You would need to literally recreate it, that is, build your own because everyone on the board affects gameplay. If you didn't build it to specs, then you didn't build it. However, the game could be simulated because it cannot be emulated, to answer your sort of question.

>>6415537
You would need to literally recreate it, that is, build your own because everything on the board affects gameplay*. If you didn't build it to specs, then you didn't build it. However, the game could be simulated because it cannot be emulated, to answer your sort of question.
*I've listened well from the experts who own the games.

>>6415537
It's not emulation if it's not a computer program in the first place

>>6414242
there actually is an emulator for these discrete logic games

>>6415603
wrong, the word emulation isn't specific to computer programs

>>6415629
>emulator
>or these discrete logic games
That's not how things work. Those are recreations and not to be confused with simulations.

>>6414274
That video is so fucking cool, I’ve never seen an arcade game that relied on a parlor trick like that before. I was so surprised at first to be seeing a 3D game from 1976, and then I was even more surprised when he walked behind it. Hopefully I’ll get to play one day, just to see if the gameplay is as cool as the illusion, but probably not unless I go to some gigantic arcade in japan or something.

>>6414274
Thank you for posting that because I saw it a while back and never forgot it. I miss elecrtomechanical games so much.

>>6415642
they're not recreations, look it up, it's actually pretty nuts, it simulates the circuits themselves

https://sourceforge.net/p/dice/code/ci/master/tree/games/pong.cpp
check it out, the pong code is just defining the circuit layout!

>>6415732
Ohhhh

>>6415658
>but probably not unless I go to some gigantic arcade in japan or something.
You'll always have Dawn of the Dead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88KtiAjyu10

>>6415494
Not a zoomer yet you parrot zoomer bullshit? You're not fooling anyone.

>>6415553
>Ugh yeah, but take the 2600 for instance...the board itself has RF...so you'd need to replicate an RF TV from scratch to achieve the desired exact effect

>>6415561
>*I've listened well from the experts who own the games.
lol

>>6415603
>Floppy and CD drives are computer programs
>That's how how floppy and optical drive emulators are possible
zoom

>>6416896
It's extremely obvious that you are projecting all those zoomerisms, anon, and I'm embarrassed for you.

>>6414254
I've had the pleasure of playing one of these. Its basically just a Drigon's Lair style game, so thats whatever, but the holographic display works far better then I thought it would when I read about it. It really does look like a little person running around, its rather wild.

Primal Rage is another game that might not ever be perfectly emulateable. Atari added a shitton of encryption to the game and the devs don't want to talk about what they used or have forgotten what encryption.

I think there's some Mame version that plays the game uncensored but I think it uses hacks for it.

Also Primal Rage 2.

Prop Cycle
you can emulate it but the game required bicycle pedals in the arcade.
fucking amazing experience playing it, I remember my entire family including non-gamer adults loved it.
it's amazing that all these virtual peloton cycling platforms are making millions now but not a single one had created actual interesting games for them.. it's all fucking simulated bike racing

>>6417280
>Prop Cycle
here is the platform if you haven't seen it before. you used your body weight to lean it forwards and back to control lift.. pedal to keep yourself in flight. fun

>>6417284
actually I might be wrong about the body weight thing but I think you might have been able to lean it. can't remember too well

>>6417153
I could have BOUGHT one instead of my Ninja Warriors if I had just asked what it's price was (also $200). I could have also chosen a 6 player X-Men but it probably would have had to serve as my kitchen table.

>>6417284
>fun
honestly this sounds like one of those "how do we make these darn kids exercise when all they want is video games??" ideas

>>6417350
it does seem like that but most of the anons who played it have said the same thing... it ruled.
I checked into it and I think the entire yellow thing moved on the x and y axis. there might be no steering input at all outside of that and pedaling. I think that really contributed to the fun of it... franticly leaning into turns and such

>>6414254
We had one of these at the mall arcade in the 90s. Nobody ever played it as far as I could tell. People did peel the white veneer off for some reason though. It was getting pretty rough looking towards the end.

>>6417075
>It's extremely obvious that I'm projecting and a zoomer, and I'm embarrassing myself.
FTFYZ

Dunning-Kruger^-textbook case.

>>6415143
Since 0.173.

>>6415193
CAPS0ff managed to get that one protected MCU for Fireshark dumped and working in time for 0.181, and it has had sound since then. IIRC, there was more improvements in 0.215 for Fire Shark.

>>6417606
>Since 0.173.
Thank you so much, anon. :)
>>6417606
>CAPS0ff managed to get that one protected MCU for Fireshark dumped and working in time for 0.181, and it has had sound since then. IIRC, there was more improvements in 0.215 for Fire Shark.
Awesome. :D

>>6414242
Bouncer

>>6414242
Do these count?

>>6417506
every time I saw that game it was like $1 or more for a game with no real gameplay

was a better deal to just stand there and watch the demo since the only interesting thing about it was the gimmick

>>6417280
>>6417284
Man Prop Cycle was the fucking future

>>6415629
>>6415732
Really cool idea.

>>6415732
>it simulates the circuits themselves

so does literally every piece of electrical engineering software out there, it's not a new concept

>>6415553
>>6415561
Why is emulating the Computer Space board any different from emulating an NES? You would just need to make the emulator for each game rather than an universal one.

>>6421620
where did i say it was a new concept?

>>6414254
What other hologram games exist?

>>6422492
The only other game besides Time Traveler that was produced specifically for it was a very bad fighting game called Holosseum. It's not really a hologram, it uses the parabolic mirror illusion. The figures aren't 3D either, they just appear to be projected (flatly) into empty space. You could put any game into the cabinet, it just looks best with ones that have very black background so you don't preview the edges of the screen. It could probably look pretty neat with Tempest or other vector hands in it but I've never seen it done. At the end of the day it's just a gimmick but it's a pretty neat one.

>>6414254
Is there a modern light fun implementation or adaptor that doesn't suck? I am yet to find one, but I don't have a CRT at the moment.

>>6414254
>people still don't realize it was just a CRT with a parabolic mirror to create the "hologram" effect
>was just a flat image on a CRT
>there was home releases of the game by Digital Leisure
Just get a parabolic reflector, set it at 90 degrees to the CRT, and you can recreate the hologram effect at home. There is no impact on gameplay, and you can play the game on your home PC just fine.

>>6415629
Sadly that emulator project is not active anymore since 2014.

>>6417280
I played it and very impressed with the graphics, the pedals weren't that big of a deal to me because the speed you pedaled didn't really affect the game, it was just like turn crank to press button.

>>6414254
>look up time traveller
>literally just a cowboy shooting randoms from different time periods with a few meaningless 3D primitives in the background
i don't know what i expected

it translates perfectly well to 2D, it's just a laserdisc game with a physical visual effect thrown on top

>>6422659
yea, but it's open source, so it's a great headstart if anyone wants to implement more games like this

>>6421740
It's not meaningfully different, people are just fucking stupid. People have been building accurate emulations of analog and digital synths for decades, I'd wager that's a hell of a lot harder to do on a technical level than moving dots around on a screen.

>>6421740
it's not as different as you'd think, they both do the same thing, use digital logic to do specific things and specific times based on specific inputs
the difference is that in these cpu-less games, the game is programmed directly as the basic logic chips themselves, that is, the hardware is a physical program
while with 'modern' cpu-based systems, the hardware logic is just to read and execute logic (using microcode) from a list contained in a rom (a software program)
the latter is just a generalised form of the former, allowing the same physical hardware (bar the rom chip with the software on it) to perform different tasks (field programmable)

>>6415401
>Just delete the ROM within 24 hours and download it again brah
that 24 hour rule is a myth fyi

>>6423954
>not knowing that they were memeing

>>6414254
>Virtually all light gun games can be emulated but the experience is very poor
I recently installed The House of the Dead for PC in my Win98 86box machine. The game runs fine with the exception of the music not playing, but fuck me if playing with a mouse just isn't the same, not to mention the hand cramps after you are done playing

>>6414242
G-Loc recently got a console re-release but the R360 machine is great https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wdWAadPljs

>>6424386
My Fuck-You-Money dream has always been to go around and buy up all manner of "deluxe" arcade cabs and fix them up as much as possible. They really are the kind of arcade experience that MAME can't effectively recreate

>>6417280
i remember playing this with my dad

>>6422596
Not afaik. Even if you have a 15khz CRT hooked up to a computer with CRT Emudriver and a real lightgun there seems to be no support for it, it's too niche. The best you'll get is a Wii Remote. There was that Sinden Light gun project I don't know whatever happened to it

>>6424763
>Sinden
What part of "doesn't suck" do you not understand?

>>6424612
I live in a backwater town in Australia and our local arcade in the 90's brought this down for a while, shit was fun but definitely not something you can play for a long period

>>6424386
I wonder if SEGA puke-proofed it.

>>6424763
>Even if you have a 15khz CRT hooked up to a computer with CRT Emudriver and a real lightgun there seems to be no support for it, it's too niche.
that's because the timing is too critical
light guns work by detecting light coming from the tv, namely the raster beam itself, to know where exactly you're pointing the gun, the gun and the beam need to be in sync with one-another
my guess is that the gun triggers interrupts, and the software can then query the system's gpu to tell what pixel is being drawn at that moment, then you know where on the screen the gun is pointing
doing this properly (no hacks) would probably realistically need to be done in an fpga
as for hacks.. if you can hijack the routine to ask the original gpu which pixel is being drawn and have the emulator instead ask the real gpu which pixel is being drawn, then you can get things back in sync, even if there is some latency (the position is more important than which exact frame the shot happened on)

>>6423745
Sadly i don't think someone will revive that project, and personally i don't even know where to post it to see if someone is interested to revive it.
Anyway, they are already doing some experiments on MAME by dumping the original game PCB, for now you can find the games but they don't work.

Also for now the only thing you can hope for are simulations of those arcade games. and talking about simulations, somebody did a pretty accurate version of Death Race arcade game.
https://fabslab.itch.io/death-race

>>6424852
I didn't really follow it that closely. Care to elaborate what sucked about it?

Emulation for this thing is a fucking shitshow.
Due to its nature, there isn't much you can do to improve it though

>>6424343
It's a bit pricey and requires some setup, but there are light guns for PCs.

https://www.ultimarc.com/light-guns/aimtrak-light-gun/

>>6426104
Relative position pointing devices are not equivalent to absolute position light guns.

>>6426109
You'll never notice the difference, tripfag.

>>6426128
>Let's Go Jungle = House of the Dead
Yeah, no.

>>6426109
"emulates a usb mouse" doesn't necessarily mean it's relative, it could be emulating a tablet device (which is an absolute cursor-positioning device)
with the right software it wouldn't matter anyway, their driver could just tell the os where to put the cursor directly

>>6426082
Everything. Its literally a wiimote that uses a border on the screen instead of LEDs. Clockboy tier faggotry.

>>6427215
There's literally nothing wrong with using a camera and a border, retard. Hell, if you actually played these games in the arcades, you probably played with an IR solution without realising it, the HOTD2 premium and pretty much every Sega cabinet after that used IR trackers around the screen.

The problem with Wiimotes and aimtrak is that they have a garbage amount of data points, so the tracking is inherently incredibly inaccurate. I haven't tried Sinden, but a full border should give perfectly accurate tracking assuming a wide enough lens and a fast enough report rate. The old sega cabs had a ring of IR LEDs around a known screen size so the cabinet could accurately detect exactly where you were aiming.

>>6428597
>There's literally nothing wrong with my brain
lol But thanks for the cope and kidsplaining it was kekful

>>6417284
>Go for solitar!
Yeah prop cycle is fucking sick.

>>6428597
idk, leds around the whole border seems like it would be most useful in an arcade for the purpose of not needing calibration

>>6426128
Not him, but I bought one of those Aimtraks and they're not nearly as great as people say. The targeting on them is so sensitive to distance that even leaning back or forward fucks them up, making using the sights on the gun useless. Lightguns were precise enough that you could aim them pretty accurate without trouble.

>>6430096
The best solution is the fewest possible number of data points required the achieve the desired accuracy. Processing data points costs time and money. That's how you can tell >>6428597 and the clockboy he's parroting are retarded. LEDs simply aren't an option for some people. Anons mommy won't let him put LEDs around the TV to play his violent video games with toy guns she wishes were banned and that's that.
What's really funny is that the kind of faggots who want this thing are the same faggots who bitch about pillarboxing. They're actually demanding that it support stretched video, which it does but they're too retarded to even know what they pledged for. But a white box around the whole screen is cool. LMAO.

>>6430767
Modern processing isn't a fucking issue, dude. Want an LED solution? You can hook up 4 LEDs and a 30 dollar camera to an arduino right now. I don't know how well it works, 4 data points isn't great, but hey, you can do it, and it's cheaper than an aimtrak.

And then you launch into some bizarre tirade about fucking image stretching, as if anyone in the world is planning on using something like Sinden on a CRT where resolution might be even a minor issue.

Is a white boarder ideal? No. Hell, I'm waiting for someone to bother hacking together some 3d printed gun sights I can stick on top of a Vive controller and a fancy wrapper so I can use it as a mouse by calibrating it with my monitor. That'd be the perfect LCD solution, because you'd get sub mm accuracy at any distance from the screen, which is something IR based solutions can never offer.

>>6430761
That sucks. Is there a more accurate option? I'd pay up to 200 USD to play lightgun games perfectly on my PC.

>>6431283
>reading comprehension isn't an issue
It obviously is. And talk about launching into tirades. Why don't you go back and chill out on reddit until you're calm enough to make some sense.

>>6431590
I've seen some low effort responses in my time, but I'm pretty sure you're an actual schizophrenic, so honestly I just feel bad for you. I hope one day you get the help you need, instead of sperging out about things you don't understand.

>>6431569
I haven't tried any of the better solutions yet, but yeah, aimtrak is pure garbage and nobody should use it. Hell, I think even the fucking PS Move, which you're forced to use for PS3 titles like HotD4, was better than Aimtrak. It's only slightly better than a wiimote, and that's assuming you're standing a solid 6 feet away from your screen. If you want something NOW, your only options are a CRT setup with an old Act-labs gun, which will work through an active HDMI-VGA converter but the gun position only updates when you pull the trigger, so you can't use it for machine gun games, or the JayBee 4 IR system, which I haven't tried but it seems decent conceptually if you dial it in but requires a lot of DIY work.

>>6431615
Thanks, anon.

>>6431615

For lightguns there is also the old Guncon2 drivers. These seem a bit of a nightmare to get working (needs Windows 7 in driver unsigned mode) but the few who managed to get it working reported it was very accurate.

>>6431659
It's been a while since I looked into the guncon2 stuff, do you still have to run them through 15khz, meaning pretty much all that works easily is old S-video cards?

I tried it ages ago but the rolling X issue made my official guncons unusable, and whenever you went over a black area the gun would flip out and often fuck up its X position.

>>6431710
When it comes to emulation and light guns you can either have them work well or be easy to set up. Often there is a third option of paying a lot of money for a product that is both easy to set up and good but afaik when it comes to this the only way to get that would be to buy a complete preconfigured system from someone who's familiar with the process.

>>6431749
I found the Act-Labs gun to be both perfectly accurate, and completely trivial to set up, while also costing me like 30 bucks. But my CRT started dying and I don't really have the space for one anyway.

I feel like the Sinden gun, if it works, would be the best of both worlds. Although I am pretty tempted to waste a ton of time setting up the 4 IR system with an old namco arcade gun I've got lying around for recoil, I just wish there was a better system for recoil control on PC, MAMEhooker seems like a mess and anything outside of that would probably be very basic.

>>6431760
Does the Act-Labs gun just werk on vga crts? I may have to put it on my watch list then. Thanks.

>>6431569
Perhaps having IR sensors surround the TV set would help the Aimtrak, but mine's been in storage for a few years and I have little desire to fix it up. I could see how that could theoretically fix my distance issue, but I have a feeling unless the software is able to parse out a ring of IR lights vs a single point, the setup won't work at all.

>>6431776
Yeah, it just werks, the only problem with it is that the guns themselves are a mediocre design that hurts my hand a little, and that because of the way they work by having a hardware 1 frame white flash to detect position, you can't use them for machine gun games. I mean, I guess you could spam click, but you'd probably give yourself a seizure.

There are also moments in games that are based on having tracking that you wouldn't think about, like the dark areas in HotD2 where you get a flashlight as a cursor, the Act-Labs always leaves the cursor wherever you clicked last because that's the only time it updates.

>>6432262
Pretty sure the aimtraks camera can only resolve 2 points for calculation purposes or some shit, it's like how a wiimote flips the fuck out if you try and add more IR points.

>>6414242
Every game shown here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88KtiAjyu10

>>6434204
>~20 seconds in
>gunfight
zoom

>>6414272
i guess that means rogue squadron and goemon are playable now

>>6414905
What I find strange is the Atari Jaguar was made open source, so all info about the custom chips and whatnot is easily available. And yet according to the virtualjaguar git(which hasn't been touched in 3 years), they were "one small step away from CD-ROM support" four years ago.

For the life of me I can't get a Dreamcast emulator to work perfectly. Closest I got had the graphics look like someone spill black ink all over the skybox and such with a ton of flickering. I literally just want to play a single game for the system, Time Stalkers. It was a market flop and objectively might even be seen as shit but it is to date one of my favorite games ever, only sin it have is to read literally everything it will take reloading a save file multiple times or replaying the whole game like ~6 times. Not a big issue given how freaking short it is. For a RPG it is something you can kill off in a day if you know what you are doing. 100% Completion (and the reason I want to play it) is a whole another story though.

Been really fascinated by that Pac-Man Arcade/Pinball hybrid Baby Pac-Man. If anyone remembers playing it I'd love to hear avout your experience.

>>6434375
what emulator are you using? try Redream

>>6434407
Forgot what I used but I'll give your suggestion a shot once I get my new computer.

Beavis and Butthead arcade

>>6434310
Ok ONE game.

>>6417280
>>6417284

Holy shit I remember playing this game years ago. Was super fun and for some reason when I was playing and getting the hang of it, the screen would turn black, everything else would still be running since the speakers still produced effects. Was a very neat experience.

>>6434448
If anyone gave a fuck about the shitty discreet logic racing and space games there'd be HDL. EM shit is a different story and based.

bump

Has there ever been a serious attempt to simulate electro-mechanical games that aren't pinball?

>>6436493
No. The only ones people care about still use electro-mechanical horses. A lot of the appeal of EM games was physical aspect. Honestly I wouldn't even want to see a computer simulations of many EM games.

>>6434403
I played this one BITD. It was an interesting concept combining arcade with pinball but overall it wasn't very fun. The maze starts you with no energizer pills, those had to be earned in the pinball portion. The pinball itself wasn't all that great. the pinball field was only a 1/4 of a full table so there wasn't much to squeeze in; Some drop targets, a L-R spinner lane that returned to the flippers, couple of saucers and a captive ball arch which was the easiest target to earn 2 energizer pellets to the maze if you hit it twice. The only ball drain was SDTM and that returned you to the maze. There were ways to earn the bonus fruit into the maze and certain saucer locks could bring you back into the maze. Your lives deaths would mostly occur only in the maze but there were exceptions where a death in the maze would give you a last chance in the pinball portion to earn your way back into the maze but if you drain the live was lost.

The biggest problem with Baby Pac Man was the ghosts in the maze didn't behave like they did in Pac and Ms Pac-Man. The ghosts would float back and forth almost at will whereas in the previous versions the ghosts could any travel one direction and make their next moves only at intersections with exceptions. The ghosts also followed a path which was exploited and charted in challenge books.

Baby Pac-Man ghosts seemed to be more calculating by hovering and waiting for you to get in an unwinnable position where they could ambush you from every angle. That was the bullshit part of the game and if you never earned an energizer pellet from the pin there was no way in hell you were completing the maze to advance.

The game was ambitious but it's problem was no one really wanted to learn all the pinball rule sets to be successful at it. It always felt like a grind that could be better used on a full size pinball table or video game. The combo of the two never really jelled.