I've built my own PC once before, but this summer, I'm thinking I need to tackle a
virtual pinball machine.
I just read this, did you get this knocked out?
Yeah, works great. Got an insane deal on an old widebody pinball machine from '79 ("Paragon") that had been gutted for parts on the inside. So the guy gave me the cabinet, with the legs, lockdown bar, backbox, coin door, and the glass top for next to nothing. I cannibalized my 46" TV in the living room for the playfield (gave me an excuse to upgrade to a 50") and bought two refurb monitors off Woot & Newegg.
Inside I put an old power supply, a quad-core i5, GTX660 graphics card, MSI Z77A-G45 "Gaming" motherboard, 250GB solid-state drive, and 8GB RAM. One intake fan where the pinball speaker used to be under the machine, and 3 exhaust fans in the back.
Drilled holes for the control buttons and wired up the I-PAC keyboard encoder, which connects to the motherboard via USB. I have a 8-ft USB extension cord in there as well so I can add new tables by downloading them to my main computer, then putting them on a thumbdrive. The computer lives near the back of the cabinet so the extension cord allows me to just open the coin door at the front to get to the USB connection. I did not need a CD/DVD-ROM drive, except I did have to briefly borrow an external drive just long enough to install the OS. I had an old Wireless Keyboard USB Receiver that matches the one on my main PC, so I just walk over with the same keyboard whenever I need to.
I also put in a 75ft Ethernet cable so I can remote-access the PC if need be, but I'm trying to keep it off the internet if at all possible. Just don't want any bloatware or anything getting involved. Turned off the firewall and almost all the Windows Services I could so it stays screaming fast.
It only ever really runs two programs, Visual Pinball does all the rendering of the machines and Hyperpin is the snazzy frontend to navigate between tables.
The two refurb monitors I used standard wallmounts to get them positioned as the backbox displays. One emulates the translite, the other the dot-matrix graphics. I got away with just using one video card to drive the playfield and am running the two display monitors off the mobo's VGA & HDMI outs. The dot-matrix display is a small monitor set to just 16bit color, so it doesn't take any real power to run.
I ended up just using the TV speakers for audio. I snipped the wires and extended them so they ran back into the backbox. The TV had to be taken apart to just the display screen itself, outside of the plastic case, to fit inside the cabinet.
Took about 4 weekends. Right now it's got 70 tables. The hardest part, really, is once you get it about halfway there, and are testing things out, it's just so addictive to play that you don't want to stop to finish working on the detail parts. The thing was in pieces for over a week, just the main playfield and the flipper buttons were working, but I was just having so much fun I didn't want to stop playing.