Tiny Pinball Fantasies Table

According to his project write-up, Jeroen Domburg (AKA “Sprite_tm”) always had a fascination with pinball machines, even if they were a bit rare where/when he grew up. He did, however, have a computer, allowing him to play simulators such as Pinball Construction Set on the Macintosh, and Epic Pinball on the PC. More recently he found the source code to Pinball Fantasies on the Historical Source GitHub repo.

Most would perhaps give the repo a quick glance, or maybe even poke around in the files themselves. Sprite_tm took things many steps further and turned it into a working miniature pinball table that runs on an ESP32S3-Wrover module. Getting it to work, though, meant first going through the x86 assembly code that originally powered it, and converting it int C, emulating its operation on a PC.

From there it was on to “step one" where he further ported it to run on the ESP32. Notably, the original game displayed only part of the pinball playfield at a time, but Sprite_tm instead converted it to display everything at once on a vertically-aligned 360x640 LCD. A second LCD is implemented as the backboard display. So this miniature version doesn’t just match the computer game, but actually significantly improves on it.

Controls are enhanced as well, with an actual plunger used to launch the ball, and physical tilt sensing implemented, rather than a less-realistic button input. Finally, a haptic actuator setup lets you feel the “ball” bouncing around on the playfield. All this in a form factor that can comfortably held in the palm of your hand!

Check out this amazing device in the video below, or peruse the device’s firmware on GitHub here.