Let’s look inside a pinball machine
Have you ever wondered what is inside of a pinball machine? Inside any modern or vintage pinball machine, one will find miles of wires connecting lights, motors, solenoids, and switches.
Electromechanical machines, basically those made before the late 70s will have no boards, software, or modern electronics like transistors, diodes or capacitors. Instead, an EM or electromechanical pinball machine is basically a fixed program laid out among physical switches, relays and solenoid activated units. Everything is mechanically based from the coin drop to the score motor, to reset banks of switches, solenoid activated flippers, credit units and ball count units.
Once the EM pinball machine is designed and built, there are not many changes that can be made to the gameplay other than changing the number of balls in a game – 3 or 5 and making some goals harder or easier to achieve.
In EM pinball machines the sounds are mechanical – chimes hit by solenoid-powered plungers. Even the score is kept by “dumb” score reels. These reels don’t even know what the score is except when the score reel is at zero or moving from nine to zero – triggering the next score reel. High scores can not be kept.
“P3 (modern pinball machine) has 4000+ total parts / 500+ unique parts.”
– Gerry
http://www.multimorphic.com
In more modern games in the SS or solid-state era, DMD (dots) and modern LCD screen games, switch hits are tracked by circuit boards and memory. Software runs the gameplay so it can be changed, sounds can be triggered, animation can be displayed on the backglass and memory can hold high scores.
But even with modern pinball machines, many of the physical, mechanical devices that make pinball, pinball are still there including solenoid-powered flippers and pop bumpers.