3D printing, eh? I made something similar from wood. I didn’t know you could use steam deck as secondary screen for the scoreboard, I should look that up…
Oh that’s super cool. I see you have a raspberry pi inside, do you use that just for retro games, and then swap over to a docked Steam Deck for more demanding games? How do you handle swapping?
The raspberry is mainly for old vertical arcade games and a few retro console games. I think most of the games I’ve got there are MAME emulated. There’s this custom Linux distro RetroPie that’s tailored for emulation. It has a fancy frontend for launching the games.
Swapping between the RPi and Steam deck is done manually. Actually its a pain, because I need to lift the monitor slightly off the chassis and fiddle with the cables in side. As for the games, Steam deck is the clear winner. There are many modern games even on Steam that can run vertical setup. Mostly pinball and bullet hell type of games, but Its cool to run something like Downwell with this setup. Oh yeah, the egstarts controller board is recognised as a xbox controller on the Steam deck, so its easy enough to map the buttons for each game as needed.
Cool, thanks for sharing. I was wondering how you switched the arcade controls without swapping cables, unfortunate to hear it’s a pain. I’ve been wanting to do a virtual pinball build for awhile now, and I really like the idea of having the device be useable without my deck docked to it. I’ll probably see if I can figure out a good way to swap devices, maybe try using a usb switch and hdmi switch to swap inputs/display.
Hah, and they’re using it to play sorcerors lair . . .
Unfortunately the steam version is lame compared to the console versions that had more diverse strategies and were more fun.
Just to make sure I understand, you’re saying there’s a difference between the zen console versions of the table and the fx3 pinball version?
Yes. For sorcerors lair, Xbox360 and PS4 were similar, whereas Steam has slight but important differences. I can’t remeber whether they were releeased as “zen” or “fx3”, it’s a while since I’ve played the console ones. I guess maybe they’ve updated the console versions and it’s just a change that’s happened over time.
On steam I’m pretty sure i’m playing this: https://store.steampowered.com/app/442120/Pinball_FX3/
On the consoles the gargoyle ball lock gives 15 seconds ball save , this gives great option to prolong a ball - and forces you into multiballs that you don’t really want, but adds variety. You need ball save because you have to be a lot more precise to hit each of the three discs to activate the sub-games, which are needed before you can reach midnight madness and actually score meaningful points.
The strategy in Steam version seems to be is much simpler, hit 3 discs (far less precision needed), get subgames, get midnight madness. Making the whole game a bit less engaging, I’ve not found any real benefit in going for most of the rest of the table. Maybe multiramp combo for extraball occasionally…
It’s still pretty fun, I do still play it a bit, but on console I just found it a lot better; all for a few minor tweaks in a couple of mechanics.
I was not expecting this kind of subject matter expertise when coming to the comments.
