sulfurousacid

I'll be here when it all gets weird

  • he him

37, huge nerd, ace/aro 🔞minors dni🔞
I like weird porn die mad about it



JuniperTheory
@JuniperTheory

I'm someone who likes pinball a lot and REALLY likes when people make their own fucked up pinball experiments. Obviously this is a super niche hobby as like... That's fuckin expensive as shit, but it's done!

the question is, where do these people show off their strange experiments

what do they do with them

if someone like me, who isn't connected to the scene, wanted to try people's fucked up and evil homebrew pinball machines, how impossible would it be where would I have to go etc etc


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in reply to @JuniperTheory's post:

If you want to play a bunch of homebrews you generally need to find a convention. I've seen a good share (5-10) at the Texas, Chicago, and Boston area shows (and mine will hopefully be at Pintastic near Boston next month :)

If you're comfortable posting your vague location I might be able to direct you to something else close

Due to pinball mostly being a hobby enjoyed by well off white men, I've never really come across much of a good community on social media sadly, and as such I also never really tend to post about the horrible things I do to mine, although you may be able to find a good Belles and Chimes women's group somewhere that's cool?

There's a custom pinball FB group if you're on there: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1148598398602739

And a Discord aimed at homebrew pinball builders: https://discord.gg/5Rw8vyKN

Lots of build threads on pinside: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/forum/homebrew-pinball

The best general pinball discord I know is https://discord.gg/wX6Avg6C

On three occasions I've been to events where people brought homebrew pinball tables.

One was like a decade ago, at a steampunk convention held at the old watch factory in Watertown, MA. I didn't know anything about pinball so I don't know what the playfield design was, but someone had made a "mad science" pinball table with blacklight-glowing liquids flowing around it in tubes. It felt like they had taken the "Mad Scientist" table from Maxis Full Tilt 2 and made it real.

One was an event at Abari Game Bar in Charlotte, NC, several months ago, where people could bring their homebrew machines. I got to play:

  • The Legend of Zelda pinball table, a reskin of Gladiators with custom code, though the code was not working very well when I played it

  • Spaceballs: The Pinball Machine, which was awesome and worked really well, and it seems to be a unique layout and not just a reskin of something else

  • A Matt Hardy table, made by Matt Hardy's wife Rebecca Hardy, which was based on the Mustang playfield. (My wife tells me that I followed Matt Hardy himself into the event but I had no idea who he is, and I'm still not that sure)

And recently I was at Southern Fried Gaming Expo in Atlanta -- I tagged it #southern fried gaming -- where there were custom machines including the Spaceballs one. I didn't have time to play them though

The homebrew sub-forum of the Pinside forums seems like a good way to keep up with homebrew pinball.