 PASCAL JANIN's |
The Pi-1 CPU board is a fantastic project for all pinball fans and the result of a lot of hard work by its creator, Pascal Janin, an electronics engineer by profession and a fan of Gottlieb electronic pinballs. Pascal has turned his hand to making a number of replacement boards for these games - his new boards replacing originals which are hard to find, use rare and irreplaceable components, and are beset with design errors. The biggest and most ambitious project of Pascal's to date is the Pi-1. The Pi-1's first production run was in Spring 2001, and the second in Autumn the same year. Pascal, with the help of many others, has been working on the project for a long time before that though. I was lucky enough to have been one of those involved from the early stages as a rules writer, tester and even translator. I am also a satisfied customer with 4 Pi-1 CPUs, even though I only have 3 System 1 games! The Pi-1 can bring all 16 Gottlieb System 1 series pinball games back to life: Close Encounters - Charlie's Angels - Pinball Pool - Totem - Incredible Hulk Genie - Buck Rogers - Torch - Roller Disco - Asteroid Annie & the Aliens  Pascal demonstrates the Pi-1 at Vierzon 2001, France.The following obscure European kit-games are also supported: Sahara Love, Sky Warrior, Hexagone and Jungle Queen. All these games suffered from a single problem: a CPU that was unreliable and whose long-since unobtainable MOS components were easliy destroyed by other defects in the elctronics design - e.g. the grounding inadequacies, the lack of protection from over-voltage through blown driver transistors, and of course, battery corrosion. These games can often be found in pristine condition for low prices but, with their bad reputation, they are often over-looked. The Pi-1 not only saves these games, it rockets them into the 21st Century. Remember that the original System 1 CPU technology that the Pi-1 replaces is over 25 years old! The Pi-1 is a direct plug-in replacement, with no modifications or specific preliminary setting required, other than having a working power supply and driver board in the game. The desired game is then simply selected at power-up using the push-button inside the coindoor. The Pi-1 is built around modern, reliable components making maintenance easy and affordable, and specific software and hardware defences protect the Pi-1 against the most common failures (e.g. over-voltage from shorted driver transistors). The Pi-1 stores all game data ("book-keeping") in a non-volatile memory, so no battery leakage/corrosion, and it can store individual settings for each game it's used in. The Pi-1 is entirely driven by text-style menus shown in the displays, and scrolled through and selected using the self-test and credit switches - no need to open the backbox and check off dip-switch settings against setting charts. All the Pi-1's menus are avaialble in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. The Pi-1 has extensive test modes for individual coil/lamp/digit/switch testing, including the special lamp-mapped coils used on Buck Rogers. The Pi-1 is fully compatibile with the original game functions but also offers many new and exciting features that can be enabled as desired: playfield attract mode, unlimited credits, skill shot, multiple extraball, expert game level, 1-million award, chance ball, repeated tilt, past scores remembered at power-up, alternate game rules, testing for stuck switches specifically associated with coils, top 5 hi-scores tables with names, and many more. The Pi-1 comes with an installation manual with comprehensive but clear explanations. The last subscription order for the Pi-1 ran in January 2004. More information about the Pi-1 can be found here and in Rob Craig's independent review of both the Pi-1 and the Ni-wumph (its only competitor) at Popbumper.com. If you have questions or would like more information on the Pi-1, please contact Pascal Janin directly at [email protected] | |||||
View Pascal's Other Handiwork here
