The pinball community as a whole has been doing really cool things like this for years. Custom soundtracks for older games and now more recently we're seeing total rewrites of the rules/coding flashed onto chips or new PCBs like this. Super cool stuff.
I have a "reset board" for WPC games that is many years old at this point. It piggybacks on the power connector from the power board to the system board and steps down the unregulated 12v supply to power the 5v rail, bypassing the power board's 5v which can become unreliable as voltage regulators age and fail, triggering a watchdog on the system board that causes a reset. It is a plug-in mod that is reversible (I actually do not currently use it).
Also you can buy new boardsets for System 11 machines in both kit and complete form. They are electrically identical to the Williams parts but use modern components. They even come on red PCBs like the Williams development boards.
Yep, friends with the guy from Pinball Basement who makes the System 11 boards. It was actually done by licensing the designs from Williams, so that's cool. They're still quite expensive, but it's great from a preservation perspective.
Not that I know of. https://pinballbasement.com/ Looks like the 11 stuff is not finished or sold out atm. I believe he was running into supply chain issues last year.
No benefit to replacing working Williams boards. The benefit is if you have a bad board and can't find replacements. The DumbAss boards are electronically identical to Williams boards so you can install them in any combination in a System 11 pin without any other modification. They're simply modern replacement parts.
The software is whatever you flash on to the ROM and could be modified on a Williams or DumbAss board equally.
Also what System 11 machines do you have? I have a High Speed (with Williams boards).
I started off as an EE in college ~20 yrs ago before switching to CS. I did some circuit board design work (never fab) as part of my coursework, but haven't touched it since. I have some baseline familiarity. I think we used pSpice and Cadence, which (at the time) still had a lot of Win 3.1 era MFC UI elements. I'd like to jump back into it for hobby reasons. Any recommendations on modern low-budget software-tooling?
I'm a tinkerer and software dev, so my use is very basic.
https://www.kicad.org/ is free and open-source It is mature and useful, has a vibrant active community, and is progressing at a healthy pace. It competes with the paid options, but might have rough edges comparatively speaking. I recommend starting here. I've only ever used this.
There is also Eagle PCB which is now an Autodesk product. It requires a Fusion360 subscription but I don't know if the free version qualifies. It's a professional tool.
Those are the only two I really hear about from the communities I lurk. But I know there are about a dozen or so currently that range from simple to professional.
> Cadence, which (at the time) still had a lot of Win 3.1 era MFC UI elements
I'm not sure how it appeared on windows, but cadence is the kind of software with an extremely long history. I'm pretty sure even recent releases have code that date back to the 70s.
As far as I know, it has always targeted UNIX, then X11, using raw XLIB for drawing? X11 forwarding still seems to be the preferred option for using it.
Anyway, try kicad, which is free and open, it has made great strides recently. You can also look at the gEDA suite, though it may be a bit rough. Commercially, I've also used Eagle and Proteus. LTSpice still is a pretty good no-$ option for simulations (though kicad integrates some barebones SPICE simulator now).
X11 forwarding for Cadence's chip layout tooling is practically unusable nowadays! Sub-1 FPS, even on a reasonable 1 Gbps pipe with only 3-4 ms ping. I had to use NoMachine when I was doing that work -- proprietary tooling that does the "simpler" image/video streaming.