Yes, you can now program pinball games pretty easily, or custom modify those games written by Ni-Wumpf to your heart's desire. And your limitations are currently the game platforms for which we have developed CPU hardware to put the code into. Furthermore, you do not need to learn a programming language to do so - so while there is a learning curve to any programming effort, the IDE was designed to keep that learning curve as low as possible through GUI point and click functionality.

Developing pinball game code through the online Ni-Wumpf Integrated Development Environment (IDE), is accomplished through a set of programs partly run on the user's workstation through the Java run-time environment, and partly on the Ni-Wumpf servers which do all of the translation, compiling, and building of the game binaries. It can be done on your Windows or Linux PC, because the IDE is java based, which means that there are some caveats about using the IDE right away:

• the software loads via the Java plug-in to your browser, so if you do not, as yet, have the plug-in, it will take a short period of time to retrieve and install that software from Sun's Java site.
• it starts an application that has been signed locally (by myself), and will pop up a window suggesting that this content will be able to do nasty and unpredictable things, such as write to your local file system.  To run the code, you'll have to accept the certificate to proceed - we don't do anything harmful to your system. The application reads/writes to a default location on your disk, namely the "Pinball" and "Pinball/Templates" directory in your home directory, if these directories do not exist, it will create them.  The directories can be otherwise named by yourself, but should always exist in your home directory. As far as security goes, the application only writes to areas on your disk that you have designated as the repository for your game designs and templates, therefore this is the extent that you are at risk from this application.  I don't know how you can mess up your filesystem, but I presume that it is possible if you start deleting things through the application.

To begin, download the source code for the games that the application will use, and unpack the files into your home directory. The home directory for a Windows platform is typically; "c:/Documents and Settings/<your user name>/", and this will be where to unzip these files (Unix users need no advise here...) Additionally, the manual would be a good idea to go over (sure - I'll just bet...).

Next, hit the "IDE" link on the left hand menu, the IDE is not spectacularly polished, but over 24 production games were already coded using it, so the functionality is there. And if you get stuck, the help file is a good place to start. Be aware right away that Java is sloooow, so it will take a bit of time to load the application. 

Once the IDE gets started, open ("file -> open") up one of the game files downloaded above, and have a quick look at the tables that get laid out. These should represent pretty familiar data; the switch matrix table, the lamp matrix table, etc.  You can see that they include game specific names for each of the switches, and these names will be used later on in designing the game play. At this point, the manual is going to be a lot more helpful to you than this web page, but you'll soon find that the overall intent of the development environment is to partition off much of the operation of a game into; logic that is common to most games in the platform, and therefore maintained by Ni-Wumpf, and logic that the user needs to create to make the game do as he/she intended...

Contact us if you get really stuck.