Living With a LISY Board: LISY_control, Dip Switches and Sound

The board is in, the machine boots, the first ball kicks out. Now what?

A LISY board is not a like-for-like replacement you fit and forget. It is a small Linux computer sitting where your CPU board used to be, and almost everything about how your machine behaves is now a setting rather than a soldered fact. Two banks of dip switches decide the big things; a web page decides the rest.

This is the day-to-day view: what to change, where it lives, and what to leave alone. If you are still working out what LISY is, start with our explainer on what the LISY board is and how it works and come back.

Getting it on your network

LISY_control, the web interface, is the reason most of this is easy — and it needs the board on your network. There are two ways in.

Client mode is the default: the board looks for a wireless network and joins it. The image ships preconfigured for a network the author uses, so your first job is to point it at yours. The /boot partition of the SD card is plain vFAT, so you can pull the card, put it in any Windows or Mac machine, and edit the wpa_supplicant.conf file with your own SSID and password. No Linux knowledge needed.

Hotspot mode is the fallback, and the one to remember when you are working on a machine in a garage with no wifi. The board becomes its own access point called LISY_Control, with the keyphrase lisy80_and_lisy1_rocks, and you reach the interface at 192.168.80.1 from a phone or laptop.

Once it is on the network you can give the board a hostname from LISY_control itself, which matters the moment you own two machines and both answer to "lisy".

The two banks of switches that decide everything

Physical dip switches on the board still do the heavy lifting, and they are worth learning once.

S2 selects your game. The board carries no game code of its own — it runs the original ROM images, and S2 tells it which one. The manual's appendices list the number for every supported title, per variant: Appendix A for LISY1 (Gottlieb System 1), Appendix B for LISY80 (System 80, 80A, 80B), Appendix D for LISY35 (Bally and Stern, 1977 to 1985).

S1 sets the options. The ones you will actually touch:

• S1-1 — free play (below)
• S1-2 — internal sound instead of emulated sound
• S1-4 with S1-8 — hand control to the Mission Pinball Framework
• S1-7 — write a debug log

One thing that trips people up: the system normally runs its filesystem read-only, which is exactly what you want in a machine that gets switched off at the wall. In debug mode it does not, so use the on-board S3 button to shut down gracefully before killing the power, or you risk the SD card.

Where the ROMs live

Romsets are PinMAME .zip files, dropped into /lisy/lisy80/roms (or /lisy/lisy1/roms, or /lisy/lisy35/roms), named exactly as the "Mame Name" column in the appendices says. Get the name wrong and the board simply will not find the game.

They are not included in the image, for copyright reasons, and that is not an oversight to work around. Sourcing the ROM for the machine you own is your business, not the project's.

Free play, and the two-second trick

Set S1-1 to ON and the machine plays for nothing. What is neater is how it does it: hold the replay button for longer than two seconds and LISY emulates a coin drop into the left chute, handing you whatever credits your game is configured to give per coin.

That detail matters in practice. It means free play still respects your game's own coin settings rather than bypassing them, so the credit display behaves normally and a game set to three-for-one still gives three.

Making LISY_control speak your machine's language

Out of the box the test pages list switch 27 and solenoid 9. Useful, but not as useful as "left drop target" and "left kicker".

Every description is a CSV file the board reads at start-up — <NNN>_lisy1_switches.csv, _lamps.csv, _coils.csv, where NNN is your game number. You can edit them on the SD card, or upload them through LISY_control's file upload page. An hour spent naming things once turns every future fault-find into reading rather than counting.

The same interface edits your game adjustments. The dip settings a System 80 owner used to change with a screwdriver inside the backbox now live in <NNN>_lisy80_dips.csv, and LISY_control is the editor: type the values, press set values, and they are stored. If no file exists for your game it creates one from the defaults.

The rest of the interface is what you would hope. Switches refresh about once a second, closed shown red and open shown green. Lamps toggle individually. Solenoids pulse from a button — which is the single fastest way to prove whether a dead pop bumper is the coil, the driver or the switch. Displays take typed text. And there is a page of NVRAM statistics, because the board keeps its counters in an EEPROM rather than on a battery.

Sound: emulated, or your own WAV files

By default the board emulates the original sound hardware through PinMAME, from your ROM. It works, and on some games it is honestly a bit rough — the project itself warns of poor sound, speed variance and clicking on certain titles.

The alternative is internal sound, switched on with S1-2. Here the board ignores emulation and plays your own .wav files instead, mapped to each game sound: seven tones on LISY1, thirty on LISY80, up to 256 on LISY35. Drop the files in the game's sound folder and they play.

That needs an add-on soundcard, and the requirement is generic rather than proprietary: any pHat-compatible card that works with the hifiberry-dac drivers. JustBoom, Speaker pHat and the HiFiBerry MiniAmp are all named as working, and there is a DIY pHat design published on the project site if you would rather build one.

Worth knowing that this is not the only route to good sound on a System 80. A dedicated FPGA sound board such as the Gosof, which handles speech as well, takes the job off the CPU board entirely. Different problem, different tool.

Original gameplay, or gameplay you wrote

This is the part owners rarely realise they have bought. Set S1-4 and S1-8 and the board stops running your ROM and starts taking orders from the Mission Pinball Framework — an open Python framework for writing pinball rules from scratch.

Three ways to run it: master mode, with MPF running on the board's own Raspberry Pi and your configuration on the SD card; slave over serial, with MPF on a PC connected by USB at 115200 baud; or slave over the network, with MPF anywhere on your LAN talking to the board on port 5963.

Realistically most owners never leave the ROM, and that is fine. But it means the same machine that plays Black Hole exactly as it did in 1981 can, with a dip switch, become a development platform for rules you invented — without touching the playfield. That is a rare thing to have in a forty-year-old cabinet.

The limitation you should know about

Software emulation reads the switch matrix in software, and the project is upfront that this has a cost: on some games, fast switch movements — a spinner being the usual example — are not detected 100% of the time. If your machine leans on a spinner for scoring, you will notice.

The project's own answer is its second family of boards, the FPGA "FA" designs — GottFA1, GottFA80, BallyFA, WillFA7 — which emulate the original processor in hardware and sit closer to the original in timing. Our roundup of who makes replacement CPU boards puts both families in context alongside the other makers.

Housekeeping

Updates normally mean writing a fresh SD card image, which sounds heavier than it is — copy your CSV files off first and you are back where you were in twenty minutes. Small updates can be applied in place from LISY_control's update page without rewriting the card.

If a game runs oddly fast or slow, there is a throttle column in the games CSV (/lisy/lisy80/cfg/lisy80games.csv) that tunes emulation speed per title. And if something genuinely misbehaves, turn on the debug log with S1-7, reproduce the fault, then read the file — it is far more use to anyone helping you than "it does not work".

One habit worth forming: keep a copy of your CSV files somewhere off the machine. They are the only part of the setup that is genuinely yours.

FAQ

How do I connect to LISY_control?

Either join the board to your own wifi by editing wpa_supplicant.conf on the SD card's /boot partition, then browse to its hostname; or use hotspot mode, connect to the LISY_Control network and go to 192.168.80.1.

How do I set free play on a LISY board?

Set dip switch S1-1 to ON. Holding the replay button for more than two seconds then emulates a coin drop to the left chute and awards the credits your game is set to give.

Are the game ROMs included with a LISY board?

No. Romsets are PinMAME .zip files you supply yourself and place in the roms folder for your board, named as the manual's appendix specifies. They are left out of the image for copyright reasons.

Can I use my own sounds instead of the emulated ones?

Yes. Switch S1-2 to ON for internal sound and supply .wav files — seven on LISY1, thirty on LISY80, up to 256 on LISY35. You need a pHat-compatible soundcard that works with the hifiberry-dac drivers.

Does a LISY board miss spinner hits?

It can. The project states that on some games fast switch moves such as spinners are not detected 100% of the time. If that matters on your machine, the FPGA-based FA boards are the project's own recommended alternative.

Do I need to shut it down properly?

Normally no — the filesystem runs read-only, so switching the machine off at the wall is safe. In debug mode it does not, so press the on-board S3 button to shut down cleanly first.

Sources & further reading

• LISY user manual v5.28 (Ralf / bontango)
• LISY project — the MPU range and the fast-switch limitation
• LISY project — FAQ, licence and DIY statement
• LISY project — manuals, assembly guides and BOMs
• Mission Pinball Framework — LISY hardware documentation
• bontango on GitHub — LISY source code

Running a Gottlieb System 80 and want the board that makes all of the above possible? See the Lisy80 diagnostic CPU board, or read how the ready-to-use Lisy80 relates to the DIY project. Fitting one is covered in our installation video, and if the machine still misbehaves afterwards, check the System 80 ground mods before blaming the board.