A guy named Mark Gibson has put an atomic clock inside a pinball machine, making one of the coolest clocks ever. It’s a WWVB atomic clock using a pinball machine marquee. What used to be the score is now the time, with atomic clock accuracy.

The downside is that it makes a lot of noise. If you want to build one, Mark has detailed instructions for building the atomic pinball clock here. It is a difficult build, but worth it.

Pinball emulators are usually running on a PC, but if you are the crafty type, you can do what this guy did and create a 1/3-scale pinball machine called the Hot Touch Arcade. The emulator is in the pinball machine itself and powered by an Intel Atom processor.

There’s also an NVIDIA graphics card, and it runs on Windows XP. The actual pinball game area is displayed on a 19-inch 16:9 LCD display, and it includes a physical shooter, flipper buttons, and a coin slot. Pretty nice!

You may have noticed that it’s difficult to find arcades these days, no matter how many hours you drive around blasting some Loverboy or Huey Lewis and the News. It ain’t the 80s. What’s a Pinball enthusiast to do? You make some killer pinball games yourself, that’s what!

Take one BadBoyBill, who happens to be the admin of the HyperSpin forums. He used an HDTV, an LCD monitor and a 3D pinball program to build his own 1080p pinball machine. Oh yeah. Now you’re drooling and thinking back to those days at the arcade. The cabinet he created recreates the whole pinball experience and he can play any game he wants on the same machine. That is genius. Absolute genius.

Check out these awesome retro arcade and pinball machines. They’re made for your O scale railroad setup, because let’s be honest, most of your setup is outdated and could use a little gaming flare. The rest of us can use them to decorate our desks.

J & C Studios makes them and each 1.75″ tall game cabinet is a snap to put together. Really, they snap together from laser-cut black styrene, and even feature a place to put an LED bulb behind the screen so it can light up. They also offer decal kits for Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Galaga, Centipede, Zaxxon, Phoenix and Defender.

I love pinball, but I don’t think I’m lazy enough to play it vertically…with a remote. Okay, maybe I would. There may be a few benefits to upright pinball: Like not hurting your back, being able to sit comfortably, it saves space in your home etc. But at $119.95 it’s cheaper to play one of the many far superior console versions of pinball. Plus that HUGE remote isn’t a winning me over. No, it’s not a good idea to play pinball in this sacrilegious manner. You will look like a tool because that’s what you are.