Pinq FAQ

Pinq is an experimental visual search engine for pinball machines. Describe a game by what it looks like, features or facts. Pinq will then build a shortlist of games and ranks them. Each result can then be expanded for links to more information.

Pinq is a portmanteau of pinball query. It is pronounced "pink", as in the colour.

IPDB is an absolutely amazing resource. It holds the richest data on pinball machines anywhere, along with the manuals, ROMs and other resources that keep games running. All the information is there, but it sits on a technology stack that is a quarter of a century old. You can search it, but only by keyword and direct hit. It is closed to crawling and has no developer API, so nobody can build on it.

That is where the wonderful work of OPDB comes in. It gives people a programmatic way to identify games and build software on top of them. The records are there, but the search is still primitive.

Community rules and guide sites tend to have the same problem. They rarely have rich search, and most block crawlers so their hard work is not swallowed into AI summaries. That is a fair choice, and Pinq respects it by only indexing factual information about named distinguishing features. Relevant community guides are linked in all search results for human readers to discover rules and strategies for each title.

Pinq is here to help pinball fans find a game easily, and then find all the amazing resources the pinball community has contributed for it.

No. The databases are IPDB and OPDB, and Pinq is built on top of them rather than in place of them.

Pinq starts from OPDB and crawls it game by game. Machine vision then studies the pictures uploaded to OPDB and writes down what it sees, which becomes the searchable index. Notes about each game's features are added to those visual records.

The finished record for every game lives on its own page with a permanent URL, linked out to the databases and resources where the full detail lives.

Low resolution thumbnails of the game images are mirrored on our own CDN so as not to unduly load OPDB. Every image links through to the full resolution original hosted by OPDB.

Anything you can see or remember about a game: a colour, a character, a scene, a toy on the playfield. Try "golf themed games", or even more wild, "sunsets viewed from the cockpit of a fighter jet". You'll be surprised at what you can dig out.

You can also search by including the game's name, number of players or a date range, or jump to it immediately with its short name such as WH2O or TZ.

That is what it is for. Describe the backglass, the playfield or the theme as best you remember it, and the closest matches come up.

If you also remember a decade, a manufacturer or a designer, add that. Typing 1990s Williams river rafting, or a Dennis Nordman game with a mine, lifts the games that match higher up the shortlist. These never filter anything out. They only move matching games up.

Yes. Type a game’s short name on its own, such as WH2O or TZ, and press Enter. If only one game uses that short name you go straight to its page.

• Machine Vision: Automated vision models analyze open OPDB playfield photos to detect, segment, and tag physical components. This visual analysis forms the primary foundation of the search index.
• Game Facts: Names, years, manufacturers, credits and photos come from OPDB.
• Feature Names: The names of shots, modes and playfield toys are aggregated from public rulesheets and guides, with no rules text, descriptions or strategy. Each title page links to the original rulesheets and guides where available.
• Accuracy: Game descriptions and visual tags are automatically generated by AI models inspecting photos. Details can occasionally be inaccurate or hallucinated.

Fix it upstream. Pinq indexes what is on OPDB, so add photos or correct details on the game’s OPDB record and the indexing here gets better.

To update a link or ask for a listing to be removed, use the contact form on the About page.

Not a separate one. The URLs are the API. The JSON and HTML payloads for each title contain every piece of data powering the search engine. Toggle the collapsible reference sections at the bottom of any page to inspect the raw vision outputs.

In the spirit of OPDB: Pinq is a free resource, both free as in beer and free as in speech.

If a URL lives under /pinq/, the metadata on that page is released under CC0 1.0: do whatever you want with it, no credit required. Build on it, scrape it, remix it. Just remember it’s compiled by custom scripts and vision models and it’s experimental, so don't assume 100% accuracy.

• Images: Our CDN hosts lightweight thumbnail previews solely to ensure site functionality, fast loading, and fallback reliability. For original full-resolution media assets or to avoid potential copyright ambiguity, we recommend sourcing images directly from OPDB.
• External Content: Respect the copyrights and licenses of external rulesheets, databases, and community guides linked from Pinq, as well as non-Pinq sections of mayapinball.com.
• Backlinks: If you build something cool with Pinq data or share a title page on Pinside, Reddit, or your blog, a backlink to mayapinball.com/pinq/ is always appreciated!