Finishing up with Pinball sound, this is an amazing page with a complete reverse engineering of the Williams DCS system. Fantastic work, although the author never picked up on the code differences that eliminated the BAH! mjrnet.org/pinscape/dcs...

The DCS crashes were a HUGE problem and the entire engineering department was all-hands trying to figure out what was going on. Software was trying all kinds of detects and workarounds. Electrical were zapping boards with ESD coils. It went on for months. We put a hidden audit in WPC for it.

Congrats on your promotion, @mattbooty.bsky.social! Let's honor Matt's humble beginnings as a sound engineer at WMS. Back during COVID the sound guys started an email thread recalling the history of DCS and other systems. I've put up an early transcript here. github.com/lkoziarz/pin...

If you visit Chicago of course everyone will say get the pizza or get the beef sandwich. This is the one real thing you need to try. Even WE can't explain why it works. But it does.

PLD Monopoly Pinball: Prototype Bank toy. Can we call it a toy? It's just a door. The 1st pass was a double-door but the hinges took up too much room and made shot too narrow. So now it's the TAF vault. Pat designed and built the opto curtain by himself using Eagle CAD and a mail-order PCB house.

2026 basically

Monopoly Pinball: The PLD workspace, early 2001. We had been working out of Pat's living room for about a year now so the clutter is gathering. But we also had Rex the yellow Labrador who provided a little office security and a lot of tennis ball fetching.

PLD / Monopoly Pinball: We got through the first demos and now we had a TON of work to do. Pat convinced the Dittons to let us subcontract Chris Granner from Incredible Technologies for sound/music. Then we hired @heyrocker.com to work on display code. Mono wouldn't have been the same without them.

1R-11L-1R-10L-1R-5L-1R-14L-1R (BA5E) #Monopoly #Pinball

Paging @heyrocker.com

Monopoly Pinball, whitewood 3: The Bondo-ing. After another demo at Stern, now it's time to tweak a bunch of stuff and make it playable. Pat's a car guy, so his weapon of choice is fiberglass body filler to patch holes in the playfield. Drillable, sandable, smells awful.

Adults wreck everything. #pinball

Monopoly Pinball: More whitewood #3. The railroad wire was redone in brass, early plastic ramps were hand-built and added. The Bank wasn't a toy yet. Lots of drop targets. Somehow Pat sealed it with a urethane that made it look like mahogany. But we were moving fast. Another demo was approaching.

Monopoly Pinball: On to Whitewood 3. Now we were starting to assemble an idea of rules, or at least putting down lamps to make it look like we were. The game board was a key feature so that grid of lamps had to go in right away. (more)

I wrote a tribute for BYTE Magazine's amazing cover artist, Robert Tinney, who died Feb 1st Tinney painted 80 vivid and surreal covers illustrating various concepts in early personal computing from 1978-1990, usually airbrushed with gouache. May he RIP ❤️ arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026...

PLD Monopoly: The first demonstration at Stern Pinball. You can love or hate Pat Lawlor, but one of the things he did well was to sell a concept. If you watch the Banzai Run proto video you can see how it worked. You need to convince the people writing the checks that this is a game that will work.

Monopoly Pinball: Whitewood #2 was getting ready to show to Stern. John built the first railroad wire form by hand and it's getting placed on the machine just before the demonstration. The shape of this ramp changed with the next revision, sending it to the left side instead.

Monopoly pinball: Whitewood #2 came really quickly after #1, we had a deadline to show a basic layout and game concept to Gary before the end of December 2000. The clock waits for nobody. Krutsch's Waterworks flipper was in place.

Monopoly Pinball: We had other secret weapons in our toolbox, and John Krutsch was probably our most valuable. John's an unsung hero of WMS pinball design and came from the toy business. He could turn any wacky Lawlor idea into a real thing. He prototyped the Waterworks flipper by hand in days.

Monopoly Pinball: It had to be risky for Gary to let a garage shop design a pin at a critical time but PLD had the ability to prototype the game on its own. This took the load off Stern's engineers and model makers. Pat had also done it once before with Banzai Run: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l14...

PLD Monopoly: Pat reached out to Gary in the late summer of 2000 - maybe it was the AMOA show - and they started to talk. Gary needed a design and theme that would work. After Sharkey and Striker, no more original pinball themes ever again. Pat had an idea. (more)

breathtaking

You're probably wondering how I got here. We'll have to backtrack a bit before going forward. The PLD Monopoly story is fun, but this wasn't what we intended to do out of the gate. Williams closed in October 1999 but Mono launched in Fall 2001. What happened in between?

I promise I'll get back to cool pinball pictures shortly. I keep finding more and more on older backup drives.

A cardinal sin...

It breaks my heart to read about the amount of shit Limor has to put up with, daily, out there. Nobody deserves this.

When anyone from SCTV dies it’s like 30 people have died. Every character they created was as alive as anyone else you’ve ever met.

I'm available for voice work, Mr. Anonymous Reddit Guy...

Now I'm curious if Planetary is going to outbid me on that Genie rotomold...

This is my attempt at a XKCD style this year: "TTL PART NUMBERS"

This is really bizarre, but a MASSIVE lot of Bally and Williams artwork and molds just went up for auction. Where did this all come from? entertainment.ha.com/c/search/res...

Been away on a bit of a break, some of it unplanned (thanks FAA). Time to start digging through all my PLD photos and sharing some of that history, which may also involve a goat.

Team Ada.

Whaaaaaa?

Seasons Greetings from all of us at Williams/Bally/Midway! (1997)

For the tiny Venn diagram slice of "pinball players that listen to classical music radio", Peter was the voice of the Narrator in Tales of the Arabian Nights. Glad to see he's still working.

not really funny

Just so I'm clear on this, computer memory has tripled in price because a bunch of it that hasn't been produced yet has been ordered to populate GPUs that aren't installed in data centers that aren't built yet in order to service a demand that doesn't exist to make profits that don't happen.

I remember seeing this in the system code we were getting from Stern for SAM1. It was to help the factory staff read the test menus as they worked. 😉

"HR" was Henry "Hank" Ross. He was one of United's lead design engineers in 1956 and would leave the company about two years later to start Midway Manufacturing with partner Marcine "Iggy" Wolverton. www.replaymag.com/midway-bally... videogamehistorian.wordpress.com/tag/midway-m...

Coin-op game programming, 70 years ago....

Pssstt... You want the good stuff? 512GB DDR5... Matched pairs... Meet me around the corner...

Very special pinball artifacts from the box: early test sculptures and final mold shots for the Tales of the Arabian Nights genie toy.

Congrats to @noobde.bsky.social for making MK the only gaming IP worthy of the Netflix merger deck. 😎

Every engineering organization, sooner or later, wants to start tracking time spent on projects to review and maintain costs. Williams pinball was no exception. Did YOU fill out your timesheet this week? 🤔

OMG another pinball artifact: Placeholder Genie bash toy from Tales of the Arabian Nights. Used to test pose and position of the final sculpted toy. Art by McMahon on xerox and colored pencil with butyrate cover.

There's a G-File I wrote back in the BBS days that's archived on @textfiles.com, I wrote it exactly 40 years ago while bored at home during Thanksgiving break from high school. My first published work! And, no, I'm not sharing the link. It's embarrassingly bad.

Next random pinball artifact: A Pinball 2000 PUB card. After the launch we got feedback that P2K's software update system was a bit exotic for most operators. It needed a laptop, serial cable, a network connection to download files, and some detailed instructions. Some found it confusing. (more)

Random pinball artifacts incoming! I'm cleaning house and everything must go. Maybe a virtual garage sale?