@flylanddesigns.bsky.social feel free to add this contribution to your art. 🤣 #pinballcats

The TOTAN artwork is pretty special to me but I don't mind this updated genie at all. Pretty badass. Just keep my cats on the backglass kthxbye.

"I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time." #democracy https://werd.io/i-want-you-to-understand-chicago/

Unexpected meetings with deliberately vague titles (“Sync”, “Chat”, “Check-in”) are almost always bad news.

This Polygon article about Gene Cunningham is good background reading, if you don't know much about him. It's about his ordeal with Big Bang Bar, but that took place AFTER all these events I'm retelling. www.polygon.com/features/201...

Illinois Pin Ball, part 2: So we got the invite to talk to Gene. A bunch of us drove down and met with him to discuss how this would work. I tried to take photos and notes to record the event.

I think we've covered enough of the #pinball 2000 years, I still have more in the archives to post soon. For now I can try to retell what happened right after we were all fired. Some engineers were going to Midway or WMS Gaming. I got a job offer from Turmell. But then another phone call came in...

The documentary with the Mortal Kombat Kollection has a ton of great stuff for arcade/pinball sickos like me, like this delightful photo of Roger Sharpe at his office at Williams/Midway.

Concept design for Count Pacula, a canceled video game/pinball hybrid arcade game. The game was developed by Bally Midway, the North American distributor for Pac-Man arcade games in the early 1980s. #namco #pacman #videogames #retrogaming #halloween

Something for the font enthusiasts

The dream is real, the PinballArtBot (@backglass.bsky.social) is up and running. Do you like pinball art? Follow the bot! Thanks to @shaneus.bsky.social for the idea and @hgstrp.com for making a kick-ass database source.

So I'm pondering @shaneus.bsky.social 's idea of doing a bot that posts pinball images every hour/day/whatever. Scraping them from IMDB is possible but I'm wary of ownership and copyright issues, either from the photog or the factories. Am I overthinking this? Any other ideas? Should I ask Duncan?

Here's an old #pinball programming tip for all you aspiring homebrew developers out there: Your lamp matrix is probably represented in memory by a few bytes or words. You can write a really cool effect in under a minute by filling it with 0xAA (10101010) and then 0x55 (01010101) back and forth.

Fun fact about the aftermath of the Williams #pinball closure: PLD helped Stern review the P2K IP @ WMS. We looked to see if buying their PC platform could be a cost saving + dev time accelerant. We joked that it should be named SPIKE (Stern Pinball Industry Killing Engine) since P2K killed WMS.

Let's find the lamenting from #pinball players when things went from alphanumeric displays to dot-matrix. Was there any? Was it too early in Internet history to archive?

I can't imagine how many people walked by this group of legends at Expo today and had no clue... (photo credit @playhistory.bsky.social)

white house has joined bluesky click here to block all official us government accounts instantly bsky.app/profile/did:...

It's nice to know that even virtual machines can be badly adjusted.

The original pre-Expo internet gathering, 1994. @heyrocker.com @tedestes.bsky.social @dwhoops.bsky.social

Finally achieved a lifelong dream, sorry to all my haters who doubted me

OG Family Guy

What a great theme, wishing these guys well! We kind of went down the same road with Ripley: is there a license (Gary's request) that leaves us wide open to lots of interesting stuff (Pat's request)?

and I feel fine

The frogs have landed in Chicago!

Classified advertisement in BYTE Magazine, January 1980. Hmm.

How do you describe a firm where all the early engineers and architects have left and what remains are younger people that happily fuck around in meetings all day but have no idea how any of the systems actually work? I liken it to Logan's Run but that's lost on people as well because I'm an old.

It's a Friday night in DuPage County, Illinois. Whatcha gonna do?

Old #pinball lore: the IRC chats. WMS was the kind of firm that didn't give people a lot of access inside the building. There were interviews with trade mags and once in a while Schelberg got to come inside, but nothing was really targeted at players. We tried to change that in the mid 90s. (more)

So does Stern just give a VIP tour to anyone with a podcast or YouTube channel now? Seems like a pretty cost effective marketing plan.

All hail the best patent drawing ever

This is new to BaT? Interesting... 🤔

Can you get a working DEC VT100 at VCFMW? Now I'm kind of wanting one again.

You pinball people are all great at Bluesky now but I think "Star Wars" has to go onto the mute list for a week or so...

Been tinkering with Home Assistant and added a CO2 sensor and now I'm down the rabbit hole of making a DIY heat recovery ventilator. Another thing for the TODO pile...

Speaking of Digi-Key - if you're ever up in that neck of the woods and need to get home quickly, try Denver Air Connection. They fly this tricked out E145 from TVF to MSP. 19 seats and unlimited snacks! The poshest commuter flight I've ever taken.

I've been to that indoor patio. I've been to the Cunningham Holidome. One of these days I'll put together the story. The tale of the field trip a bunch of ex-WMS employees took down to Bloomington, looking to save what was left of Williams Pinball.

Me: I can't wait for TRON: Ares Brain: The Pixels remake? Me: [sobs]

Pinball 2000. Laying out the menu system for diagnostics/adjustment, pixel by pixel. April 1998.

Pinball 2000, Wizard Blocks. Another photo of the first whitewood on the rack in the mechanical lab. The drop bank was one piece here (stolen from Jackbot) it eventually became 2 to agree with the game mechanic. Early levels would have you bashing 2 large blocks across, then 4 smaller ones later on.

Pinball 2000, Wizard Blocks. This was a digital photo I made for myself to guide placement of video elements against the playfield. Pat and I really wanted to avoid some of the visual issues of the first two games. Keeping things off the edges of the tube was critical to preserve the illusion.

Wizard Blocks, the concept, had a strange origin story. Pat had started early work on a conventional WPC pin after Safecracker named "Wizards!". I believe it had a teen-wizards-vs-big-bad theme but I can't totally recall. Trademark was filed two years before Harry Potter was released in the UK.

Pinball 2000: First Wizard Blocks whitewood. May 1999. Unlike other Pat games where things get added iteratively, the WB schedule was so insane that he went to a nearly completed design on the first build. Turning just the flippers on was easy and Pat could tinker while we started software.

Mortal Kombat will always be part of Chicago. Rock on, @noobde.bsky.social

Pinball 2000. Working on the coin handling code and pricing tables. There wasn't a lot of time to, you know, get this all arranged nicely on a table. There wasn't a lot of time to sleep.

Pinball 2000: "It Came From Uranus" If you play RFM and start Drive-In Demolition you'll see a movie playing on the screen. The artists created and acted out a real retro film (with a plot!) as content. The WMS factory+offices were used as the set. An amazing job. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq_U...

This guy.

The irony of this all is that Joe read rec.games.pinball as much as everyone else. When I posted on a Saturday night about WMS' Indiana Jones on test but didn't say where, Kaminkow called me, at home!, a few hours later the next morning to ask me where I saw it. groups.google.com/g/rec.games....

In August 1994, after one Steve Baumgarten made degrading comments about Data East Pinball on rec/.games.pinball, Joe Kaminkow (then the vice president of engineering and design) issued a lengthy rebuttal in the company's defense. Source: groups.google.com/g/rec.games....