koz1000

As they say, it was a different time.

I'm friends with someone that worked at Atari around that era and he'll be the first to tell you it was a very loose atmosphere there.

The amount of homebrew games has been growing year after year, and the results are getting pretty impressive.

Here's a review of what showed up at Pinball Expo 2024: https://pinballexpo.com/homebrew/

My last name contains the character sequence "rz".

Back in the BBS days this would trigger a Zmodem transfer on certain clients. It made a lot of people upset.

If you ever played a Williams Bally/Midway pinball machine from the 1990s dot-matrix era (Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Attack from Mars, Medieval Madness, etc), all of the artwork and animation for those displays was done entirely by hand in Deluxe Paint Animation for MSDOS.

The features like stenciling and animbrush were incredibly powerful. And with a little bit of extra software the exported files could be converted directly into a format for the game software to use.

We switched to C++. Nobody had a problem with the switch, although multitheading became a sticky point with some of the developers so we had to write an API to simulate nonpreemptive tasking like the old assembly system.

It also ran Williams' line of pinball machines all the way until 1999.

I was working on an 8-bit system back in this same time period. We couldn't afford flash devices and the kit required to reprogram them. But we did a similar trick with an extra write pin located near the ROM socket, then used a special daughterboard filled with SRAM that replaced the ROM and also touched the write line. Now we could just use our cheap debugger and blow an image into the address space the ROM used.

Only downside was that you lost the image on power down, so I can see why EEPROM was more important to Apple in developing their systems.

Guess we shouldn't spoil how William Gibson's Neuromancer ends, then.

I worked with erasable EPROMs back in the day. It was a pain in the ass.

And a lot of smaller microcontrollers still use a UART port and serial protocol to reflash the device. It's the lowest common denominator for hardware interface and the simplest thing that works.

And, not you specifically, but you're the guy that ruins RTO for everyone else.

I'm hybrid and every Wednesday there's a wave of people that slide in, put in their earbuds, and shout into Teams calls for eight hours. It's impossible to concentrate.

I've managed to get some of them to get self aware and use conference rooms or those silly phone booths, but it's a nonstop problem now.

Glad you're enjoying it. We had a lot of fun making this one.

I have lots of early photos and stories going up on Mastodon. Go check it out.

It's been 26 years. I figure that's long enough. =)

If your NGG is on free play, here's the code to warp to the hole in one challenge (the final mode):

Both flippers, then 3L, 1R, 9L, 1R, 1L, 1R.

Then hold the left flipper button in before starting the game. Have fun!

(Source: I wrote the backdoor)

My kid routinely asked for access to Photos, which seemed pretty benign. Turned out she was screen recording entire Netflix movies and saving them in her Photos cache, not only bypassing every single restriction but also tanking my iCloud storage quota.

Given how people stuff their carts, seems like you could easily bury something expensive at the bottom. If the store is super busy the receipt checkers probably won't disassemble your whole cart.

That's right. Bally/Midway left the city for the suburbs during the boom years, with offices in Rosemont and factories in Franklin Park and Bensenville.

The Franklin Park factory is actually still in use. It now makes equipment for Life Fitness, which has a historical tie back to Bally.

Here's the factory back in 1982: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62s_BIYg5Gs

And today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UUpzCJaNrQ

The more likely reason is that it was a test machine, as shown by the paperwork in the cabinet and the low play count. It was put on location for a few weeks to gather earnings data and then probably pulled back to the factory. A lot of those test/proto machines were then scrapped or sold at a very low price to someone on the design/production team if they had the means to take it home.

Back in this era it was very rare for an arcade cabinet to be sold directly to the home. Aside from being very expensive, you had to buy from a distributor much like a car dealer. Most local distributors hated dealing with home owners (too many questions, couldn't fix it themselves, delivery was a bitch, etc).

Given this was found in a Chicago suburb I'm going to take a wild guess and say it was a Bally/Midway employee that kept it in their garage or basement for a few decades and then decided it just took up too much room. Or it was handed off to a friend or neighbor over the years but either way it really hasn't left the city and never saw hard use in an arcade. Galloping Ghost has taken great advantage of this situation and obtained many pieces that are more rare then Discs of Tron.

The reason I know this is because I have a few engineering sample games in my basement as well.

The EXORciser was also used by Williams Electronics to develop software for pinball machines in the 1980s, as well as the Defender video game.

Here's Steve Ritchie and Larry DeMar working on Black Knight:

https://64.media.tumblr.com/04e09410654d43180fcf2dd0591bba38...

One embedded platform I worked on was developed in the late 80s, launched in 1990, and code I wrote in 1994 is still running. It's a 6809 processor with a little bit of RAM and 512KB of EEPROM attached. The entire code base is pure assembly language. That doesn't mean it doesn't have bugs, it just means no stdlibs to lean on.

The key isn't the longevity of the CPU, it's whatever is attached to it. Input and output stages fail, power supplies spike, things burn out, things wear out. So the processor can keep going strong...but what are you controlling?

But TDLR the answer is use the oldest sustainable tech you can find. Think like Gunpei Yokoi and build a Gameboy, not a Steam Deck.

Chicago Gaming just announced a non-remake, Pulp Fiction. The designer and programmer are veterans from the Williams days (Mark Ritchie and George Petro)

https://www.chicago-gaming.com/coinop/pulp-fiction

The old System 11 look and feel...is kind of neat.

That's the Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield. They now have the largest collection of arcade videogames under one roof, and they're growing their pinball collection.

https://www.gallopingghostarcade.com/

Indiana Jones and all other Williams/Bally pins were written in pure 6809 assembly language up until the launch of the Pinball 2000 project.

Stern tried this a long time ago to compete with Golden Tee Golf tournaments, since those games were paying people cash and killing pinball in street locations like bars.

The problem was stopping nefarious players from taking the glass off and rigging the score. It's an impossible thing to prevent.

Why do all the tech? The goal is to have the ultimate model of just-in-time manufacturing: to never run out of supplies and, without sounding creepy, to know precisely what the customer plans to order and have it in a bag in and in their hands the moment they arrive at the store.

There are upstream benefits for marketing to see the feedback of their campaigns in real-time, but this is mostly about keeping inventories low and service times lower. That equates directly to profit.

CFA isn't the only chain working on this, but they're the most open about how they're implementing the infrastructure.

I have a hunch if the developers eventually got this to run on original Midway hardware and installed it at Galloping Ghost Arcade outside Chicago that Ed would show up to check it out and say hi.

Yes, Fluke Electronics.

A lot of games I worked on kept a running counter in RAM and then seeded the PRNG when a coin was inserted. That was random enough.

Warren obviously downplays his work after Gottlieb/Ratslime* because this talk is about Q*Bert but it's worth watching the documentary Insert Coin about the technology he was helping to develop at Williams/Bally/Midway in the years afterward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1OXgCmOvbQ

The digitization of live actors wasn't completely novel but definitely helped accelerate a generation of iconic arcade titles in the 1990s.

(* I had heard the story about "Mylstar spelled backwards is Ratslym!" from others in the business and nobody could remember who it was but Warren admits it was him and that's awesome.)

I'm curious about the quality of the uSD card holders on all of these units. Do they all use quality non-corrosive fingers with enough force on the contacts?

I once had an intern that told me all about his RPi project to do model rocket telemetry, then after some interrogation sheepishly admitted that the project never quite worked because the g forces and vibration at launch were enough to make the card holder lose contact and the kernel panicked. Bummer.