# Episode 450 - Interview with Gerry Stellenberg 6-26-19

**Source:** For Amusement Only EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast  
**Type:** podcast_episode  
**Published:** 2019-06-27  
**Duration:** 80m 11s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://foramusementonly.libsyn.com/episode-450-interview-with-gerry-stellenberg-6-26-19

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## Analysis

Gerry Stellenberg discusses his entry into pinball, the creation of the P-Rock control board and PyProcGame framework that enabled custom pinball development, and the origins of the Multimorphic P3 machine with an LCD playfield and infrared ball tracking. He traces the journey from hobbyist custom coding of WPC machines to building a complete modular pinball platform.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Got into pinball around 23 years ago (approximately 1996) while in college at Virginia Tech playing Theater of Magic and Attack from Mars — _Gerry Stellenberg, direct autobiographical statement in interview_
- [HIGH] Designed the P-Rock board as a control system to connect computers to existing pinball machines for custom rule set development — _Gerry Stellenberg explaining the genesis of P-Rock in response to question about how he came up with the control system_
- [HIGH] Adam Preble helped structure the P-Rock device driver into LibPinProc and developed PyProcGame, a Python-based software framework, over 3-5 months of collaboration — _Gerry Stellenberg recounting the partnership with Adam Preble who contacted him after seeing his work on forums_
- [HIGH] The first major showcase of custom P-Rock potential was Dutch Pinball of Pinbot 2 video, presented at Pinball Expo 2011, which generated significant community excitement — _Gerry Stellenberg describing the 2011 Pinball Expo presentation where the Bride of Pinbot 2 video was shown to the audience_
- [HIGH] Created pinballcontrollers.com as a sole proprietorship to sell P-Rock boards, while LibPinProc and PyProcGame remained open-source projects available on GitHub — _Gerry Stellenberg explaining the business structure of pinballcontrollers.com_
- [HIGH] The P3 concept involved an LCD display in the playfield center with infrared ball tracking using transmitter/receiver grids, designed to keep game information in the player's line of sight — _Gerry Stellenberg detailing the P3 playfield design philosophy and infrared tracking technology_
- [HIGH] The P3 floating slingshot mechanism was designed using a remote-mounted flipper linkage connected via mountain bike brake line to avoid drilling through the LCD display — _Gerry Stellenberg recounting the engineering solution he and Les developed for slingshots over the LCD_
- [HIGH] The first P3 prototype was showcased at Texas Pinball Festival 2012 and won an award despite Stellenberg initially insisting it would not become a commercial product — _Gerry Stellenberg describing the 2012 Texas Pinball Festival presentation and post-show feedback_

### Notable Quotes

> "I like skill games. I like having to develop a skill set around some specific goal."
> — **Gerry Stellenberg**, early in interview
> _Explains his foundational motivation for pinball and game design philosophy_

> "The board by itself is nothing and a machine by itself is nothing, so I needed both pieces to work together in order to make any progress."
> — **Gerry Stellenberg**, mid-interview
> _Key insight into why P-Rock backward compatibility was essential to P3 development strategy_

> "You look out there and there are all these bored, sleepy faces. And then we said, well, check this out. This is a video that one of our customers has put together. And we played this Bride of Pinball 2 video and the entire room lit up."
> — **Gerry Stellenberg**, discussing 2011 Pinball Expo
> _Pivotal moment where the community recognized custom pinball was viable; demonstrates the power of visual demonstration over technical presentation_

> "Why do machines have this painted piece of wood in the lower portion that the ball rolls over as it gets to physical components when you could put a really cool dynamic canvas in there?"
> — **Gerry Stellenberg**, explaining P3 LCD concept
> _Core design philosophy behind P3's playfield innovation_

> "Les said, no, can't be done. There's no way. If you look at a coil, you look at the actuator, you look at all these mechanisms that they have in a slingshot, it's just too big."
> — **Gerry Stellenberg**, discussing slingshot engineering challenge
> _Illustrates the mechanical innovation required to solve LCD-over-playfield problem_

> "I told him, all right, that's great. Great job, Les. Well done. Now let's take that cool thing and let's make it transparent."
> — **Gerry Stellenberg**, describing transparent slingshot development
> _Shows iterative problem-solving and user experience focus_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Gerry Stellenberg | person | Founder of Multimorphic, designer of P-Rock control board and P3 pinball machine, computer engineer from Virginia Tech |
| Adam Preble | person | Software engineer from Atlanta who collaborated with Stellenberg on LibPinProc and PyProcGame framework |
| Les | person | Mechanical engineer and mountain biker who worked with Stellenberg at his day job; designed the P3 slingshot and transparent mechanical solutions |
| Nicholas Baldridge | person | Host of For Amusement Only podcast, interviewer |
| Kuhn | person | Dutch software developer who worked with Barry to create Bride of Pinbot 2 custom rule set using P-Rock |
| Barry | person | Dutch graphics and video professional who worked with Kuhn on Bride of Pinbot 2, created promotional video |
| P-Rock | product | Control board designed by Gerry Stellenberg to enable custom rule set development on existing pinball machines; foundation of Multimorphic ecosystem |
| LibPinProc | product | Open-source device driver library for P-Rock control board, developed by Adam Preble |
| PyProcGame | product | Python-based software framework for developing pinball games, built on LibPinProc; foundational for modern custom game development |
| P3 | product | Multimorphic modular pinball machine platform featuring LCD playfield with infrared ball tracking and custom mechanical slingshots |
| Multimorphic | company | Pinball equipment company founded by Gerry Stellenberg to commercialize P3 and control systems |
| pinballcontrollers.com | company | Original sole proprietorship created by Stellenberg to sell P-Rock boards; precursor to Multimorphic |
| Dutch Pinball | company | Pinball customization company co-founded by Kuhn and Barry; early adopter of P-Rock for Bride of Pinbot 2 |
| Theatre of Magic | game | Williams pinball machine from mid-1990s that Stellenberg played in college and still owns with original board |
| Attack from Mars | game | Williams Pinball 2000 machine Stellenberg played in college and still owns with original board; design inspiration for P3 |
| Bride of Pinbot 2 | game | Custom rule set created by Dutch Pinball (Kuhn and Barry) using P-Rock; breakthrough showcase of custom pinball potential at 2011 Pinball Expo |
| Judge Dredd | game | Pinball machine both Stellenberg and Adam Preble owned; used as test platform for PyProcGame framework development |
| Bride of Pinbot | game | Original pinball machine that Dutch Pinball customized with new rule set (Bride of Pinbot 2) |
| Medieval Madness | game | Williams pinball machine mentioned as inspiration for P3 playfield design; games from this era shaped Stellenberg's design philosophy |
| White Water | game | Pinball machine Stellenberg restored from poor condition; one of three machines he currently owns |
| Pinball Expo 2011 | event | Chicago pinball expo where Stellenberg and Preble presented P-Rock/PyProcGame and showed Dutch Pinball's Bride of Pinbot 2 video; key moment for community awareness |
| Texas Pinball Festival 2012 | event | Event where Stellenberg debuted the P3 prototype; won an award and generated commercial interest despite his initial dismissal of productization |
| Virginia Tech | organization | University where Stellenberg studied computer engineering with electrical engineering and programming components |
| Visual Pinball | product | Pinball simulation software that Stellenberg helped integrate with PyProcGame to allow custom games written in Python instead of Visual Basic |
| PinMame | product | Pinball emulation software that Stellenberg worked to integrate with P-Rock for controlling physical machines |

### Signals

- **[design_innovation]** P3's LCD playfield with infrared ball tracking represents a novel approach to integrating digital and mechanical pinball elements, solving engineering challenges like transparent slingshots and remote-mounted actuators (confidence: high) — Detailed technical explanation of infrared grid, brake-line slingshot design, and transparent acrylic components
- **[design_innovation]** P-Rock board with USB connectivity and external computer control (rather than embedded microcontroller) enabled flexibility for unknown future machine specifications (confidence: high) — Stellenberg's explanation: 'I didn't know exactly what my machine was going to be like. So what I chose to do was add a USB slave device to the P-Rock board'
- **[community_signal]** Custom pinball community grew from forum discussions among a few users to recognizable movement after Dutch Pinball's Bride of Pinbot 2 video demonstration at Pinball Expo 2011 (confidence: high) — Stellenberg: 'the custom pinball community didn't exist at the time. It was just a few guys on a forum... The room lit up' when Bride of Pinbot 2 video was shown
- **[design_philosophy]** Stellenberg's design approach emphasizes skill development, iterative problem-solving, and keeping game information in player's line of sight via LCD playfield placement (confidence: high) — Multiple statements about preferring skill-based games, playing games like Attack from Mars and Medieval Madness, and philosophy: 'while they're playing the game they never need to look up'
- **[technology_signal]** LibPinProc and PyProcGame released as open-source projects on GitHub alongside commercial P-Rock board sales, creating foundation for broader community development (confidence: high) — Stellenberg: 'PyProcGame and the LibPinProc driver were not company products. Essentially, those were open-source things that we made available to everyone'
- **[personnel_signal]** Cross-disciplinary collaboration between Stellenberg (software/electrical engineering) and Les (mechanical engineering) proved essential for solving complex integration challenges (confidence: high) — Detailed account of slingshot design iteration and transparent component engineering requiring mechanical expertise
- **[product_launch]** P3 prototype initially conceived as hobby project; public reception and repeat requests at Texas Pinball Festival 2012 created momentum toward commercialization (confidence: high) — Stellenberg: 'I was like, no, that's not happening... And then... my aunt and uncle... asked me if I was going to make it into a business'
- **[business_signal]** Stellenberg maintained day jobs while developing P-Rock and P3, indicating bootstrap/part-time development model in early stages (confidence: high) — Multiple references to 'day jobs' and time constraints: 'I had day jobs, a series of day jobs that I was spending most of my time in'
- **[manufacturing_signal]** P3 prototyping required custom fabrication (acrylic/polycarbonate components) and careful mechanical design to integrate LCD, infrared tracking, and physical playfield elements (confidence: high) — Detailed account of transparent slingshot manufacturing using 3/4-inch and 1/4-inch plastic with custom shapes and precision mounting
- **[historical_signal]** Stellenberg's college-era pinball experience (Theater of Magic, Attack from Mars, Medieval Madness) directly influenced P3's playfield design and philosophy (confidence: high) — 'Remember, I'm coming from games like Attack from Mars and Medieval Madness... most of its elements. It's about two-thirds of the play field'
- **[content_signal]** YouTube videos of early P-Rock and P3 prototypes served as key marketing/community-building tools, particularly the infrared ball tracking proof-of-concept and Bride of Pinbot 2 video (confidence: high) — Multiple references to posting videos and status updates on forums; Bride of Pinbot 2 video breakthrough at expo; 'you can actually dig up that seminar. It's on YouTube somewhere'
- **[regulatory_signal]** No regulatory or legal concerns mentioned regarding custom board sales or modified machines (confidence: high) — Absence of discussion about licensing, IP, or legal constraints in P-Rock/PyProcGame open-source release or pinballcontrollers.com business model

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## Transcript

What's that sound? It's For Amusement Only, the EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast. Welcome back to For Amusement Only. This is Nick Baldrige and today I have a special guest. The man with me is going to go down, I think, in coin-op history as a legendary figure. He has provided a service which is unlike anything that has ever existed previously to allow for homebrew Rewoo and custom development as well as a machine which allows some of the same ideas to take root. Gerry Stellenberg joins me. How are you, Jerry? Hey, Nick. I'm good. Thanks for having me on. Pleasure to have you. So I thought I'd start off by asking you, how did you get into pinball? Oh, geez. So that was about 20, how many years ago? 23 years ago. So I was in college playing a lot of pool in our student center and they had pinball machines there. I had some good friends who would commonly go and play a few pinball games while waiting to play pool. And they kind of forced me over to play a couple of machines begrudgingly. I thought it was a waste of money, but I played a few games on some free credits that they had racked up. And the rest, as they say, is history. So was it winning free games that really got you hooked? Actually, no. I'm kind of a guy who just, I like skill games. I like having to develop a skill set around some specific goal. So I watched my friends play super well and then I would step up there and I'd lose the ball super fast. So it was interesting for me to try to understand what made them good and why I was so bad and to practice and develop those skills. Excellent. So did you have a particular favorite game at the time? What games were you playing on? I got started in the mid-90s, so it was Theater of Magic, Attack from Mars. I wanted to say they had a shadow. They might have gotten a medieval madness right before I graduated. It was kind of in the heyday, really fun, popular kind of games that have stood the test of time, too. So I actually still have a Theater of Magic and Attack from Mars in my house. Running an original board set? Running an original board set, yes. Very good. And as far as pool goes, what attracted you to pool? Was it the skill factor? Yes, I suppose, but I grew up with a pool table in my house. My parents bought a pool table when I was six or seven years old and my brother and I used to play all the time. In college, it was a nice respite from work and studying. Unlike most people in college, I don't drink. I didn't drink back then either. So when I had some free time, instead of going out to the bars or downtown, I would go to the pool hall and just waste a few hours playing pool trying to get better. Hustle kids for their beer money? Hustle kids. No, we had some tournaments and leagues and ladders and all the competitive stuff, which they have in pinball now as well, but all that competitive stuff just kind of gave me the drive to keep practicing and get better. And I still have a pool table in my house as well. Very cool. Coin operated or no? No, I'm kind of a pool bigot. It's a nine foot professional table. That was actually the one requirement for my house when I had it built in 2001 was that it had a room big enough for a full size nine foot pool table. Wow. OK. Well, remind me not to play pool with you because I'm terrible. But so what were you studying in school? Computer engineering. Ah, OK. And it all makes sense. It does, yeah. Did you minor in electrical engineering or how did that part come about? So I went to Virginia Tech in southwest Virginia and their computer engineering program was essentially, this was in the early days of computer engineering, it was essentially a mix of electrical engineering with a computer science minor. So we took all the electronics courses and they also had us taking programming and object-oriented classes. So they introduced us to both sides of it. That's really cool. And, you know, I support that. That's neat. Yeah. It's actually interesting to me how even the stuff we did in electrical engineering or learning how to define low-level logic and circuits and those kind of things is super fun and interesting for me. But nowadays, even when I started working after school, we didn't do any of that. We basically wrote code whether we were doing software or hardware. We wrote code even to describe the hardware. Wow. There's always been some aspect of programming in everything I've done. Yeah, and I've tinkered with EEs, the building circuits and so forth, and with logic. And I've found the similarity between the two pretty fascinating. A lot of my programmer brethren don't feel that way. Well, there's multiple levels of electrical engineering, right? There's analog circuits, which you're dealing with transistors and basically current curves and voltage curves. And there's really not a whole lot of logic to that. I mean, it's all based on fundamental theories and principles. But when you're talking about logic, when you're talking about programming, it's all ands and ors and ifs. And when you're doing digital logic or programming, it's all essentially the same thing. Yeah, just with logic gates instead. Yep. So what gave you the idea to come up with a control system? I had, as is common in the industry, I grew my pinball collection in my house from two games to four games to eight games and then to 11 games. Mm-hmm. Expensive play field layouts and kind of give them more life. So they have computers inside them. They had older computers that were obviously powerful enough to do fun things and create new or create interesting light shows and sound effects and videos on the dot matrix displays and progress through rule sets. But to me, it was an interesting technical challenge to try to come up with a way to connect a computer to those machines so that I or anybody else could create a custom rule set. So that was kind of the beginnings of it. I wanted to figure out a way to connect a computer to these machines and write my own software. And which platform did you choose as a base? At the time, my most popular, interesting games were WPC to me, so mid-90s Williams games. But I also had a couple of Stern games, so I didn't pick one. I actually designed a board that worked with both of them. Go for the most challenging wave. Well, so yeah, there's more to the story. While thinking about how to make or how to breathe new life into these games or how to write new software for these games, I came up with a concept for a machine, and we'll talk about that machine more, I'm sure, in a little while. But so the original goal of this board called the P-Rock that I developed was to be a fundamental building block, the controller board, the foundational piece for an eventual custom game I wanted to make. So the building blocks of that were there all the way back with P-Rock? Yeah, because what happened is I had a board now. I designed the P-Rock. Oh, I had the idea to design the P-Rock. I didn't have the board yet. I was sitting there thinking, the board is useless without this custom game or without features and playfields and things to control with it. So I either had to design and build the complete custom game at that point. In other words, the board by itself is nothing and a machine by itself is nothing, so I needed both pieces to work together in order to make any progress. But that was a ton of work, and I didn't want to bite all that off. So what I wound up doing was building in compatibility into the control board to work with existing games. And that essentially let me use old machines, old being the Williams games that I had in my house, as development platforms for future custom game development. I see. And was there one game in particular that you wanted to rewrite the rules for initially? No, I didn't actually have that goal myself. What I wanted to do was build the custom game. So what I did when I was researching how to build backwards compatibility into these things, I researched on the internet and I started talking on the pinball forums and asking questions to people who were more familiar with the control systems of those games. And as we talked through it and as I designed the board, it kind of became obvious that there were other people who wanted to use such a board to do new interesting things with their machines as well. So while the project kind of started as an idea to create a custom machine that might be able to run custom code, it grew into this potential product, this potential board that other people could use to write custom codes for their existing games as well. I see. With the board, you have to have some way to program it, to tell it what to do. Yes. So how did that come about, the framework that is used to control it? Yeah, so it's actually an interesting story because back then embedded control systems were very common. Anyone developing a thing that needed to be programmed would design some kind of embedded microcontroller onto the board. So they'd pick usually a RISC type of controller or maybe an x86 type of processor and stick it on the board. I didn't want to do that because I didn't know exactly what my machine was going to be like. So what I chose to do was add a USB slave device to the P-Rock board so that I could connect it to any kind of controller, whether that be a laptop, a desktop computer, or some kind of single board computer. At the time, computers like the BeagleBones were just starting to get popular single board computers. So the neat thing about that was no matter what you wanted to do, whether it was program new rule sets for an existing game We're going to develop a new game with low processing needs or high processing needs. You could connect to it whatever computer you wanted, whatever computer had enough power for you to run the type of software you needed. So developed the board, added the USB to it, connected it to a computer. It happened to be my desktop computer at the time just because it was sitting there. And I started obviously needing to write some simple device driver type code so I could connect to the board and configure it And then start twiddling driver bits or turning on coils or turning on lamps and those kind of things in a pinball machine. So originally it was all kind of hard-coded, very low-level driver work. And I was talking about it on the forums and I was showing people the progress. I'm sure I put out a couple of videos and some status updates. And a guy who lived in Atlanta, Georgia at the time just happened to be interested in a custom pinball project of his own. He was doing some research. He saw one of my posts or one of my videos and he contacted me to see what was going on or to see how he could get a hold of a board. It turns out his name was Adam Preble and he was a very accomplished software guy who saw what I was doing with my hard-coded, low-level hackery of code that would control this board. And he offered to help, basically to help structure the device driver and to structure a higher level framework around that code. That's awesome. Yeah, so we spent the next three or four or five months developing a more structured device driver that's now an open source project called LibPinProc, the library for the pinball controller called the PROC, LibPinProc. And he started developing on top of that a Python-based software framework to help with all the features in a pinball machine that you would need to basically develop a game. And that's now called PyProcGame, Python P-RockGame, PyProcGame. And that is basically the foundational framework that's used in a lot of the modern-day frameworks that people are using to write custom games. Yes. So Adam started with the core pieces, the things that needed really good performance and functionality. He developed this thing called a priority-based mode queue, so you could structure your game in subsets of logic, one to control like a multiball, one to control all your different modes, and you can put those together in a priority-based system so that it can properly respond to switch events and those kind of things. And I took the base of that and I was, the one machine we both had in common that we both owned at the time was a Judge Dredd. So I connected it to a Judge Dredd and I started writing a game using this Pi Proc game thing that Adam had created. And so to do a complete game I needed to add all sorts of functionality like ball trough management and tilt management and stuff to track the number of players in a game and all that stuff. So he gave me the core of that framework. I started adding pinball functionality to it. And fast forward about six months, we had a completely working custom rule set for Judge Dredd and a super feature-rich software framework that anyone with a P-Rock board could use to develop a game. Excellent. So do you still run the custom rule set today? Do you still have the Judge Dredd? I don't have the JudgeGrid anymore. I worked on it for, I don't know, about a year, but I moved on to other things. I wrote compatibility or functional game code for Stern machines to prove that would work. I did things with PinMame to make sure PinMame could control physical machines through the P-Rock board. I worked with Visual Pinball so that we could write games in PyProc game and have those connect to the Visual Pinball tables that people were developing. And I think at the time, or maybe they still do, have to write most of their games in Visual Basic for Visual Pinball. I'm pretty sure that's the case, yeah. So we wondered why people were struggling with Visual Pinball when they could use this higher-level scripting language that was much more user-friendly And that had the structure, the pinball structure that we put into the PyPROC game. So I helped to develop a bridge for that so you could use PyPROC game for those kind of things. And, of course, at the same time, I had day jobs, a series of day jobs that I was spending most of my time in. There was a lot going on. I don't have the Judge Dredd anymore. I got rid of it a while back. I actually paired my collection down from 11 machines to 3. Still have the original Theater of Magic. Still have the original Attack from Mars. And I also have a whitewater that I restored from basically a piece of junk to something that's pretty pretty. It's a cool machine. Very good. Those aren't the only games you have in your home, are they? Those actually are the only games. I used to have some of the machines that we work on now for our business, Multimorphic, and the P3 machine. But now all of those are at our factory, and we have them in a test lab and work on those during the day. And I go home at night and try not to work all night long. Understood. Okay. So how did the public receive the framework and the P-Rock when it came out? So it was a slow roll, mostly because the custom pinball community didn't exist at the time. It was just a few guys on a forum. I think it was rec.games.pinball at the time, RGP, just talking about possibilities. I think the first thing that happened to kind of create more awareness of it was a couple of Dutch guys got a hold of or saw the videos, saw the board, and ordered one to re-theme their brightest pinball. And today people know of them as Dutch Pinball. There was a guy named Kuhn who was a software developer and Barry who was a graphics guy who developed a lot of 2 and 3D animations and those kind of things. They got a hold of a P-Rock and Pipe Rock game and created an entire new rule set for Bride of Pinbot. It's now a popular project called Bride of Pinbot 2. But what's interesting about that is they developed or they created a video demonstration of what they've done. Barry was a video guy, so he packaged all their work into almost a promotional video for their game. And Adam and I were attending Pinball Expo that year. I want to say it was 2011, I think. So Pinball Expo in Chicago in 2011. And we got up there and we started presenting this super technical thing called the P-Rock Rock Board. And Adam was walking them through the, you know, the Pinball framework, the P-Rock Game framework, and explaining how to write code. And you look out there and there are all these bored, sleepy faces. And then we said, well, check this out. This is a video that one of our customers has put together. And we played this Brighter Pinball 2 video and the entire room lit up. And people were like, holy crap, that's awesome. It was super well produced and they were obviously doing some cool things with video and other things. And people at the time didn't realize you could customize a pinball game or at least not rewrite code for it in the way that they were doing it in the Bride of Pinball. So the room lit up. It got exciting. People had great questions after it. And I think you can actually dig up that seminar. It's on YouTube somewhere. Well, that's great. So then I know Multimorphic, you had pinballcontrollers.com. Yes. Did you get that started at that time? Yes. So because of the interest in the P-Rock board, I created a sole proprietorship at the time called pinballcontrollers.com. The only product at the beginning was the P-Rock board, and PyProcGame and the LibPinProc driver were not company products. Essentially, those were open-source things that we made available to everyone. So anyone could buy a board from us and then download the software from GitHub at the time, the repository, online. And go about it doing their thing. And then what was the impetus for making the P3 Rock? Okay, so the next step since I had the P-Rock board, which was the core piece that I needed to build a custom machine that I wanted to build, was that I needed a way to control coils and I needed a way to control lights. So the next thing I did was I designed those boards. So I designed a board called the PD-16 board, which is a PD stands for Power Driver, Power Driver 16. It's a small board that has 16 FETs on it and some control logic, and it can control up to 16 coils. And I designed that board in such a way that if you put a different type of FET on half of the board, you could use it as what's called a push-pull circuit. So you could supply current or you could sink current. And by populating half the board one way and half the board the other way, then instead of driving 16 devices like 16 coils, you could control a lamp matrix. So, for instance, you could have eight columns and eight rows, just like they have in a traditional Williams or Orlard Stern pinball machine to control lamps. So the P board had switch inputs and control circuitry to do all the low logic in a machine and we had this PD board to drive coils and the variant of that board we called it the PD to drive a Lant Matrix and that was essentially all we needed to have to control an entire pinball machine So at that point, I got with a hands-on kind of mechanical engineer type friend I had who was a guy I worked with at the time. And I said, we're ready. We're ready to develop. We're ready to build this custom machine that we wanted to do. The concept for this machine was that I wanted the central portion of the playfield to be essentially an LCD. I wanted real flippers, real bumpers, real slingshots, all that stuff, but I wanted the area just in front of the slingshots to be an LCD. And I wanted to develop physical elements, you know, traditional physical loops and targets and pop bumpers and all that stuff, and put them a little deeper into the play field. Remember, I'm coming from games like Attack from Mars and Medieval Madness, and even Theater of Magic has most of its elements. It's about two-thirds of the play field. So why do machines have this painted piece of wood in the lower portion that the ball rolls over as it gets to physical components when you could put a really cool dynamic canvas in there and draw graphics and basically take your display, take the scores and the instructional information and the pop-ups that happen when you shoot stuff and put them right in front of the player's eyes so that while they're playing the game they never need to look up. So that was the basic concept, and I was sitting there thinking, well, we now have these flat screen tablets and mobile phones and these things where you have a display and you can use your finger and touch points on the displays and interact with them. Well, holy crap, we're putting an LCD in a pinball machine and we have a physical pinball rolling over them. Why don't we do the same thing? So this sounds like a fun, simple idea, and it's very much not a simple idea. Obviously, you can't have a physical pinball. Well, being the input device onto a touchscreen LCD because it would break it. As soon as the ball touched the surface of the screen, the screen would stop working. I started thinking through how to solve that. There were a couple of ideas, but what I wound up doing was developing an infrared grid of light using transmitters and receivers along the edges of the screen in this interesting mess pattern to basically shine light across the playfield, across the top of this LCD. Have the physical pinball that is rolling around break combinations of beams of light, some from the left, some from the right, and use the data of which beams were broken to calculate a position of the ball. And if you again go back to YouTube and search early P3 concept videos from 2011, you'll see my first, call it a whitewood, because it was actually white, my first attempt at developing an infrared grid over top of an LCD and rolling a pinball around, drawing a, I think it was a red dot at the time in software to represent software's understanding of where it thought the pinball would be. And it's pretty cool because it actually, I mean it's not super, it's not even close to perfect, but what you can see is the red dot kind of jumps. Let's say you roll the physical pinball straight up the playfield right in the center of the playfield up on a vertical line. You would see this red dot move up the screen and kind of jump back and forth from the right to the left to the right to the left to the right to the left. And you could see that if you average the left and the right components of those dots, it would exactly match the line. The direction that the ball rolled up the screen. So it was this super cool and super basic proof of concept. That play field or that prototype had a, I believe it was a 17-inch screen in the middle of it, and it had two flippers. It didn't have slingshots. It didn't have anything else. It was just a very simple proof of concept. So then I got with less, and we started making it more complicated. A 17-inch screen is neat, but a pinball machine doesn't play like a pinball machine unless you have slingshots. So we were going to put these physical slingshots in, but 17-inch display, at least in the area we put it right in front of the flippers, blocks the mounting holes that you would need to mount traditional slingshots. So I went to Les and I said, you need to come up with a way to remotely mount actuators for slingshots. You need to physically somehow suspend them over the screen and figure out how to drive them without drilling a hole through the screen and without resting anything on the surface of the screen because that would block the light that we were shining across. He said, no, can't be done. There's no way. If you look at a coil, you look at the actuator, you look at all these mechanisms that they have in a slingshot, it's just too big. There's no way we could do that. We couldn't mount that such that it would exist over top of an area where a slingshot needs to be. And I don't remember whose idea it was, but we talked about it for a while. Eventually we realized that if we basically took the idea of a flipper, which is a linkage that gets sucked into a coil through the plunger of a coil, and the actuator, the linkage gets pulled in and that is translated into movement of a flipper bat around a pivot point. If we kind of took that thing, miniaturized the bat, stuck that into a slingshot, and every time a ball hit the slingshot, we could have this little tiny flipper bat thing fire, push into the slingshot rubber, and pop the ball out. The actuator or the linkage that connected to the actuator, to the little flipper bat, doesn't necessarily need to be right next to it. Instead of a one-inch linkage, let's make a six or seven or eight-inch linkage and move the coil somewhere else, somewhere beyond the screen, and then basically remote activate a slingshot mechanism. Les is an active mountain biker, so all of his early ideas are inspired by mountain biking. So he took this concept of a floating little tiny flipper bat thing, connected it to a coil through the use of a brake line from a mountain bike. Okay. So the coil was connected to a brake line, the brake line was connected to the back end of a flipper bat, and we tested it, and it actually worked surprisingly well. Of course it gets more challenging because you have this big thing mounted above the surface of your display, but you wanted to be able to see the display. So now we have this big mechanical thing blocking visibility into the display, and that kind of defeats the purpose of having the display there in the first place. So I told him, all right, that's great. Great job, Les. Well done. Now let's take that cool thing and let's make it transparent. He's like, what? What do you mean? He's like, well, we have a screen there. We need to be able to see it. So his next prototype was made completely out of nuts and screws and custom shaped pieces of acrylic. Acrylic or polycarbonate or some form of plastic. We got three quarter inch plastic and a quarter inch plastic and whatever we needed to build the various components. He built two slingshots with them. We remote mounted them over the thing and it's super cool because now you can see. I mean it kind of obscures the shape as things move around it. But now you have these working slingshots and you can see through them. So you can see the stuff underneath or you can see the stuff on the display. You tell me how deep you want me to get because it gets crazier from there. I'm excited and all ears. So keep going. All right. So now we have two traditional flipper assemblies, which I bought. I think I bought rebuild kits or full kits of WPC-93 flippers or something. We have these fully custom floating magical slingshot things that we invented on the spot. And we had a 17-inch monitor and we took all this and we built all that into a prototype pinball machine. I had some concepts for what I wanted the upper play field to look like. It was a very loopy kind of layout. We wanted everything to be very high speed so every shot that we hit left or right side there were loops and ramps but we wanted everything to kind of flow around and come back to a flipper. And some of them would be fed by a mechanism like a wire flow or a feed tube or something, and others would flow around the orbits and come back to the flippers on the playfield. But we wound up developing this. I think I actually built the first one because Les was off making a new version of the slingshot assembly. So I, with my lack of mechanical production skills, cobbled together this fully working upper playfield with switches wired and everything. It's also on some early videos. And we built this idea for a pinball machine with an LCD in it that could track the position of the ball as it rolled across it. It's super cool. We have some simple concepts, some simple demo concepts. Like if you're familiar with our Rocks and Barnyard games today, there were super early versions of those things which were used as basically technology demos. If we drew shapes of asteroids on the screen and the ball rolled over them, we made the asteroids blow up just like they would in the video game asteroids. Right. We developed a game that we called Barnyard where barnyard animals, two-dimensional representations of barnyard animals, would walk across the screen and as the ball rolled over them, they'd flip around and acknowledge the fact that you hit them. Interestingly, the reason I came up with that simple demo was because at the time we were using Pygame, the Python media library that lets you manipulate graphics and manipulate sounds. And they had a little piece of sample code that was a monkey, a monkey's head that when you drag the mouse on top of the monkey, the monkey's head would spin around. Okay. So great. Let's create a bunch of barnyard animals that walk across the screen, and when we hit them with the ball, they can spin around. Basically, it was code I could mostly just adapt from that sample. So we had this fully working game. We developed a couple other demo apps, and we took it to the Texas Pinball Festival 2012 to kind of show off to the world and say, Hey, we are these geeky engineering guys who developed this kind of neat concept for a fun custom pinball machine. And it was a blast watching people play it. We had so many fun things going on. We had people walking up to us with their kids, and their kids would play the thing for hours. I think it wound up winning best. It won best something. It couldn't have been custom game because there wasn't a custom game category at the time. It might have been the best in show. I don't remember. But it won a nice award, and everyone asked me when we were going to turn it into a business and take it into production. And I was like, no, that's not happening. This is just a thing that we did for fun just to kind of prove that we could, and that's it. So then I took it home. A strange little coincidental timing, I had an aunt and uncle visiting some family in the area, and they came over and they played the game for fun just because it was a neat thing I could show off. They asked me if I was going to make it into a business, and I was like, no, it's going to cost a ton of money to do that. We don't have the money. They called me a few weeks later and said, hey, if we give you some money, will you go and do this? Because we think it's super cool and we think there's potential for it. Wow. And so that's what we did. Very true. So them calling me, they kind of ruined my life. They thought they were helping me, but in reality they ruined my life because of that phone call, because of their generosity. And to be honest with you, I told them how much I thought it would take to build a company to do this, and what they gave me was a lot of money, but it was a fraction of what I thought it would need to build a company to do this. But it was enough to get us started to cover the cost of a couple more prototypes and to give us a little introduction into the world of pinball manufacturing. That's great. Yeah, it gets worse. I was going to say, so where did you go from there? So we tried to think of what machine we took to Pinball Expo that year. It was another machine with pretty much the same exact concept, except I got a little ambitious and I told Les, Instead of putting that 17-inch monitor in there, I wanted to grow it to another size, a bigger size. I wanted a bigger monitor in there. Keep going. Yeah. We had this 17-inch monitor in there, but we had all this dead space around it. It's like, well, it's still dead space. It still could be a painted piece of wood or whatever, but what's the point? We have the ability to, we've proven the ability to float stuff over a play field. Let's float more stuff. So we took a 24-inch display, put it in a new playfield, and a 24-inch display is a lot bigger than a 7-inch display. Yeah. And it winds up, without making it go all the way up the playfield, we wanted it still to be kind of lower so we could have physical devices at the top. Unfortunately, it overlaps the area where the flippers need to be. Okay. So I told Les, it's a great job with the swing shots. Now, basically, all we're going to do is take that same concept and apply them to flippers, which seems pretty simple, right? It's the exact same mechanism. We even designed the slingshots after flippers to begin with. Well, for those who don't know, flippers are a little more powerful than slingshots. So, what did he do? He cut a few flipper bats out of half-inch or three-quarter-inch polycarbonate, because polycarbonate was the strongest plastic that we knew about, And certainly the strongest plastic that was transparent so we could see the screen through the flipper batch. And he connected them to the same thing, bicycle brake lines, connected them to coils, put the coils above the surface of the screen but lower on the machine so that they were out of view, ran the brake lines across the place to these flippers that we were floating. We were suspending them from a large sheet of transparent plastic. And we tested them, we did a flip, and the flip worked great, but the flipper bat didn't come back. So with bicycle brake lines, they're great at extending, but they need some sort of force to retract them. Right. And it turned out that the flippers were so strong, we were using a 70-volt power supply, which was the standard at the time to drive flippers, that it would bend that brake cable so much that it kind of lost its ability to come back. Wow. So we learned very quickly that brake lines aren't the answer for driving 70-volt flippers. So, Les being the mountain biker that he was, iteration number two on the flipper assembly used bicycle spokes instead of brake lines. So he took the spokes out of one of his old wheels. He cut them. I think he curled the ends of them so they could attach to the physical mechanisms. We actually ran with those for a good six or seven months. They weren't super reliable. I mean, he would have to fix them every couple of hours because just flipping a flipper over and over and over again with those bicycle spokes would wind up either bending them or breaking them. They would actually snap at the linkages. I bet that was exciting. Well, we took the machine to Pacific Pinball Expo in 2013, I think. It might have been 2012, the last Pacific Pinball Expo, whichever year that was. And we brought two or three different flipper assemblies. By the way, because we're floating this piece of plastic over the screen, we were able to basically separate it from the machine. It's this large piece of plastic with flipper bats mounted to it and coils mounted to it that we could disconnect from the machine really easily. So Les built a couple spares that we could swap in pretty quickly. And that show was nuts because we had people playing it the whole time. It was fun talking. We talked to Jersey Jack. We talked to Gary Stern. We talked to a lot of the who's who of pinball at the time. And Les managed to keep the machine running the entire time. But essentially it was run it for a couple hours, wait until it breaks, swap one in. Les would run back to his hotel room, grab his tools, fix or rebuild the other assembly, come back just in time to see the old one break. Wow. It was just this constant, but the game was playable almost the entire show. So super cool. So we came back from that, less iterated again, went to, I think it's a remote control wheel linkages. They have these commercial plastic things with articulated heads that he connected to the plungers and the flipper bats. We went with those for a while. And then we wound up making it super robust a little later. We went to full metal linkages that he cut out of. The first iteration was steel, I think then he went to aluminum. Now there's some kind of composite, super durable composite plastic. But yeah, that was fun. The iteration of the flippers. A lot of people when they interface with a pinball machine and they talk about flipper designs over the years, it seems like Williams has always been considered the best of the most. The flippers that feel the best and people playing other machines, Stern games at the time, didn't feel great. Gottlieb machines didn't feel great. So it was actually an experience trying to recreate a flipper assembly and create them in a way that felt right. So that was a challenge. We modeled the timing after Williams. We actually modeled the linkage after Williams. Our linkage isn't super different. It's just that it's floating above the playfield surface instead of running below the playfield surface. Right. So we had this machine. We had these flipper assemblies. We had this big monitor. We had a party for some friends in Austin, Texas, where I lived at the time. I still do. I still live in the same house. We had a bunch of friends over and we were talking about it and somebody made the suggestion. They're like, you have this display in there and you have this upper play field. And I get that you can do all these cool dynamic things with the display, but isn't the upper play field going to get old? Isn't it going to get boring just shooting the exact same shots every time you play any game? Uh-oh. And so the wheels started turning and that actually was the very beginning of a discussion that led us down to making the entire upper third of this playfield a pluggable module. So the P3, the P-Rock Pinball Platform that we called it at the time, we actually called it P-Cubed at the time, we changed the saying to P-3 later. This P-Cubed machine, which had floating flippers over a dynamic and interactive playfield display, soon got a modular upper playfield, which made it a fully modular, multi-game capable, multi-playfield layout capable pinball platform. And that was fun to design too. There's a whole other set of gotchas and design iterations and all the obstacles that you could imagine with the upper playfield. But fast forward a few years and now it's fully engineered. We have things that are die-cast aluminum stuff to make everything fit together right. And we've got this whole system debugged, designed, and working. We're shipping multiple games. We've turned this iterative concept into this super cool, progressive, and capable pinball platform That we've experimented with gameplay over the years, but kind of what we're thinking today is that it can deliver fully traditional pinball experiences. A game like Attack from Mars, as we talked about, is a very open playfield and has physical things up near the top of the playfield. We can deliver an experience exactly like that or we can get crazy and build new mechanisms that float over lower portions of the playfield over the monitor So we can create traditional pinball experiences that way If we wanted to, we could put a static piece of artwork on the playfield and actually make it really traditional, but that's a little bit boring. And we can also try out all kinds of new ideas, both in physical layouts and in software, because we don't have to build a full machine to try it. Right. So now we have this platform. It doesn't take too long to write a little bit of sample code to see if a new software scheme or rule set or this completely new idea in software will work. And honestly, it doesn't take too much time to develop an upper play field with a couple of different or unique mechs that you can just drop into this pre-existing machine and try it out. Yeah, I wanted to talk about custom development in particular with the game, but we'll swing back to that in a moment. At this point, you have a product, the P3, and I'm still not clear, when did the P3 Rock come about? Like, what was the impetus for that particular board? Yes, that happened somewhere in those iterations. Yeah, so we started the first versions of this P-cubed machine, which is now the P3. The first two iterations of this were built with the original P-Rock, and our first prototype, for sure, had a switch matrix, And it connected to a computer and connected to our driver boards. But the P-Rock, because of what I told you earlier about designing in all the backwards compatibility for WPC and Stern machines, was this. I mean, it's a pretty big board. It's about 10 inches by 5 or 6 inches. It's the same size as a WPCPU board. And we weren't using half of the, or more than half of the functionality on there in the P3. We were using the switch matrix and we were using an interface cable to our modular driver boards, the PD-16 and the PD-8. But we weren't using all the connectors that we had in there or all the other circuitry for all the other functionality of this WPC machine. So being the computer engineer and logic designer that I am, I went off and I designed a size and cost reduced version of the P-Rock. Essentially, we called it a P-Rock that we designed for the P3 machine. So we shortened that into P3-Rock. And at the same time, I personally wasn't a big fan of switch matrices. I don't like how they're wired. I don't like how they're debugged. I'm with you. I just don't like how they work. So I changed the whole switch input mechanism to directly connected switches. I build a little small board, we call it the Switch 16 board, SW to S16, that has 16 individual switch input circuits. It can talk back over a serial bus to the P3 rock, and you can distribute now, you can distribute the connections of your switch wirings wherever you need them to be on the machine. So if you have 16 switches, you need one Switch 16 board, and you can connect it directly to all your switches. If you have 32 switches or 64 switches, then you can install two boards or four boards or however many boards you need to connect to the number of switches you need. And you can distribute them remotely around the play field to shorten your wiring runs. Yes, that's fantastic, by the way. But how many Switch 16s can the P3 Rock address? So the way the P3 Rock board works is it has internal circuitry to read from the Switch 16s and store the state of those internally to the P3 Rock. And we built in enough, essentially, memory to remember the state for up to 256 switches, which is 16 Switch 16 boards. That's quite a few. Yeah, so at the time, I think WPC games had about 64 switches, and Stern games might have increased that to 80 switches or so. But, yes, I mean, it was just basically in code when you're using software to describe hardware, it's just adding a number, another bit to your number or increasing the max value of your number. So that wasn't so much of a technical challenge to do that. So we supported 16 Switch 16 boards and we built in driver control logic into the P3 RAP to control up to 128 coils, which is 8 different PD16 boards. So we figured with 8 16 driver boards and with 16 Switch boards, we could pretty much handle any functionality anyone would ever want on a pinball machine. Pretty close, yeah. So far, that has not been proven wrong. And with the release of this new board set, you know, I'm seeing a lot of custom folks who are using this board set now. Would you say that the response has been greater than the P-Rock, or is it about the same, or where do you feel this product line is going as far as the board set goes? Yeah, before we came out with the P3-Rock board, custom pinball developers had no choice but to use the P-Rock, The P-Rock was a $325 board and then they'd add the driver boards to it and it was very easy to quickly add a lot of cost to a custom machine. So once we developed the P-3 Rock board, which was stripped down and I think we were selling it for $200 something at the time, now it's only $175 for the P-3 Rock board. We lowered the cost, we lowered the barrier to entry for people developing custom machines. So for people building fully custom machines, and by that I mean from the ground up without some kind of a donor cabinet and donor power supply and maybe a donor driver board and all that stuff, for people developing fully custom machines, they almost always now use the P3 Rock and the Switch 16 and PD16 boards. Whereas people re-theming existing games, writing new rules for their WPC or Stern machines, they have no choice but to use the original P-Rock board. Or they could rip out all the wiring and use the P-3 Rock, right? Right, that's true. If they're just using the cabinet as a donor cabinet, then it makes sense to develop a completely new structure and wire it yourself. If you're trying to take an existing playfield and just write new rules with it without doing a lot of basically redoing the entire wiring And the entire setup of your switch matrices and driver connections, then you can just get away with the P-Rock. Very good. So there are other frameworks today aside from PyProc game. I'm pretty partial to PyProc game. I feel like it gives me some nice lower level control. And I'm just familiar with Pygame and stuff. So I'm just kind of comfortable with it. But there's also Skeleton Game, which is kind of an offshoot. It adds high-definition capabilities, so you can have LCD monitor instead of a DMD. And some other basic trough handling and so forth is carried out automatically. You kind of get that for free. And then there's MPF as well. And these frameworks all support the PROC and the P3ROC, which I think is fascinating that there's so much kind of cross-pollination as far as hardware support. Yeah, so the reality is that all of those frameworks, Skelton Game, Mission Pinball Framework, even NetProc Game, they all kind of grew out from PyProc Game. In fact, the Mission Pinball Framework, its first iteration was PyProc Game plus some additional functionality to support some other hardware. Oh, okay. We obviously didn't want to, because this was a business for us, PinballControllers.com, which became multimorphic. We were selling the boards and we developed the framework, so it wasn't in our best interest to support other frameworks, but we had released the original PyProc game under the MIT license, which meant anybody could use it and do anything they wanted with it. So MPF kind of grew as an offshoot of that that supported other hardware. So I personally haven't been involved with Mission Pinball Framework. I actually don't know how it works or I've never used it myself. But I do have a lot of intimate familiarity with Skeleton Game and with the NetProc Game, which is an offshoot of PyProc Game that works in the .NET programming language. And speaking of .NET, let's circle back to the P3 and custom development there. So this is one aspect that has always excited me about the P3 very early on is seeing videos and a write-up of how that upper playfield module worked. Being somebody who has wanted to make games for a very long time and I have a lot of ideas, the one thing that has never really interested me is doing a bunch of woodwork. Okay. You know, putting together a bunch of cabinets. I can screw together hardware, I can write some code, but I just don't want to be cutting cabinets all day. And so having the ability to have a bunch of functionality thrown in on top of just having the cabinet, having, for example, multiple hardware button configurations or an LCD that allows for dynamic ball tracking and having an upper third of the playfield, which can actually be removed and swapped in with whatever I choose, is incredibly intriguing to me. So, with the P3, obviously, all that and more comes with it. And one of the things that I found really fascinating was the fact that there was going to be an SDK to allow for third-party development. Right. This SDK is available for anyone who wants to develop, and how do they get a hold of it, Jerry? Yeah, so, a little bit more background. And because we have this multi-game system, we see ourselves as kind of like a Nintendo or a Sony where we want to develop games for it. We want to sell platforms and make games for it. But we want other people to have the ability to do so as well. So we released this, basically the entire programming framework that we use internally to develop games. We've packaged a lot of that into some DLLs to some libraries to protect some of the proprietary code. But we've made interfaces to that so that anyone can take our development kit and develop their own games. So all they really have to do is email us, info at multimorphic.com, say they want to be a developer, say they want to develop a game for the P3 or to experiment with the development kit, and we'll send them a download link so they can get it and play around with it. The SDK is very well laid out. The documentation is quite nice. And the lower playfield, the LCD area, uses Unity for the graphics, which is a very popular game engine, which is used on many platforms, including Pinball now. The programming interface, however, is not Python, which it is in a lot of the open source frameworks. It's C Sharp, which, of course, merges well with Unity. Is Unity the driver behind that decision? Yes, absolutely. Because Unity worked with, at the time it was C Sharp or Java. And it just turned out that there was someone in the community, Jimmy Lipum, who had ported PyProc game to C Sharp before. So once we decided on Unity, it was pretty clear that we should take that, we called it NetProc game, which was Jimmy's port, And repackage that into a way that made it work with our environment and build on top of that. I can't say enough good things about it. I've been playing around with it. I've even gotten some code to run, which is exciting. Not having any background in Unity whatsoever, it was very quick to take your sample application and get something up and running. It makes you feel accomplished quickly, which is nice. Yeah, and another nice thing about using Unity is there's, since it is so popular in the game development community, There's tons of tutorials and how-tos and examples, and we handle kind of the pinball interface to it, but if you need help doing anything on that screen, then Google is your friend, and you can pretty much get answers to any question you'd have. Yes, and with most game engines and frameworks in general, there's usually multiple ways to do the thing that you're trying to do, so it's a matter of finding the most efficient or the easiest way, depending on which is better for the application. It's very nice, and I've enjoyed it very much, so I'm planning on writing some games. Well, good. I mean, it's an ongoing process. Our SDK will continue to grow and expand and get better documentation and all that as we continue developing for it. Generally speaking, the SDK grew out of the first game or games that we developed for the P3. In fact, there's a script that we ship with the SDK that allows you to take the sample game and rename it so that you can kind of use that as a foundation for your custom game. And we used that renaming script to take our original game code that we wrote for Lexi Lightspeed, our first full-featured game for the platform, and turned Lexi Lightspeed into the sample application. So we renamed Lexi into the sample application, and then we stripped out a lot of the Lexi-specific code, and then we added a little bit of demonstration stuff on top of that, and that became the sample game. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's super straightforward. And essentially, I can see how the SDK would have grown, because you have a need to document as you're building this thing, right? Like, you need to have some way to make it so that you can write another one. Well, yes, although since we know how we wrote our first scans, we like all software developers. Well, not all. There's some that are really good about documenting, but generally speaking, we use our code to remind us how we did something in the past. But as we started preparing the SDK for public consumption, we forced ourselves to go through and document. And there's a lot of features that we have in the platform that aren't yet documented that we need to document. But we feel like we're part of the community still and we're very open and we're more like a friendly organization rather than a very closed proprietary information type of place. So if anyone asks us anything, how do I do this, how do I do that? And if we have sample code, we'll just send it over to you. Great. Speaking of how people can get in touch from the custom pinball community and for those looking to build P3 applications, would you recommend the Slack channel as the best form of communication? The Slack channel is great for a lot of reasons. The Slack channel you're talking about is the Pindev Slack channel, which is a place where we kind of fostered the growth of an online community where people can connect and talk about their custom projects and help each other or ask questions from people that are more experienced or have done it before. That's mostly built around the PROC and the P3ROC projects, but we've recently added a channel or a sub-channel into that to talk about P3 specifically. We actually use Slack internally in Multimorphics for our developers to discuss development projects and therefore we're all kind of hanging out there regardless. So if somebody in a different sub-channel asks a question, then usually there's one of us around to answer it for them. We encourage people to email their questions or their needs. If they don't understand something, we encourage them to also email to us so that we can roll those email conversations into a to-do list to create more and better documentation. Again, I can confirm it's easy to get in touch. And I love the community. It's wonderful to be able to log in and see what people are working on. And if anybody has some kind of bingo question, I can answer them. Your posts are always great because everyone's talking about their modern idea to do something and then you give a summary, you write a paragraph summary of what you've been doing on your multi-bingo machine and it's always this flashback, this interruption from modern pinball development to this flash to the past, which is awesome. I love it. I love that these boards can be used to do any kind of generation of machine, but I love it. I love seeing your progress. It's neat to see it when other people are talking about how to integrate an LCD into their machine to do some kind of a graphic intensive application. Well, thank you. Yeah, it's fun. I'd encourage anybody who's thinking about doing any kind of custom development, you know, retheming a machine, building a machine, or doing work for the P3 to reach out and join the Slack channel because I found it incredibly helpful. Yes, so that Slack channel. Slack, I don't think you can just do any Slack channel by yourself. Normally you have to email someone who's already a member and then they can invite you. So you can email Nick or email me at gstellenbergatmultimorphic.com and ask for an invitation to the channel. Let's talk about the P3 and what games are available on it today. Yeah, we're actually up to eight games or seven games with an eighth coming. So we started with Lexi Lightspeed. Lexi Lightspeed Escape from Earth, which is a Dennis Nordman designed playfield and game concept that we turned into a traditional style game. It's got the physical stuff, an eight ball ball lock, it's got three pop bumpers, it's got a bunch of stand-up targets, and all the things you'd expect to find in a traditional game. It's got a couple ramps in an orbit, all the cool stuff. We developed a couple of mini-games, and a mini-game is what we call a software game that works with an existing upper playfield module. So we developed a game called Rocks and a game card Barnyard, which are basically modern versions of those sample games that we created way back when. We created a second playfield module. We call it the Cannon Lagoon Playfield. And this is completely different from Lexi Lightspeed because it's a very simple layout. It's got five shot lanes. And the thought process when we were developing it was how do we take an idea like skeeball, in the skeeball where you roll the ball down the path and try to get it to jump into one of the holes to get points, how do we take that kind of a simple concept and roll it into a pinball machine or into a pinball game? And so we developed this game, this layout with five shot lanes. It's very straightforward. It's very, well, it's the opposite of a complex layout like a Lexi Lightspeed or any kind of modern pinball machine. And we built on top of that a pirate game. It's more like a shooting game where you are fed pinballs and you see pirate ships floating back and forth across a screen we put in the upper playfield. And you're literally just shooting one of the five shot lanes to see if you can hit the ships. It's what we call a redemption style game. So pinball people generally understand the deep rule set kind of things like Attack from Mars or Theater of Magic or Alexi Lightspeed or any number of other games. But people that aren't pinheads, that aren't heavily knowledgeable about pinball, they walk up to a pinball game and they don't understand what to do. They're too complex. They're intimidating. There's a story that they don't understand how to progress through the story. They don't realize you have to try to control the ball and hit specific shots at specific times. So Cairn and Lagoon is a very stripped down kind of concept that anybody can walk up to, hit start, and quickly understand what to do. They can get a couple balls, flip them to the play field, and try to hit the targets. So we have that. That's our fourth game. We have a sub, a mini game based off of Lexi Lightspeed that's just mostly about using that eight ball physical ball lock to get multiball called Lexi Lightspeed's Secret is a Showdown. Which, by the way, is a great game for parties. Grab a couple of friends, hit this put in the Lexi Lightspeed Playfield module and start up Secret Agent Showdown. And literally in a two or three minute game you can see how big of a jackpot score you can get and then your buddy can try to beat your score. Super fun, super cool use of the Playfield on Lexi. And more recently we released our third Playfield module which is built for the Cosmic Kart Racing game which is a kart racing game but adapted for physical pinball where the concept is you controlling a character in a ship because it based in outer space it a cosmic kart racing game and you are racing But it the same kind of thing that you get in a Mario Kart type of game where you can get power and you can attack your opponents and you can get protection shields from attacks from your opponents. But essentially you're racing in outer space through this tubular kind of a track and you're trying to go as fast as you can by hitting physical shots and getting to the finish line. So that's our third play field module. We're currently working on our fourth play-sled module, which is going to be a more traditional type of game. But in the meantime, we released a couple other games, or other people released a couple of other games. Yeah. Because we have this software development kit. The first person to use that was actually this friend I told you about who ported PyProcGame to .NET, Jimmy Lippum. He wrote a game called Grand Slam Rally, which is a pitch and bat recreation on the P3 that uses that same Cannon Lagoon play field we talked about earlier. It's really well created. It's really well designed because it takes the physical pinball slipper and it basically turns that into a baseball bat. It feeds a ball through one of the five shot lanes and it lets you try to flip the ball back up the playfield and get it into a lane that's labeled as a single, a double, a triple, or a home run. And of course there are outs along the way too, so you have to hit good shots and you can basically recreate an entire pitch and back game on the P3. And then there's one more game that a third party developed for us so far and that's called Hooping It Up, which is a basketball themed game that works with the Lexi Lightspeed Playfield module. And it's a full basketball game. Yeah, the developer of it, Greg Goldey, he told me one day he wanted to develop a basketball themed game for the Lexi Lightspeed Playfield. And I'm sitting there thinking the Lexi Lightspeed Playfield has an eight ball ball lock and it's sci-fi based. It's got all these things that are specific to the Lexi Lightspeed theme. I actually honestly wasn't expecting much, but what he came up with was this really cool implementation of a basketball game Using a lot of the wall scoops and using software and the screen stuff to show you around a basketball court. And he's got it broken up into offense and defense and you have shot clocks and you have little halftime mini games. And it's really a cool experience. It's quite in-depth. Very cool. I'm excited for the potential that the platform has and for the games that I already have. I've put my money where my mouth is and bought a P3 and have a Lexi play field and a Cosmic Kart racing play field. One of the things that I really enjoy about it is that my family all like different games on it. And so it's great to be able to cater to the things that they like without having separate physical machines. And that's one of our big, I guess, sales pitch, but it's one of the good things about the platform. It's unlike a traditional game where someone buys it because they like it and they hope the rest of their family likes it, but that isn't often the case. And generally speaking, kids aren't so much into traditional pinball these days. With this machine and with the multi-game capabilities and with the ability to put games on there that are tailored to different age groups or different demographics, we can give people content that interests their entire family or their entire friend base or anybody can find content for the machine that they enjoy. Yeah, there's nothing quite like it, so it's been a joy. And every time that I play, I think of some new concept that I'd like to try as far as hardware or software on the machine. So it really sparks creativity, which is neat. Yeah, we take the machine to shows and show people. And a lot of people have never seen it before still. And they come up and a certain type of person gets it. They see the possibilities of it. And they're always like, have you thought of this? Have you thought of that? And they come up with 10 or 20 ideas on the spot. And usually a guy like that or a person like that will hang out in the booth with us for three or four hours just watching people interact with it and coming up with more ideas and wondering if we thought of certain things. It's really fun to see people see the machine for the first time to start thinking of what's possible with it. So two-inch flippers, trapholes, all these things. Yeah, I'm actually, I know you have tons of ideas. I'm excited to see what you come up with. What I suspect, Nick, is that, I mean, obviously we have a lot of ideas for what we want to do with the platform, but generally when you have a platform like this and you open it up to third parties to develop, what you wind up with four or five years later is usually something completely different than you envisioned. Right. Because someone will key in on something that you never thought of and build a game around it, and it'll just be so far away from what you thought the platform could be, but totally in a good way. Well, hopefully you'll be pleasantly surprised as opposed to the alternative. Well, yeah, those are the options. As long as you're happy, it doesn't really matter what we think. I am super happy. So one of the neat features, I think, is the serviceability aspect, and I like to talk tech on the show quite a bit. Can you tell me a little bit about the Flipper Slingshot modules and how you can change those? Yes, so I think I mentioned when I was describing the development cycle of the flippers themselves that the flippers are mounted to what we call a ceiling piece of plastic up the pieces. It's a quarter inch piece of polycarbonate that goes the entire width of the playfield. It goes up about 12 or 14 inches and the slingshots and the flipper mechanisms are mounted to that. What that means is that the entire assembly can be easily removed from the system. We did similar things with our side target assemblies that we put on the, basically on the left and right sides of the LCD. And when we were concepting this, when we were developing the idea for this, we realized if we came out with a different kind of playfield structure, If instead of the painted piece of wood that traditional pinball machines have, instead of a half-inch or five-eighths inch piece of wood to which everything else mounts, if instead of that we developed kind of like a, we use the phrase server rack, like a rack, an electronic equipment rack that holds routers and switches and the things you might find in a telecommunications closet. If we change the structure of the playfield into a slotted rack system, then we can slide in the mechanisms that we need to create the functionality we want in a pinball machine. So literally, we went and designed an extruded aluminum profile. We got someone to start creating these frames for us, so they extrude aluminum through this profile we made, which has a bunch of slots in it. What comes out of that is the entire length of a playfield, so it's about 48 inches long. By six or eight inches tall and it's got some slots in it. We attach one on each side of what we call our playfield structure and we put some cross braces in there and some other things to give it some basic structure. And then we literally slide in all the assemblies. The flipper assembly that I described earlier literally slides into the top slot on this extruded aluminum frame. And below that we slide in the LCD which is mounted to brackets so the brackets slide into the aluminum slots. We have a piece of polycarbonate plastic that sits on top of the LCD to protect it from the ball. We slide in our wall and scoop assembly, which is a physical assembly that lists various target mechanisms or scoop mechanisms. We literally slide in our ball trough assembly. All these things are mounted to this extruded aluminum frame. And in essence, we've turned the entire playfield structure into a modular and therefore serviceable mechanical thing. So if something goes wrong with your flipper assembly, say for instance, I don't know, a screw comes loose and your coil starts to get sloppy and your flipper doesn't flip right, then you can literally just disconnect one cable, slide your flipper assembly out of the machine, take it to your workbench, tighten the screw or clean it or do whatever you want to do with it, And bringing it back to the machines, why do they reconnect it and you're good to go again? Yes, it's astounding. It's so cool. The playfield is quite a bit heavier than traditional playfield, but there are multiple service positions, and I find this very cool as well. So when you lift it up, you can kind of rest it on the end, and that's position one, and you can pull it back a little bit further to position two. And one of my favorite things is pulling it all the way out like you would on a traditional playfield and lean it against the backbox. On this one you pull it all the way forward and it is completely vertical. It sits by itself. So cool. And it's so much easier to get at anything on the underside of that playfield because it's closer to you by several inches. Quite handy. Yep. Good job. And there are some things that are easy to get to from the top and some things that are easier to get to from the bottom. So obviously the bottom, they're more accessible when you have the play field listed in a vertical position. I just think it goes to show how much this has been thought through. I'm always looking for the serviceability aspect of any machine and any board set and any piece of technology in general. And I find this to be extremely serviceable, which is great. I mean, that was one of the things that sold me on it as well is the fact that everything slots into the frame and you just fold down the flap in the front and you have access to everything. Yep, and you can take out one or more assemblies at a time, fix them on your desk and put them back in. One of the reasons we could do that was because we had our modular serially connected hardware, right? Because we were able to essentially put a driver board and a switchboard and maybe an LED driver board onto each subassembly to drive the components that are on that subassembly, we're able to modularize every subcomponent of the machine. So the wall scoop assembly has its own driver boards and it has its own LED board. The upper playfield modules have whatever boards that they need. So if someone designs an upper playfield that needs 16 coils, they put a PD-16 up there. If it only has switches, they only put a switch 16 up there or whatever they want. But because the control system is modular, that allowed us to make the entire machine be modular. It's fantastic. We love that our vision actually worked out like we hoped it would, and that it helps people develop and debug and service their machines. Yeah, how do you feel about the public reception to those who have received machines? Is everybody generally excited? Does that make you happy? Do you see more work to be done? So, yeah, we have a ton of work to do. We've actually struggled getting traditional pinball people to accept that the P3 is traditional pinball, and I'm not 100% sure why that is. I think, yeah, there's an LCD in the playfield, and that makes some people think it's a video game or some kind of video game variant, and it's totally not. This is still completely physical pinball. We just use the LCD, the dynamic graphics underneath the ball, to enhance the physical experience. For example, in a game like Lexi, we use virtual targets to give you a reason to shoot specific trajectories with the physical pinball. Whereas in a traditional game, you're always aiming for a ramp or a loop or a target on the upper playfield. We could potentially have a target, a virtual target, floating down the playfield in the opposite in lane, for instance. We could give you a reason to try to shoot it up the other in lane to hit a virtual target, or any combination of things, obviously. But we've struggled with a lot of the community accepting the fact that this is pinball. And I don't understand why that is, and it's been a challenge to get the community to... I mean, we have a lot of fans, don't get me wrong. We have a lot of customers. We've shipped hundreds of machines already, and we're hoping to grow that significantly. But the larger, the broader community seems to be very hesitant to buy this new concept that doesn't have a specifically licensed theme. They shy away generally from original themes because it doesn't have a character or a plot that they relate to, that they have an emotional attachment to. So we, as a small startup, bootstrapped company, we don't really have the money to afford a big name license. So we started with original concept and we hope to grow that into a library that's large enough to attract everybody to it. Because we feel like once the game library is big enough, it's pretty hard to ignore the fact that you get a lot of value for your money with this machine. I feel the same way. I have never considered purchasing a new pinball machine ever until I saw the P3, and that really got me going. So the value is definitely there, even with what you have today. And I've certainly had a ton of fun, and my family has had a ton of fun, and my friends have all enjoyed it as well. So looking forward to many more years of cool and exciting content, and hopefully I'll be making some of it myself. Yeah, that's awesome. And the validation that this machine convinced you to buy a new pinball machine is great validation, and we're happy we developed something you enjoy. Yeah, I mean, I'm an EM guy, and this is something that I really like. This is the opposite of EM. It is. Which is a great statement from you. Yeah, it's pretty much as far away as you can get, but the benefits and the cool things that you can do with the platform, I'm serious about 2-inch flippers now, you know, that is a possibility. Well, that's, yeah, I mean, that's awesome. A lot of machines have upper playfield flippers, and since we have exchangeable lower playfield modules, you can put them both up top and down low. Yes, everywhere. Yeah, it's very exciting. So before I let you go, I did have a question for you, a couple questions, and they're kind of related. What are your thoughts about EMs? So from an electrical standpoint, from a design standpoint, I'm super fascinated by them. From a what do I want to spend my time making and debugging and working on, I've actually never worked on an EM machine before. Oh, really? I love looking at schematics and trying to figure out how things work, but I got into the pinball industry when they were fairly mature, solid-state machines, so I just never really got into the older machines, and I tend to be a guy who likes the DMD games and now the LCD games and never found too much enjoyment playing very, very simple playfield layouts. I always more enjoyed the story of pinball and playing things with a shot progression that they could attach a theme to in a story progression. So I have nothing against them. I think it's super cool. I think it's awesome that there are people out there who understand those things so well that they can just look at a machine and understand which relays are out or how to fix something. I think it's super cool. But I personally have never really gotten involved with them. Sounds like that will be my new mission. Well, I enjoyed TPF where you walked me through your bingo machine and that was my first exposure to a bingo machine as well. So, one, thank you for spending the time with me and thank you for walking me through everything. But two, it was fascinating hearing the reasons they did things and hearing the logic and the algorithms they used to do this stuff was really cool. Yeah, I'm pretty partial, as you might guess. Yeah, thank you for spending the time. And I love seeing people play them for the first time and realizing that these machines are a lot more complex than they might suspect, you know. Because at first glance, there's 25 trap holes and there's not much else going on. But there is so much happening behind the scenes. And the fact that it was all implemented electromechanically, notes on state technology, is pretty incredible. Yeah, it's fascinating, yes, that they were even able to do it at all. And I guess I should also thank you for making me spend who knows how much money trying to get a jackpot on any of those games. Nick's just like, keep putting in money, keep hitting the start button, keep putting in credits. It's just another nickel. It's just a nickel. Yeah, what have you got to lose? Yeah, you were the only one, by the way, that I... Well, I suspect I funded the purchase of a P3. I was going to say, you were the only one that I actually charged for each button press. So, sorry about that, but it all worked out in the end. Yes. I didn't charge Jerry, in case anybody says something. But that won't stop me next time, so. I'm ready. Well, let's see. Now I know the machine. Now I know the logic. Now I don't need you standing there telling me exactly what to do. Exactly. That's not true at all. I need you just Well, next time you'll have to try an even more complex game. So I'll get you on Golden Gate or something like that and see if we can get you into the Golden Game. I'm really glad that you enjoyed it. And, of course, that was the idea is to get people to like it. And for those who are listening, I didn't mention this up top because I'm a terrible host, but I used Jerry's board set, a multimorphic board set, the P3 rock and associated control boards in the multi-bingo. And I've used it in multi-races as well. And I have plans to use it for a non-pinball project in the future. And I'm also using it in a game that is driven by a skeleton game. So I've used PyProcGame, skeleton game, and I'm currently developing in the P3 SDK. So a lot going on. Very good. Well, yeah, that's awesome. I've always loved seeing projects developed around our boards. It's kind of cool developing a control system that allows people to implement their visions and to be creative and to do cool stuff. So we appreciate your business. I appreciate your business. And I'm also always happy to help. So if something comes up and you want some advice on how to do something, I'm happy to help anybody, anyone listening. Just send me an email or let me know what you're thinking about, and I'll try to help craft a control system design to help you through it. Well, thanks, Gary. And I really appreciate that you made this available through Multimorphic, both the P3 and the P3 Rock control system, because I wouldn't be able to do any of this stuff without it, or I'd have to make my own, which I don't want to do that. But it's fun. That's the best part of it, Nick. Actually, it's funny, because that's what I like to do, so it just works out. Yeah, yeah. That's true. And we all have our niche. Right. And I enjoy control systems, a little logic and that kind of stuff. And other people like building applications or writing games or developing something that they've been dreaming about forever. So it's great to be able to help them do that. Got to be gratifying. And I've just got to say that I'm gratified with the products. Thanks very much. And thanks for coming on the show and chatting EMs this whole time. Very much appreciated. If anybody wants to get a hold of you again, how can they best do that? Yeah, just send me an email, gstellenberg at multimorphic.com or just go to the site www.multimorphic.com and I think there's a form there. If you forget my email, you can just jump on the site and fill out the form and that'll find its way to me as well. Perfect. Well, thanks for your time, Jerry, and I look forward to chatting with you in the future. Yeah, thank you so much, Nick. I appreciate the opportunity to be on the show and chat with you, and I'm super excited to see what you come up with on your own designs. Well, thanks again. Talk to you later. All right. Bye, Nick.

_(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v5)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-08-04 | Item ID: ccf5a264-e661-4798-ad17-5400900ea183*