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Retroplay Gets Us Talking About VPX

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 7m·analyzed·Jul 11, 2022
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

RetroPlay develops VPX installation software, simplifying virtual pinball table setup while pursuing lean manufacturing and authentic cabinet design.

Summary

Chris Freebus and Jared Morgan interview David Gilmore of RetroPlay, an Australian arcade and virtual pinball cabinet manufacturer. They discuss RetroPlay's approach to building virtual pinball machines that closely mimic mechanical machines, their adoption of Kaizen lean manufacturing methods to improve production efficiency, supply chain challenges during the pandemic, and crucially, RetroPlay's development of software that simplifies Visual Pinball X (VPX) table installation—a long-standing pain point in the virtual pinball community. The discussion covers cabinet specifications, button placement philosophy, tactile feedback systems, and the importance of preserving classic pinball games through digital emulation.

Key Claims

  • RetroPlay developed an app that can install five VPX machines with full backglasses and audio in approximately three minutes

    high confidence · Chris mentions seeing a RetroPlay video demonstrating this capability; Jared confirms witnessing it and calls it 'What is this sorcery?'

  • RetroPlay ships 20+ cabinets per month after moving to Australia four years ago, up from 1-2 per month

    high confidence · David Gilmore: 'Went from making one or two cabinets a month to shipping 20-odd cabinets every month now.'

  • RetroPlay manufactures CNC-cut cabinets locally in Australia using a partner company

    high confidence · David confirms all cabinets are CNC machined through a local partner, recently switched suppliers

  • KL25Z Freedom boards (Pinscape brains) are currently out of stock everywhere globally

    high confidence · David: 'that's been one of the big problems. Is you can't buy the KL25Z at the moment. It's out of stock everywhere in the world.'

  • RetroPlay successfully built two arcade cabinets in three hours using Kaizen manufacturing method

    high confidence · David describes the Friday test run; intended to build four machines the following week but component delays prevented it

  • RetroPlay owns and operates 3D printing equipment (five filament printers, one resin printer) to manufacture custom parts

    high confidence · David describes the small 3D print farm and its use for brackets, holders, plungers, and toppers

  • RetroPlay manufactured arcade machines for Marvel Stadium Melbourne using original CPS2 Capcom boards

    high confidence · David: 'we were asked by Marvel to make some arcade machines for the Marvel Stadium in Melbourne. So we manufactured some arcade machines for those. And we actually used the original CPS2 Capcom boards inside the machines.'

  • RetroPlay designed three-quarter size pinball cabinets with 32-inch playfield to match full-size machine height when standing

    high confidence · David: 'it was specifically designed to be at the same height at the front, yes, as a full-size machine. So that when you're standing at it, you don't have to sit on a stool'

Notable Quotes

  • “What is this sorcery? We're talking about VPX. In all honesty, I can't believe it's taken so long for the community to get to this point, really. Installing these tables is so tricky.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~12:30 — Expresses the community's frustration with VPX complexity and validation of RetroPlay's solution addressing a long-standing pain point

  • “Yeah, the primary goal has been to actually deliver the machines, to actually make them and deliver them.”

    David Gilmore @ ~18:45 — Humorously acknowledges that reliability and fulfillment are primary differentiators in the arcade cabinet market, implying competitors struggle with delivery

  • “I'm trying to keep them as close as possible to the mechanical machines in terms of how they play and feel and how they look as well.”

    David Gilmore @ ~22:00 — Articulates RetroPlay's core design philosophy prioritizing authenticity over DIY customization trends

  • “I mean, you know, I do okay for myself, but owning two, three, or four mechanical machines is out of my price range. I couldn't justify that. But I can do that digitally through Visual Pinball.”

    David Gilmore @ ~54:20 — Frames VPX preservation as accessibility for players priced out of mechanical pinball collecting

  • “one of the biggest selling points of something like Visual Pinball, VPX, is the fact that we're preserving games that will potentially be lost in the future.”

    David Gilmore @ ~53:40 — Positions VPX as cultural preservation medium for vintage and rare pinball games

  • “It completely feels alive. And you would never go back once you've played a machine with mechanical feedback. You'd never go back.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~65:00 — Validates RetroPlay's emphasis on haptic feedback as critical to virtual pinball experience quality

  • “Nothing's locked down. A customer can wipe the hard drive if they want to and completely change everything and customize it as much as they want to.”

    David Gilmore — Contrasts RetroPlay's open architecture philosophy against competitors who lock proprietary software

Entities

RetroPlaycompanyDavid GilmorepersonChris FreebuspersonJared MorganpersonVisual Pinball X (VPX)productBlockade Pinball PodcastorganizationKaizenproductPin-Up PopperproductPinscapeproduct

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: RetroPlay scaling from 1-2 units/month in UK to 20+ units/month in Australia within four years, indicating successful market positioning in virtual pinball segment

    high · David: 'Went from making one or two cabinets a month to shipping 20-odd cabinets every month now'

  • ?

    community_signal: RetroPlay positioning VPX/digital pinball as cultural preservation mechanism for vintage games (1950s+) that are economically inaccessible or at risk of loss; frames accessibility as feature

    high · David: 'one of the biggest selling points...is the fact that we're preserving games that will potentially be lost in the future' and personal example of affordability vs. mechanical collecting

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Implicit criticism of AtGames/Arcade1Up's single-screen design choices and pricing strategy for mass market; RetroPlay targeting enthusiast segment willing to pay for three-screen setup and quality specs

    medium · Chris/Jared discussion of why AtGames/Arcade1Up haven't adopted three-screen design; David: 'people actually...are willing to spend the cash if they're going to get a quality product'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: RetroPlay consciously prioritizes authenticity and minimalism over feature-creep; explicitly avoids DIY trend of excessive buttons/LEDs in favor of Stern-like interface

    high · David: 'trying to make them as close as possible to the mechanical machines'; 'I've got a thing about buttons. I can't stand having buttons all over the place'

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: RetroPlay adopting Kaizen lean manufacturing to reduce build times and waste; successfully demonstrated building two arcade cabinets in three hours with intention to scale to four machines and three full-size pinball machines in three days

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.203

0:00
blockade pinball podcast this is the blockade pinball podcast i'm your host chris freebus aka shut your trap joining me as always halfway across the world jared morgan hey how's it going uh it goes very well, Jared. We were planning on doing a kind of a let's play video this week about the latest offerings in Zen's pinball effects. And then instead we're changing things up and we're going to talk to somebody else that's halfway across the world right in your neck of the woods.
0:45
Absolutely. I've got a local. We've got a local. Let's go ahead and bring him in. This is David Gilmore of RetroPlay. an arcade manufacturing company there in Australia. Hello there. Hi. Hello. What part of Australia are you doing this in? So I'm based in rural Victoria. I'm originally from the UK, but yeah, based in rural Victoria. Very good. So here's the thing. We now and then see various manufacturing companies with their pinball machines, virtual cabs and stuff, and me and Jerry would always go, ooh, ah, that's kind of interesting. And then it's kind of like, yeah, but it's out of our price racket. And so it doesn't really grab our attention and everything. And the reason why you're on here today specifically is because I saw a video that actually made me go, oh, my God, we're going to have to talk about Visual Pinball X.
1:44
Finally. How easy is it? Something that people have been begging us to do and we're always just like, no, no, no, no, because it's such a mess. It's too difficult to talk about. There's too many things to deal with. The installs are a nightmare.
1:56
And there's just a bazillion tables. How do you possibly filter through all that stuff? In your video that you guys had recently posted, you're building an app. And I didn't realize this was basically for your cabinet. So the thing that I saw was, oh, an app that I can download? No, no, no, it's for your cabs, but we'll get into that. But your app, you installed five machines in like three minutes with full back glasses, audio packages, everything that was absolutely needed, and it was just like a breeze. Yeah.
@ ~77:00

  • “I'd like to tinker. And I think a lot of people that are into pinball like to tinker.”

    David Gilmore @ ~78:15 — Identifies tinkering culture as core to pinball enthusiast identity, justifying open-platform design

    • KL25Z Freedom Board
    product
    Marvel Stadium Melbourneorganization
    Hewlett-Packardcompany
    AtGamescompany
    Arcade1Upcompany
    Zen Studioscompany
    Stern Pinballcompany

    high · David discusses Kaizen implementation across multiple test runs; goals to improve production speed post-pandemic

  • ?

    technology_signal: RetroPlay commits to open, non-proprietary architecture: unlocked software, standard PC components, user-customizable, upgradeable; contrasts with competitors' locked-down systems

    high · David: 'Nothing's locked down' and 'It's designed to be all supported with commercial off-the-shelf tech'; customers can 'wipe the hard drive' and customize

  • ?

    product_strategy: RetroPlay's three-quarter-size cabinet specifically engineered to maintain full-size machine height when standing (avoiding stool/chair requirement), addressing ergonomic complaint with mini-cabinets from AtGames/Arcade1Up

    high · David: 'it was specifically designed to be at the same height at the front...you don't have to sit on a stool'; Jared confirms mini machines felt 'like a toy'

  • ?

    supply_chain_signal: RetroPlay deployed 3D printing (five filament + one resin printer) as supply chain resilience strategy to manufacture custom parts in-house when sourcing delays or unavailability occurs

    high · David describes 3D farm and use cases for brackets, holders, plungers; mentions manufacturing challenges and four-day print time for Batman bust

  • ?

    supply_chain_signal: KL25Z Freedom boards (critical control component for VPX machines) are globally out of stock, creating bottleneck for virtual pinball manufacturers

    high · David: 'you can't buy the KL25Z at the moment. It's out of stock everywhere in the world' and 'That's the main brains of the pinball machine'

  • ?

    technology_signal: RetroPlay has developed software simplifying Visual Pinball X table installation from complex multi-step process to ~3-minute automated deployment with full backglasses and audio

    high · Chris: 'your app, you installed five machines in like three minutes with full backglasses, audio packages, everything'; David confirms this is a solution to long-standing community pain point

    • 2:29
    It was amazing. I saw it too, and I was just going, what is this sorcery? We're talking about VPX. In all honesty, I can't believe it's taken so long for the community to get to this point, really. installing these tables is so tricky as you as you may know it's not straightforward so there's absolutely a demand for something like this yeah uh so we're gonna circle back to this but let's get into why it's even a demand uh for you guys you guys make arcade cabinets as well as uh pinball cabs uh for the virtual market um how long have you guys been uh been around doing this um so i've been building cabinets for about 10 years okay um but i've been building specifically in australia for about four years which is when i moved to australia okay so you you had it all set up in the uk um doing yeah so i was doing this in the uk a much smaller level um i mean i'm i'm the kind of i'm one of those stories of a guy that starts in his garage um so i basically started with no money and started building arcade and pinball machines, moved to Australia, and it was the same here, started in my garage with no money.
    3:44
    And it absolutely took off overnight. Went from making one or two cabinets a month to shipping 20-odd cabinets every month now. And these cabs, these are all home-use cabs? You're not making commercial cabs, they're home-use cabs? Or are you doing commercial? We do make some commercial cabs, yeah. A few years ago, we were asked by Marvel to make some arcade machines for the Marvel Stadium in Melbourne. So we manufactured some arcade machines for those. And we actually used the original CPS2 Capcom boards inside the machines. Oh, yeah. With coin mix. So they're currently at the Melbourne Stadium. And then a year after that, we were asked by Hewlett-Packard to make five pinball machines for a product launch.
    4:32
    Wow. I was looking at those machines. They were beasts. Yeah, they were beautiful. So, yeah, they were really nice. Yeah. So, with the pinball cabs there, you've got both mini models, full-size models. You've got a VR model, which Jared and I definitely want to talk to you about. We're going to get to that in a moment, too.
    4:55
    What was your primary goal with these machines to separate you out from other virtual cab machines? Yeah, the primary goal has been to actually deliver the machines, to actually make them and deliver them. That is a thing, yes. Yeah, it's a thing to get them in front of people in their games rooms. but my whole ethos from day one has been to try and build these machines to be as close as possible to you know the mechanical machines okay um trying to make them better and of course they're always going to be different they're never going to be exactly the same as a mechanical machine but i'm trying to make them as close as possible so you know we if you look at some of the diy ones on the internet they have 10 buttons down the front of the machine yeah all kinds of weird lights around the play field and matrix lighting and stuff. We don't do any of that. I'm trying to keep them as close as possible to the mechanical machines in terms of how they play and feel and how they look as well. Awesome. That's always been the ethos.
    5:57
    One of the things that strikes me with your, basically a lot of your machines there, you've got the diamond plate going on,
    6:09
    your buttons, and your plungers and everything. I mean, it looks like it's all real deal kind of deal. And then we start reading about, you know, the guts that are inside of these things in terms of your accelerometers and your shaker motors, all that stuff.
    6:29
    Is this stuff that you are sourcing in Australia, or are you dealing with having to ship them around? Because I know a couple of your videos you've talked about just, obviously the pandemic has thrown everything into a tizzy about sourcing. supplies. Yeah. So I'm just kind of curious, how are you guys dealing with that and handling that so that you can have these things and be able to ship with them? Yeah, I mean, that's the biggest challenge is getting parts in. I guess most of the time, I try and source parts from within Australia, and not just because I'm trying to support Australian business, but because we need the parts quick, you know, at a speed. so the first point of call is to try and get stuff within Australia solenoids shaking motors plungers they're all supplied from people in Australia already and then if we have to then we'll go to China or America for other parts but I try not to do that where I can because the cost of shipping and delays and getting stuff yeah so certainly certainly the pandemic has been a massive learning task in terms of shipping and logistics. It's been a nightmare.
    7:41
    I've experienced firsthand the logistical challenges of trying to get stuff out of the US. It is impossible to do it. It seems to be a new thing at the moment, which we're experiencing, which is very tricky, is we'll tend to, you know, a contact with a supplier who will have 50 plunger housings, as an example. So we'll order the 50 housings, pay for the shipping, and then a week later we'll get an email saying we've only got five in stock. We'll ship out five now and the other. And we've got machines waiting to go out. We're waiting for plungers. And that happens a lot with arcade buttons, plungers, yeah, a lot of stuff. So it's tricky, but you've got to carry on. Are you switching? I noticed that some of the things on your website, because you've got not only the pinball products on your Shopify site, but you've got parts as well that enthusiasts can actually buy from you directly. One of those things was the housing for the room sensor. That looks 3D printed to me. Are you experimenting with different ways of producing products to try and get those logistical challenges down? That's right, yeah. So we've got a small 3D print farm. We've got five filament printers, and we've also got a resin printer as well. so yeah we had to learn that from scratch basically and that the idea behind getting the 3d printers was more about customizing the machines making plungers and making toppers and that kind of stuff you've seen some of our crazy toppers and plungers but yeah having the having the 3d printers gives us the ability to make some of our own parts like brackets and you know holders and things that we can't buy elsewhere yeah so you don't have to actually go and spend you know a thousand dollars and committing to like you know run of a thousand units for example that's right you know that's right yeah but of course 3d printing in itself has its own challenges that's probably for another podcast we can do a 60 hour we can do a i remember actually we made a um a batman um speed racing machine and the guy wanted a bust of batman on the top with led lights so we actually 3d printed the batman bust which took I think it was four days to print. Oh, my God. Wow. And about three and a half days in, we had a power cut. Oh. And the printer couldn't remember where it was up to. Oh, no. 3D printing does have its own challenges as well. Yeah. Wow. So next time everything's on a UPS. I'm sure anybody listening to this podcast who has a 3D printer will know that pain. It's just nodding in pain. Probably, yeah. Yeah. You guys are, with regards to the cabs themselves, the wood and everything, are you CNC cutting everything there on site? Yeah, we have a local partner company who does all the CNC manufacturing for us. Okay. Again, that in itself has been challenging. We've recently changed supplier.
    10:40
    But yeah, so all of our cabinets are CNC machined. So like you said, I mean, basically as much as you can source it there in Australia, that's where you're pulling from. to put these things together, which is probably, I imagine, helping you get through the supply chain issue because it's more local. It is. Yeah, it is. My full-time job at RetroPlay has evolved over the years, but really right now, pretty much every day, I just organize parts for the coming builds. That's pretty much what I do full-time because that's how much effort it takes. Wow. Yeah. I just watched a video today. You guys were talking about switching your manufacturing method to, I believe, the Kaizen method or something of that nature. Yeah. Okay. So, Warren, you built two cabinets, two-player arcade cabinets in three hours, start to finish.
    11:43
    How long? Basically, what I want to know is what was the method prior to that? Because it looked like you had three people at the same time all working on both machines.
    11:52
    Prior to that, what was the normal method of actually manufacturing one of these? So the normal method we have, I've got five guys that work for me. And each one of them is more or less a specialist in their own area. So I've got a guy who focuses on arcades. I've got two guys that work on pinball machines. Another guy works on the speed racers. And then there's some of the other products, the dart machine, which we sell less of, which we all kind of fill in and do bits to. So before this new method, I mean, what I would say actually is this new method of manufacturing is a process that we're adopting slowly because it's quite painful to change.
    12:30
    So, yeah, at the moment, we're all working on different parts of different machines as a member of the parts. So we might get two thirds of the way through one machine and have to stop and then start another machine and then have to stop that machine. So it's difficult and it's tricky. With the Kaizen manufacturing method, what we'll be doing is not building the machines until we have all of the parts together ready to go. And in fact, actually, this week was a very good example of that. As you say, a week ago, we built the two arcade machines in three hours. yeah on friday a couple of days ago we were actually due to build four arcade machines in one day so that was the next test was to take on four machines which we we're confident we can do and then right at the last minute we didn't have enough buttons oh um right so thursday morning we all waited you know on bated breath for the post and the buttons that were due to arrive didn't arrive so that's now been pushed back to probably tuesday so you know even even with a new manufacturing method it has its challenges but the idea being is with kaizen is that we you know we basically won't build the machines until we have everything we need and then we'll work rather than work individually on machines we'll work as a team and all focus together and build them out from start to finish you'll essentially swarm on the task and actually do it on the task yeah but the key is it's reducing waste that's the the main focus of kaizen and the lean manufacturing method is to reduce identify and reduce waste and what we're doing with these test runs last week was two machines this week would have been four machines next week we're trying to do two speed devils the the racing sims um is to try and nut out and find out where the waste is where are wasted movements where is wasted human movements why are we looking for a glue gun when it should be here at this workstation you know okay so yeah so it's it's going to be for us internally it's probably going to be tricky to make the conversion but it's now really really important i see really important to do this now to improve things it was definitely an interesting dance to watch in the video with uh just you know what started out as looking like three different people doing three different things by about the halfway point it all merged into just all hands on deck just like going back and forth between the two machines and that was all very carefully I mean it probably didn't come over in the video but that was all actually very carefully choreographed I had written down every person's job what they were doing, when they were doing it the time slot, how much time was allocated so that was a fun video to make next week we'll do the four machines that would be good fun and then in about three or four weeks the intention is to try and build three ball machine full size pinball machine in about three days okay that would be a big test that's gonna be a big test so kaizen i think it's toyota who actually invented the kaizen method um so if you think about what you're trying to do there and the sort of production line way of working then you know you can see why it's a good thing to apply when you're building things It even works to an extent when you're trying to do software, but it's more agile when you're talking about software. But the principles still apply, you know. Plan first, make sure everything's ready to go, and then start doing, you know. That's right. Yeah. So we're really excited about that. And what we're trying to achieve as an end result is to basically make these machines faster because, you know, what's happened because of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine and the global logistics crisis, all of these things have come together to form a perfect storm, if you like, and have meant that build times for these machines have gone way out from where they were a year ago. So we're trying to bring it back. That's the idea.
    16:41
    So I noticed with your pinball machines, like you said, you making rather than having a bazillion buttons everywhere you making it look much more like a standard pinball machine I like the fact that on every single one of your machines you putting the little what I call the stern button right there on the top of the lock bar, yeah, which was a nice touch.
    17:06
    What are you guys going to do? And I always bring this up. I've even brought it up with Mel over at Zen. They've yet to make a pinball machine that requires the second flippers, but what's going to happen when you get a pinball machine Or one of those tables that requires a second driver.
    17:22
    Yeah, we can put those extra buttons in. I'll find it painful. I have a thing about buttons. I can't stand having buttons all over the place. I really don't see the point.
    17:33
    Minimalist on buttons. So, yeah, we can fit, if it comes to that, then we can. Yeah, I mean, I think we were the first virtual pinball manufacturer to start using the fire button, as well. We call it the fire button on the lockdown bar. because I could see that's obviously the way Stern were going and whilst I'm not trying to copy Stern that button is very very handy for start and select and honestly I can even see it with some well I shouldn't say with some with Zen tables when they're using their active power that you can activate in the thing it would make it really easy if it was mapped to that the bam you tap that and now you're starting so it's like it's a natural fit for what they're doing and i think it can be a natural fit for a lot of uh machines um even if that's what your magna save winds up being to just like slap on the top and get your magna save going you know that's right yeah and actually and that button on our machine does perform magna save function as well oh okay um yeah so again you know i know that you know there are other pinball manufacturers who do put the Magnesave buttons on the side by the flipper, we use that fire button again.
    18:50
    How many? Oh, go ahead, Gerard. No, sorry. I was just going to say, no, it makes sense to put that on. I mean, let's be serious. Stern spends a lot of R&D on trying to find ways to have their user interfaces on their machines as intuitive as possible. So why not look to them when you're actually trying to design interfaces for a digital pinball machine. It makes sense. That's right. Absolutely. So in terms of tactile feedback, I noticed that from your entry level to your top level, everything is including nudge, analog plunger, some transducers, and some solenoids, correct? A mixture of both, yeah. And I think that's really what makes these machines come alive. I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast may have tried the Chinese mass-produced models, pinball shows, that don't have any feedback. You may as well just be playing on your Xbox or your iPad.
    19:49
    But when you've got one of these virtual pinball machines with feedback, and we use a mixture of real mechanical feedback, solenoids, shaker motors, as you said, gear motors, blower fans, that kind of stuff, coupled with tactile feedback,
    20:04
    it completely changes the gameplay, and the machine feels alive. It completely feels alive. And you would never go back once you've played a machine with mechanical feedback. You'd never go back. And again, that's the point here, is that the idea is not just to make them, these machines look like mechanical machines, it's to make them play and feel like a mechanical machine. I want somebody to walk up, put their hands on the lockdown bar, put the coin in and say, you know, it feels real. It feels like a mechanical machine. And they do. That's really important. I noticed that with, and this is probably where the software end of things that you guys are doing is a big part. I'm sure you've noticed over the past two years when both AtGames and Arcade1Up came up with their mini pins, that immediately the community started modding them. Yeah, the first thing everybody does. Right? And, of course, so all of a sudden they're dropping in PCs, they're dropping in transducers everywhere, they're doing all of this stuff. And I mean, it's a lot of DIY to get to that point. And here you guys are taking that next logical step. And it's just like, no, it's all in there, pre-built, pre-wired. I assume, though, you're making some custom software to make sure that this works fluidly with no issues for the end user. Yeah, there is some custom software there. I mean, the brains of the machine is the pin skateboard. board okay um so a lot of you know guys who mod these machines um buy a small board which is the kl25z freedom board um and the software on there is pin is called pinscape and that really is the brains of the machine um and back to supply chain issues that's been one of the big problems is you can't buy the kl25z at the moment it's out of stock everywhere in the world and it's the main brains of the pinball machine. That's a small circuit board that has the accelerometer, it controls the analog plunger, all of your outputs, your solenoids, and all your buttons.
    22:06
    So that one small board is the brains of the entire machine. So yes, there is some custom software that we use, but also most of the software is publicly available for free. Because I know the front end that you're using, that's a launch box, if I'm not mistaken, yes? A pin-up popper. Oh, a pin-up popper. Oh, excuse me, excuse me. Yeah, so, yeah, that's okay. Yeah, so Launchbox we use on the arcade machines. Oh, that's right. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And it's probably important, though, isn't it? Because I think there are specific licensing requirements about when you're actually using these on machines that you've got to be quite careful of as a manufacturer of digital pinballs, correct? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah, I know that there's a lot of virtual pinball machine manufacturers, they're very quick to say, we are not selling the software. This is just, we are offering this to make it easier to use it. And the reality is that all of the software and all of the tables are freely available on the internet. Anybody can go onto various websites today, right now, and start downloading various tables that are tables from the 50s and 60s right up to modern day tables. They're all freely available for anyone to download.
    23:27
    And one of the biggest, I think one of the biggest selling points of something like Visual Pinball, VPX, is the fact that we're preserving games that will potentially be lost in the future. Tables and games that were made in the 1950s or even earlier, at some point they're not going to be in existence anymore. You won't be able to buy them anymore. You won't be able to play them. some of these tables of the cost of mechanical machines is now so high as i'm sure you know it's i mean you know i do okay for myself but owning two three or four mechanical machines is out of my price range i couldn't justify that no i can't um i've got five kids to feed i can't justify having five pinball machines um but i'd love to i'd love to have five pinball machines but I can do that I can get my pinball fix digitally through visual pinball and and that's a great thing of course that's great no it really is um okay so we've talked about um the sort of the manufacturing side of the business let's talk about the actual products I think Chris Yeah. So there's, and this is what I was pleased to see, you've got not only full-size machines, but you've actually got a three-quarter size machine as well, similar to the way that Legends Pinball and IK1UP is going with their home use cabinets. Because not everyone has the footprint for a large machine. Absolutely. What I was really quite happy to see about this is while it's small, it doesn't seem to sacrifice specs like that no that's right pretty it seems like a pretty solid unit yeah absolutely it's built in exactly the same i mean it's basically our full-size machine literally just shrunk down to a 32 inch monitor yeah it's almost exactly the same cabinet uh we're still using the metal back glass around um as you can see on the picture there um the same metal work has just been shrunk down and the key thing is with this machine is that it was specifically designed to be at the same height at the front yes as a full-size machine so that when you're standing at it you don't have to sit on a stool or on a chair or on your on the floor and you can stand at normal height and it feels like a normal machine that's the biggest frustration for people like me and chris who are pretty tall well i'm not pretty tall but i definitely have an opinion about it better be the right height other than that pinball machine is yeah it breaks it i saw one of the mini pinball machines about it two years ago i think and a friend had bought one and invited me to sit down on a little bar stool in front of it um and it just looked like a toy um yeah it just it looked it just looked weird and didn't feel right um so yeah so the the specs on this one, it's, you seem to, it varies on the specs of the machine, obviously, you know, the more money you have, the better the specs of the PC. That's a pretty obvious trade-off. But this one seems to be sitting sort of in the middling area of the range. So, it's Ryzen 5, 16GB RAM, terabyte SSD, and then a 6GB GPU of whatever manufacturer you prefer, I'd imagine. or it's probably whatever you can get your hands on at the time. Well, it has been, yeah. At the moment, it's a 1660. But yes, during the pandemic, graphics cards were like gold dust. Yeah, yeah.
    27:05
    Unobtainium, as we like to say. Yeah. So, okay. So it's a 32-inch playfield with a 24-inch back glass. Is that right? That's correct. That's right. Right, right. And a separate AMD, right? Did I say that correctly? Yes, that's right. So it's a total of three screens that we're actually talking about here. Correct. which a lot of, this is what we see the modding community doing to things like Legends and 1UP as well. They're squeezing three screens into these. Except the monitors, yeah. In some respects, I'm surprised that both of those manufacturers haven't actually caught on to the fact that that's what people want. It's a bill of materials. They're shooting for a price point. Like, they're going to get it for like $800 or something. It's only one extra screen. It's not that expensive. right yeah i think when they were doing it because we were talking with zen during the time you probably may have listened to some of those episodes that were concerning all the you know the physical machines because it's you know in your area but you know they were saying that you know to there's a sweet spot for their products in particular rk1 up where people don't want to pay any more than an x cost but i think this is not the problem um for for you folks because people actually that's not the consideration that's not the market people are actually willing to spend the cash if they're going to get a quality product. Yeah, absolutely. So it's an interesting point where, you know, you're making a machine for a specific market versus making a machine for the market that wants to spend the money and actually not have to actually go through the stress of actually doing it themselves. I agree. But, you know, if you want to be able to play some of the newer Stern tables, then you really do need the full-size DMD. It doesn't really work on a two-screen setup. If you have the full-size DMD appearing on the back glass, which then covers up the back glass, it just doesn't look right. You do need that separate screen. Yeah, absolutely. If somebody wanted to provide their own PC,
    29:06
    is it a simple swap out with whatever you guys have in there? Do you sell it without the PC? Yeah, we do sometimes. Yeah, during the pandemic, graphics cards, back to that. Yeah. We were, I mean, graphics card prices were absolutely crazy. They were over double what they are now. Oh, yeah. And there was a time for about nine months where the most common card we used was the NVIDIA 2060. Yep. And you either couldn't buy one anywhere in Australia or you were restricted to one card per household. Oh, jeez. And this is the truth. I was using friends and family's names and addresses to buy graphics cards. because a couple of times I'd gone to a supplier and ordered two cards and then immediately received a refund saying, you bought a card last week, you can't buy any more. So I was using friends' and family's names and addresses and having cards sent all over Australia. You're like, I swear I'm not Bitcoin farming.
    30:07
    This is a crypto thing. So yeah, so graphics cards were a challenge and during that time we had quite a few American customers who were able to get graphics cards at a reasonably decent price. So we were building the machines and the customers fitting their own graphics card when it arrived. So we would set it up on our own 2060, get all the graphics drivers installed and prepped and ready, and then when it arrived, the customers installed their own 3060 or 3070. So that happened a handful of times. Okay, great. Good to know. We've also got customers who do upgrade their own machines. You buy a machine today. As we all know, computers change in a couple of years, and we've got customers who will buy new setups and install the computers and upgrade the graphics cards themselves. So it really is designed to be all supported with commercial off-the-shelf tech. Absolutely. You can just upgrade it. There's no proprietary lock-in.
    31:06
    So you can buy the unit, and then it evolves with you as time evolves. And it's the same as the software that, you know, we don't lock the software down. Some people who have had dealings with these machines may or may not know that sometimes the manufacturer locks the software. So you you can't change anything at all. Yes. We've actually approached that differently. Nothing's locked down. A customer can wipe the hard drive if they want to and completely change everything and customize it as much as they want to. um and i that's i've done that because that's what i would want i want a machine that's locked down um i'd like to tinker and i think a lot of people that are into pinball like to tinker yeah even digital pinball they they do yeah definitely yes yes um the trade-off of course is the fact that somebody makes a mistake i've got to be here with remote support to dial in to fix the problem so there is a there is a trade-off um and that does take some time um however i still think that it's a better customer experience to have unlocked software yeah yeah absolutely so let's let's talk about uh this new software then that you're doing your uh your retro play app store um the the challenges of this seem daunting to me are you guys curating all of these tables that are available to put them in the store so there's select ones, or are you just like, whatever is available is going to be available in the app store? How are you guys approaching this? Yeah, so I'm literally putting the stuff together myself. Yeah.
    32:43
    Weekends and evenings, getting the tables, the back glasses. Yeah, because one of the things that, one of the challenges in visual pinball, And the reason why there is a need for technology like this is because the table designers who are absolutely amazing at what they do, the downside is that none of them subscribe to the same format of making the tables and the coding. So what you end up with is 50 different tables that have all been put together with different DMD software, different backglasses, different music files, different requirements, scripts. And they all have to be put in certain folders and named in certain ways. It's a mess. Which is literally why I never dip my toes into Pinball X. I think the last time I think I messed around with VP9, I was definitely into VP8. and the VP8 was a beast and it just kept on seeming to get worse and worse as everybody started throwing in more and more Yeah it a real challenge And when I first got into visual pinball i mean i it took it honestly probably took me i say six to nine months of working on machines and software just to get my head around the whole thing to be able to master it and understand everything it is so tricky and i'm i would say i'm pretty good with computers but even i find found some of the things challenging. So I know from some of my customers who buy these machines, some of these guys are middle-aged guys who have no computer experience at all. They just want to play. The new Batman table's out or the new Medieval Madness mod table is out. They just want to play it. They don't want to spend half a day learning where to get the back glass from and what file's got to be renamed this and where that's going, why that doesn't work and why I don't have any volume in sound. Right. And so that's a key thing. But one of the things for me was when I was learning myself, and again, I know from customers that fed back to me on this, is that sometimes the pinball community is brilliant and have massive respect for the table designers and all the guys that build the software. But the community can sometimes be a bit frosty to newbies. Yes, yes. Yeah, it absolutely can be. I see people post a basic question. I've lost my DMD, I've turned my machine on, and all you get back is Google's your friend. Yeah, right. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that's just not helpful. I'm sorry. I just don't, you know, if you're even going to bother to spend the time replying to somebody who's new to the hobby, just help the guy out. Yeah. Just tell him. Yeah. So, yeah, so for me, there's a need for something like this app that will combine everything together. If I if the new as I said, there's a new medieval madness table next week, a mod that requires a certain back glass for certain files and certain MP3s and certain settings have to be put together first. I've done all that. I've done that myself. I put it all together. it's all pre-packaged and the customer has as you saw in the video a couple of clicks of the mouse and it's installed yeah no it was brilliant it literally made me go okay so if i'm eventually going to spend money on a cab this is what i expect now this is what i want and you guys are the ones doing it so that's right yeah absolutely no one else is doing this are they it's only you Yeah, at the moment, yeah. At the moment, yeah, well. So that's with working with VPX. I assume that your cabs also work with Zachariah Pinball, Zen Pinball, the various other pinballs that you're able to purchase. Am I correct on that? Yeah, absolutely.
    36:43
    Now, in the case of some of these, Obviously, their back glasses are either built into the game or, like in the case of with FX3, you've got to provide your own image. We're still waiting on what's going to happen with pinball effects because, obviously, they're at a freeze point with their cabs that will happen after the console stuff comes out. So how do you adapt your cabs to what I'll just call prepackaged console-style pinball? Yeah. So I suppose you have to understand the fact that the front end and the actual game are two different things, first of all. Yes. And that's the two different challenges is getting the game working and then getting it to work from the front end. so out of the box when a customer buys one of our virtual pinball machines the front end is pre-set up ready to take uh zacharia and pinball fx3 or two um and what we say to people i mean i personally i'm not a massive fan of either of those um emulators in particular um i'm a big fan of visual pinball because of all the feedback and the realism but if somebody wants pinball fx3 then they sign into their own steam account they have to buy their own tables with steam they download and install the system they get a cabinet code from zen and then i've got a small written guide on how to set it up which takes five minutes or most people opt for me dialing in and setting up for them all right okay yeah so i can remote dial into a machine with team viewer which i do often and it take me 10 minutes to set somebody up with fx3 so the back glass images are already pre-installed on my machine, just sat in the background ready.
    38:39
    So they're basically just sitting there, dormant, ready for someone to activate their license and go about it officially. And the same with Zachary, I'd imagine, as well. I mean, with Zachary, you don't have to worry, because they've got their own animated back glasses. The only tricky thing, really, with FX3 is just setting up the DMD. I mean, the way Pinup Popper works is that it actually uses the back glasses that are in the front end. So when you look at the table in the front end, you see videos of each screen. And then when you launch the table, it launches Pinball FX3, but keeps the video back glass in place.
    39:16
    So that's always there. The only thing that somebody has to set up is the DMD, the positioning and the sound. That's pretty straightforward. So is it safe to assume though that then as things evolve, especially with Pinball FX, that you guys are going to adapt your software off or download to make it function once it's actually a concrete product that they have pushed. Absolutely. Awesome. That is very good. Now let's talk about Jared's thing, which I also am excited about. Yeah, this is my thing. So after I've experienced FX2 VR and also the Star Wars VR, I quickly realized that, honestly, VR is the way to play digital pinball. It is such an immersive experience. And if done right, it's just like standing in front of a machine. But the thing that was always missing was the interface layer. It doesn't feel right getting a little controller and going like that. It just breaks the illusion. It does, yeah. So enter the Pinsim VR. Now, Chris, behind you, you've got your own version of this.
    40:29
    Not currently. Or wherever it is now. It's in the other room. It's in the other room because it's big.
    40:35
    And so he went and made his own up, but yours is a bit different in that it actually has the PC built into it. Yes. And it's got a screen in the top that lets you initially. Look at that. That's right. That impressed me once I saw that. I did that because I just could not get on with the VR desktop thing. Right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's hard. Honestly, it took me like a week to get my head around it. I thought, I can't do this. It's so annoying. Yeah, because all you need to do is just, in the case of, because with this product, if we're getting back to the speech, you actually get a Quest 2 with it. That's right. And the PC inside isn't a bit of a slug either. It's quite beefy. although I did have a question about the RAM, which surprised me. So I'll mention that now, and then we can go back into the actual experience of using this. So the PC in there, it's a Ryzen 7, which is a fairly decent, juicy spec. It's got DDR4 RAM, but it's 8 gig. That seems low. How are you getting the performance out of a VR? I'll be honest with you, Jared. I think you just picked up a mistake on the website. It should actually be 16 gigs. Oh, it's 16? Oh, that's good. Right, I was going to say, because eight, you probably won't be able to run VAR. Yeah, no, thank you for pointing that out. I'll make that a change now.
    42:02
    Yeah, well, that's good. So 16 gigs, that seems good, and DDR4 is nice and fast. So that allays any problems I've got with that.
    42:10
    We recently moved our website from Wix. We had a basic Wix website to Shopify, which you mentioned earlier on. And unfortunately, there's no way to export all the products. I had to spend an entire weekend rewriting everything. Oh, wow. And I made some mistakes. So, yeah, it should be 16 gigabyte. Look, I'm happy to peer review the website. I do it all the time for my job because I'm a tech writer. I'll send you a machine for free. Hey!
    42:39
    Yeah, so that's a good, like, beefy spec for it. I mean, the laptop that I'm recording, well, that we're doing the show on now, it's a 2060 RTX, and it does VR just fine.
    42:55
    And also, I'd imagine that because of that small screen in the actual cabinet, that would not take a lot of resources to run. Actually, it's a USB monitor. It's the same monitor that we use in the full-size pinball machines. So USB doesn't have any implication on the graphics card at all. Wow. Yeah. That's very clever. The only downside is you don't get the BIOS screen.
    43:21
    It doesn't actually, the monitor doesn't turn on until Windows boots up. Okay. So there's a slight payoff there, a trade-off. But if you needed the BIOS, you could just plug in the monitor. You could plug the monitor in the back. Does it actually, so it does, this is my next question because I couldn't quite see, but does the actual pillar actually have outs on the back, like outputs? or is it all just... You can output to a monitor.
    43:49
    So visual pinballs, you may know, you can output what you're seeing in VR onto another screen. Ah, yeah. Yeah, so I've got a few customers that have got the Pinsim next to a big screen TV on the wall and they output what you can see onto big screen TV so other people can see what you're seeing. And I'd imagine that if you can output to an external screen, this could become a base for if you just want to play other vpx titles or even if you want to yeah or vr game or if you want to actually just play arcade games on it you could probably install what you need to do and have that output to a regular tv as well i think it's one of the biggest selling points about this product is it it's not just for pinball is it it can basically be a base station, a home base station for all VR games. If you're lucky enough to have a man cave or a games room, then this can basically be your one-stop shop for all things VR. Yeah. So what I was trying to point out and see, because I was questioning, do you have the USB port for the connection if you're doing the link? Is that here in the front of the machine? It's actually underneath that red button. It's underneath that. Yeah, that's right, underneath there. Yeah. So it's a USB-C extension. So with Visual Pinball, you really do need to use the link cable for requests. So, yeah, it's just underneath that control deck. I was going to say, because, you know, I've seen, I think Meta has improved the latency with their AirLink software. So I was going to ask, have you, you probably would have tried it out, but have you actually tried out Air Link with VPX, and how does it perform? Actually, I haven't yet. Yeah. I haven't tried it yet. Because, you know, some other manufacturers I've seen that are producing a product like this in Australia, they're doing it with an Oculus Rift S, which is obviously a lot harder to set up because you've got, you know, it's got to be tethered to the PC. That's right. And I think the S is still, I think they've got the virtual cameras in the headset, so you don't need to put up the actual infrared senders on the roof. But it's still a big, chunky headset. Yeah, I think the Quest 2 is a better headset, personally. It's lighter. It is. I think visually it's better. The visuals are better.
    46:22
    Yeah, I personally, we use the Quest 2. I've actually got my, in fact, the original launch videos of this product showed me playing with a Rift S. I have my own Rift S, but I don't really use it much. But the Quest 2, I think, beats the Rift S easily. Yeah, I think, yeah, spec-wise, it's got slightly better screens and field of vision. Yeah, that's right. When I first set my machine up, to tell you a funny story, when I first set this machine up,
    46:52
    I built the cabinet first and then did the software afterwards. Again, like Visual Pinball, complete new learning curve. I started everything from scratch. It took me a day to get it all set up.
    47:05
    But the first experience was I had my headset on and I started the first game, which was Indiana Jones in Visual Pinball VR. And I hadn't realized you had to set your standing position in front of the table. Oh, yes. I'm in a room, you know, it was in an Egyptian room. I'm looking around and I can't see the table anywhere. I thought, where is it? and it was actually above me for some reason. And as I looked up, I could actually see underneath the play field all of the lamps and the lights.
    47:38
    It was incredible. It was the first time in a long time where I was genuinely flummoxed about how good it looked. Jaw on the floor, OMG. Literally, when we got the Star Wars VR, I did that because I had my Pinsim in front of me.
    48:00
    And I looked underneath to see if there was a bottom. And I started going around the table to try and see how far around the table I could get until I eventually bumped into my own wall. but it was just like man if you have that physical object in front of you it sells so much because your hands no like your hands going directly to where it is immediately just walks you into that environment and i found that it it keeps you from having any kind of sense of vertigo um it keeps you being able to stand there uh longer and play it just is such a nice route uh into that and i'm guessing with uh this is the same thing i think i saw it in the specs but um that again you have transducers and solenoids yeah uh within this cabinet yeah that's right so the to the audio and your call outs and music is directed through the headset as it would be um and then the mechanical sounds are fed through the two tactile speakers so you actually can feel and hear those mechanical sounds through the cabinet so you can feel the ball bouncing off the sides all the knockers, all the solenoids kicking off. You can even feel the lamps on old tables clicking and flickering. Oh, wow.
    49:16
    So you can even feel down to relays energising. Yeah, absolutely. Even when you lose the ball and it goes down the reloading mechanism, you can feel the reloading mechanism in front of you. That's crazy. Mind-blowing.
    49:30
    There must be a lot in there to actually give you that much feedback. It must have been a challenge to actually spatially putting the feedback into the smaller box size. Yeah. Because you have a lot of real estate to move in there. And a lot of the time with the larger cabinets, you put transducers and stuff in different positions along the side of the cabinet to give that sense of distance and feeling. So that must have been a challenge. Can you talk about that a little bit?
    49:59
    Actually, you know, tactile transducers are not that large in all honesty. and the pins in vr has two just two it's a small unit and we mount those as close as possible to the flippers so they're directly at your hands basically all right um so yeah they're not very they're not large i'm guessing the ones that i get well tactile transducers have been one of those parts that's been tricky to get in the last few years yes can't always get the same ones but we tend to get dayton uh transducers where we can and the ones that we typically use are only about I guess four and a half five inches in diameter so they not that big really so it not really a challenge fitting them in fitting a PC in the graphics card in is more of a challenge right yeah because i imagine the back of the cabinet it gets quite tight where you've got the checker plate um down the back so it looks like it'll all be up in that sort of everything's at the top everything's at the top yeah yeah right no it definitely does look really slick and it looks like you're using like just like all the other cabinets you've got there you're using arcade quality equipment on there um so buttons etc that's all standard across the range and the analog plunger as well yeah yeah of course the crucial thing is inside again is that pin skateboard that we spoke about earlier so you've still got the ability to nudge as well so if you're playing you can nudge the entire unit and the ball will move with you yeah yeah a lot of the time like i'll always wonder with these smaller ones and chris you could probably speak to this as well do you when you're using the smallest size cabinet is it harder to nudge because you don't have the inertia behind you when you're actually you've got to be more careful you don't tip the machine over you know what you know what i honestly found uh that i had to make the adjustment for because of i had put the pin sim board lower in the cabinet about midway and therefore, but your hands are up at the top, and so then when I would slap, it wasn't quite registering. So I should have really had it mounted up higher, but I couldn't mount it much higher because I had all the cables coming on from the top of where all my buttons were.
    52:14
    So I had to really fudge with the sensitivity of it in order to finally get it to have a nice feeling. But the fact that I had a wooden cabinet in front of me on steel legs, the tipping over factor wasn't an issue because it has weight so that wasn't actually the factor that you know for me personally yeah i mean and the thing that you guys have built you know with your kick plate therefore you can even have a foot sitting on it but i mean it's going to the floor i imagine it weighs uh you know it's got to weigh at least 50 pounds yeah it's got a bit of weight to it i mean i never tip i've never tipped one over right i'm quite a messy player and the idea of the checker plate there, I mean, it does feel nice. I mean, of course, it's not necessarily the standing position of playing pinball, having your foot on a pedestal of any kind, but it does feel really nice to play with one foot up slightly on that aluminium checker plate. It feels nice. Let's talk a little bit about your graphics packages because I just brought this up and I was like, hello, that's a nice graphics package right there. um you guys doing uh all the printing of your graphics in-house and is it really kind of uh sky's the limit for what people can have on there yeah i mean i assume you guys are designing the the packages or yeah i mean a lot of the customers design their own um binals and things you know and send in that particular machine you just featured there was an example of a customer who you know who supplied us with the the graphics um and we just have it printed locally okay yeah right but imagine that from what i've seen there's like a set you can have like really loud graphics on there or you can have stuff that's a little bit more subdued um everyone's got different tastes yeah yeah so you've got a library that people can select from right yeah absolutely yeah i mean it really is is only really limited by somebody's imagination yeah yeah absolutely yeah Oh, that's good. That's awesome. Where do you guys see yourselves going from here with this, with your pin cabs? What do you see kind of tumbling down the pike as the trend goes? Because, I mean, what we've noticed is that digital pinball seems to be on a very much on the upswing. People are really getting into it and doing all this stuff. And whenever that happens, obviously changes are going to start coming in swift. So I'm just curious, your take on the market, where you see things going or what you would like to see coming into these machines.
    54:49
    There's some very, very big changes that are happening. There are currently two forks of Visual Pinball that are being developed by two different teams of people. One is using the Unreal Engine, and there's another fork using Unity. Sorry, I'm fogging my throat. No, no, we're good. um the unity version looks really good the unreal engine 5 version is mind-blowing the graphics if you think the art if you think the graphics look good on visual pinball i mean you know visual pinball looks amazing running on a 4k monitor you know 144 hertz yeah it's brilliant but when you see unreal engine footage of visual pinball it will blow your mind the detail the physics are incredible we don't doubt i mean when we saw the demo for unreal 5 my mind immediately went to oh my god what this can do for pinball so the future the future definitely is using a dedicated game engine a lot of the table developers are already you know talking about that and as i say there are two active forks of visual pinball. Interesting.
    56:05
    It is the BDX and VHS of visual pinball. Who is going to win? I think I've got an idea who's going to win based on how many redundancies I've seen with Unity recently. Yeah, yeah. So I think Unreal is what I'd be backing if I was going to win. Well, I mean, the technology that they have in the engine now, you know, with the new, you know, the lighting engine. Ray tracing and stuff. It's just out of this world. Incredible, absolutely incredible. The visuals look stunning. The physics are brilliant with Unreal Engine. But I think that, you know, I released a video a few months ago, you know, about the idea of having a meta-arcade, you know, having an arcade in the metaverse. You know, this is technology that's being developed right now. Whether or not you're on board with it completely, and I know that there'll be a lot of people who'll be thinking it's all crap, you know, it's never going to happen. Oh, it will happen. Our friend, Mr. Zuckerberg, is investing tens of billions of dollars along with NVIDIA and Google and Microsoft.
    57:04
    So the metaverse or something like the metaverse is going to happen. And I think that Pinball needs to stand up and say, I want to be part of that technology. I want to be there. I want to find – one of the greatest things that FX3 has achieved is it brought a younger audience to Pinball. Right. younger people are experiencing pinball for the first time yeah um and the metaverse and those technologies have the same opportunity to bring in a whole new audience and a whole new experience and as we've said you know vr is the vr pinball is really really good it's only going to get better yeah we really are at the at just the beginning of what vr pinball is all about at the moment i i know that for sure and i i tend to agree i think um if imagine the possibilities of what you could do in in a virtual space with an arcade it could be the most extravagant arcade you've ever seen in your life with no limitations yeah that's right and you know there there's got to be you just got to work out how to monetize it we we we've already you know we already registered the domain name the metaverse arcade a few months ago we've all we have we've already started this plan to start putting together the technologies i'm not a game developer i don't have the skills to experience myself but i'd like to be involved in you know putting together a team of people that can work on a metaverse style arcade and one of the ideas i had which i i i think it'd be great would be to have a blank pinball machine so to actually buy a retro play full-size virtual pinball machine in your house yeah have no artwork on it yep um so it'd be completely blank and you put your vr headset on enter the meta arcade and then what you'll be able to do is download graphics packs so that when you look at your machine through your vr augmented reality you'll be able to see the godzilla artwork or the beatles or whatever else you know oh that'd be crazy actually on the outside of your machine yeah and then to actually customize the play field as well so actually to have an experience where you in augmented reality. So you'll be able to see your furniture around you in your room and your family. But when you look at your pinball machine, it will look completely different and you'll be able to actually choose elements on the play field. Pick up a pop bumper, move it, change the flippers, change some lighting, actually do that in augmented reality on your machine. I think that's the future. So designing pinball in VR. I like where your head's at. No, we're not. Yeah, this sounds pretty cool. I think it'd be great. I think it'd be amazing. That's awesome. Before we let you go, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about this because this is the other thing that grabbed my attention. As a former huge fan of all things rock band and guitar hero, I'm sorry, you have 9,000 songs available on your cab? Love that machine. Love that machine so much. We're selling more of the Guitar Pros right now than we're selling of any other machine. I'm not surprised. I am. Honestly, I am. It was never really a thing in my childhood. Okay. And it was actually one of my guys at work somewhere who had the idea of bringing it back. And I was like, I don't know, really? Didn't it die a death? Didn't it just stop and everyone, you know, stopped playing it?
    60:30
    But it's great. It's so good. But yeah, 9,000 tracks. It was like, that's two and a half grand or something, isn't it? Two and a half, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. Man. Brilliant machine. Yeah, that thing is an absolute beast. And I love the fact you've got, like, really good quality guitar controls on. those ones that you ship with the game they're solid units it's a learning experience, new technology I'd never used them before I'd start off with wireless controllers and they kept dropping out latency was awful and I thought this is never going to work and then somebody said have you thought about using the Raffinet adapter so I reached out to Raphael at Raffinet and we're now using those in the machines and we're now their actual official supplier in Australia as well yeah I saw that That makes a big difference. So you'll see behind me, I've got a drum kit, right? Ah, yes. So that thing there, I play a bit of software called DTX Mania. Yeah. And it's like Guitar Hero, but for drums. And it's based on the Konami Drum Mania and Githadora series. Now, I noticed that you've got, because it's a PC inside, there's nothing stopping me getting that probably installed on that box. and that becomes the the tower because if you have a look online you'll see how the drum mania um and gizadora kits look they look amazing yeah um and that's what i was thinking of like as an application for that i could just plug the the drum kit through usb into that and the screen would be at around the right height if you're seated at a drum kit um and off you go so i i I think you've got Drum Hero on there as a mod? Yeah, we have, yeah. So Phase Shift and Drum Hero will both use the drums, and there are about, I'm guessing, a couple of thousand tracks that will use the drums. Oh, right. You can select either bass guitar, lead guitar, vocals, or drums. Oh, this is through Guitar Hero itself. So as long as you've got an e-kit, is it any e-kit that'll work on there? Yes, anything USB. Anything USB that has MIDI in it. It will be recognized by Windows, and it's just a case of setting the controls up, you know, telling the software what drum does what. That's very cool. Because I noticed you also mentioned DJ Hero, which I also loved. And I was just like, there was just like a swing-out table to put your pad on. Oh, yeah. So you could just not have to provide a separate table for that and be able to stand up and do that. That would be like bang on. I actually haven't tried DJ Hero myself yet. It's on the to-do list, yeah. Have you got the dick for it? sorry have you got the dj hero dick yes no no no i haven't no no not yet okay i think they're a little bit hard to come by so uh we need to do that in fact it's only on friday we're just finishing off a batch of five machines and two of the guys that work for me um the great guys and they every lunchtime they play guitar hero and one of the guys mentioned to me said we thought about doing a scene style machine oh my god what's that it's basically the same machine yeah but with The guitars have mics. Right. Yeah. Again, I was like, is that even a thing? Really?
    63:42
    It's a thing. So we started looking at that on Friday afternoon. And yeah, it's a thing. It really is a thing. So we'll be releasing. It looks like a sing style machine. Wow. There you go. Yeah. I like how adaptable you guys are being with just like, I mean, obviously, again, because you're doing all the manufacturing as much as you can, I should say there in Australia. Yeah. An idea pops up. It's like, well, we can try and see where it goes from there. Yeah, and we are like that. I'm more than happy to listen to ideas and try new things out. We're trying out a dance mat. We're going to try and manufacture our own DVR dance mat. We've built an early sort of demo version. It works.
    64:26
    So maybe in six to nine months, we'll have our own metal-framed DVR pad. But, yeah, it's good to try new things. It's like 2005 all over again. It is. It's what I want. I want to see, I want to have a DDR. You want to see me dance.
    64:41
    Yeah. Those things, you can buy the actual metal mats now, I think, and get them in Australian dollars for about one and a half grand. So having a local manufacturer of those. I've got two full-size Plexi ones in my closet. The controllers no longer work anymore. Yeah, because of the dodgy leaf switches. It was fun for a while. yeah you can buy those cheap mats that are from amazon for about 100 bucks yeah that lasts literally a day yeah pretty much goes in them there's a manufacturer of the dance pads in poland um i can't remember their name now but they are they seem to be the guys at the moment who are manufacturing um sort of industry standard dance pads um again i'm not quite sure how big the market is i'm not i'm not sure you know is there a demand for ddr yeah there's a massive open source scene for Step Mania. That's right, Step Mania. Huge open source scene, just like there is for DTX Mania. Like, there's a whole community like VPX. Guitar Hero. Yeah, Guitar Hero and DTX Mania. And this is what cracks us up is that all these games back then that we got started with, a lot of them, Red Octane was the company making the peripherals for, which is where Mel Kirk was before going over to Zed. So it's like, it's just kind of funny how people are going from that little thing growing and then everything is coming back in because they're like well hey we really liked it let's throw it back into the mix you know so yeah absolutely yeah that's awesome as we've proven that these communities are still alive and kicking and when i first started looking into the guitar hero stuff back in the early days of researching started looking at youtube videos yeah and there's guys on youtube with like four or five million views yeah in the first three or four weeks playing Guitar Hero or Clone Hero. And I'm like, that's mad. That's a lot of views. Yeah, it really is. It really is. Some of them are so good. Well, hey, folks, if you're looking to research this stuff further a little bit more, checking it out for yourself, go to retro-play.com.au. Their full store is up there. You can check out everything. You guys also have a whole mess of videos on YouTube. I know I've been searching them out and watching them, kind of educating myself a little bit about what you guys – I think you guys have your head in the right spot, and things are looking really good.
    67:02
    Thank you very much. All right. So, everybody, that was David Gilmore from Retro Play. I guess next time, Jared, we'll maybe play some pinball. Yeah, we might have a flip next time around. If we're not having a flip, we're doing what? we're talking about stuff and things our favorite stuff and things folks alright until then thank you once more David and we'll see you guys next time bye bye see you later thank you