So when he was a young pinball player in a local bowling alley at 10 years old, he was often playing pinball. One day, the service tech walked in to take a look at one of the machines, and he started chatting with Steve. Steve would then say that the guy looked at me and said, you know what? This is a gut leave, the Cadillac of the industry. Did they say that because they probably weighed as much as the Caddy? You know, yams are heavier than I realized when I got my Spanish eyes, which is a single-player EM. I figured, oh, no problem, and I went to lift the thing. It's like, ooh, oh, yeah, these are heavier. One of the, I guess, you know, mid-'70s, you know, early-'70s, things are starting to change at Gottlieb specifically. So in 1976, Alvin Gottlieb, son of David Gottlieb, who is the D in D. Gottlieb & Co., sold Gottlieb to Columbia Pictures, yes, the movie folk, And we'll go into more of that in another episode at some other time. But the leadership was more or less kept the same at Gottlieb at that time. The ownership changed, but the leadership within it, the Wayne Nyans, who's a legend in the industry, continued to stay around. Alvin continued to stay around. The guidance of the old Gottlieb in the 60s and early 70s is still there. just things and priorities are starting to change kind of at the higher-up ownership level. The competitors really started to change at this time, didn't they, Ron? We're starting to kind of get into that mid-'70s. Everybody's trying to kind of catch up a little bit. Yeah. Like I said, Bally starts to try to do some licensing, making games like Wizard, Captain Fantastic, trying to do that to boost sales, which if you look at the numbers, you can't argue. That definitely boosted sales. It's working. Then you have Atari, which basically tried to do everything different. They had all live bodies, so their games would look completely different than the competition. With their score displays on the apron, again, so it would look completely different than their competition. Yeah, when you're behind in the market, most companies know that you need to do something to jumpstart business. So you either compete on price. If you start competing on price, you start a race to the bottom. Who can make the cheapest pinball possible? who can take the most stuff out, who can just get it out the door. If you're not able to come up with some sort of other innovation, you have to invest in technology, you have to invest in talent. You're going to close your door if you don't do that. There's a great risk to doing things differently, and a great example of that, and you mentioned it a moment ago, was Atari. Well, they tried to do something totally different with their machines. Nolan says, I thought we could make a business, meaning pinball, but we could not do commodity pinball, one that looked like it was the same size. So we created Y-Bodies and these other various innovations, which allowed us to price them anywhere we wanted. Yeah, so that's a great example of doing something different. So he calls it commodity pinball, so he just didn't want to be like everybody else. He had to do something totally different. You know, that is an example of when things went, you know, bad, because we can see that Atari's pinballs, you know, they had maybe two good machines, both done by Steve Ritchie. They did some crazy stuff with, like, Hercules, boards in the bottom. It's just, things just didn't work. So you continually need to evolve your offering to consumers. So let's take a look at, like, McDonald's salads. You know, people all of a sudden are demanding changes in the market, and McDonald's starts making salads. Right? Do you think McDonald's wants to make salads? They want to make hamburgers? Great, with great seed meat. Yeah, like McDonald's needed to capture another part of the market because people were going to other fast food places because they had salads. So McDonald's creates salads to follow the market demand. And then when people end up coming to McDonald's and realize the salad sucks, they probably just go back to the burgers and fries anyway. But this is like pinball industry, right? They need to continue to move the market and Gottlieb has to follow where the market is going. Pinball decided to invest in solid state And when we say that word, it's like, what does that mean? What does solid state pinball mean? It just basically means all those reels All those relays, those stepper units All that stuff is going to be replaced Yeah, we're able to reduce cost, right? We can get rid of all that metal and all those bits We can reduce the cost by having a computer board Which is the future of the world It's funny because I'm in my mid-30s and I've never really known a non-solid state, I guess, world. I've always known the silicon processing microchip. You know, many companies in the 70s were working on creating these silicon processing chips and that was, you know, companies like Texas Instruments, Intel, Western Digital, I'm sorry, Western Design Center. You know, all of these companies are all starting to come up and the race around the world, particularly in the United States, was the microprocessor. It was all about sort of dominating the new world that was coming. Eventually, pinball would notice that quick computing in the microprocessor, as well as their ability to keep a memory, all of that stuff could be leveraged in pinball to help create efficiency. Pinball machines would be lighter. They wouldn't need those massive score reels anymore. They could have digital displays. They would require less tinkering, less adjustments, and hopefully they'd be cheaper and easier to manufacture, and that savings could be passed on to the distributors and the operators. This information, actually, we're going to go through. This is where we're going to get a bit nerdy. This is from an article written by Dennis Creasel. It had originally been put into This Week in Pinball, and it sort of breaks down the early solid-state by manufacturer, and we're going to make it a lot less boring and hopefully add some kind of fun commentary. so ron do you want to go through the chronological order of who's launching their solid state platform and who's following who and what's going on sure first out of the gate was bally the innovator the innovator and the thing to remember about bally is when they came up with their system they actually tried to patent not just their system but patent the actual idea of a solid state pinball machine they wanted to say if you've got a computer board in it you've got to pay us. He's got to pay us. Yep. It went to court and the judge did not agree. But I'm wondering what would have happened if the judge had decided the other way and everyone had to pay Bally if they wanted to make a solid state game. That would have been interesting. Man, so they went with a sort of a prototype approach. So what they did is they wanted to take an existing machine and try to make it work in solid state. That was in late 1974. They took a bow and arrow in 1974, and they decided to modify it. An interesting note, of course, is that the EM version of bow and arrow sold 7,630 units in November of 75. They just had a bunch of these laying around, I would assume, so that's why they chose this one. This was followed by one prototype flicker and one boomerang. Doug McDonald was a ballet engineer in the late 70s, and the boards for the machine were designed by Doug McDonald is a name that would pop up fairly often when it came to mechanics throughout the research. So certainly a very important engineer at Bally. And his initials, the letters D and B, are sort of like decibel, back-to-back dB. And you'll be able to actually see them on those prototype machines. They made 17 of the bow and arrow machines to try to get these to continue to work. They've got an understanding of, okay, how do we make a machine that we have work with these boards, right? So they're in the factory. They're all just trying to figure it out, which is pretty interesting. What did they end up eventually coming out with? Well, their system, I always get confused at what their actual system is called. It's like the Bally 17, the Bally 35, named after the CPU board. It came out with a MPU board that was, MPU stands for, what does MPU stand for? Microprocessing unit? Yes. It is powered by a Motorola 6800 series chip, which is an 8-bit microprocessor. Yeah, so this is where we get nerdy. Things are going to get nerdy with Ron and I here, because we're going to talk about sort of chipsets and stuff. So if that's not your thing, go back to Episode 1 about Steve Ritchie. Well, in their most basic way I can break down a Valley Board set, you have an MPU, which is your main, the brain. I think it's the brain. It runs the game code. It does all the math. Yeah, it does all the math. They will have a solenoid driver board. It runs all the solenoids. Yeah, so the flippers, the kickouts, the drum carves. The score displays. Then they will have a lamp driver board Does all the lights Does all the lights And then they will have a rectifier board which is the thing that the transformer plugs into this board and this board provides the voltages for the whole system. Yeah, so clean power, voltages don't go up and down. And that's at the beginning. Later they would add things like, you know, they'd be auxiliary boards, if it has special features, sound board, a speech board, that kind of thing. Yeah. Bally decided to drive all their lamps and solenoids, So all of the light bulbs and all of the things that drive the flippers and the drop targets and stuff directly. So right from the thing, which is why you would have that driver board, rather than using a matrix. So what is a matrix? Matrix is a series of rows and columns. Yeah, so what does that mean? It means if you have, say, you have an 8x8 matrix and you want to fire something, It's at position, say, row two, column one. But it decreases the amount of transistors you need. So you don't need one for, let's say, if you have eight by eight, you don't need 64 transistors. You just need eight by eight. I had a system ADB Gottlieb. My stand-up targets weren't scoring. And after a bunch of troubleshooting, I traced it right back to the matrix and one specific chip and one specific leg of a chip. And that one leg on that one chip ran the scoring for that stand-up target. So that had to be replaced, that whole matrix of tracing things, computer boards. Beyond me, I'm not that kind of person. But I find it super cool that after being in the hobby a short period of time, I was like, oh, my God, that's how a chip works. That's how a matrix works. It was very cool. You know, Bally could control up to 60 lamps and 19 solenoids, 15 that were momentary and used and four that were continuous. This is a big deal. You could have 19 solenoids. So you could have 19 things. You could have drop target, you know, up. You could have two flippers. You could have four flippers. You could have a kick-out. You could have the out-hole has a solenoid, right? You've got, like, all of these options, right, of what you want to come up with. And the lamps. So these are like having playfield lamps underneath, right? Like, spinner is lit when the light is on. Yeah, 60 lamps. They'd be controlled lamps. So one that it can light to tell you to do things. GI, meaning general illumination, or lights that are just always on. Yeah. Okay, there you go. You've now proven Joe C. correct.