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Wifi Leaderboards, Video Aprons, & More - Pinball Expo 2025 - Pinball News

Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2025)·video·45m 11s·analyzed·Oct 17, 2025
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.026

TL;DR

Warped Pinball launches EM leaderboard system; Las Vegas Playfields demos interactive video aprons.

Summary

Paul Mullen and Maxwell Mullen from Warped Pinball present their plug-in leaderboard system for pinball machines, highlighting support for System 9, 11, WPC, and a newly demoed EM interface. Tim Crowley from Las Vegas Playfields showcases a video apron card system that replaces traditional cardboard aprons with interactive displays showing tutorials, high scores, and real-time game data. Both products emphasize affordability, reversible installation, and open-source collaboration to engage casual and family players.

Key Claims

  • Warped Pinball debuted last year at Expo with System 11 support and has now added WPC and System 9 support

    high confidence · Paul Mullen describing company timeline and product expansion

  • The EM interface for Warped Pinball is currently being demoed but not yet for sale; they are gathering feedback to assess market interest

    high confidence · Paul Mullen stating 'It's not for sale yet, but we're showing that to get some feedback'

  • Warped Pinball's boards do not require internet connection; data lives locally at the location and the board serves web pages directly

    high confidence · Paul Mullen explaining system architecture: 'we don't run a server... the data doesn't go up to a server'

  • The EM solution uses zip-tied magnetic sensors clipped to score reel coils without soldering or permanent modifications

    high confidence · Paul and Maxwell describing EM board components and installation method

  • Tim Crowley's video apron cards will be available for Fishtails and Addams Family starting March 1st

    high confidence · Tim Crowley stating 'That and Adam's Family will be available March 1st'

  • Operators responding to video apron demo are primarily interested in advertising capability rather than game interaction features

    high confidence · Tim Crowley reporting feedback: 'operators seem really interested in the advertising part of it. They don't even care if it interacts with the game'

  • Rob Burke encouraged Warped Pinball to develop an EM interface after meeting at Texas Pinball Festival

    high confidence · Maxwell describing encounter with Rob Burke who challenged them to create EM support

  • EM machines have inconsistent scoring behavior and sometimes don't register hits accurately, which Warped Pinball had to account for in their sensor design

    high confidence · Maxwell noting EM games 'are liars' and describing scoring inconsistencies discovered through testing

Notable Quotes

  • “Our basic mission is focus on the players, the people playing the games, the ones we're doing this all for, engage novice players.”

    Paul Mullen@ 1:06 — States core philosophy of Warped Pinball's product design approach

  • “The one thing I'd like to tell you about EM games, though, that we have learned is they're liars. They are liars.”

    Maxwell Mullen@ 29:34 — Humorous but technical observation about EM machine scoring inconsistencies discovered during development

  • “What I really want is this. This is why we come to the show and stand in the booth for three days. We want to hear from you what makes this fun and engaging for everyone.”

    Paul Mullen@ 9:32 — Demonstrates commitment to community feedback and iterative product development

  • “It seemed like dead real estate on a pinball machine. So I decided I was going to put video screens in the place of an apron card.”

    Tim Crowley@ 18:44 — Explains genesis of video apron concept as utilization of unused playfield space

  • “If you're an operator you can sell ads to bob's bar and grill down the street or whatever and put those things on those video cards so it's a way to do some advertising.”

    Tim Crowley@ 20:03 — Identifies revenue opportunity for operators using video apron technology

  • “We're not making any permanent modifications to the pinball machine. So it's totally reversible. It's easy, you don't need any special tools or skills, no soldering.”

    Maxwell Mullen — Key selling point addressing customer concerns about machine modification

Entities

Warped PinballcompanyPaul MullenpersonMaxwell MullenpersonTim CrowleypersonLas Vegas PlayfieldscompanyRob BurkepersonPinball Expo 2025eventTexas Pinball FestivaleventPast Timesorganization

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Las Vegas Playfields video apron system will launch with limited initial game support (Fishtails, Addams Family) at March 1st availability date

    high · Tim Crowley: 'That and Adam's Family will be available March 1st. We'll be at the Texas Pinball Festival with a bigger booth'

  • ?

    community_signal: Rob Burke's direct influence on Warped Pinball product roadmap demonstrates tight interconnections between community members and manufacturer development priorities

    high · Maxwell describing how Rob Burke challenged them at TPF to develop EM support, directly influencing their R&D focus

  • ?

    community_signal: Both Warped Pinball and Las Vegas Playfields actively seeking community feedback at Expo to guide product development priorities

    high · Paul: 'We need direction, people. You have to tell us what makes this fun and engaging'; Tim requesting feedback on operator vs. home use focus

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Both products emphasize reversibility, no soldering, and accessibility for non-technical users as core design principles to maximize adoption

    high · Multiple statements about avoiding soldering and permanent modifications; focus on 'easy install' and broad user accessibility

  • $

    market_signal: Operators prioritizing advertising capability over interactive game features in video apron adoption, suggesting different primary use case than designer intended

    high · Tim Crowley: 'operators seem really interested in the advertising part of it. They don't even care if it interacts with the game.'

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.135

0:00
I'm Paul Mullen from Warped Pinball. This is Maxwell Mullen. We have Tim Crowley from Las Vegas Playfields, but also Video Arcade, Video Apron Card System, sorry.
0:24
It's been a long day already. Everyone enjoying the show? So, in case you wondered, yes, appreciate it. In case you wondered, Max does get his good looks from me. Just want to make that clear.
0:38
So, at Warped Pinball, we do plug-in boards for a variety of different game systems to get your leaderboards online, to get better engagement from the kids in your family or the club, to let everyone track their scores, trying to just increase the fun that everyone can have, not just the people who score the best.
1:06
So our basic mission is focus on the players, the people playing the games, the ones we're doing this all for, engage novice players. I think very often leaderboards leave that behind. Keep it affordable. I think if you stop by the booth, you'll find out that our plug-in boards give you a lot of features for a very affordable price for all the feature and function that they provide. And keep it open and collaborative. And that's part of the reason we're here with Tim. It's a great collaboration that we've done with him. And open, our software is online. If you're a techie person and you're interested in how these things work, hacking them at home or what have you, right, we're very open to that.
@ 14:18
Fishtails
game
Addams Familygame
Johnny Mnemonicgame
Bow and Arrowgame
Midnight Madnessproduct
Vector boardproduct
  • ?

    product_strategy: Warped Pinball planning achievement system for novice players, Data East/Whitestar support, golf mode, and System 7 support based on community feedback

    high · Paul Mullen listing planned features: 'achievement system', 'golf mode', 'System 7', and mod maker collaborations

  • ?

    technology_signal: EM machine scoring behavior inconsistency ('they're liars') required significant development effort to match actual vs. displayed scores in sensor system

    high · Maxwell describing discovery that EM games don't consistently register hits and that Warped Pinball had to develop workarounds to match score accuracy

  • ?

    technology_signal: Warped Pinball introduces magnetic sensor-based EM scoring without soldering or permanent modifications, representing new approach to classic machine automation

    high · Maxwell describing EM sensor solution as 'zip-tied to the coil' and completely reversible with no soldering required

    • 1:58
    All of this together makes it really great for families, locations, clubs, some of our best customers or places where a group of people meet and there's a bunch of machines, and these additions really work well for them.
    2:11
    Okay, so you add a little board to your pinball machine. What do you get? So you get longer leaderboards, and I'm going to jump ahead here to this slide. This is, I mean, I'm not bragging or anything, but in my game room, this is what the leaderboards look like.
    2:30
    They're all my initials in all the spots, and that's kind of a problem. honestly, I would rather see best scores from the whole family, right? And that's the point here. So individual and family best boards. So when you use one of our products, everyone in the family or the club enters their initials, they get their own history of their own scores and can, you know, click on that on the website. And then also there's a view where it's the best score from each person in the group, right? So now you get one score on that leaderboard. Everyone gets one score, and you can see them all in one place. Everyone gets included, not just the dominant players.
    3:16
    We have a bunch of other things, games that have boards automatically linked together so it's easy to move between them and see leaderboards for every game. We have a tournament mode.
    3:28
    We do instant adjustments. So if you have like a, say a System 11 where you have to go in and flip it to free play sometimes, or you have pay to play nights and you have to go through all the menus, right? You don't have to do that anymore. You just click a button on the web interface. It loads in a preset profile for free play night or tournament night or pay to play for a charity night or what have you. And you do that all on the computer and it just goes into the game automatically, which is super handy we also we also keep all the information a game and nvram so it's our board is an nvram out on so you don't have to buy that other nvram chip or even if you install one of our boards and you have an nvram you can take it out and move it doesn't even have to be there another feature that we really see a lot of people getting into is the live scores. So if you stop by the booth, you can see when someone's playing, the browser on the big screen TV or the computer or whatever shows the actual score, incrementing and kind of being animated when they score big. And so everyone in the room can follow along with the game, even if you can't see the scoreboard. Or if, you know, the display on the machine's doing other things, it's showing animations or whatever, we always have the score up on the big screen.
    5:01
    So it's kind of fun for clubs particularly or tournament nights to have everyone watching the live scores.
    5:09
    There's a ton of other stuff, and it's always growing. We're continuing to work on the software and add features all the time.
    5:16
    We recently did a Midnight Madness mode. Who knows what Midnight Madness mode is, by the way? Okay, interesting. So I didn't know how well it was known. I believe, and the experts in the room may correct me, I believe it was an invention of Dwight Sullivan. I don't remember what the first game was, but the idea was that if you're at an arcade and you're playing at the strike of midnight, there was a special mode that started.
    5:48
    So I have Johnny Mnemonic at home, and that's a pretty cool midnight madness mode. when it happens, the game goes dark. It's like it broke. You know, you're like, who pulled the plug? It comes back on, and it does some crazy graphics and lights, and it launches all the balls, and you get this endless multi-ball for three minutes or something, and the display does different stuff, and it's really cool, and I just figure not many people have seen it or played it because you had to be in an arcade at midnight, and the clock in the game actually had to be set right, and you And all those things had to happen. So we figured out a way to make that adjustable and make it happen when you want it. So when you have one of our boards in a game that supports Midnight Madness mode, you can actuate it and play it whenever you want. It's just kind of fun. So we're looking for fun ways for people to experience more of the game. I think there's like seven or eight games that have it, but it's an example of the kind of thing that we're getting into. scores again in case you missed them that's that's what it's like so what so what is it it's a little circuit board there's a picture in the upper left corner there it's though it's the white board that's some WPC game so the green board is the main processor board in your machine our board plugs right in there's one you see a little wire and a clip there you clip that on one specific spot so there's no soldering there's no modifying your game it can be undone it can be taken out right it's a relatively easy install you put this in and then you get all these all these other tools and leaderboards and fun stuff and these are some of the examples of the different different screens that you might see it does not actually need an internet connection we don't run a server okay so this is a big difference from a lot of other systems the data doesn't go up to a server and we don't have to host it and it doesn't come down right it just lives in at your location so the game our board serves up the web page directly to your computer your smartphone your tablet your big screen anything with a web browser okay no software install it's like super easy open a web browser connect it to the address of the machine and you get all these views and control you can have it up on the smart TV and on your phone at the same time if you want you know all these kinds of things so we try and keep it really accessible lots of configuration the lower left corner is you know, options. You want to have players type in initials or not or claim scores afterwards or not. You can adjust it however you want. The lower right is an example of the live score. See that 23,000? That's kind of turning yellow because someone scored something big. So that gives you an idea of what the live score display looks like. And of course, you have a ball in play so you know how far the players are in their game. And then it's also very updatable. I mentioned that we are continuing to write new software and add features and all these kinds of things. And the big part of us coming to the show is showing people what we have now and hearing from you what you really want. We need direction, people. You have to tell us, okay, that's cool, that's not cool. What I really want is this. This is why we come to the show and stand in the booth for three days. We want to hear from you what makes this fun and engaging for everyone, okay? And then those updates come online automatically. You click a button, because you have to accept updates, but you click a button in the interface, it loads onto the board, good to go. No USB dongles or, you know, connecting computers or anything. It just comes over your Wi-Fi to get, and you get all the new features, whatever they might be. We basically founded or debuted, let's say, Warped Pinball last year at Expo. Our first show was this show last year with System 11. We made a number of improvements, as I've mentioned, and then this year we have added WPC support. In the meantime, also System 9. So we have system 9, system 11, WPC, and we're demoing a EM interface. So I think this is really unique. We have a board and a sensor system that goes in the back of an EM machine, and we're showing that this year. It's not for sale yet, but we're showing that to get some feedback and see what the interest is in an EM automatic scoring system. We also have an output system for mod makers like Tim over here, to output game data to mods or other systems. We have all the game data in play, the high scores, modes, you know all this kind of stuff that we can output and help mod makers make their mods more interactive with the game So we excited about that too So Max is going to take over
    11:24
    So we thought we'd tell the story a little bit about why we decided to do EMs, because maybe that's surprising to some people. We were at TPF, Texas Pinball Festival, and I'm sure many of us in the room know Rob Burke. He shows up at our booth. He says, are you coming to Chicago? Well, yeah. He said, well, this system's great, but you're really great. And he said, you've got to do the system for EMs. You've got to have an EM. So we said, ah, sounds kind of hard. I don't know. This is not really a good way to hook up to it. And we thought about it. And we're like, all right, we'll take a swing at it, Rob. We'll see what we can come up with.
    12:03
    So we got together with our friend Chris there. This is us at past times. Rob let us in. after hours and we pulled out a bunch of different EM titles and took a bunch of different measurements. You can see our oscilloscope there with some different pulses from coils we're measuring.
    12:25
    It's just a – if you haven't been to past times, it's a wonderful place. A little bit more – sorry. You should go. Yeah, everyone should go. It's a little bit of – we'll take a measurement and then maybe play a couple games.
    12:37
    A little bit of work, a little bit of play. So anyways, we took all these measurements to see, like, okay, Rob, this is what you want, but is it even possible, right? There's different voltages, different – some of these games are designed in Europe, so how are they going to handle the different grid voltages? We just wanted to confirm, could we make something that would work consistently? And it turns out, yes. so we we found a solution that we're happy with love to show you that solution in person in our booth if you'd like but kind of our high level goals we're keeping the electronics out of sight because you know these are classic games and I think the last thing anyone wants is like a big light up display on it you want to keep it looking the same so our electronics are totally invisible You don't even necessarily know anything's installed if you don't know it's there. We keep it affordable. We keep the cost reasonable. We're not charging a monthly subscription fee or anything like that. So we want to keep it accessible to everyone.
    13:47
    We're bringing all the relevant features of other Warp Pinball products to EM. Obviously, adjusting adjustments doesn't really make a lot of sense in that context. But we get the live scores, different ways to claim scores, stuff like that is all built into the product.
    14:08
    The system integrates over the network with the solid state machines, just like they integrate with each other. We're not making any permanent modifications to the pinball machine. So it's totally reversible. It's easy, you don't need any special tools or skills, no soldering, and it's compatible with most EM games. Probably just about all of them, but, you know, asterisk.
    14:43
    So, how do they work? There are two main components. We have on the right, there's our control board. This is the brain. It's running the web server and everything about keeping track of scores. It's what you're interacting with. And then it's got a series of plugs at the bottom, and that is for connecting to our sensors. So we just have one sensor per score reel coil. It gets zip-tied to the coil, which may sound like a hacky solution. It turns out it's actually a very robust, very neat solution. It's easy to use. And that's enough for us to get everything we need out of the EM machine to... Oh, and we have clips for the end-of-game light.
    15:31
    There's some clips, not pictured here, but some clips for that. Yeah, did you want to take these? Go ahead. All right. So similar to the EM solution, our system 9, 11, and WPC boards all work in a similar way, reversible install. In this case, you're unplugging your CPU, putting our board into the motherboard, and plugging your CPU into our new socket. So we're kind of sandwiched between the motherboard and the CPU. That's what allows us to work like an NVRAM chip, but do a lot more because we can read and write to that RAM. So that gives us access to a lot of great data, and that helps us drive our collaboration with Tim.
    16:26
    These are our currently supported games. It's growing all the time as we add more lines, more MPUs, sorry. And of course we didn't list all the EM games because we would be here all day just going through the slides.
    16:45
    So what's next for us? We're planning to – these are what we're thinking about doing next, and we'd love to hear from you if these are exciting to you or if you would be interested in products for, say, Data East or Whitestar or things we would like to do. I'm thinking about adding an achievement system, especially for those younger players that maybe don't get a super high score. It would still be great to have maybe some more achievable things for them to work up to. We want to continue doing mod maker collaborations like with Tim, which he'll talk about here in a moment. And some of the other ideas we have are like golf mode. And I've found with some of my coworkers that golf is a really great way to play pinball with people who aren't necessarily pinball people and a great way to introduce them to a tournament that's more casual.
    17:47
    And, of course, System 7 is another one where it's like, well, we've got the boards that are close, so maybe we'll do that. All right, I'm going to turn it over to Tim, who's going to talk about how his system is developed and working and integrating with our system to make something new.
    18:07
    Big crowd today. My name is Tim Crowley. I own Las Vegas Playfields. Typically we restore playfields. People send them to us in the mail and we fix them and clear code them and send them back. but I've restored a lot of games over the years. And one of the things that always irritated me was apron cards. They're just cardboard. They get tired. They get, you know, stained and stuff. You have to replace them if you're going to make a game look nice. And basically you have to print new ones. You can find them on the internet. Now people are starting to sell them for five or 10, 20 bucks, whatever. And they just always irritated me because they never fit quite right. And to me, it just seemed like dead real estate on a pinball machine. So I decided I was going to put video screens in the place of an apron card. And that's what we've done.
    18:59
    Like I said, that space on a pinball machine is the one area that manufacturers have really never done anything with. And I thought, okay, that seems kind of gimmicky. You can put screens anywhere you want in a pinball machine. But if they don't provide something useful, then what good are they? And thinking about them, on one side, they tell you how much they cost to play. On the other side, they give you a little set of rules that nobody ever reads because the print's too damn small. So I thought it needs to be a tutorial system. And this has a tutorial thing in it. And it also needs to be basically it's a slideshow, two different slideshows, one on each side. and it cycles through either jpeg pictures or mp4 videos it'll play videos and it'll show pictures and they can be downloaded by the op by the owner the user so it has that and that's kind of what they look like we just put some stuff there but you know if you're a homeowner and you have games you can put your kids pictures in there you can put anything you want on the thing if you're an operator you can sell ads to bob's bar and grill down the street or whatever and put those things on those video cards so it's a way to to do some advertising once you hit either of the flipper buttons the things connected to the game partly through just wiring with flipper buttons but partly with a vector board that's sold by warp pinball and that opens a lot of doors we'll get into that in a minute but basically that hit neither flipper button brings up a menu the menu is on the left and you know everybody seems to like to put information about the designers and when it was built how many were made and all that so we got a page for that it's going to have that game's high scores on it you hit a button it goes to the next thing high scores and then it goes through all the modes and this is on a fishtails now it's out there you guys can come out and look at it play it if you want fishtails is reasonably basic but a lot of people including myself I'm not a great pinball player so basically you're just shooting for the lights and I don't know why these modes start half the time and reading that little apron card pulling out the manual and looking at what Williams wrote back in 1990 never really happens so I thought we can use this tutorial mode to go through the different modes in the game and show on the right side either a video or a slide that tells you how you get into how you how do you get a monster fish or what is autocast and some of the stuff that's in these games that's a little perplexing and for some people that are good at pinball they might look at that and say well i don't need that but it's great for for you know your spouse or your best friend trying to get other people involved in pinball because then they can start to understand the game a little better so that was part of this thing and the next thing is it always irritates me with scores that don't you can't find your score while you're playing a game and people don't think about pinball machines in the way that they did when they were first designed but the way they were made was for operators they weren't made for home use and it was designed with a big back box that if you're walking out of the movie theater you're walking into a bar and you see a big back box that says Star Wars and you say, hey, I like Star Wars. What is that thing? So you go look at it and it's a pinball machine and maybe you know what they are. Most people do, but some people don Okay I going to sit there and play this thing Here a put my dollar in and and you know Paul going to stand there with me and we going to play this thing So as they evolved they built excuse me they built dot matrix displays And that display is actually designed for onlookers. It's not designed for the person playing the game. Because the person playing the game doesn't have time to watch it. But as they evolved these games, that's where they put all the information. Well, as a player, especially a player that's not very good, I want to know what my score is. and I want to know what ball's in play because half the time I forget. And it's not always up there, and when I do look up there, the ball drains. So I thought, we can use these screens to put that information on the right side all the time in big numerals close to where I'm looking anyway, and I can get that information whenever I want it. And it updates. You can't see it in the slide very well, but every corner's got player one through four. So if I'm playing other people, the score's there well enough that I can read it and see whether I'm beating my buddy or not. And it cycles through that. So on the left side, we're using Vector, the Warped Pinball card that Paul's talked about. It can extract data out of the game and tell me what mode the game's in. And we have to map every game. It takes a little bit of effort to do that. But we can map that game and know what mode and what that game's trying to do. And with that, we can put data on the left side that tells you what to shoot at. So that screen's going to be interactive. And as you're playing through the game, it's going to either show pictures or big text or whatever it needs to get that information to you. So if you're not sure what you're supposed to do next, if you just don't want to shoot at the flashing lights, you can look at that screen and figure out what I'm supposed to do in this game next.
    24:12
    So that's kind of what the thing does. After you get through the game, there's a little better picture of that thing.
    24:21
    You know, the color changes. The active player, player three, turns a different color. Of course, the active score is in the middle. And when it's over, it goes to game over mode for 30 seconds, and then it goes back to the attract mode. So it's got these three basic modes in it. And it's going to open some doors. The way we're building it, it's run by a Raspberry Pi. So that's essentially a cheap desktop computer, a little thing about three inches square.
    24:50
    They have pins on those that run lights, and you can run stepper motors and all kinds of stuff with it. So these mod makers can take this system and use it to make toppers that actually do something. We're talking about fishtails. It's got a video mode in it where boats are running back and forth. We can physically make a topper that has motors in it, stepper motors, and little plastic boats that run back and forth. So you can play that topper kind of like they do Cactus Canyon's topper. So instead of a $500 or $1,000 piece of plastic or whatever that people are buying today, We can put interactive functions and mods to these games. And not everybody's going to want them, but that's kind of the game. And it's in development now. The system we have on Fishtails out on the floor works. If you stop by and look at it, you can see what it does. We're going to finish getting that fleshed out. That and Adam's Family will be available March 1st. We'll be at the Texas Pinball Festival with a bigger booth to show that. but right now we're here to see what people think. The feedback so far in the show, and it's still early, is operators seem really interested in the advertising part of it. They don't even care if it interacts with the game. They just want to be able to put ads on their apron.
    26:06
    And people like to show pictures and stuff at home and stuff like that. So right now I'd like to hear your feedback. I think Paul and Max want to hear feedback on leaderboard systems. And we're talking about how that might interact with this and how we could put stuff out there that is easy to install for you guys. This kit that I'm building, I give you a new apron. So basically you take the old apron off, you put the new apron on, you run the wiring underneath the play field, which is fairly simple. And there's a module that sits on the floor of the game and ties into the 120-volt system, the service plug right now. But they're easy to install. and so it should be easy to do if you want to take it out put in a different game other than the apron possibly being different looking different that's that's the gist of it so i want to start off with questions about the em implementation that's these guys let's do it sure uh there are some games with bulb scoring where one stepper unit does two digits did you account for that? Did you try one of those games? Yeah, so that's part of the caveat. We support most EMs. We're doing right now at least all EMs that have score reels. Okay. So I think those things may be possible in the future. We can certainly, you know, those steppers are driven by a solenoid. We're sensing the solenoid. I think we can definitely do that. It's a matter of software and a little reconfiguration, but not today. Yeah, well, all you'd have to do, since it's always the two highest order digits, you just have to not set an upper limit. Let it go past 9 to 88, and then you're ready. Yeah, it's a matter of software. Yeah, but that was just the warm-up question. So in an EM, it seems you could tie those sensors onto any relay, So you could sense that some condition is on, which is basically a mode. Something is lit for higher value.
    28:16
    Do you have plans? I guess if you could publish how the mapping works that you referred to a minute ago. Yeah. Just to say this being on means something and sense that it's on continuously as opposed to just momentarily. Yeah, absolutely. Kind of picking up other information from the game to kind of make it more interactive. We're super interested in. So what we've got demoing today is, of course, the score reels. And then I think Max mentioned the game over lamp so we can at least tell when a game starts and ends and wrap up the scores appropriately. But we have a few extra inputs already on the board to tie to other lamps or other coils with exactly that in mind. Like are there some key things that we want to pick that would be really interesting? Yeah, or some of the EM games have the reels in the play field for like a bonus. Yeah. And something has it and stuff like that. Right, or it could be a stepper under the play field that's moving the light around. Yeah, exactly. So there's certainly options to integrate that. We've got the basics of the software working, and that's something we'd love to add in as the product matures more. Yeah, that's good feedback. The one thing I'd like to tell you about EM games, though, that we have learned is they're liars. They are liars. Oh, my gosh. I hit that spinner, you know? Like I have bow and arrow at home, and I hit the spinner really hard. The first 20 flips don't even get counted. You know, when we hooked up instruments, so, you know, I always kind of suspected that, but when we hooked up, like, measurement instruments to things, we could see it. You know, like, hey, this game's cheating us. But, which is, of course, part of the game.
    30:10
    But it was really kind of fun to explore all that and really see it in, you know, what we suspected in real time. And really been kind of the challenge in making our hardware match what the game is doing.
    30:26
    You know, if in some cases when we're developing, our score wouldn't match what's on the EM score. Well, ours is really right, I have to say. It reflected what you really hit. Yeah. But we've worked on making things match and understanding when the EM's not scoring and trying to track it better over time. But are you moving in the direction of sensing switch closures, or are you just going to do this through coils and lights? So far, coils and lights. And part of that is not modifying the game. We're really trying to keep the switch closures okay, but it's hard to get clips into them.
    31:06
    And when we get out the soldering iron, I feel like we lose a lot of potential users, potential customers. I don't know if that's the case. You guys tell us. I think the other thing that's interesting about doing switch closures over sensing the magnetic field is all these different games are all handcrafted effectively. They're all a little bit different. Some of them have different voltages. And that's what was really valuable about going to past times is we could measure all of these different things about EM machines. And the one thing that we found to be very consistent was the magnetic fields because at the end of the day, to move a little chunk of steel to pull your reel, you need about the same magnetic field on every machine roughly. And it turns out that's consistent enough. You can make one sensor that works for pretty much every coil, at least as far as we found. There's probably one out there, but yeah. It's a bit of a challenge to craft the right kind of sensor to be adjustable for very old games that actually have really much stronger. The coils are more leaky and they have stronger fields. In the newer games, you notice the score reel coils are actually smaller. They're more efficient and they leak less of the magnetic field that we sense. But we narrowed in on a design where we could really cover that breadth in one design, which is important to keeping the cost reasonable. Yeah. Other questions? I'll keep asking you about EMs if you don't have any questions.
    32:37
    Got a question, and this goes for people that have their own leaderboards. And you did say your software is open. And I'm wondering how can we get signals from your hardware over to our leaderboards? Yeah. Right now, how we're doing it, I mean, I don't know if everyone does this, we use MQTT. That protocol, I don't know what you guys do. Yeah, so I don't know how technical we want to get here. I'd happy to take more of this question offline if you want to go in more depth. But at a high level, yeah, you could. Our software is on GitHub. You can download it, play with it. You could flash your own board if you'd like.
    33:20
    There are 99% sure there's MQTT libraries for MicroPython, which is what's running the web server side of our board. So yeah, you could integrate with that. We've had someone in Texas asked if we could integrate with Home Assistant, which is like, I don't. Oh, OK, sure. Oh, really? Which I thought he wanted, you know, high score, make the lights in my house go crazy. I don't know. Cool.
    33:44
    But there's no reason you couldn't do it. Right. It certainly possible You know you looking at the entire development team So you know we we have to pick and choose what features we develop So certainly it possible It something we looked at and we may do in the future. It just hasn't happened yet. Yeah. I would just add that all the data is there in human readable JSON. So taking the JSON and translating it to MQTT is probably pretty straightforward we haven't done it but the the really the only limitation is you know if if you could do anything you want as long as you can write micropython or ask chat gpt to write micropython for you and um and you have a board and want to you know get messy with it you know try it try a couple things and and we'd love if someone has a feature that they write and would like to contribute it that would be awesome so we're in fact we have had one uh like outside of the user fix a problem and contribute to the code repo. It was great. What does your system do now? What do you have now?
    34:50
    It primarily interfaces with a tournament software, but we want to make sure that whatever high score gets put into a game, it immediately goes to the leaderboard. and right now how we're doing it is that we're just pulling up a like an ipad and then typing in the number and then sending it to the leaderboard i would much rather have it be automatic sure yeah sure and you know honestly now that i think about it um it's been a while since i messed with home assistant but i suspect there's a way to have home assistant um call our web front Because there is an API. It's not super well documented, but if you need information, we'd be happy to provide it for you. But there are web routes that you could call from Home Assistant to get what are the top 20 scores, and that exists today. Just like I said, it's not super well documented. That's maybe one thing we could improve.
    35:50
    But a lot of that data is available over the local network today with very little effort. I mean, documentation may not be great but also you call the API and it comes back in human readable it's fairly straightforward it's not fancy player one and score and ball and play I would love to help you figure out how to do that if you're interested because that sounds cool to me what game titles are you playing?
    36:20
    our oldest game is Zachariah Time Machine and then all the newer ones I guess we go up in time would be Twilight Zone, Wizard of Oz, Metallica Remastered, and then some newer games from here too.
    36:39
    That's pretty wide. Everything except EM. Right. There's a dichotomy in these systems too that we're going to have to address at some point. everything I'm doing and everything I'm using their their tools for is Motorola 6809 based or earlier and that runs up all the way through the end of WPC, Data East, SAM and White Star. SAM runs on a more advanced processor but it's still it's still a processor based system. If you get into basically spike systems, spike one, spike two and now spike three and I don't know about the other systems we can make this work with a fast system and some of these new games are running on faster or modified fast hardware so those could be tied into my apron cards they could be tied into their leaderboards but the spike stuff the architecture of that system is very different and i'm not the expert to talk about it these guys know more than i do but to get into any any of the stern games that are newer would require stern's participation so anybody out here that knows has buddies at the top end of stern we could use your help i think just put in a word for us come on yeah at the texas show i had a little demonstrator thing that was pretty basic and i drug um seth davis and george gomez over to look at it to get their opinion on you know they're They're pretty well entrenched pinball guys. And they looked at it and they said, well, this is kind of cool. And Gomez says, what's this thing cost? And I said, well, just the parts on the apron are going to be $300 to $400. And they don't need a vector board to get stuff out of their system. They don't need a Raspberry Pi to interpret it. All they need is screens because they can build a node board that would tie into their system. And Gomez says, he says, well, the guy's been around forever. he says if I'm going to spend $300 on play field or on a pinball stuff I want to put it on the play field he says but these are interesting we'll see where you go with it just don't get us in trouble and he's basically talking about copyright and trademark stuff and that's a whole nother conversation for me and I've managed I think I've managed I talked to an attorney I figured out how to avoid all that but but so Stern is interested or they at least know it exists or the idea exists and they're smart they're going to sit back and see if if we start selling some of this stuff then they might look at putting it in because you mentioned two stern games that you own we can't really touch those until stern wants to play they've over the years with with them and everything else in technology they've learned how to protect their stuff so everything earlier than that this thing's in my way everything earlier than that we can do stuff with last call for questions I talked to you a little bit earlier on the leaderboards but I didn't really put together so that screen that you have connects to a webpage yeah that's right our booth currently has a demo where we have some mini PCs set up just to have something to run a browser But ostensibly any device you would like that's on your local network with a browser can pull up the interface that we showed in the presentation.
    40:08
    So you can use your phone, a tablet, whatever, and it will show you all the same information, maybe a little bit smaller. So the leaderboard like you're showing is just a web page? Yeah, it's just a web page. It's as simple as that. And just to be really clear, the web host is fully on the board we sell. You don't have to install anything on your PC or your phone, or there's no app or anything. It's all on the vector board itself. So that's important because there's no cloud hosting costs on our end, So we don't need to charge you a subscription or charge you a huge profit margin so that we can run that computer long term.
    40:54
    Yeah, so it means your internet could go out and the leaderboard will keep going. It will keep working as long as the Wi-Fi is on. So does your board go to a Wi-Fi signal? Yeah, it connects to any Wi-Fi signal. Your internet service provider could go out and it will keep working just fine.
    41:15
    yeah i second i second the question earlier about anything that'll help a tournament director uh do his job easier more accurate uh the other thing i was interested in is you mentioned achievements earlier uh i operate an arcade and i've always thought about vanity uh things for the player uh you know f14 tomcat if you win a free game it's got a nice light show that goes to the dead But I'd like something like that that I could put on any game that I feature on a given day, a Terminator 2 or a Joker's or a Diner or something like that where I'm calling attention to a winner in the arcade or something that can combine the cards. A lot of times people don't know they've won a free game because my place is Coin-Op. and so something like that that comes on the screen and game over and says congratulations you've won a free game press start play again those kind of things are nice and that could even be off an em thing too yeah right yeah totally i think we've talked about there's an opportunity for you know integrating with all sorts of toppers or mods or whatever you want because yeah we have that information so i think we'd be interested if anyone is interested in building something like that, great. If no one else wants to, maybe one day we'll do it ourselves.
    42:46
    I like the idea of featuring a game, saying, hey, Wednesday's top gun night or whatever, and if you get the lights, you get something, a free hamburger or whatever, I don't know. But if you can enable one each day and kind of draw people's attention around, that sounds pretty interesting. and there's opportunity to like if there's a specific shot or mode or something there's a lot of those we could suss out and and pull out that data if we needed to not all of its maps because we just haven't needed to map it yet but um we have access to yeah we'll get there yeah we have the whole game state so pretty much anything that you want we could probably get it that's i met these guys just this last march and they're doing what i'd always tried to do and in their vector board gives you the ability to interact with the existing system so the stuff you're talking about i'm from vegas and i kind of chuckle because they do that every time somebody wins a jackpot now and it's it's it's doable with the with the products that these guys are building and that's what's enabled the apron card system that i'm building to to exist because you can interact with that old game and i tried to various different methods to get to that point and I don't know how many of you know about Rick up at Planetary Pinball. He doesn't own the code, but he's in charge of the code. And it's all written in assembly language. And he wouldn't even let me look at it. He says it's a nightmare. He's an old programmer too of some sort. And he said, you can't mess with this stuff. You might burn the game down.
    44:25
    And, you know, I kind of argued with him a lot, but he was in charge and I wasn't. So, but what these guys have done with this system is they can access data from the CPU and the RAM and the ROM and all this stuff and use it without touching the existing code or making the game behave any differently. And we're just starting to get into how that can be used and what it will work for. But what you're suggesting is certainly doable.
    44:53
    Awesome. Thanks for the questions. Yeah. All right. So thanks for coming up and giving us a counterpoint to some of the other presentations about leaderboards and such.