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2022 Homebrew

Pintastic New England·video·1h 4m·analyzed·Oct 12, 2022
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.028

TL;DR

Homebrew pinball panel shares ramp design, prototyping, and low-cost tool strategies.

Summary

At Pintastic New England 2022, homebrew pinball developers Ryan McQuaid and Lynn discussed their process for building custom pinball machines, covering technical details like ramp design, materials, tools, and clearcoat finishing. They emphasized that homebrew development doesn't require expensive equipment—makerspaces, 3D printers, and basic tools suffice—and encouraged community collaboration. The panel showcased prototyping philosophy: use cheap materials first, iterate, then refine.

Key Claims

  • Ryan McQuaid created Sonic the Hedgehog Pinball and intentionally did not include video modes to keep players engaged with pinball rather than breaking to play video games

    high confidence · Ryan McQuaid speaking directly about his game design philosophy during panel

  • Lynn has built 11 homebrew pinball machines and currently possesses five Whitewood machines

    high confidence · Lynn discussing his prolific homebrew output during self-introduction

  • Lynn previously worked as a lead developer on the motion-control Tony Hawk game for Nintendo DS

    high confidence · Lynn disclosing his video game background when asked about prior work

  • A 1/16-inch difference in ramp width significantly affects ramp performance, causing ball rattling and power loss

    high confidence · Lynn demonstrating two ramp prototypes and explaining dimensional tolerance impact

  • Make It Labs in Nashua, New Hampshire charges $40/month for membership and includes CNC router, wood shop, welding equipment

    high confidence · Lynn directly promoting local makerspace as founder

  • Harbor Freight spot welders cost approximately $80–$120 and can be used to weld stainless steel wire forms for pinball machines

    high confidence · Lynn describing his hands-on spot welding process and equipment sourcing

  • Ryan prototyped Sonic the Hedgehog's loop-de-loop ramp using only a single strip of one-inch steel and painter's tape

    high confidence · Ryan describing his prototype ramp construction and acknowledging the danger involved

  • Playfield dimpling from ball impacts over thousands of plays is normal and unavoidable wear, not a manufacturing defect

    high confidence · Panel consensus discussion about playfield dimpling expectations across manufacturer and homebrew machines

Notable Quotes

  • “I very intentionally did not put any video modes in my video game themed pinball machine because if you want a video mode for Sonic the Hedgehog, go play the game.”

    Ryan McQuaid@ 5:02 — Reveals design philosophy prioritizing pure pinball experience over multimedia hybrid; positions against trend of LCD integration

  • “Five flipping Whitewoods. Five flipping Whitewoods, really? I can't even get one. It's more than American Pinball.”

    Moderator (Jillian Hafner)@ 2:46 — Humorous jab at American Pinball's production capacity; indicates Whitewood kit availability as competitive advantage for homebrew

  • “Try, fail, improve. Repeat.”

    Lynn@ 10:44 — Encapsulates homebrew development methodology; emphasizes iterative prototyping over perfection

  • “You don't have to do it alone. You don't have to know everything. If this scares you, that's okay. Get someone else to help you.”

    Lynn@ 19:03 — Core message: democratizes homebrew access by promoting community-based skill-sharing and tool access

  • “I built my game to get destroyed. If you're stupid enough to put too strong of coils on your flippers, you're going to do even more damage. My game is here to be enjoyed by everyone.”

    Ryan McQuaid@ 29:54 — Reflects homebrew vs. commercial tension: homebrew makers prioritize playability and repairability over preservation; contrasts with collector mindset

  • “I made it from nothing, so if it fell off a truck, I could make it again. Nothing you can do to that game I can't fix.”

    Ryan McQuaid — Demonstrates confidence and self-sufficiency; emphasizes maker independence and reproducibility

Entities

Ryan McQuaidpersonLynnpersonJillian HafnerpersonMarkpersonMark SeidenpersonSonic the Hedgehog PinballgameFrozengameHaunted Cruisegame

Signals

  • ?

    event_signal: Pintastic New England 2022 positioned as premier homebrew showcase venue; previous year noted for exceptionally high concentration of homebrew machines vs. industry conventions

    high · Moderator notes 'our last show here, I think we had more homebrew pinball machines than any convention in there or similar interjection probably five years'

  • ?

    community_signal: Panel actively promotes makerspace membership and community skill-sharing to lower barriers to homebrew entry; emphasizes peer mentorship model

    high · Extensive discussion of Make It Labs, Artisans Asylum, and other makerspaces; direct encouragement for programmers and tool-holders to help others; call-out to Mark as mentor figure

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Homebrew development emphasizes accessibility and community-driven innovation vs. commercial manufacturers' resource-intensive approach

    medium · Repeated messaging about low-cost materials, makerspace alternatives, and DIY prototyping as viable path to game creation

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Homebrew designers prioritize playability and repairability over preservation; machines built to be played and damaged without concern for collector value

    high · Ryan: 'My game is here to be enjoyed by everyone...shake it, destroy it, tilt it. Nothing you can do to that game I can't fix.'

  • $

    market_signal: Whitewood pinball kit represents key enabling technology for homebrew proliferation; Lynn's possession of five kits indicates product availability and adoption

    medium · Humorous exchange about Lynn owning more Whitewoods than American Pinball seems to have produced

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.193

0:00
Thank you very much. And time for the home brew developers or former home now factory brew developers to tell their stories of building games with Jillian Hafner as moderator. Take it away, Jillian. Well, hello everybody. So welcome back to another exciting episode of Homebrew Pinball here at Pintastic. As I like to say, the home of homebrew. Because our last show here, I think we had more homebrew pinball machines than any convention in probably five years. and this year as you know I'll introduce the wonderful panelists well I'll introduce you Lynn has too many names for me to remember all of them so he needs to introduce himself so go ahead introduce yourself just said you would fine this is Brian McSquid but you can call him Brian because he loves that not Randy McQuaid that was a great tag The developer of a creator, visionary, and perfectionist of homebrew, Ryan created Sonic Spinball. Yes, I did. Thank you.
2:05
That's all you got? That's all I got. I haven't done anything else ever. Now, because Ryan did such a great job on his homebrew, that if you haven't seen it, it's probably the most professional-looking homebrew pinball machine you're ever going to see. um lynn here has been doing uh homebrew pinball for a while he had to outdo ryan and brought three machines this year one of which works pretty well the other ones quantity this man has it he's done what nine games no 11 no no am i getting warmer or colder colder a little less Really? I have five flipping Whitewoods right now. Five flipping Whitewoods.
2:46
Five flipping Whitewoods, really? I can't even get one. It's more than American Pinball. He loves me. It was seven, but I had to take some parts for some other ones.
@ 30:13

  • “The barrier isn't nearly as big as everyone thinks it is. And you don't even need code. Just any two flippers that will work whenever you hit a button is enough to have fun.”

    Ryan McQuaid@ 26:21 — Lowers entry barriers; encourages experimentation over perfectionism

    • Tales from the Crypt
    game
    Metroidgame
    Make It Labsorganization
    Tectopiaorganization
    Artisans Asylumorganization
    Portsmouth Makerspaceorganization
    Lowell Makerspaceorganization
    American Pinballcompany
    Multimorphic P3product
    Pintastic New Englandevent
    Spooky Pinballcompany
    Jon Heyperson
  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Extreme dimensional precision critical to pinball function; 1/16-inch tolerances directly impact playfield behavior and ball physics

    high · Lynn's detailed comparison of two ramp prototypes differing by 1/16-inch in width causing significant performance degradation

  • ?

    product_concern: All pinball machines (commercial and homebrew) experience playfield dimpling from ball impacts; presented as universal unavoidable wear rather than defect

    high · Panel consensus that dimpling is normal after 2000 plays; comparison to getting bruises from 2000 metal ball bearings thrown at a person

  • ?

    technology_signal: Lynn developing AR/VR pinball platform as evolution beyond traditional physical machines; represents video game industry perspective entering homebrew

    high · Lynn mentions AR platform in other room; describes self as video game developer bringing interactive/AR mechanics expertise into pinball

    • 3:04
    Five's a lot. Come on. Yeah. You can't stop inspiration. That's right. That's right. But you're really specializing more in your VR platform now. Yeah, the AR platform. AR platform, right. I'm a video game developer by trade for 16 years, developing games, PlayStation, mobile, all that stuff. So, you know, I want to get video screens and interesting mechanics into it, and augmented reality is really the cool thing to do these days with everything. And there was a platform that tried to do some type of augmented stuff way back in the 2000s, so I've taken that idea and I've enhanced it with my own stuff at this point with the augmented reality pinball system. And that's what is in the other room. Any video games you worked on that our guests might have heard of? I worked on a DS Tony Hawk game I actually have played that the motion one? yep yeah I was the lead developer on the motion one that was the first motion game for the Nintendo DS before it was incorporated the first one used in that manner I think Kirby's Tilt and Tumble and a couple other things did that first but it was the first one that really did to that extent I'm trying to get Derek to turn up your two mics you just shouldn't have to you should just be able to turn it up is this better? well it was fine you don't have to hold it you just had to turn it up but that's okay should I do ASMR? you're fantastic we do sound checks live yeah I will not be backstage directing from the front of the house I will not be backstage directing from the front of the house yes I will so yeah you and I have that in common we both worked in video games for a while I still work in video games and now you technically are a video game developer I suppose am I? You have a video mode in your pinball machine, thus making you a video game developer. No, I don't. You do. I do not.
    4:59
    Thank you. I very intentionally did not put any video modes in my video game themed pinball machine because if you want a video mode for Sonic the Hedgehog, go play the game.
    5:11
    He created a game that has a video of a hedgehog going across the more you do things on the game. He created a video mode. I suppose you're right. It's not a video mode. All right. Whatever. slot machine you're still playing pinball instead of taking a break from playing pinball to play a video game well the only video mode that i actually hate in the pinball machine is a pinball video mode in a pinball machine awkward mark's up there where is he right there i didn't see him oh sorry have you played the toy story video mode it's actually pretty fun i i was i was a skeptic but i enjoyed it when i played it i'm sorry getting that extra ball in theater of magic's video mode It's fantastic. Do you know the secret for Theater of Magic? Yeah. If you hold the left flipper when you hit start, your first mystery award will always be virtual pinball, but it won't be worth an extra ball. Nope. I don't know a lot of trivia, but now that I work for him, I have to spout out any trivia that does come to mind, or I'll get in trouble.
    6:13
    I'm sorry. I think we need to rename this to the SAS panel. We all enabled him, though, and I'm very sorry. We're the SaaS company.
    6:22
    A SaaS company? Yeah. Software as a service? Working on that. All the SaaS needs in the industry is software as a service, the last time I checked.
    6:31
    All right. So back to Homebrew. Those of you who were here last year, you heard all about the creative process and all of that. We got feedback that said that people wanted to hear more about the nuts and bolts. That's hard to do in a session like this. It's hard to really give you guys a good vision of how someone built a pinball machine that's already built, how they did it from scratch, because very few people, except two, that happen to both be in this room, they don't take pictures and stream pinball while they're building them, because that would be a stupid thing to do in the pinball industry, of course, because someone could snipe your IP or snipe your ideas. But we have two people in the room that did exactly that.
    7:14
    And so you can go watch that. That's there. We have that history already. The things that people wanted to hear, and you guys get to provide feedback this year, you talk to Dave, not to me, because I don't listen to you. He has to listen.
    7:28
    Partly because I have a bad memory, and anything you say goes in one ear and out the other. You guys want to see more of how you do these ramps, how we do these things. So Lynn has a bunch of pictures and things through his process, as well as some ramps and things. Yeah, I brought a couple of ramp bucks that I made for the games that are out there right now. different versions of it with various levels of completeness and goodness, I guess. And I have a bunch of pictures over the course of the 10, 11 years I've been doing this that I can show up on the screen. And if they deem worthy, I can load up SolidWorks and show you one of the games as well.
    8:06
    So we can actually get into some nuts and bolts here, but we have a community of people sitting in front of us. Is that what you guys want to see? You're the people sitting in the room.
    8:14
    What do you guys want to talk about? They see me and do it. Yeah, I see three thumbs up and everybody else silence. Everyone else is here for the Q&A.
    8:23
    We're doing Q&A? Yes. I'm trying not to make you talk as little as possible. What the heck am I here for if not to talk?
    8:30
    She said talk as little as possible, so you need to talk as much as possible. Yeah. Go. Go ahead. All right. What's the... Lynn, take it away.
    8:43
    All right. What do I do? Why don't we talk about the rails? Okay, let's do that. I'll bring up the ramp. Pass them out. Pass them out to the class. We got some hands-on stuff for you guys today. Ramp box. Yeah. You get to see part of the actual process. All right. They are heavy, though, so don't hit each other with them. I don't really want to hand them around. I'll leave them up in the net for people to come check afterwards because it takes a while to make these sometimes. But this buck right here, and for those of you who don't know what a buck is, it's a mold of some type used for vacuum forming. This buck right here is the buck that I created for Frozen right out in the game room right now. So how does the vacuum forming process work with this right here? Show people who don't know what's going on. Now, as you can all see, this is not something a ball can go into. This is what's known as a reverse buck. You have normal bucks where you would have cavities, like what a ramp actually would be, and then you have bucks that are the reverse version of it, that when you form onto it from the top down, when you take it off, it becomes a ramp.
    9:45
    All right? And so with this, I took my CAD drawing, and this one is actually kind of interesting because Frozen, it does have an entry that kind of goes down a little bit, but this side is not how high it is at the end. It's actually pulled down a little bit in the game, and I had to offset the length of this because of that. So this is, I believe, a quarter of an inch longer this way than it normally would be. Like if you look at the CAD file, it doesn't line up. But when I pull it down and mount it, it does line up. So another one of the thousands of little details that if you forget about it, the game doesn't fit together. Exactly. And a couple of the thousands of little details. These are the two ramp bucks that I made for one of the ramps in Haunted Cruise.
    10:28
    It's the same ramp. This is the first one I made, which didn't work very well. This is the second one I made, which I ended up modifying three additional times, which is what all these other little pieces are that I have here, with little minor cuts and things to make a ramp. Try, fail, improve. All right. Repeat. So we've got plywood here. We've got a little bit of hardwood here. No hardwood. It's all plywood. That's fine. Yeah, it's all plywood. Or it's whatever crap I had around in the garage at the time. All right, so junk wood. Yeah, junk. That's really all you need. You know where my junk wood pile is. I generally get three different sizes of wood. I have quarter-inch wood, half-inch wood, and three-quarter-inch wood, depending on the depths and things for the ramps.
    11:16
    And so this one took me about two weeks to make because I smoothed this whole thing really, really nice, and it didn't work very well. So how durable is this?
    11:26
    That's a trap. Well, that's what I wanted to do with it after you said it was durable. Oh, I wasn't supposed to bang on the table.
    11:35
    One job. And I failed. Yeah. Yeah, so it's pretty durable. This is not the correct material people usually use for ramps. They usually use, I believe, a 3-16th inch or something like that. Well, the correct material, as you stated earlier, is whatever you have lying around. Well, no, for ramps. I actually had to buy this plastic. Ooh, fancy. Yeah, this is PETG. However, this is only 0.09 inches thick, so it's really thin. So when you have really deep ramps, like the Tail of the Dragon ramp that I have in there, it had a very deep pull, so there's some parts of it that are very, very flimsy on the edges, which if I used the proper material, it wouldn't be as flimsy and be a little stronger. But for the purpose of prototyping, it works perfectly fine, and it saves like $100 in material. MDF? Yeah, that's MDF. So, the first ramps I made were plywood and it takes an awful lot of sanding to make it smooth or somewhat smooth. And I saw people online in YouTube say, oh, use MDF, it's already kind of smooth. So that's what I did with most of the other bucks that I'm doing now. And it makes things nice and smooth but MDF crumbles a lot so you need to be careful on the edges where pieces meet and such. But yeah, and MDF has a much nicer finish generally speaking. CNC routered? Yes, CNC. Okay, so who has a CNC router at their house? Show of hands. You do not. Okay, so we got you and one other. Hey, are you doing a homebrew yet? Not close. A V-pin. A what? A V-pin. Okay.
    13:08
    We'll not let you talk about that at all, okay? I have a V-pin too. Hey, I'll say this. A V-pin is the one pin to have if you can only have one. But actually, I'm starting to change that because the P3 would be the one pin I'd want if I only could have one. Male Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Male Speaker 2 I have a question. Male Speaker 1 I moved up here. It would be the official question of position here. So you say some of the ramps didn't work out. So can you talk a little bit about how far you can get with CAD versus what you had to just sort of try and feel your way through? And does that mean you'll do better CAD next time and have fewer trials? So, it goes 100% of the way with CAD. I don't make these things without making them in CAD first, even if the CAD ends up being slightly wrong. So with these two ramps, as I explained, they're ever so slightly different, right? This one, hold this please. This one has a long neck like this part here of one and a quarter inches wide. This one is 1 16th inch wider than that and it makes all the difference. Just 1 16th. This one, when the ball kind of came up, it would rattle so much it would lose all its power and fall right down. Also the curvature of this ramp, this kind of S curvature. Thank you. Thank you, Van and Ron. You're welcome. Yeah. This curvature is actually a little too much and the ball, as you might think it'll make the ball kind of go up and over really nicely. This actually kills a lot of the speed as well. I love that you said an eighth of an inch or was it a sixteenth? It was a sixteenth of an inch. A sixteenth of an inch. Now, when you look at a play field and you think of one sixteenth of an inch on this shot and one sixteenth of an inch on another shot, and you take another sixteenth of an inch off another shot, and if you did that, Houdini would have been a great game because it would have won less shot. No one's going to laugh harder than us about that. I don't want to plug American too much during this seminar. Yes, you do. All right, maybe I do. Depends what your next game is. What's your next game? Good.
    15:21
    That would be great. The thing I wanted to just loop back at, if you do have questions, go over there to that mic and wait to be recognized next time. Dave. I want to talk about access to equipment. Who here has a welder in their house? Put your goddamn hand down. Okay, you, same guy. All right, you're in trouble.
    15:44
    Who here knows how to compute a program? And most of you know how to use a screwdriver and some general tools. So most of you have the ability to build your own homebrew machine. But for those of you who do not have this is not sponsored by any makerspace whatsoever if you do not have this equipment you need to find a local makerspace Who lives in the southern New Hampshire area Anyone Okay you guys Make It Labs in Nashua I not biased I was the founder Not biased at all $40 a month. You can get a membership there and we have a 5x10 CNC router, a complete wood shop, a welding shop, an auto shop, you name it, it's got it. 40 bucks a month. All right. Pack in, pack out. Worcester. What's the name of the Makerspace in Worcester that you were at?
    16:30
    Tectocopia. If you're up even in northern New Hampshire, you've got Port City up in... Not Port... Portsmouth. Thank you.
    16:44
    You've got Lowell. You've got, of course, Artisans Asylum in Boston. All of these places have classes for their stuff and everything and are a community of people that are autistic geeks. Is that what I want to say?
    17:03
    What? Yeah. So it's a great community to get tapped into, and you'll find people that will often want to pick up your project and help you with it. I suggest carry a hammer if you don't want them to. They'll get the hint really quick. But do not be limited by your access to tools and technology because it's out there. Absolutely. And also, there are people in this pinball community that if you're really nice to will probably help you along the way. Yep. I owe one forward. Mark helped me out. I wouldn't have made my game without him.
    17:38
    So if you don't have – oh, yeah. By the way, Mark is in the audience this year. Stand up, Mark. Come on. Go ahead. We know how much you hate this, so I love doing it too. He does hate being called out.
    17:50
    But he is now a full-blown professional. and I will hopefully be up there in the audience with him next year and one of you will be down here instead of me.
    17:59
    So if it takes many... I'm not moderating anything ever. You don't want me doing that. Ask him. Yeah, absolutely. Find other people that will help you get access to the tools you need or skills you need. If you don't have the skills, if you're not a programmer, I only saw like 10 hands when you said, can you computer program? The ones who did raise their hands, go talk to them. they can help program your game some of them don't know how to use a CNC machine but they would love to program a game and just team up, find people get access to the tools it is out there, you don't have to buy all these big fancy robots you don't, but you can that's fine you just need to find a mark who can bring you there and then spend 12 hours trying to cut a playfield on a broken CNC machine and then go back the next day without you that is a true story Make it lab CNC machines, not broken. It's not anymore, but it was the day we went down. No, no, no. The MyMaker's machine is not broken. It's brand new. You don't... It's brand new. So, yeah, that's the point. You don't have to do it alone. You don't have to need to know everything. You don't... If this scares you, that's okay. Get someone else to help you. Yep. Or learn. This is something that looks really complicated, but you can try and fail and try and fail, and then your third time probably will work, or at least get you started. these were not my first I've made a bunch in the past and then I put paper mache over it to see if the things would work great advice you don't need a vacuum forming or CNC or anything you can take just scrap pieces of 2x4 and what not if you just need a straight ramp or a curved ramp and paper mache around it and you'll get something that's good enough or if you have a 3D printer you can 3D print your ramps you don't even have to do vacuum forming I was going to do a raise of hands on 3D printer How many people here have access to a 3D printer?
    19:49
    Or a person who has access to a 3D printer that you can buy a beer for? There you go. Cider. There you go.
    20:01
    I'll print you something for a Down East. Absolutely. The pineapple one. Oh, yeah, the pineapple one's good. I had it at Chili's the other night.
    20:12
    So, absolutely. So what else? We got nuts and bolts, ramps. Any questions? How about wire forms? All right. Wire forms are actually, I used two hand pliers to make my wire forms.
    20:29
    I bent them around a dowel to make the entrance nice and round, but there was nothing fancy involved there. I don't have a wire bending machine. I don't have access to a wire bending machine, although I really want to. Buy me one. but I just used a couple pairs of pliers and I drew out what I wanted on a piece of cardboard I would bend it by hand and match it up to the cardboard nope, need to bend it a little more and perfect and eventually I was able to put all those together I bought a spot welder, learned to use it from YouTube University it took me an afternoon of ruining some stainless steel because someone told me to get stainless steel and that was not the right answer, but I did it anyway. No. So I got good enough that I could spot weld stainless steel, throw it against the wall and it wouldn't break. That's what I was doing all day. I was welding, throwing it against the wall and trying to break it until I failed. And where did you buy that spot welder? Harbor Freight. I know that. I'm going to ask you. And how much did you pay for the shitty Harbor Freight? Like 80 bucks? 80 bucks. here's the thing this guy on YouTube who like built a spot welder out of like a microwave transformer that seems dangerous I approve he's making this tool and I'm sitting here watching it the whole time going wait Squid bought one of these for like less than $100 at Harbor Freight goes on sale all the time yeah don't really like $120 but still that's money you can just take two wires plug right into your wall and tap medical bills are also expensive have you met this country no no no No, no, no, because if something goes wrong, all he has to do is make sure he collapses like this, and he can restart his heart. It's fine.
    22:13
    Don't do that. American Pivotal does not endorse using car batteries as spot welds. We are professionals. Do not attempt this at home.
    22:22
    I got you, boss. Now, something interesting. Mark, your wireform ramps, I should be talking to a microphone. I'm sorry. Mark, your wireform ramps, if I remember correctly, you had a version that you actually just 3D printed plastic holders to do. And I thought it was fantastic at the time because the ball would go down and it would kind of like wave a little bit as they went down. I thought it was a great effect for Metroid. But, you know, you can get creative with some of this stuff. My wire form ramps on Haunted Cruise and Frozen doesn't have it anymore. On a couple of the other tables you guys don't know about, they're all 8-gauge copper grounding wire that I bent around and then I can easily braze and solder them together. And once you make... Ooh, good idea. And once you solder them all together, it's quite strong. I mean, you can't throw it against the wall necessarily, but it's still very strong for what a pinball needs to do. Now, last year, November, when we were here, Haunted Cruise had a cardboard ramp taped up with... Haunted Cruise had a lot of problems last time we were here. No, no, I'm not even saying this is a problem. I liked the cardboard ramp. Cardboard ramps work, which I decided not to bring this time. It had black gaff tape on it, if I remember correctly. It was black gaffer's tape. and and i was like it wasn't black afterscape so haunted cruises ramps were made out of um paper from uh michael's painters tape a couple pieces of metal in there for stability a spray paint some more metal some more painters tape more spray paints and probably more paper tape and it worked for like two days yeah well not but yeah but but the point is is you're trying to get something flipping it's a prototype it doesn't need to You can do whatever you need to to get it going. For us perfectionists out there, this is hard for us to go, well, this isn't done, and then want to show it to people because it opens you up for criticism. Well, why didn't you do this this way? Why didn't you do this this way? Because I'm not done. Why didn't you do it that way? Because I'm not done. And if you want to do it, go ahead. I actually streamed the first prototype ever of the Sonic Loop-de-Loop ramp, and it was made out of one strip of one-inch steel and exclusively painter's tape, like an entire roll of painter's tape. And it almost killed me. And it was hilarious.
    24:31
    But it worked. And so I'm like, okay, if I can make a working loop-de-loop ramp out of one piece of strip of steel and a bunch of tape, then I can do it easily using the right materials later on. So I knew I wasn't wasting my time. And it was actually really funny to listen to me scream when it went off and almost killed me. And it makes perfect sense when you think about it, right? Why would you want to make it out of metal? You're going to try to adjust this. You're going to try to move this. You're prototyping. Yeah, and any time you're trying to figure out and feel out and see if something's going to work or not, if you just run right to the finished product, you're going to waste a lot of time with either molds or clamps or cutting metal and your hand's not going to be happy with you.
    25:12
    I have a lot of cuts. Yeah, and my next tool is going to be a CNC plasma cutter. I'm looking for one this summer. My hand is not happy with me cutting all the rails. But, yeah, just use whatever material you have, paper, strips of metal, like the cheap whatever you get at Home Depot or Lowe's or whatever your preference is.
    25:31
    Even the supermarket, cut a piece of plastic Tupperware or something, and then that can be what you need. And just get it working, and then you can figure out, okay, these are the dimensions. This is how the holes are. This is what it needs to be, and you can make it a little more formal. I know a lot of us see a lot of old pinball machines like we're playing games that are 40 and 50 years old, and we see them. They're broken. They're beat up, and it makes us feel like pinball machines will be a lot more fragile than they are. But the truth is that only happens over decades and decades of abuse. If you went into the vendor hall and played one of their pinbox 3000s in there, I guarantee you one of those tiny little ramps they made out of paper could stand up to a real pinball for at least like a couple hours. It's surprising how little you actually need to get your idea in front of you and working.
    26:21
    The barrier isn't nearly as big as everyone thinks it is. And you don't even need code. Just any two flippers that will work whenever you hit a button is enough to have fun. You don't even need two flippers. If you have your hand, you can throw and see that things kind of work. And then you can figure out where it is. That's true.
    26:37
    Controlling hardware can be very, very expensive. It can be. It doesn't have to be anymore. It doesn't have to be anymore, but it can be. I think I started off with a P-Rock a long time ago, and that whole system was like $800 to just get the boards and things for that. And you can find things a lot cheaper now, but it's a big level of entry to get into some of these things. But you don't need it. If you just want to see, hey, will the ball go around here? Where will the targets make the ball bounce and things? And you don't even need targets for figuring out if targets are going to bounce. You can just put strips of little wrapped rubber things, and that will bounce roughly where you want to go. you can get the angles right. Then you can spend the $10, $15, $20, whatever it is for targets.
    27:20
    So this is a question I actually don't, I know your answer because I own a machine that you've restored. So I know how your process is. How do you clear coat your play fields? I put it on two horses outside in front of my garage and I spray. I wait a day, I spray. I wait a day, I sand. And then I do that, I don't know, maybe a dozen or two dozen times and I waste way too much money on it because I'm never satisfied.
    27:44
    How am I not surprised? Yeah, I do it like twice. Yeah, I do it more. I used to use DuPont clear coat for when I do restoration things, but you can't really find the stuff I used to use anymore because they changed all their branding and things. I know Chuck uses some clear coat that I want to start using, but that stuff is really expensive and it's not easily accessible, so run to the hardware store and get whatever they have. water-based, don't use oil-based, frozen-used oil-based by accident, and it screwed everything up. Waterslide decals and oil-based do not come together. When that happened, I was very disheartened, but I said, screw it, I don't have time to make another playfield right now. I use Spraymax 2K, which is automotive clear coat in a can. I usually use around four to five cans per playfield, but I'm not as much of a perfectionist as these two. I'll rather spend three hours with a buffer to make a mirror than get it perfect like they do. Yeah, I tend to wet sand after each couple coats or some such. And so this is something that, you know, in the pinball industry, all the manufacturers, everybody gets criticized about playfield dimpling. Not us. Thank you.
    28:53
    I could say something really cruel right now, but I'm going to refrain because I'm being recorded. At any rate, all the manufacturers have always had problems with playfield dimpling. But what do you expect? Oh yes they did Oh my god Come to my house and look at my At my Adams family It's dimpled Do you want to come up here? 91 just to be specific 81 80s technology Same thing The official question thing is right there My point was Let's say the machine has 2000 plays on it I don't know how anybody in here would feel But if someone started throwing metal ball bearings at you, 2,000 of them, I think we'd all have some dimples and bruises. So when you are the one buffing that play field, do you care if it happens? No. I mean, it's a ball bearing that's being shot around. Of course it's going to do damage. Yeah. I built my game to get destroyed. Yeah, and if you're stupid enough to put too strong of coils on your flippers, you're going to do even more damage. I know that sounds weird, but my game is here to be enjoyed by everyone. Everyone's like, oh, but that's your baby. I'm like, yeah, but shake it, destroy it, tilt it. We made these games once. We can make them again. Exactly. I made it from nothing, so if it fell off a truck, I could make it again. Nothing you can do to that game I can't fix. Nothing. So hopefully this gentleman up here who's going to ask a question has something to say about playfield dimpling so that we can shoot 6,000 ball bearings at you and see how you do it. We could do any more questions if you guys want to. John Graywich from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Welcome. I've been there. All the years I've been doing new play fields, and I keep telling people that want to get into it, it's like you can go to Home Depot or somewhere else for water-based ferritane clear coat. I've used it for like 10 years. It doesn't matter what automotive clear coat you want to use on top of it. There's no problems whatsoever. I've never had problems like with Merco or anyone else where there's cooling with play fields with whatever I do. Like Varathane, the seal the wood is like the best thing. Like two coats of Varathane, I filter it, spray it, never had a problem. The Clearcoat guys, whatever brand automotive they've used, never had a problem with cooling or ink, the laminating off the play fields or anything. This is going to turn into a whole other seminar if we don't reel in the clear coat. Don't worry about it. So just the gist is, like, I keep going on telling people it's not the UV ink that's the problem. It's the process, whoever's doing it. So if you've got good wood, good clear coat, there's absolutely no process, like, no problems to it. Like, getting back to, like, even Clay in the days, he goes, he got to sand between each layer of clear coat. Never had to sand any time using water clear verithane It like you could apply it next day two weeks a month from now No problems whatsoever. So I can't understand how they got serious problems. It's like moisture in the plywood that's giving them problems. Well, there's a bunch of seminars tomorrow that you can ask that question at and find out what they have to say. If all of this conversation is scaring you into not wanting to do it, I don't know how to clear coat. and even the professionals can't seem to get it right. You don't have to clear coat your game. It's a homebrew. You can do whatever you want. When you're developing your game, don't clear coat the play field. You're going to be drilling holes in the damn thing every two seconds. You don't even have to open a can of this stuff. You just get a piece of wood and drill into it and you have a game. I've got some pictures in here I can show eventually of the very first version of Haunted Cruise from 10 years ago with the shittiest plywood I could find and certainly not clear coated. Last year we talked about quality of plywood and all of that. Good luck finding plywood in box stores right now. I almost didn't have three games because I couldn't find plywood. I just call Mark anytime I need wood. It probably won't work anymore, but it's worked up until now.
    33:13
    I'll hook you up. That was intentional. I got a guy. Good. What did you just say? I missed it. Absolutely nothing. Move on. Good, because Lynn and I were talking. I wasn't paying attention.
    33:28
    I made a wood joke. I'll watch it later. Keep going. What are you, a beaver? I'm not answering that. Keep going. Next question.
    33:39
    When you guys are starting from a blank canvas, like you have no idea what you're doing with the play field yet, do any of you design out and kind of prototype your stuff in VPX? Yep. Sonic Spinball was 100% made in VPX before I ever started going on anything to do with physical. I had the whole game designed out, most of the rules written, and some actual real code finished before I even started building. And that is something I still do. It's mostly just for my own creative process, trying to get my ideas out so I can see them. But VPX is a wonderful free tool. Most people think it's just a video game, visual pinball.
    34:22
    And that's mostly because it's used in virtual cabinets to emulate existing games. but a lot of people don't know it's a full editor you can design place and um prototype virtually without spending any money in this free open source program that's been around since the 90s so they've been working on emulating real pinball physics for 30 years now and they failed for 30 years but i'll get to that in a minute they're doing pretty well they're taking to account ball spin, ricochets, there are things that... Try to backhand something you can actually backhand in real life. Good luck.
    35:01
    It has some flaws, but it's free. Game engines are hard. What? Yeah. Just saying. He's a video game developer. He's a perfectionist. Speaking of video games, has anyone ever played a game on PlayStation 3 called Pinballistic? It's a multiplayer pinball game. I was one of the engineers on that. I wrote the pinball engine on that. We actually designed all those tables in Visual Pinball, and I wrote an exporter that would export all the physics objects for PlayStation 3 and would cross-compile the VB script into Lua script. Cool. So it was all done in that. And it does great, but as I was kind of playing... Can you make me Cosmic Lady for the PlayStation 3? No. Damn it. I can do it for the PlayStation 4. I have a PlayStation 4. Okay. VPX is Lua?
    35:50
    No. It's Visual Basic, but I created a cross-compiler that converted... Oh, that was a hand-paste. This was before Microsoft stuff was open source. Think about this before you ask nerds questions. How much of that programming is directly convertible or usable on the actual... It depends on what engine you use.
    36:10
    But there is a... So if you're using... In my case, I use the Mission Pinball framework, which is a... I highly recommend it. You basically have a couple options, like Skeleton Game or Mission Pinball, or write your own.
    36:22
    But I would recommend starting with either of those. But there is a bridge that will allow Mission Pinball to talk to Visual Pinball, which means you can start coding and playing in Visual Pinball with your actual pinball code. So it's fully exportable. It took me an hour and a half to port all of my code and modes to the real game once it was done. So you can get started on your code and on your rules and on all your light shows and music and everything before you even pick up a screwdriver.
    36:54
    I don't use Mission Pinball or anything like that. All my stuff is custom, C Sharp and C++ and things. Programmer. But if you want to use the Microsoft libraries and such, you can take whatever you've written in Visual Pinball and just use that code in your Microsoft libraries and whatever editor you're using for that. a visual studio or whatnot. It will take a lot more heavy lifting to get to the point to use hardware if you want to use Mission Pinball, or if you're writing your own kernel and things like I did, it'll take a while. But there are plenty of different paths to do it. It's all how you want to do it. So one of the things that Ryan has said many times in the past was his mission to get a good game that he wanted to finally make a Whitewood out of was to have a game that was fun to flip.
    37:45
    And so he took his... It's fun to flip with no other rules, no music, no scoring, no anything. If it's fun to flip with nothing else, then you're going to have a good game at the end. And I can look around the room and see about half a dozen people that Ryan tapped to, hey, here are all my VPX files. This is how you load them onto your computer so they'll actually work. And play this and tell me what you think. And so the first time that I actually played the physical machine up at your house,
    38:11
    I felt kind of comfortable with it. Like you knew it was going to be a fun flipping game. and you should keep saying that. Good to know. Thank you. That part of your process was... It's fun to be able to email your homebrew to somebody and be like, what do you think of this? And I kind of wish I had had a virtual cab. I need to talk to them about that. What was that? Do you offer your Sonics demo VPX files? There is a demo, yes. It's up on VP forums. It's an older version, but it is out there. I was never able to finish a full code export or anything but there's a little demo that I made for my friends at a party just to be like, what do you think of this basic rule loop and that was all written in the visual pinball script instead of the real code mission pinball but that is available free for download out there because not all of us have a pinball a virtual pinball coffee table but you can run this just on any computer you don't have to have a virtual machine you can just play it on the computer Now, Lynn, if I remember correctly, and this is now three years ago before COVID, wasn't Frozen, didn't you do Frozen in Unity? Yeah, so all my stuff is written in Unity now. Okay. So all the games, Frozen, Haunted Cruise, Tale of the Dragon, everything else I do is all written in Unity, just so I have that full game engine background in there so I don't have to worry about how do I throw a polygon on the screen, how do I texture it, where do CG shaders come from, how do I play music, that's all taken care of. So all I had to do was create a little C-sharp glue code to talk to a C object to control the thing. And all game code is in there. And it makes life a lot easier. When doing light shows, it's night and day. You can ask me. I can show you all the debug stuff I have in those games. I literally have a texture that I just sample off of where the lights are. And so I can do anything I want, and then it just blends down to a texture, and I can pull whatever lights. and that's very different from what you did. Oh yeah, completely different. And yours and Mark's games were basically built on the same platform, correct? Yeah, definitely. They were cut from the same tree. They're very similar. I love telling that story.
    40:26
    Playfields were from the same wood, right? No, they were from the same tree. Yeah, the two playfields were from the same tree. They were cut from the same tree. Oh, I didn't know that. They were from the same batch from the same hardware store. Mark, at the party that I had that little visual pinball. I'm not making him stand up again. We already did that once. Sorry, Mark.
    40:44
    So I actually had a party for a Twilight Zone restoration that I did, and that was when I first showed all my friends this little demo on my coffee table, which is my visual pinball machine. And I just tell people, what do you think? And Mark actually brought me a chunk of wood to that party and said, here you go. You're ready. Start cutting. And you were all out of excuses. And then later told me, yep, this is one that I bought when I went and bought my wood for Metroid, and I didn't use it yet. So, yeah, the original... And I think the next one, too, this one, was also from the same batch. Yeah, so Metroid and Sonic were cut from the same tree. They were clear-coated at the same time. They were cut at the same time.
    41:24
    Even if you're working on your own game, you can still find help from other homebrewers working on their own projects. We worked very closely together, and look where it got both of us. Now, one of the things I want to promote again, and we've talked about this, is these sessions, we've got an hour, I think we may have 15 minutes left, 20 actually. So we're going to start going hardcore into some questions, make sure we get everybody done. But the great time to meet up with the homebrew community and to find a spot in the bar or something and talk about after the seminar, really exchange contact information and try to be part of this homebrew community so that you can sit up here. and I can ask you stupid questions and embarrass you in the audience in future years.
    42:11
    It's only so long they're going to take my abuse, so I need new suckers. How many people here are thinking about building their own game?
    42:20
    As opposed to just thinking this is interesting. It's like ten people, I think. One, two, I know you're very reluctant, but just shoot it. If you even had a little bit of a thought of joining a team, of building your own game, of helping someone build a game, all right, half the people in this room. Don't steal their ideas.
    42:41
    RPG style. Okay, well, you talked to Mark. Just so you know, don't make MMO pinball machines. It's a bad idea.
    42:52
    But there are ways to make RPGs work. Anybody else got some different ideas, different concepts that they're wanting to do? Anything fantastic?
    43:00
    Anything you want to share? Go ahead. I just want to talk about plywood. Oh. You can go to Home Depot over these years and get a panel of Baltic birch to produce your own individual play field. But there's actually, you can search out thin, hard maple veneer Baltic birch plywood that's out there from suppliers. And that's what I was doing for years. so like if you want something that's not like pinball quality plywood but the next step down that would be what you want to go for is bulky perch with a hard maple veneer on both sides so what i use for my homebrews is the maple plywood from lowes and that used to be okay seven ply you need to be careful because it's often said hey this is seven ply but there's actually just five ply or three ply with two veneers so i one of the things i almost didn't have uh tail of the dragon done because i couldn't find the plywood i needed because of covid and everything and every time i would go to a store they would have the three ply instead of the seven ply that is supposed to be or they wouldn't have any and i had the same problem with that wood for the cabinet i use a similar maple uh three quarter inch for the cabinet and I had to drive all the way to Hartford, Connecticut to get a couple sheets. And I destroyed most of them because the CNC machine decided to do its own thing, but I had just enough left to make what I needed. I'm glad you got it done. I'm excited to play it. If you haven't played Lynn's games yet, there are three of them in the free play room over on the right wall. You've got Frozen, you've got Haunted Mansion, Haunted Cruise.
    44:44
    And what's the name of the last one? The other one is Tale of the Dragon. Tennessee Road for motorcycle people. That one, I mean, you can flip it and it dings. It doesn't do too much. I just got it here just barely. And I'm still writing the code in my hotel room and updating it every day. But if it's fun with no rules. Exactly. That's the point. You know you have a good game. Yep.
    45:06
    Oh, God. Don't you love when I ask you guys questions? Let's go for it. All right. So we all know, why don't you share with us why you guys don't use the same kind of wood play field that Stern's using for the pin for your prototype?
    45:27
    So I think what the question is, I will field this one. Go ahead. Ryan knows the answer. I think what the question is, is why would you not prototype on MDF because that's what Stern is using currently for their playfields in their pin versions, their home versions of their games. Is that the question? Did I summarize that one correctly? My answer is because I get water on my playfields all the time. Yeah, that was what I agreed to. Just one drop of sweat hits a piece of MDF and it's ruined. So this is where I put my official staff badge on for a second and don't actually side with anything here. I brought up the point about, and on, well, Todd just left, we streamed one of the machines, we lifted it up, and I saw it was MDF, and I went, oh, yeah, well, that's nice.
    46:17
    I'm worried about this, and I'm not worried about this today. I'm worried about this five years from now. MDF will soak up moisture, and these things are going to start buckling and pucking.
    46:27
    I'm sure that Stern did extensive testing on it. it is a home pin it's not an industrial pin these are made to be in homes i advise anyone who is buying one of these and you're thinking of putting it in your basement if you do not have a dehumidifier within 20 feet of it do not expect it to last long it is three thousand four thousand dollars less than its counterpart for a reason i'm not saying that i think these things are going to fall apart next week. I don't think any of us think that. I just think the lifespan is not the same as an industrial pinball machine. That's why it's value. Why wouldn't you use it in this case? I would use it. If it was all I had, I would use it. If it's all you had, you would use it. If it's all you can afford, and it's all you can get, use it. It absolutely crumbles if you try to take screws and move it around. It's sawdust.
    47:22
    It's good if you throw a schematic or a piece of paper on it and just glue things on it and move stuff around, that's fine. One of the first things I did with Frozen was I got a 20 by 30 sheet of foam core and I was just gluing things around. It doesn't matter what you use for your first thing. But if you want it to be durable by any stretch of the imagination then MDF, it just won't hold those screws. And one more defense of Stern, and by the way I do not own a Stern pinball machine. So that could you can take whatever you want from that. I will say that the construction that Stern did on the home pins, there is not a single post screwed into that MDF. There are T-nuts on the back side, so everything is a machine post that put in and threaded So I believe they did some they must have done some decent testing to be able to put it out in the marketplace But it is not an industrial machine I think we getting off topic Yeah, we are. We're talking about non-industrial machines. That's what we're talking about. But I think... So here's something. I'm going to shock the world, especially my boss. My first place field was MDF. And how did it hold up? It didn't because I never intended it to. I cut a piece of MDF on the CNC router because it's cheap and throwaway. and I needed to know if the CNC router was going to produce what I expected it to. So I cut one out of MDF, test fit all my mechanisms, said, all right, that's good. And then I cut the correct wood because I only had one sheet. So then later on, I used that MDF playfield to test my playfield's fit in the cabinet while it was on the rotisserie. So I used it as a tool. It is useful in certain situations. Is it going to be the one I bring to the show and hope and expect it to stand up to the abuse? No. but is there a use for it somewhere in the process? Absolutely. But would it stand up to 2,000 plays? No, and it didn't even get one play, so that's fine. It depends on what you have in there and where the poster plays and how strong the person is. That's a subject for your Stern panel. Are we doing one of those? Where's Mike? Are we doing a Stern panel? No, he left. He left?
    49:27
    Mike Grant jumped out of here 10 minutes ago. I wouldn't have noticed that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Lynn, do you want to? Unless we have any more questions. Oh, we got somebody else up here. You're still there. All right. Got another one? No more wood, no more clear coat. So we're into plywood. Nope. So just so people for homebrew, we're in Massachusetts, so I'm in Canada. So the company's called Robert Burry is a wholesaler of half-inch and three-quarter-inch Baltic birch hard maple plywood. So, like, in my area, they bring it in by the skids for the university to make cabinets, and I jump aboard and buy whatever the hell I want. So, like, down here in Massachusetts, maybe if people want to do something, they can reach out and see the quality plywood that's void-free, that's hard maple veneer. It's very thin, but it's great for building pinball machines or play fields out here. All right, great. There's a source for you. Write it down.
    50:34
    Alright, slides. Who knows what this is? A play field. A drawing. A drawing of what? Anyone? Pinball machine. Yeah, a pinball machine. This is the very first drawing ever made of haunted crews over 10 years ago. This is where it all started. So if you have a sheet of paper, you can design a pinball machine. and let's see you fold it up into a little airplane and you throw it at my head this is the very first white wood I made of Haunted Cruise that looks nothing like Haunted Cruise but there's a lot that's the same in this that is currently in Haunted Cruise these jets are in the same spot this loop around is in the same spot this upper table and this ramp relatively the same spot Things have moved around a bit to make it all work out well, but this is some of the cheapest plywood I could buy at the time. And that's all it took. These flippers were driven, I think, by a little controller board I made at the time. But this is all you need. And the cabinets it's in, it's a supersonic cabinet.
    51:48
    You don't need, like, a fancy, fancy cabinet. You can use a couple of horses, like wood horses, and just have it kind of hanging on the wood horses. I do that a lot for a lot of the things. Yeah, Sonic's cabinet was originally supposed to be an Earthshaker restoration, It never became one because the owner decided to restore the original.
    52:05
    So I just bought it cheaply on the internet. Oh, there's a cabinet. Done. There you go. There's the bottom of it. Just old parts that I had floating around. I think these flipper mechs and the jets and slingshots came from a blackjack table. A belly blackjack.
    52:22
    And the power supply, same thing. And it was all just directly driven. From what I remember now, the flippers just went right power. And so you hold it and it did it. And that's all you needed to really make it work. And I was able to see, oh, this works great, or this doesn't play well.
    52:38
    On top of that, this metal siding over here, it's just little strips of aluminum that I got from Home Depot.
    52:45
    So it doesn't take a lot. I think this whole thing was maybe $40 to make with getting parts. Now, mind you, plywood now is, what, $2,000 to get a sheet or something. But get the cheapest stuff you can find. I have a big 5x10 sheet of Baltic Birch. Oh, okay. You can talk to Aaron. You can get some Baltic Birch.
    53:08
    And, yeah, all these posts and flippers that you assimilated from other games to start off with. You don't need to go crazy and get brand new stuff until later. Yeah.
    53:18
    Yeah, there's a flea market. There's, like, dozens and dozens of flippers and everything over there right now. And you can just grab them and, boom, you can be up and running. I have not had time to go through the vendor hall yet. There was a person at TPF who sells flat pack cabinets.
    53:35
    Johnny Graywich is representing him. He's here, isn't he? Yeah, same one that was just pumped. Oh. Okay, I've never met you. I guess I've met your business partner.
    53:50
    Okay, that makes sense now. Wow. Hey, I wouldn't have been so... Corporate sales. Go ahead, go ahead Dave, go ahead, take the mic. Sorry, I just want to point out something. Let me point out something. John Gray, which I've known for, what is it, 20 years? Anyway, John started out redoing play fields for people. Sorcerer, we also did back classes. Paragon, that's when we were proving stuff out 20 years ago that could be done on a flatbed inkjet printer. All UV ink, before the whole industry went that way, okay, we were doing this 20 years ago when I was working with CPR. So John is still a great asset that you can have back laxes made, you could do your plate fields, you could do anything you want. If you want to take that next step. So if Ryan wanted to take that next step and do all of the reasons done, you can contact John, and John would put it in his queue and help you. So John is a great asset to the community. He has been for a long time. Well, one of the things that... I was at Texas Pinball Fest. There was a vendor there that was selling essentially flat-pack cabinets. Easy Pinball. Easy Pinball, is that the name of it? Yeah, that's... I know he was having some stuff shipped here because I was thinking of buying one. But I just never got my hands together. And that's what I'm promoting here. Oh, okay. All right, so those cabinets are probably made out of good wood. That's just my guess. In California. But those are Bally-Williams-style cases, correct? Cabinets, if I remember? It's classic stern. He's getting in the classic bally at the end of the year.
    55:40
    The only thing I wanted to bring up here is like... If you mention another thing about quality of plywood, I'm shutting your mic off, my friend. I'm sorry. You seem like a nice guy, but corporate shilling. I need my kickback. I'm getting into metalwork. So even back in their area. Great, so we're going to sit and talk about 316 and 304 stainless steel? No, but for metalwork, it's like even in your area, if you find out a good source, like even in my area, they've made good side rails for pinball machines and other metalwork. So, like, just don't think it's not available. You just reach out and try to work with somebody, and you can make all these stuff up. Yeah, the thing I was going to say is, you know, people who have access to CNC routers and things, I'm sure we can figure out how to put a cabinet together. There's already a vendor out there who's done it, and the price is compelling enough. And there's those of us who have done it themselves, too. Yeah, and there are people who do it themselves and design their own. Yeah, all those cabinets are, as I mentioned, I've made those in the past four months for this show. It's of my own design and things.
    56:45
    But I have a CNC machine, so it helps. Yeah, we did a lot of plywood talk. We talked a lot of plywood.
    56:55
    Alright, there have been two wood jokes made. There is only one more allowed for the whole room. Who wants it? Peter, go ahead.
    57:04
    I learned a lot about wood today. Good. That's not a joke. That's all you got. It's the best you could do. That was the best you could do? I'm disappointed. You ruined it for all of us. I'm disappointed. Peter, go back to your corner and never make another comment again. Does anyone have a question that is not related to wood?
    57:18
    Anyone? Bueller? Makerspaces. Yes, that's the term. If you want to Google makerspaces, what you will find is basically a subscription-based gym, except instead of going to work out, you just have access to a ton of tools and a place to build stuff. Yeah.
    57:44
    So if you don't want to buy all the tools, just find your local makerspace, join up and you will all of a sudden have access to anything you could want and they will probably train you how to use stuff too. Makerspaces are amazing and I highly recommend them as a source of knowledge and power I guess. I just want to remind everyone that makerspaces are run by volunteers and so you have to expect that you're not getting the quality of service you get at a gym. Equipment is occasionally broken and you need to be patient because humans like me are all flawed. We don't have enough time to do everything. So, you know, please be patient with these guys. Like you had said earlier, the machine was broken. It just wasn't behaving right. And sometimes you just have to do that. But it is what it is. It is what it is. Now, the benefit of owning machines is if they're broken... It's your fault? Well, maybe, maybe not. My CNC machine is on and off. No, you can just have an excuse to modify it and expand it.
    58:43
    So how big is your CNC router? It's not that big. It's 50 and a quarter inches by 23 and three-quarter inches. So just barely enough. Just the right size. Just barely the right size. But when I originally got it from Craigslist, that's where I get all my stuff. Remember Craigslist? They renamed it the Facebook Marketplace. I heard that. I had to set up all my email alerts again. It was originally 40 inches long, which is just not big enough. But it was fine for most things and most cutting of play fields because the front section you don't really use too much, and the back section you can just drop off anyways. So I made a bunch of plate fields that were just a little small, but then it had a couple issues. There was, like, trapezoidal issues with it, and I said, screw it, I'm just going to get a couple more rods, and I extended it out an extra foot.
    59:35
    Who said that? Who said what? Of course Peter did. Of course it was Peter. Of course he did. I missed it. All right. Anybody else?
    59:44
    No. . Is that the one that mounts on the wall? Yeah. That one's cool to look at. That one's really cool to watch work. They look really precarious when you're watching them work. It's just a hand router with a couple of ropes attached to it, and it's somehow making magic.
    60:40
    It looks... Yeah, they keep scouring Marketplace and Craigslist. Craigslist is still a thing, believe it or not. It is. And you can find them fairly cheap. I've seen some people sell those particular ones or that style for under $600. It was about a year ago. So it's maybe a little bit more now. But you can still find them. It's also a good source for junk games and junk parts. That doesn't exist anymore. Yeah, it still does. Not project games, but just a pile of parts from some guy's basement that doesn't know what Facebook is. That's a thing. same time I put the blue balls in it alright we roll it roll question number three because there is no good source of durable blue pinballs we have I have tried many different ways of doing it you can heat treat it it will come off a lot of you are familiar with glow balls those are a good answer but they only last about 100 plays and Sonic got 100 plays yesterday so they're about $60 a set if you all want to buy me a new set of pinballs every day for the show at $60 a set we'll talk about it and unfortunately David was unable to locate the few blue prototype power balls that Williams made those have been lost due time we tried that too so well I'd like to thank you all for being here yes thank you so much you can hang out here for the Todd Tucky hour which it will probably be an hour and a half to two hours so I would suggest getting a bathroom break now thanks for being part of probably the last time I'm going to host the homebrew panel here because I am not mature enough to not make a blue balls joke right now so that was the point I just, yeah, I think that might be where I belong at this rate.
    62:47
    I'm going to hand you over to Dave, my boss, and let him fire me. So that's the last question for you people who are thinking of developing. Is anyone here far enough along in their homebrew development that they are entered in the American Dream contest that this guy is going to award in a few months? Hey, Dave, could I just answer, like, one thing I've been waiting here for? Nope, nope. Not if it's about wood. Session's over. So just a homebrew, like, no matter what plastic insert you need, you can still get them made by either Foremost Plastics or Northern Precision Plastics or somebody else, because I've done three-quarter inch and one-inch blue inserts that were unobtainable, same as the one-inch stir and lens. So like anything can be done. So if the lens isn't available, you can still get them to manufacture it.
    63:44
    Foremost Plastic, the famous supplier of pinball since at least the 1940s that I know of. All right. So that's it for now. And Todd Tuckey's on in a little while.
    63:59
    Throw it back. It's fine. Thank you.