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Butch Peel Deep Dive of WIlly Wonka

Pintastic New England·video·40m 22s·held·Aug 4, 2019
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.029

TL;DR

Butch Peel details Wonka's new tech innovations and JJP's manufacturing documentation systems.

Summary

Butch Peel from Jersey Jack Pinball delivers a detailed technical deep dive of the Willy Wonka pinball machine at Pintastic New England, focusing on new hardware features (RGB LEDs, mini magnets, reflective opto boards, 60-degree kickers), playfield design innovations, and manufacturing documentation tools. He also showcases interactive assembly drawings and production aids used at the JJP factory to improve build quality and worker efficiency.

Key Claims

  • Willy Wonka will have full RGB LED general illumination throughout the entire game, unlike previous JJP titles

    high confidence · Butch Peel, directly discussing Wonka's specifications at Pintastic New England

  • Jersey Jack Pinball has introduced mini magnets as a space-saving alternative to large magnet coils used in previous games

    high confidence · Butch Peel explaining underfield mechanics and comparing to The The Addams Family and Dialed In!!

  • Wonka features a six-ball trough, the first time JJP has enabled six-ball multiball (previous games limited to five balls)

    high confidence · Butch Peel showing underfield features of Wonka

  • The new reflective opto board is a single board with integrated transmitter and receiver, reducing wiring complexity

    high confidence · Butch Peel demonstrating the reflective opto board and how it uses the ball as a reflector

  • Wonka has a seven-inch display, significantly larger than previous JJP games (Wizard of Oz had one-inch, others had four-inch)

    high confidence · Butch Peel comparing display sizes across JJP titles

  • Jersey Jack Pinball uses interactive, touch-screen-based assembly drawings at the factory to improve build quality and worker training

    high confidence · Butch Peel showing examples of interactive production kiosks used during factory assembly

  • Wonka features new spotlight mechanics with single LED bulbs that are more compact and resistant to vibration-induced drift than traditional spotlights

    high confidence · Butch Peel demonstrating new spotlight design on Wonka playfield

  • The Wonka Vader (three-ball lock feature) revives an old electromechanical/early solid-state design where locks carry over from ball to ball and game to game

    high confidence · Butch Peel explaining the Wonka Vader as a homage to vintage pinball design

Notable Quotes

  • “The whole game will be lit with RGB. So all the lamps underneath, swing shots, and around under plastics and all will have RGB capabilities. 32,767 possibilities.”

    Butch Peel@ 3:06 — Establishes Wonka's full RGB lighting as a new standard for JJP, contrasting with previous mixed approaches

  • “These tiny little inserts in the playfield... there's groupings of them here and they're kind of in the shape of little circles. Real cool little tiny inserts that go through the playfield. Can get some really neat lighting effects with those.”

    Butch Peel@ 3:28 — Highlights a novel visual feature not seen in previous JJP games

  • “It's kind of a nod to the old-fashioned pinball games where you know you could walk up to a game and it's a carryover feature from ball to ball from game to game... it makes you want to try one more time.”

    Butch Peel@ 4:57 — Reveals JJP's intentional design philosophy of honoring pinball history in Wonka

  • “You're fighting for extra little sixteenths of an inch and thirty-seconds of an inch and little spaces to get things... developments like this new board here really aid in getting those extra little bits of space.”

    Butch Peel@ 12:32 — Illustrates how compact electronics enable more features in playfield design

  • “Pinball, evidently, it's really hard to keep a secret. So this was from Expo last year... It's fun to watch all that and see the faces when we actually bring the real game out and see who was right and who wasn't.”

    Butch Peel@ 18:17 — Acknowledges community speculation about unannounced games and the difficulty of maintaining secrecy in the tight-knit pinball industry

Entities

Butch PeelpersonJersey Jack PinballcompanyWilly WonkagameEric MeunierpersonThe Wizard of OzgamePiratesgame

Signals

  • ?

    design_innovation: Willy Wonka introduces full RGB LED general illumination throughout entire game (all lamps, swing shots, under-plastics) plus novel tiny circular insert groupings for lighting effects, representing evolution from previous mixed-approach JJP titles

    high · Butch detailed RGB GI, 32,767 color possibilities, and new tiny insert lighting effects not seen in previous JJP games

  • ?

    design_innovation: Mini magnet technology (using 23800 coils with metal plungers) replaces large magnet coils as space-saving alternative; reflective opto boards combine transmitter/receiver on single board; both innovations free underfield space for additional features

    high · Butch showed and explained mini magnets vs. large coils, and the reflective opto board with integrated IR transmitter/receiver using ball as reflector

  • ?

    design_innovation: New 60-degree ball kicker mechanics replace older circular eject designs; uses single coil, low power, compact footprint. New spotlight design with single LED bulb addresses vibration-drift issues in traditional spotlights

    high · Butch demonstrated both new kicker and spotlight mechanisms, comparing to Williams/older game designs

  • ?

    design_innovation: Wonka Vader three-ball lock revives electromechanical/early solid-state design where locks carry over ball-to-ball and game-to-game, creating FOMO incentive for additional plays

    high · Butch explained Wonka Vader as intentional homage to vintage pinball design philosophy and player psychology

  • ?

    design_innovation: Willy Wonka features seven-inch display (up from four-inch max in previous JJP titles, one-inch in Wizard of Oz), allowing more on-screen information and better player visibility

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.121

0:00
Our traveling expert from Jersey Jack Pinball, Butch Peel. Thank you, thank you. You're too kind. I think this is my fourth out of the five Pintastics here at Sturbridge. One of them was on my wedding anniversary actually, so. Sorry, I'm first grade. God bless you. Mine's July 9th. Remember when they used to put them on the other side of July 4th? That was one, 36 years this summer for me, so my life with the same wife, that's really something these days, that's great. I love this setup here, it's great for people who are shy. I can just kind of stand back here and say, look at that, and then over here, and not so good. They want us all, I've never seen so many cameras in my whole life, these guys. I have seen through the four years of progression of video and audio, these, Derek and his dad here, and a bunch of these other volunteers, Anytime you see somebody that works at this show, make sure you tell them thank you. That goes for any show you go to. A lot of work goes into these. These aren't little matchbox cars that people are dragging around and bringing out for everybody to play with. Thank you guys for having me. Dave, all you guys, the hard work that you do to make all this happen. I'm going to start with going through some of the new features on the Willy Wonka game, of the things that you haven't seen in some of our previous games, new electronics, new features and things like that, new shots to make, how the play field is kind of laid out. Not so much into rules and how to play the game as to how the game itself works and how it's built. Then I'm going to switch over to my slides over there and show you some cool drawings and things that I've made for the factory to help out with production and all. Hopefully you'll be entertained. I'm going to start with the play field surface up here. I made some notes of things I want to make sure and not forget. So the first item, and if I turn my back to you, oh, I apologize, but I think they can see me up there. This little gobble hole toy is one of the cool features on this game. It can spin around and sit in this position and wait for the player to make a shot off here. It's not one of those that's going to get rejected real easy because it's got a spring-loaded kind of kill-the-ball momentum and drop it into the hole, so it's kind of a cool shot. A lot of times you'll hit that on its way up the ramp. It makes for some neat combo kind of things. You have to hit this target several times to qualify that lock and play multi-ball through the center gobble hole there. That has a whole spinning disc thing underneath the play field that I'll show you when I lift the play field here in just a minute. Let's try and stand where I'm looking at the back of my head. It's not my best side. I don't know what my best side is, quite frankly. The game has RGB LEDs throughout. The pirates had some split with the standard editions having general illumination that were white. This game will have RGB GI and everything, just like Wizard of Oz. The whole game will be lit with RGB. So all the lamps underneath, swing shots, and around under plastics and all will have RGB capabilities. 32,767 possibilities. One thing that's kind of cool on this, you've never seen on any of our games, is these tiny little inserts in the playfield. There's groupings of them here and they're kind of in the shape of little circles. So there's three of them here and then there's three of them over here. Real cool little tiny inserts that go through the playfield. Can get some really neat lighting effects with those and you can use them to kind of count hits on some of the targets and things like that. Just a lot of flexibility when you have these groupings of LEDs under there and they're really cool looking. We have new spotlights on the game that you've never seen before. They're just a single LED bulb. There's one there. There's a couple of them over here. There's one down here. Maybe that one would be a good one for you to zoom in. You can see a little better from the front. bright, very focused, go right where you want to aim some light on the play field. You can see this has a spinning motor that spins this gobstopper around. So this light on that, you can see the light changing as it goes. Very cool combinations. And they take up so much less room. They're on a nice little sturdy bracket that kind of locks in place so you don't get that normal spotlight drift you get on pinball machines where the vibration, next thing you your spotlight's facing you when it should have been facing something on the play field kind of a cool new feature the wonk evader in the back back here again get where i can reach here this is a three ball lock and it's a really cool feature for the game it's it's one of the it's kind of a nod to the old-fashioned pinball games where you know you could walk up to a game and it's a carryover feature from ball to ball from game to game so any lock that goes up into this super lock area up in here will hold so when your game ends it doesn't drain those balls it holds them in there so if you see coming to the game and you see two balls in the lock you know that if you just lock one more you're gonna get that multi ball so it's kind of a feature to you know maybe pump a few more quarters in or or make you want to try one more time you drain that third ball like we've all you know had happened in the past where it makes you want to play one more game. So that feature is really neat. Some of the older pinball machines had that sort of thing, like I said, old electromechanical games, very early solid-state games. So it's kind of a neat part of pinball history also. We've kind of revived it. Let's see, we've got a new larger display here on this game. For most of our previous games, you know, Wizard of Oz had the tiny little one-inch display behind the crystal ball. Hobbit dialed in. Pirates all had little four-inch displays. This one has an actual seven inch so it's a larger. You can put a lot more on the screen. It's easier for the player to see. It takes the entire back corner of the play field there. Very cool feature. You can show you when the ball is going to get ejected from here. They put a little message in the corner of the screen to let you know it's getting ready to be kicked out and you can use your flipper up there to make another shot. So in the top part of the play field, there's a lot hidden behind here. It's hard to tell where the ball is going to go when you hit it in any one of these spots. So if using this upper flipper here, and this game has four flippers, so the upper right flipper is a shot that goes up under this camera and there's a ramp shot that comes all the way around the back panel and back down the play field here. So that's a continuous loop back behind the Wonka Vader. And then you have a shot coming from this flipper. This is your upper left flipper that will shoot across the play field and you can send the ball around the orbit here. This is a continuous loop around the orbit for the very right hand side next to the Wonka vision over here. So that's a big long orbit that comes around and ends up in the pop bumpers over here. You can all, you know, conversely, you can shoot with the lower flippers up through the pop bumpers, and you can put it around to this, feed this upper flipper again, same sort of loop. Then inside the main outer loop is an inner loop that comes through this second opening here, the one on the left right next to the camera. So next to that ramp, there's a loop that goes around and brings it into the pop bumpers also. So you can shoot that from the lower flippers down here. A lot of times you can ricochet off with the upper right flipper and get the ball around into the pop bumpers again too.

  • “I like to do like a skeleton drawing of something and I like to put in what details in that drawing that I think are important for you to reference... photographs are really perfect, but I like drawings better.”

    Butch Peel@ 26:32 — Reveals Butch's design philosophy for technical documentation and why he prefers illustrations over photos

    • Hobbitgame
    Dialed In!game
    [name withheld pending review]game
    The Addams Familygame
    Pintastic New Englandevent
    Derekperson
    Daveperson
    Patperson

    high · Butch directly compared display sizes across JJP product line and noted screen messaging for ball ejection timing

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Jersey Jack Pinball uses interactive, touch-screen assembly drawings and storyboards at factory kiosks to improve worker efficiency, reduce errors, and enable rapid onboarding of new production staff; ties to inventory management system

    high · Butch extensively demonstrated interactive HTML-based assembly drawings for gobstopper, up-kicker, WonkaVision assemblies and cabinet/backbox construction, showing hot-spots, part numbers, and integration with inventory tracking

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: New Opto IO driver board features improved connector layout (single line vs. two rows), power LED indicator, and better positional locking; backwards compatible with previous JJP games

    high · Butch explained connector accessibility improvements and power indicator LED that eliminates need for voltmeter checks

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Butch Peel favors skeleton drawings over photographs for technical documentation; selectively includes visual cues and important details while removing background clutter; uses color coding to distinguish components

    high · Butch discussed drawing philosophy extensively, contrasting photo-based documentation with his annotated illustration approach, using Yellow Brick Road pin blade caution sheet as example

  • ?

    product_strategy: Wonka features four flipper design with complex shot routing: outer orbit loop, inner orbit loop, U-turn shot, pop bumper feeds, multiple ramp paths, and diverter-fed upper flipper setup; designed for combo potential and multiple ball paths

    high · Butch detailed every flipper position, shot path, and routing mechanism, explaining how balls can reach upper flippers via multiple methods

  • ?

    product_launch: Willy Wonka is in late production/final documentation phase; manual is currently in progress; game appears ready or near-ready for shipping

    medium · Butch stated 'Wonka's in progress right now' when discussing manuals, indicating game is complete but documentation still being finalized

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball community actively speculates about unannounced JJP titles on online forums (Pinside); rumors spread despite manufacturer efforts to keep releases secret; industry insiders acknowledge difficulty maintaining confidentiality

    high · Butch discussed watching community threads speculating on next JJP game, acknowledged it's 'really hard to keep a secret' and expressed enjoyment at seeing reactions when real game is revealed

  • ?

    industry_signal: Butch references designers fighting for space in compact playfields (quoting 'Pat and other designers'); compact electronics innovations (mini magnets, reflective optos) are industry-wide design constraint driving innovation

    medium · Butch quoted designers discussing space optimization; attributed mini magnet and reflective opto innovations partly to spacesaving pressures

    • 7:57
    There's a quick little U-turn type shot, very similar to feeding the thing on Adam's family. So it's a little U-turn shot in this opening right here and drops the ball into a kicker spot here and pops it out for the upper, kind of feed your upper flipper up here. So that's kind of a nice way with the lower flippers to get the ball up there we can use the upper flipper. This one's fed by a diverter that drops the ball off of this ramp here. When it's qualified, it'll kick the ball down here. A magnet that protrudes through the play field will hold the ball here and tee it up for you, for you to try and make this super lock shot, which is the one that puts the ball into the Wonka Vader. It actually diverts up in there and kicks into vertical up kicker and puts it into the lock. There's a super lock insert there, so whenever you see that one white and flashing, you've got a shot with that lower flipper. And that's not the only way to get the ball, of course, to that, you have a lower flipper shot, you can shoot the right flipper and kick the ball up into here, hit a target there and it'll trigger the magnet to grab it also. Or you can just kick it around and if you get it anywhere close to that, you can use that upper flipper to make the shot. So there's more than one way to feed those upper flippers and that's what keeps things exciting and makes pinball so much fun. Let's see, so now I'm going to lift the play field up and show you some of the stuff underneath. So we have a new ball trough for the first time in a Jersey Jack pinball game. Now we can put six balls in the ball trough. So five balls has been the limit before. You can get six ball, multi-ball now going in this game. And it happens quite often. A lot of fun, more frantic with one more ball. You have these mini magnets. These are kinda cool.
    9:57
    If you've ever seen the underside of play fields like Adam family some of the I think even Dialed In has it also the three giant magnets the big magnet coils They take up so much room You have to route out a huge space underneath the play field in order to put those underneath the play field. And so it takes up a lot of real estate. Well, now we can get some of the same effects with a trio of mini magnets where you're basically using a 23800 coil and you're routing out some of the play field and you're using the tip of that coil and putting a metal plunger through it that you can get the same types of crazy variations of the ball, you know, getting sucked around on the play field, doing magical-looking things with a much smaller footprint underneath the play field. And you can see if we can get light boards and all kinds of things in around that, whereas if we had three of those giant magnets, that would take up this entire area and, you know, you couldn't have anything else like targets and things like that nearby. So that's a really cool addition to our games and a neat new thing for people like Eric over here to have in their toolbox when they're designing a new game.
    11:07
    Let's see, we got a reflective opto board. So for the first time in one of our games, we have a single opto board down here that has both transmitter and receiver on it. So it looks very much like an RGB LED board, which is one of these up above. You can pan up just a little bit there. It looks about the same size as some of these RGB LED boards, but it's a much smaller footprint, and you don't have to deal with having transmitter and receiver, one on either side, and all the extra wiring and all that. It's very compact, very, very cool. And now I'm going to pull the playfield down just briefly to show you a look down inside there. So now if you can look down in here, you'll see on the screen up there, there you go. So you see the transmitter and the receiver are right next to one another, the two little dots there on the end of that red board. So you're basically using the ball as a reflector. So the transmitter bounces the infrared light off the ball and back down. So whenever there's a ball in that hole, that little board tells the game there's a ball there. without having to have separate transmit and receive pieces and extra wiring. And, of course, then triggers a little kicker there to bring the ball out.
    12:29
    I've heard Pat and other designers saying, you know, you're fighting for extra little sixteenths of an inch and thirty-seconds of an inch and little spaces to get things that developments like this new board here really aid in getting those extra little bits of space to put other cool features into the game and makes them function a lot more reliably too. Less things to go wrong.
    12:54
    So on the, let's see, we have a new Opto IO driver board, which is this guy here. And you can see now, these, we've used them in other games, and this new board is fully compatible with the old games. So you drive eight optos off of one of these boards here, and that's where all the green and red and black, white wiring are coming from. That's a pair of optos somewhere up on the play field, a ramp or a vertical up kicker or something like that. So we can drive eight of those off of one of these boards now. Well, this new board has, the old board had two rows of connectors, so it was really hard to get your head in under here and see which color was which in there, and you're following black, brown, red, orange. Then it went yellow, green, blue, and violet in the back, and it was hard to see through all the wiring and connectors. Now they're all in one continuous line there, so all eight are just in a single line. A lot easier to see, a lot easier to make sure you're plopping it in the right connector when you're putting those underneath the play field.
    13:57
    It's got a power LED, power indicator, which we didn't have before, so that's very important. Sometimes your opto board is not getting any power, then it tells you all eight of those optos are going to be disabled. So if you've got a you don't have to check with a voltmeter anymore you to make sure you have power There'll be an LED indicator showing that Of course, we got better snapping Connectors that positively lock for the switch matrix and the other things that connect to the board the power and such So a lot better board all the way around and it'll be compatible with our old ones same footprint same mounting bracket as in previous Games, so that's kind of cool another new feature here on the another new mech is a 60 degree ball kicker All of you that have worked on previous older Williams games. They have those
    14:46
    circular eject things that used like a Slingshot to pull on one end and and just turn this circle that ejected a ball out of a saucer This this takes the place of that a lot more compact Uses a single coil and the single little plunger. They're very low power doesn't require a lot of strength to just basically knock the ball out of the hole there. It saves a lot of space underneath the play field. Very cool.
    15:12
    And the last thing I want to show you on the game is something we did in the back box to address some issues that we had with the monitor back here. So in previous Jersey Jack pinball games, with the new cabinet design, basically dialed in forward where all the boards are in the back box. We had two latches here that held the, on either side, one latch on either side that held the monitor in place. When you fold the head down, that's very important because this shakes loose and comes up against the back of the back glass. It causes a lot of damage. So you want to make sure you have a good positive lock in there. So we put these really strong magnets in there now. So when you go to pull this guy out, you've got a couple of magnets, one on either side. that when you go to put it back in, now it just snaps into place.
    16:11
    It wants to be where it needs to be, and then you straighten it up. Works a lot easier. The fumbling with those latches back behind here is very difficult. Make sure you have it latched properly because it would pretend that it was latched, and then it would come loose when you pulled on it. Much cleaner effect now.
    16:29
    Let me put the back glass back in here. I was talking with Eric Munya, I don't know if you guys know, designer pirates, Jersey Jack pinball guy here. You see either of us out on the floor out there, we love to talk pinball. This guy knows the rules, he was right beside the guys writing the rules on Willy Wonka. So if you want to learn how to play the game or have any question about subtlety in the rules, that's your guy right there. I'll listen to the answer and learn like I always do too, right? So there we go with the game itself. I'm going to switch to some slides and show you some of the other work that I do for the company here. Wake my laptop up here. So physically now we have to change that or? Start this up. Oh yeah, a shameless plug for Eric. Tomorrow morning, what, 10.30?
    17:37
    So maybe he'll be there is what I guess I'm hearing from that. So he'll be there and have some really interesting stuff to do too.
    17:49
    So our new game. And pinball, evidently, it's really hard to keep a secret. So this was from Expo last year. This couple was sitting like right in the middle and they were waving these tickets and I'm like, oh that's funny, I gotta use this picture later. So I took their picture and you know, it gets out there. Just watching the pinball threads on pin side of what our next game is gonna be. It's gotta be this, it's gotta be that. I heard this, well somebody said they were gonna do that. It's fun to watch all that and see the faces when we actually bring the real game out and see who was right and who wasn't. So some of the primary roles that I have at Jersey Jack Pinball, I write the manuals, the game manuals. I've done four so far. Wonka's in progress right now. I create service and maintenance videos for how to fix and repair games and how things work, tools and things like that. One of the really fun things I get to do is work with the people at production up in the factory and help visually with aids and things like that, help them learn how to make the games and provide references. Even when you're doing this all day long, every once in a while you'll grab that red cable and you're like, now where did that go? And you just train a thought, it's nice to have this as a play field drawing of the underside of Willy Wonka and shows where all the RGB LED cables go. So it's really nice to have a visual reference every so often and keep you from making some of those mistakes where you're like, I think that one goes there. It's the same size connector, but now we can look up here and you can actually tell for sure.
    19:27
    I do some drawings. I'm going to show you some of these in just a moment in a little more detail because they're pretty cool. They're interactive drawings that they use at the assembly tables at the factory. So the people, the way the games are made is all the individual assemblies like those gobstopper, that spinning gobstopper and that gobble hole and those 60 degree kickers and all those things are made on benches around the factory and then they put them on carts and they roll them up to the line set them behind the line and that's where they pull an assembly off at a particular point in the game assembly process where it makes the most sense as you all know when you take something apart there a certain order to it you gotta put this on first then that and then that and then that and then you get all the way to the end you still got this part left over that should have gone on first and you got to take it all apart again You all know what I talking about But these help them with all the assemblies and putting them together and getting everything correct so that when they go into the play field and onto a game, get married to a game, that they're going to work better and be more reliable. I can do all kinds of cool things with assemblies. I can do visuals that move like this, allow them to see how something comes apart, what the order of things are, how everything goes back together again.
    20:46
    They're kind of cool. Look at the micro switch there and how it goes on. A lot of neat stuff like that.
    20:55
    Now I'm going to escape here, and I'm going to go back into, see if this messes up our resolution here. So this is one of the interactive drawings that I did for the factory for the gobstopper and switch assembly on the Willy Wonka game. So this has got a lot of hot spots and links inside it. It opens up in a normal browser. You can look at any part of the drawing. You can go back to this overview view right here. You can see how the three main pieces in it go together. They use a couple of screws and a couple of nuts. and here's when you need to see what the individual parts are, then you can just click on one of these pieces, and it brings it up here and shows you the entire assembly here. And now what's cool about this is it's interactive also. So if I say, where's that one bracket right there that I'm holding there, that's how it goes in there. Or if I'm over here, I can say, oh, what's this bracket part number, and I need a new 1062 now because that one's broken or bent, and it makes everything work really cool. And they tie this in with their inventory system, so that when somebody builds one of these, and they check I've finished one off, then they subtract all of these parts from the line and say now those are part of a game now. And that's a really cool thing to be able to do to tie this in. I can go back to the overview here. I can look at the bracket here and how it goes together. I can go back to the overview again. I can look at the switch part and see all the pieces and parts, everything's interactive. I can go back and forth. It's a really cool tool for them. And they can do all this with touchscreens up at the factory. So they have these kiosks set up. Anybody has one of these that they're having trouble figuring out where that one screw goes, they can walk up to it and they can start just touching the screen with their fingers and say, oh, okay, that's where that goes. So that's the gobstopper and switch assembly. This is the up kicker, three ball lock with an up kicker and side popper assembly. I tried to say that three times fast. Offset up kicker even but there's basically two main parts to this there's two sub assemblies per se and i can click on either one of those and it shows me all the parts interactive again everything's part number tells me how many of them are when there's something that has two of them it shows me where both of them are it highlights both of them something that has four it shows all four where all four of those go i can be up here and it'll highlight all four of them again show you that i don't need to go there but up there also it's very very cool feature very neat thing for them to have on hand up there for a reference. And here's the vertical up-kicker portion of it.
    23:30
    And then I'll show you the WonkaVision here. So this one shows it all put together, and in the put-together portion, you can see which part's supposed to be showing, you know, which little piece I can see underneath in the middle here, you know, which part's supposed to be protruding, what I should be able to see from any view from the front or from the back. I can go through all the parts. Anything I can highlight in there, I can bring it up, and it'll show me where all, you know, those three screws are all the same size. These four screws are all the same size. Very, very handy thing because you start putting some of these complex things together like this and, you know, there's a lot of parts, a lot of things that you could put on backwards or in the wrong order. So very handy tools to have.
    24:11
    And then last I was going to show you was some of the storyboards I've done for our cabinet and back box lines. So this is just ground braiding. some of this stuff. So here's, again, a kiosk they have right there where they're building our cabinets in the factory, and it gives them a few tools and things that they can use. It shows what size of braid we're supposed to be using, the size of the staples. You have two different sizes of staples, so you've got to keep those straight. You don't want to be trying to staple ground braid into the bottom of the cabinet with a super long staple because that ends up with stuff protruding from underneath. You go to hit your power switch and you stick your finger. That's not a good thing. So make sure you staple around the braid instead of through it, just general rules like that. And then it shows the entire cabinet here from looking above. And if I want to look at something like in more detail, how to do that ground braiding in that corner, I can show them exactly how many staples you need to be putting in there, make sure that you don't cover these holes and make sure you don't fold and don't cut and keep it continuous piece. All these instructions that you can go to and you can just step through all of the steps that way and go around the cabinet. They're in an order, one, two, three, four, five, and they'll take you all the way around the cabinet doing your ground braiding. So that's kind of a cool thing. And then we do the same sort of thing for the back box. And I think, let's see, back box station one, and I can show you how. This is showing how to not only do the ground braiding, that was just one small part of this, but how you mount all of the pieces inside the bag box, what orientation they should be in, how many screws are used, what all the part numbers and everything are in here. So these are just really cool things for the people working on the line to be able to use and to reference. If you bring a new person in that's never built the cabinet before, they can be shown a few things and then you have this reference and you don't have to have a person standing right with them showing all this stuff because it's all laid out on touch screens where they can do that. So here we go. So one of the things working with manuals and documentation, everybody says, you know, you're so lucky these days. We have high res photos. You can do everything with photographs, right? The photographs are really perfect for what you're doing. I'm more of a, I like to do like a skeleton drawing of something and I like to put in and what details in that drawing that I think are important for you to reference in visual cues and things like that. So for instance, if I take my, I was asked a while back to make some caution sheets for us to put on the yellow brick road was, because it comes with these pin blades artwork on the side, and that's the only Jersey Jack game today that had those. So, you know, something to tell our customers, you know, don't twist the play field, Be careful with those that can be damaged. You've got to treat this one with a little bit more respect, a little bit more care when you're pulling the playfield in and out. So I took, I said, well, Yellow Brick Road's going to go in my, in a pirate-type cabinet. So I go to my pirates game and I take a picture, and it's got all this clutter in the background. It's got all this clutter on the playfield itself. To talk about pin blades, I don't need all this stuff up on the playfield. I don't need a bunch of things in the bottom of the cabinet. I definitely don't need all my stuff that I have under the game and all that, right? So I could take a picture like that and show it. That would solve my problem, right? Well, then you take that picture and you Xerox copy it 50 times and you get in black and white, and now it's even more of a mess. And so same sort of thing with the play field. I figured I would want to show the play field partially up out of the cabinet and then the play field all the way up and leaning against the back box as we were doing over here. So there, again, lots of extra clutter, There are lots of things that I don't need in the picture to relay what I'm going to show. So I just redraw those two, and I make this. So I take the play field itself, and I take the cabinet, and I draw the cabinet, and I show basically what I need to show to show that you're in the front here. You don't want to twist. You don't want to move it back and forth, but you do want to go straight in and out. I add these kind of visual cues to the top of it, and I think that's a much more effective, simpler way of showing that than trying to draw all these arrows and things on top of all this other clutter in the background that doesn't need to be there. And it makes for a really nice clean sheet that they can then, with a few instructions on the bottom here, tape to the top of a yellow brick road. And that's, to me, that's effective documentation and useful documentation. I like doing stuff like that. And I really enjoy the challenge of, you know, just be given a task like that. We got these pin blades we want to protect. How do we show that? You know, I sit down for a minute and I make a couple of quick sketches. I think about it a lot and I come up with something I think that works pretty well. So if you've seen some of our documentation from over the years, I started with Wizard of Oz. You've seen things, this is what an assembly drawing looked like in Wizard of Oz. Everything was black and white. Everything was drawn in 2D so you could see it from different angles. I could turn it around, look at it from top or from bottom, and then you just picked a view that kind of showed some of the parts that you were trying to call out. And you added the little bubbles accordingly. Well then, it's like, you know, I see black lines here and I see this bracket. How much of this part is that bracket? How much of this down here is this part? It gets kind of confusing because everything is black and white. So then we're doing everything in color, so I said, well, I'm going to make use of that color. clearly see with the red bracket here where its extents are that this piece up here is a completely different piece. All the different pieces inside look like and again color had taken another step. I did DI a good portion of DI were done this way also but as we were doing DI we started using more of the SOLIDWORKS and I started getting some three assembly drawings from our mechanical engineers. They weren't exploded, which is kind of what I was thinking. I want to show how things come apart and go together. But I was given these types of views and so I used them accordingly and I picked the best ones that I could for doing, showing what I wanted to show and calling out what I wanted to call out. And then when we got to Pirates of the Caribbean, I actually started getting three-dimensional composer, which is a SolidWorks companion program. And now I can take the three-dimensional model and I can spin it however I want. And once I get it to a good angle that shows what I'm trying to show, I can blow it up and I can explode the diagram and I can pull out the parts and I can make sure that everything's separated in space, and now you can clearly see all the extents of all the parts. And I just, you know, use the color also. And then I can show a few kind of shots of it put together from different angles that show how things go together when everything's together properly. Because when I start asking them for exploded drawings, what I would get from our mechanical engineers, there's a button in SolidWorks that you hit and say, explode. When you explode the pivot assembly for holding the monitor back there, this is the kind of diagram you would get. It would explode it to that degree. I didn't like that because you're trying to point out things that are hidden. Some of the nuts and bolts and things are obscured by other parts. So when I have control of that now, I can do something like this. And that's my exploded version of that. So again, everything shows separated in space. much clearer. I can show a few views of how it looks like put together. I can twist the elbow and turn and pivot things and then use all the color to my advantage and make a really, really effective exploded diagram. And so there's SOLIDWORKS composers and that's the kind of thing I get from our model from our engineering. It shows the chest, the treasure chest on there. Then I can do the same sorts of things with our circuit boards. So I take Gerber files and build materials that show all the parts, numbers, and everything on a circuit board, and I can turn all that information into a nice drawing of the board, and you can see where all the components go and all that stuff. And then you can also add showing how the wiring attaches to that board and where all the signals that go on each one of these ports, where they come from, where they go to. And I can take their schematics, which are a little rude and crude in Altium, and I can make them into more easy to follow, I call better schematics, and actually use resistor symbols and capacitors and things like that, things that people are used to seeing in pinball. Then I can take play field drawings above and below. I could take those 3D models that I get in Composer, and one of the ways I can spin that thing is look at it directly from underneath. So I'm looking at it just as it attaches to the bottom of the play field. Or I can look at it directly from above, how it attaches to the top of the play field. So I'll make play field drawings above and below. And then once I've got all that placed and put on the play field, then I can call attention to anything I want to. I can look at brackets and under play field assemblies I can use color to call out everything I want, all the circuit boards, and I can use little colored dots and things like that. I can call out the inserts and the lights and the logical order that the programmers use for that. I can call out the wiring and cabling. I can call out the rubber rings from the top. And I can take different layers of the play field and remove them so that they're not in the way of showing what I'm trying to show with the rubber rings, because a lot of those are underneath multiple things that I could just highlight what I wanna highlight. And that's really powerful in doing effective documentation. I can do metal brackets on top of the play field. I can show how to play the game with rules and things like that, what shots to make, where the ball needs to go to get this sort of thing. So very kind of cool stuff.
    34:36
    And that's about what I've prepared. So if you could take some questions. Up there. Anyone who has a question, walk up to that microphone, please, because we're recording all this. So we'll record your questions also. Ask something quick, or Dave will go ask something. I know he will. I know how this guy works. Come on up. I was wondering, if you purchase a table, do you get the breakdown of all the parts and diagrams, like on a thumb drive or something? Well, you can get an electronic version of our manuals are all available for free on our website. You don't even have to buy the machine. They're there under our support. You can take a look at what all is in there. Also, that beautiful 27-inch monitor works as a great display for that digital one also. So the manual is actually inside the game. Oh, cool. I mean, I could show you that real quick over here.
    35:35
    You go into the menu system, and you go into utilities, and you view the manual. And that's where it would be. Unfortunately, Willy Wonka is not here yet. But yeah, the Pirates, all those games, they have the manual inside the game and you can page through and go to different devices and look at that. But the latest, greatest documentation is always the online and our website. And again, that's perfectly free. And yeah, I put a lot of effort into the digital version too. You can go and there's like 1500, 2000 hyperlinks in there. So if you're hovering over a device and it turns into a finger, if you click there, it'll take you to a drawing of that.
    36:22
    In the pages where all it says a page number, C63, if you hover over C63 and press it, it'll take you right to that page. You can go back and forth in schematics and the tables and all that. A lot of thought goes into that, a lot of time too, and a lot of work, but it's a labor of love, what can I say? Compared to the old way of having a parts catalog that never stayed in sync and all the- And a manual that won't even stay open. Yeah, I love those. You set it down and you start to look at it and it goes, and closes on you. So with the addition of the smaller optical switches, do you see yourselves abandoning mechanical switches anytime in the future? No, no, no way. Just because of what they add to the play? You look on, there's electrical considerations. Each one of those opto.io boards underneath the play field will only drive eight optos. You don't want to put an entire new board on there just to get one more opto in a game when a microswitch would work fine. I mean, microswitches handle all of the rollovers. I mean, there's magnetic switches and things. You've seen some of those on other games, and you haven't really seen everybody say, okay, we're all going to go to that because there are problems with those too. But there's tons of microswitches on that game. entrance where it just makes sense you can attach one right to the bracket you don't have to have wiring running up to it you know like you know I'm not both sides like an opto would be yeah there's there's just gonna be places like that saucer where it just makes sense to do something compact like that a single place like that so yeah though we're always looking to complement what we we have I don't think you ever really get rid of anything you always find another place don't you Eric where geez you know I need to use that old mech you because it works better in this particular instance. So, no, they'll never replace them completely. And there's just going to be places that the designer, it's almost dictated by real estate and use and electrical constraints that you have. It almost dictates where you need to use what kind of switch. So the offset coil design you mentioned before, where you tilted the angle to get the shot out that way, why do you think nobody else has done that? They've kept them all. Oh, they've done that. On that street? Okay. Yeah. If you look in the Pinball 2000, they had those 60-degree ball ejectors in there. And I think there's one in Adam's family, too, for kicking the ball out of a saucer. It just takes up so much less real estate than one of those half-moon things that are problematic because they had a little bitty tip on the end that would bend, and you have to hit the ball in the right area or it would bounce in the wrong direction. They used to use them as a ball eject into the shooter lane for all the games, and they were just a pain in the rear. So, yeah. Thanks.
    39:06
    Like I say, we're not, you know, Pat worked for Williams for years, and he knows all of their coils and all of the devices they had, and if we need to reuse some of that, that's when you resurrect something like that 60-degree ball kicker. It's just really cool to be able to use old stuff like that. And it works well. I mean, you don't need to shoot the ball 30 feet. you're just trying to knock it, you know, trying to make a trunk shot or something like American does. You're just popping it out into there to feed an upper flipper.
    39:39
    More questions? Last call. All right, well, thanks, Butch. No problem. Thank you guys for having me. Again, if you see anybody working for the show, thank these guys. It's just a thankless task that they're doing. and where would we have to go on these weekends and get together with all of our other pinball pals if not for people putting these shows on. So thank all the volunteers.