In this episode we'll learn Norman Shaggy's hottest sex secrets for attracting wild willing babes! Yeah, right. Like that was going to work. You're listening to Topcast. This old pinballs online radio. For more information, visit them anytime. www.marvin3m.com. Flash Topcast. Today on Topcast we're doing a very special interview. I could not do this over the phone. This gentleman did not want to do a phone interview, which is fine. So I drove out to Chicago to interview him at his office, worked at Valley Williams during the 1990s and developed the software for Twilight Zone, a very classic Williams pinball game. He was a demo man and the Red and Ted Roadshow. He also became the head of the programming department for both pinball and gaming. And has some interesting insights into that whole 1990s era of pinball. Special guest. Special guest. Special guest. So we're taking Topcast on the road to Chicago to talk to Ted Estes in his office at Cisco Systems about his days in the 1990s at Williams in Valley pinball. So I'd like to welcome Ted Estes. Give me an insight. How did you get started on a whole pinball thing? Where it works the road here. It's a long story and it's little bits and pieces over the years. A friend of mine in high school had a really old game. And I can't remember the name of it in his basement. Any old game in the paint was all worn off. And I would go over in the afternoon and play sometimes with him. And I wasn't very good at it. But they had played it to the point where they could get the skillshot at the top to get the rollovers. They had little pencil marks on the shooter gauge. So this is where you pull it out and get it into that spot. And I always thought it was pretty interesting. My dad was an electrical engineer. I did a lot of electrical circuit type stuff and things. I had some interest in that. And I thought it'd be fun to have something like a pinball machine just to work on. Not necessarily to play, but to work on. And then it was years later in college when I first discovered the solid state games like Firepower and Black Knight, which just blew me away in terms of how much fun they were with the game. So really you had no experience playing at the gym in the college Firepower. And you went to Purdue of course. Right. Where I went. And so I spent all my lunch money and all my lunch time, one semester playing Black Knight at the union. Way I wasn't at the union actually. So a couple of years right around that time, I was working for the W.D. Department doing preventive maintenance on the printers in order to make money. And another person who worked for the W.D. Department was way into video games and pinball games. And he bought a Black Knight brand new in the box. And at around the same time, or maybe a couple years later, another friend of mine who I worked with at Purdue and actually got me that job. You mean at the W.D. Department? At the W.D. Department who eventually came to work with me at Williams, his name is Tom Uban. Tom went to Purdue and he and I know each other from Purdue. He bought a tempest game which was like the one video game that I've ever liked. I'm not big on video games except for that one. And I kept thinking wow it's really neat to have an actual arcade game of your own. And it always had that sort of little bug. So somebody else bought that Black Knight from that person, not heard about it. And then that person had it for a couple years and Tom said hey, Kurt selling that old Black Knight, you're interested in it. And I bought it. Why didn't Tom want it? He probably living in an apartment and didn't have room. And so I drove down and met Kurt halfway bought the Black Knight for 300 bucks. This was 1988. It was still a nice shape. It was still a nice shape. It was still pretty good shape. I mean, Cabin was beautiful, play field had somewhere. But it needed some rebuilding. The flipper max were held together with duct tape and cable ties and stuff. My long track for, oh can you still get parts for something like this? And I end up rebuilding that game and getting the bug. I started buying, you know, once you start one game, you have to have more. So when did the divided by 10 scoring thing come in? Was this in this era? Or is this much later? Try to think when did I do that? And some people don't know is that you've modified the roundcode for nearly all the system 6 games to do the scoring divided by 10. So when they roll over, they don't roll over. Yeah, after I got the Black Knight, I went searching for a firepower and it's only a 6 digit game. And I probably had it set up too easy, but it was frustrating that I would roll over. Oh, you're right, I'm sorry, it was system 6 games. Not system 7. System 7 games have 7 to do scoring. So I had this idea, you know, the least significant digits, always a zero. Right. It's not used for anything. So why not just divide all the scores by 10? And so I started trying to disassemble the code on there and just didn't have very much luck. I guess nowadays people have better tools for doing that kind of thing. Is there doing all kinds of fancy rewriting of rules on the game? Well there's only a couple guys doing that. And they also have pin main so you can do all the tests without burning e-proms. Right, you can run it on your machine. So yeah, you're right, they do the better tool set. So this was after 88, when you did well after? Yeah, it was probably about 1990. It was probably about 1990. Oh, so it wasn't that far off? It wasn't that far off. I was doing it in my spare time at work using a 386 computer. Not everybody had PCs back then to work on. And where were you working? I was working at AT&T. So I couldn't rather than try to figure out how to disassemble all the code, instead I built a simulator that ran the code on the PC. It simulated the instruction set and put the lamp matrix up on the screen and put the score, did it score as opposed to... You made your own pin main. So I did a pin main sort of thing, right? Although it's very low tech, it was only text. Oh really? Yeah. So I had a little file where you put in the names of the solenoids and the lamps and stuff. And it would fit it on an 80 column by 24 line display on the PC. And you could watch the lights, blank and stuff. And you'd hit keys on the keyboard to simulate key switches. And then I could set breakpoints and things in the code. And so I discovered where were the scores kept. Set a breakpoint on when they got modified. Took a look at the code that modified it and then found a way to do the divide by 10. And luckily the way that the score numbers are internally kept were a number and a... Well the mantis is on an exponent. So it's a number and a power of 10. So all I had to do was... Change the power of 10. Change the power of 10 and I got my 10 scoring. And I keyed off of the setting for the match display. You turn off match and it turns on the divide by 10. Because the match isn't going to long anymore. Right, right, it'd be one out of 100 instead of one out of 10. At that point in order to do it. So you're all good. So I mean were you good at the disassembly thing? Oh yeah. My background was in microprocessors and programming. And in fact I had been programming that same microprocessor in high school. That's used in the early ballet and Williams games. My dad used to work for motor roller. And when I was a junior in high school he brought home an evaluation board for the 1600. Had little hex keypad on it. And a display. And I made a little external port with a bunch of LEDs on it that I could blink and stuff. And I had little programs. How was your inner coding? Well you'd do it by hand in hex. And you'd have to hand assemble it. Because there was no assembler. So I'd write the program out and then hand assemble it. And then type it in and test it. And then once you got it done it had a serial port for dumping to cassette tape. So you could load your program back in. Instead of having to type it all back in again. How I started too. I bought an Apple 2 in 79. And the one thing that really intrigued me the most was all the software available for Apple 2. But it wasn't supposed to software but the fact that it was all copy protected. The copy protection intrigued me. Not the actual software but the copy protection. So I made it like my mission. Anything that I bought to remove the copy protection and would bootcof trades. And then a buddy of mine who was in the double leading department said, I know I have to make your job a lot easier. And I said, why? Or how? He says, I'll make your box. It'll show you the current address that's being executed on the Apple 2. And I said, yeah, it's going to go so fast. Who cares? You can see it. He goes, I'll pull the ready line. And I'll put a pot on it. You'll be able to step through the code. You'll be able to slow it down as well. Execute one address at a time. You could step through it manually. You could make it go as fast or as slow as you want it. And it was like, oh my god. That's me. At all. Was that ever neat? You knew exactly where the program was going. You know, what it was executing. You could watch the loop. He showed the address and the data. And then, oh, it was great. But all of the, all of the, I refused to use the assembler. I had it entered everything in hacks. I know. You know what I mean? For any kind of modifications or programs or anything. And then a buddy of mine, Felly said, you know, they have macro assemblers. 65.02. Why aren't you using them? I'm like, ah, it's a plusy to use that stuff. Yeah. You know, but then, you know, you eventually sober up. You know, so sorry, my subversion. Well, yeah, well, I didn't have that available, you know, on the, when I was on this little evaluation board. Right. And so I was real, real familiar with the instruction set. It was just a matter of refreshing my memory on that stuff. I pulled out the old manuals that I had for my dad's basement on the 1600 instruction set. And, you know, what flags are set by which instruction in order to set up my simulator. So it really wasn't that big of a deal once I found the routines. Now, you know, in 77 or 78 when Williams started with the system three, how were they entering this stuff? I mean, how were they writing programs and stuff? Were they using the assembler? Were they entering it in hacks? Were they using, you know, your evaluation box and right now to get sat? What were they doing? No, it was all, they were using all assembler and they were originally using the Motorola Exerciser development stations. Now, back then when the manufacturers would, would sell you their micro processors, they also had, here's the development system that goes along with it, which includes, you know, keyboard and big 8-inch floppy disk drive and, you know, in a display and, you know, an assembler and that sort of thing. And I've seen the program listings from back then. So they still have the big 8-inch disks and all that stuff there? Well, it's probably not at Williams anymore. It's a Duncan Brown's basement. Interestingly, I haven't seen them, I didn't see them at Williams, but at some point somebody dug up all the stuff from Balli. And Balli had a better archiving system from the very early days than Williams did. They had a file cabinet, had a file for every single game. And in there was the 8-inch floppy, which I presume had all the stuff on it, had no way of reading it, plus a hard copy and printout of the game code. So, you know, there was 1% tar, 1 for 8-ball blocks and one, you know. Were the printouts, the assembler printouts, or just the final, you know, the final hex codes? Oh, it had all the comments in it. Oh, it did. It was so, it was fully okay. It was the assembled version then. Or the unassembled version. And along in there was, you know, the, you know, the lamp matrix and the mappings for all that stuff. And the switch matrix and whatever other notes that you had. Oh, pretty cool. Now who has all that stuff? I don't know. It disappeared after I left. And you didn't make copies of any of that stuff? Uh, no, really. No? No. Yeah, it certainly was really interesting to look at. Oh, yeah, that'd be great. Did it say who wrote the stuff? That's a good question. I don't remember. As I only remember checking a few of them out in the drawer, you know, to pull it out. Wow, this is really neat. Look at this. All right. I don't remember if it had the, you know, at the top, you know, or, you know, whether it was just initials or whatever. We don't really know who programmed that stuff, huh? Yeah. Okay. All right. So that's early 90s. So that's, yeah. So that's early 90s. I had, I modified the firepower ROM. And then a friend of mine who I hooked up with who was way into ballet games convinced me that I should only collect Williams games. So, so he could go over your house and you could go over to his and. Right. Right. And so we're not in competition with each other. All right. But he also had the idea of making free play ROMs for all the ballet games. So I changed my simulator to work with the ballet system as well. And then I went through and made a series of free play ROMs. You did that for the ballet? Yeah. Okay. Because the guy over in Switzerland is on that too. Okay. Yeah. I think my version of the ROMs have ended up in one of these all in one aftermarket CPU boards. All really? Yeah. So maybe the Callahan one or something or all tech one or. I think the all tech one. I think. Did I ask you or just do it? Well, I did it for somebody else. So somebody else who gave it to them. Gotcha. Do you care? No, I don't care. Okay. Just care. Doesn't matter to me. So I also made friends around that time with Jack Simonton who had the Pimbal Trader for a while. Okay. And he came in town in the Chicago for some training seminar. He worked at Apple at the time. And he got Larry DeMar to give him a tour of the factory. And you tagged along? And I tagged along because I had done a couple articles from Pimbal Trader. And he said, oh, he worked for the magazine book. Come along. And so I brought along my disc with my Pimbal simulator. And of course getting a tour of the factory after I finished. Well, you mean on like three and a half inch flop or something? I have an informant. Yeah. Yeah. So I brought along in a brought along. And the high part of the day, I thought was going to be getting a tour of the factory, which is pretty darn exciting after our sort of thing. But also I wanted to show Larry the simulator work that I've been doing. And he couldn't take me upstairs at the time because he was working on a new Pimbal game. And they're very secretive at Williams. So instead, at the time, the Williams video department was still in that same building downstairs. So he took me into Eugene Jarvis' office. Did you know who Eugene was at the time? I knew that Eugene programmed a firepower. I thought that was a temp program. I thought Larry programmed a firepower. No, that's a Eugene game. Really? Okay. And so I put my simulator into Eugene's game. And I popped the thing up. And of course they have to use their imagination because it's just showing you the lights and that sort of thing. But I'm now playing the game. I said, okay, let's put three balls in the trough. Let's put some credits on the game. What do you have to hold keys down for the trough? You put right. Well, I was a talk. You press once for down and you press again for a touch. So I put the balls in, started putting some credits. And you could see the credit counter go on the display. And I said, let's start a game. And then you could see it go out of a track mode and do something else. And so then I was hitting some roll over targets and showing the late-change thing. And everybody was gathering around because they're all working late over there. What's everybody looking at? All looking on my shoulder. I'm like, now this is really cool. Here are all these people who work on... To develop the game. Yeah, to develop the game. Here I have a Eugene Darviss' computer showing him something 10 years after the fact. 11 years after the fact. But it was pretty neat. Do they have a similar development tools system? I would imagine that will marry or those guys would have written something similar so that they could test stuff on their machine without dumping it into the game. No, it's all done. Yeah, because they have a separate module that plugs into the RAM spasor some. Or the ROM space on the CPU board. Right. But then goes through a serial port on your computer or a parallel port or something. That's the key for doing that kind of development. Instead of burning a ROM, maybe time you make a change. And then you have basically what's a ROM simulator. It gets a big RAM chip that you can download rapidly in some way. In the older days, those of the Williams AA double-lead apartment would make them custom. And it would talk over the serial port or the parallel port off of a PC. But nowadays you can buy them off the shelf. Oh, really? Because they have ROM emulators. They're still kind of pricey. But sometimes you can pick them up cheap on eBay if you're really into that sort of thing. Right. You mean, so you can emulate a 27, 4 mag or whatever? Right. Right. Huh. Okay. Interesting. I didn't know that. So that night, they were invited us back to his apartment and bought us pizza. And he told me, why? You should be working with me. And I thought about it for a while. You know, well, you program one pinball game, but then you've done it. Right. How much is there to put actually doing a pinball game? There's, you know, can't be that much more work to do the same thing. Was he insulted when you said that? I would not. You can say it to him. I was just thinking it to myself. You know. It took me a while. I kept thinking about it. And things weren't going so well with my job at AT&T. My division got sold to Memorax Telex. And then eventually Memorax Telex decided to move down to Raleigh. Well, they're based in Raleigh and they were going to shut down our division. And the interesting thing was I was getting more and more, getting sort of a weird vibe at work and getting a little more dissatisfied with the work I was doing there. And the day I decided to go into work and fire up Microsoft Word and put my resume together and send it to Larry just on a whim to see. Was the day they announced that we were going to move to Raleigh, North Carolina. And one-third of you are, you know, we're going to walk you out today. And one-third of you, we're going to pay you for four months to wrap things up. And one-third of you, you can move to Raleigh if you want. What started with you? I was actually one of the ones that offered the relocation down to Raleigh. But I did a bunch of interviewing around here and I looked at the things and the job at Williams was the one that was the most interesting. Did they, Williams paid real money or was it all like, you know, we can get anybody in here to build pimble on machines. We don't need to pay these people. It's interesting because they did take a cutting pad, took a pretty big cut of pay. You did, okay. To go down there. Because I talked to Cameron, I interviewed Cameron. And I kind of, you know, he moved from Australia and it just sounds like they weren't paying him anything to come do this. That he just wanted to do it. They could, you know, he was almost sounded like he was almost paying them, you know? Well, yeah. When Cameron approached me at the time, I was afraid of moving somebody halfway across the world. And then it's pretty sad that they're not working out. Right. And part of the issue there was to sponsor somebody to get the green party. Yeah. Well, it's not even the green card. It's the visa. Yeah, the visa for working. It's a lot of work and a lot of money and just to get him all set up and then to not, you know, not have a file through or whatever. Well, it's not like that. Or walk out. And he basically said, look, this is my dream job. What if I show up on your doorstep? Right. And I said, well, if you were here, yes. If you were already here, I would, I would do. Yes. Exactly what he said. Yeah. I would give you a job. And so I, you know, I did our part of the job, but he paid the attorney to get the visa thing. And it worked out really well as it turns out. Right. It just goes to show sometimes when you look when you look at people's school records and stuff, and they'll always tell you how they're going to do at work. Right. And, and, and, and Williams went on to sponsor his, his green card, too. Right. So then, okay, so then he told Larry to take it. That's why, well, I went interviewed and he was, so you mean it wasn't a for sure then? It wasn't over sure at the time. He really wanted to get me in. Larry was just an engineer back then. In fact, I think he was a contract engineer and we're directly for Williams. And he was in the middle of getting Adam's family out the door. So he was very busy. Right. So it took a, it took a few go rounds to get some of the management who actually was involved in the hiring decision to actually get to hire me. You know, they're looking at me and like, well, hey, we're used to hiring somebody fresh out of school for, for real cheap. Right. You know, opposed to just regular cheap. Right. And, you know, you don't have any experience with coin op. But even though my experience was in embedded real time systems, and I eventually did bring a lot of more order to the development process in terms of, let's document our changes and make sure that we can back up what we've, Larry wasn't doing all that stuff. He was doing it on his own games. It was not done as a role in the whole department. Oh, okay. You know, Larry was a firm believer of source code control and backing things up. Right. A lot of the other stuff was just really nearly. Right. So Larry at the time was not head of anything. He wasn't even a Williams employee. No, he was a contractor. Huh. For all through the 80s, he was too? Well, I don't, you don't have to ask Larry about the history there because I can't really remember. I mean, I don't want to speak out. Right. Interesting. Because he eventually became head of pinball division, right? Right. He became the director. Yeah, the director of engineering. Right. And you became director of the software. I was software manager. Right. Yeah, I was software. After I was there within about a year and a half, I became manager of the software department. Was that because once again, your experience in more structured policies and that, or you know, it just kind of ended up. Yeah, sort of fell out of that. Yeah. Yeah. And, well, and unfortunately, that meant that I didn't have time for doing many games either. Yeah, because you did Twilight's own Red and Ted in demo. And that was about it, right? Right. But I also did Adam's family values, Coindrop game. Wow. That's the novelty. Right. Right. The redemption is in a... It's a redemption game. Yeah, it's a redemption game. Right. It gets better. And the road show, I wasn't the main programmer. Do I... Why? Yeah, I was just back up. Right. I was displaying ground. Display ground? Yeah. Okay. Now, what about on Twilight's own was Larry, the lead programmer. And you were, you know, you were again, you know, or were you the lead programmer? Larry was the lead programmer on that. Larry's all asleep programmer, right? Yeah, I guess so, yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting, too, on that game, which was my first, I was working so hard because I wanted to prove myself. Because, you know, these are all these other people who had a bunch of other games under their belts. And I was just working long hours and through weekends. And when it was all over, Larry said, I was working so hard to keep up with you. And I said, I still wait a minute. I was working so hard to keep up with you. Oh, man, you guys should talk more. Well, you know, that, I mean, the Twilight's own. I mean, did you get to pick that project or was it just a sign to you? It was pretty much a sign to me. Did you see it as a winner right from the get go? When I first got there, I don't think Pat had anything. He was still, you know, he didn't know what his next game was going to be at that point. And it wasn't clear that I was going to be assigned to that project at first. You know, I sort of had an end because, you know, I'd convinced Larry, you know, that I knew what I was doing. And the fun thing was when I first got there, they didn't even have an office for me. I showed up to work and there wasn't a place for me to sit. And I spent the first week there sitting in Pat's office and learning some of the pinball operating system on the Twilight's own in his office, you know, doing the equivalent of Hello World type stuff. Right. So that gave me the opportunity to at least meet Pat and talk to him some more. So the game was well into white war or not Twilight's own Adams family. I'm sorry. Adam's family. No, no. His Adams family that was sitting there. Right. Do you know any neat mods on Adams? The homerom has the bigger font on it. Bigger font. Yeah, the bigger score font. Oh, yeah, yeah. I noticed the score is kind of meager in size and you may have any. Yeah. So the homerom has that was one of the things I did as part of my learning experience ended up as a homerom. Is that entirely your baby? No, I don't know. No, no. Now who did the gold? Mike Booan did that. Okay. Okay. So any of you corporate any of your home features into the home? I think so because I was working on the same code base and then he just split off from wherever that was sitting. So there were a couple of options I added in there too. Like, there's a rule change on one of the adjustments for spotting the thing letters. It's still the fault the way it was in the production game but you can change the rule. I added that in there as a thing. All right. I forget what the rule is now. I think it's. Ball comes in the right return lane and then you flip it into the. That that center ramp to spot the thing letter. Now were there when you were doing this was there anything that you were like looked at and were surprised about? Oh, wow. I would have never thought they did it like that or you know, you know anything in the in the in the code or in the whole process. You know in the you know in the development process that you know. I mean anything that surprised you or you know any interest in well the big surprise for me I guess was that there was so much that goes into a game. And part of that has to do with the stuff that's on the display to the display is a lot of a lot of the work on on the more modern games. Now did you do that where I mean you weren't actually doing the art for the display right? No, I'm no artist. It would look like stick figures if you had me doing the art. All right. So did you ever try that? The best I ever did was late at night where I needed something slightly changed you know because the animation artists go home. You know regular hours it's the programmers that oh really that do the long weird hours you know and I might need you know a few dots. Move around or something like that and you could do that. That's about it. That and I had some background in font design from my work at AT&T. I worked on computer terminals for well what it used to be the teletype division. All right. And so I dabbled in a little bit of like big blocky fonts so that all you're playing you can play it up at the start. Right instead of yeah. And read the instructions and that sort of thing. But no any kind of art worked out not no good at any of that. Well like for instance if you want to font on there how was a how was a font actually done. I mean how is it implemented in that system. I mean I assume that you know you create a character set or something right I mean how does this work? It's just a bit map and there are a bunch of routines that so each letter is bit mapped. Right. Doesn't that take up like I'm guiding my space. It's not that much now because it's not that big of a display. So think about it and the character is not all that big. And what about the intensity levels of the dot so I don't know how many intensity levels were there. Well there's three intensity levels plus off so it only takes two bits per pixel. Gotcha. So. Okay. Now what takes up all the room is all the animations when you're playing on little movies and things. But you never had to do that because the animation guys do. Right. Right. Okay. And then okay so now it's finally so you get on a twilight zone and you and Larry are grinding each other's teeth on the stone. Yeah. You know and I mean when you got all done with that what version number was actually the release version that went out on the street when the game first went in production. Well what we always tried to do at Williams was L1 was the first release. Okay. And P1 is prototype or what is Pme? P means probably the first one that you put on test. Okay. You know when we first started we used to call it bottom of the stairs. We put a game at the bottom of the stairs outside engineering and that would probably be like a PA or a PB version. It barely had any rules in it not much artwork and you know. And then when you first went on test you would jump up to P1 and start keeping it. Test being the restaurant or bar or arcade or whatever you're putting this stuff. Right. Right. And you could probably burn through P versions pretty quickly because you know you're visiting those games every night and you're going home and you're going Oh wow we found a bug or you know or you're dumping a whole lot of artwork in and you're trying to make the game as interesting as possible too. So you can get some earning numbers out of it and so you know if you can get the get more artwork or more rules in it or whatever. And how did Twilight Zone earn on test? I really don't remember that was a long time ago. But I mean were they happy with it? Yeah. They were. Okay. Twilight Zone was still in the good days of good earnings. Right. And the little straw. Yeah Pimole was still strong. Right. So L1 was the revert and was the release. Right. And they eventually ended up at 9X or whatever. Yeah well we changed the numbering system at some point in there. L stands for level because on the original, Larry told me this so I hope I get it right. On the original alpha numeric displays only the top line was the many segment one. The bottom line of the thing was only sub-in segment. Right. Right. The top was alpha numeric and the bottom was numeric. It's system 11. Right. So you couldn't do an R on the board. Or you're going to say you couldn't do an R for Rev. So instead they did an L. Gotcha. And that was left over from those days. Right. It was left over from those days. Okay. So we would do L1 as the first release, you know, as it hit the line. And you tried not to do too many changes after that. Usually when you go to like L2 and L3, it's either for bug fixes or putting the coin in-gen or you're finishing up translations. Right. Not for German or French or whatever that sort of thing. Did you have to do that too, the German and French stuff? The way that we did those was we let the distributors give us the text back. Oh really? Yeah. So you give them the game in English, let them figure it out, then they write everything down, they want to translate it and how they want to translate it. Well, it's where it's more involvement on our part. We would give them a list of the text strings and even describe why this message comes up so that they would know a little bit about the context of this message. And then they would write back, okay, here put this there, put this there. Some of them, we got to know, we could remember what Shoot Left Ramp was in French, for example. So we didn't need to ask them that over and over again. But when you're trying to describe the dead end feature in Twilight Zone, I can remember having a conversation with our French distributor about that. He couldn't understand what a dead end was, what a dead end street was. And finally he goes, oh I came up with the good name for it, Kudusak. And I'm like, oh well, yeah, that's exactly what it is. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. But apparently Kudusak means bottom of the bank. So it was even a joke in French, so it was very proud of that whole thing. So was that what you ended up using? Yeah, well it's called a sack. Even though here that means a completely different thing. Right, right. Interesting. So you had that sort of thing and then you got to fit it back in there. Because sometimes there's a lot more letters in it than it was in English. And then you got to ask him again, well I can't fit this on the screen. You can fit it in 26 letters instead of 32. They tell you how to abbreviate it. So some of those things are iterative. Right. And there was all the space in the rocks for this stuff? Yeah, that kind of thing. Especially with a Doc Matrix game. You know, if you run it out of space you get to take some pictures out. Well, pictures. So the animations instead of having 10 frames it feels down to 8 frames. Yeah, right. Okay, so you could do that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, text and bitmaps for fonts and stuff just don't take up that much room. It was mostly the animations. The animations, yeah. So now, so you do the Twilight Zone. But you still, you've got this Revision. You said L1 was the release, but then you get the 9, whatever. Something changed in the middle as always said. Yeah, well the other thing that happens is that there's a core operating system that's used on the Apple system. Yeah. So you got the actual software operating system that used to compile the whole thing. Right. And that changed, is that what you're saying? Right. And Larry over the years would add features to it. Right. Like hidden both flipper buttons, kills, and a ball sequence that was part of the operating system. No, that's actually game specific. That is. Yeah. But you know, like a coinage mode would be in the operating system or adding support for printers. And I noticed the Tetsides improvement is the progression line that boot up. That was you, wasn't it? No, I don't think so. Really? I think Camer did that one. Oh, really the progression bar? Yeah. Oh, okay. I think that's Camer. I think that one. All right. Yeah. I thought that was you. No, I did logic for broken flipper switches. Also, use the other app though? Yeah. I did that logic. I added that in there. Right. But there were some other things. There were some parts in the real time where I tweaked and optimized a few things to take out a few instruction cycles here and there in order to gain some of the real time processing time back. I don't know. There's all kinds of little changes over time. But the goal was always to make that operating system backwards compatible. All right. And in order to test that, Larry would always crank out versions of like fun house and Twilight Zone and World Cup and take them all home and put them in his game. And I tried demolition man and that's right. You're games. Right. I tried my games and we tried them all out and go, okay, seems like we've got it backwards, compatible, do it pretty well. It's our regression test. So that's part of the reason why some of those games kept incrementing in Rev number. So even though there was no game specific fix, they might have picked up new features on it. From this, yeah. The operating system. Right. Like I know one feature Larry added was when he changes setting, remember the older version and since then goes, Bong, Bong, Bong, and you've got to parts to start by. You can do those starts button and then just speed up the saving of it. The idea of the Bong, Bong, Bong is to give you a chance to cancel the save. Right. And he's like, well, what if I don't want to cancel? I know I want to save it. Okay. So there were some other things like that that were added in. So that was part of the reason why Twilight Zone had so many... Had a jump in numbers. Had so many jumps in numbers. It went, you know, one, two, three. Sometimes there were revs that were internal and we never released them. Because we were bumping the revision number just to test the operating system, you know, changes that we got. And in some cases, there might have been game specific fixes in there. Just, you know, oh, I noticed this display glitch and I fixed it. You know, these sorts of things. Now what about the magnet throw thing in Twilight Zone? You know, was that your idea? Was that a pass idea? No, that was actually Larry's idea and he implemented the code. But you're saying that it never really worked right or something, right? It didn't work in Twilight Zone because the optos and the magnets were too close together. Well, it's not even that. It's not even that problem. Problem was that they were not in alignment. It's because the magnets were screwed to the bottom of the playfield and the optos were screwed to the top and based on manufacturing differences, they would move around. Really? Yeah. By how much? Well, it doesn't take very much because all you're doing in order to fling the ball is turning the magnet off for a few milliseconds. The ball fall back. Fall back and then you pulse it for a few milliseconds. And then slide it back up. Right. And then you don't move the momentum and then let it go. And it goes around. So like on Shadow, you're saying that that was all one assembly. The magnet and the optos were in one metal mechanical assembly from the bottom of the playfield so it was easier to compensate for any. Right. So if you look at Shadow, that mechanism bolts right through the playfield and it's all one piece. So if the optos shift, so does the magnet, vice versa. So there are always an alignment and you've got the alignment just right. Larry got the toss in working on one game in his office. But then it wouldn't work on the game in my office. And then we try to tweak it some more to get it working on my game and then it wouldn't work on the one in his office. So we just disabled the code. But you have that version of here at home, right? Yes. And be like it. It's okay. It's interesting to watch. I turned it on in a few places, probably more than it needs to be just so that people can see it happen. Right. It's enough that it actually gets in the way. Like why did the ball do that? I forget which rules I added on there, but shooting spirals on a spiral award, it actually throws the ball back at you after it catches ball. Instead of dropping it down, it throws it back the way it came from. The nifty part about it is when it does the beginning of multiple, it loads all three balls on the three magnets if you've got the three magnets in place. And depending on where the balls come from, if it's kicking them out of the lockup, it has to use the ball tossing code in order to get them up and around onto all three magnets. No, not on nine four. You use the three, you can use if your three magnets are installed, it'll do that similarly, lock each one. Right. But it doesn't, in order for that to actually work, doesn't the power ball have to cycle through the gumball machine or something before that I'll actually turn on. Right, I have to know where the where the where the power ball is before. And so that's the way you so it's so if you know, yeah, okay. So once you turn the game off, you have to turn it, you turn the game back on, the power ball has to cycle through the gumball machine before that option will turn on. Yeah, okay. Yeah, and the nine dot four code that's regularly released, it will only do the ball catching code if it if it most one ball is in the lockup because it can't one ball in the lockup or in the for the beginning of multiple. Okay, right. And I'm hoping I'm remembering right again, that was many years ago because I can't get if there's too many balls in the lockup, I can't get them on all the magnets. I need to be able to use them off the auto fire plunger. Right, right. But I also want to know where the power ball is because I can't catch that ball. Right. And I didn't want it flinging around. Well, well, yeah, hit on the other stop and knock it off the magnet. Right. Well, all this other choreography is going on and I didn't add any new logic. I just used an existing routine that tracked the white ball that it actually had seen it once and now it knew that it was in right in the in the gumball machine, but it doesn't save it to stay across power cycle. Gotcha. Well, so that's why it's not like that. Okay. So, you were brought on like when you did nine four and then you did the home, you were originally going to do something past that too, weren't you? And then that fiasco with the preplay thing came kind of set everything on hand, right? Well, the nine dot four, which is a strict home version, strict free play version. Right. And four H, right, which is strictly free play and strictly home version. And I was going to put out a non free play version of that, but it wouldn't have had, I don't think that's it. Well, you wouldn't have the thing where you press the button and answer the phone. Right. That holds the ball in the upflip position. Right. Right. There were a couple other things that it wouldn't have had. I don't remember what. But that was, it had a few minor bug fixes and that sort of thing, but it was going to be the last release. And I just never got around to releasing it because I was just, you know, somebody disabled the free play code on there and it just bothered me that people were messing around with it like that. Games under development, we turn free play on by default just so that a released version of, an unreleased version of code wouldn't get out in the field. Right. But at some point, while I was manager of the software department, I instituted the Ryan Policky that all the homeroms had to be free play only also. Right. Because you don't want those out there collecting money. Well, it wasn't the collecting money that was really the problem in the public eye. And the biggest problem was the service issue. Somebody calls up to the service department says, I'm having problems with this game and it's acting funny. Right. And they go, well, what version of ROM are you using? And they go, oh, I'm using, you know, version five. And the service person is looking down at them. The last one I see is us officially releasing this form. Where did you get this five from? Right. You know, it meant that we weren't making very many friends in the service department when that sort of thing was happening. So we wanted to keep anything like that, anything that wasn't officially released, is free play only, just so that it wasn't a service problem. And our service guys have enough problems with real issues. Right. Yeah, much less, you know, something like that. Right. In 93 after you did what Red and Ted, then you went to department head of software, right? Now I was department head probably by about the end of Twilight Zone, I think. Man, you move fast. Yeah. So see, we'll buy all the other software guys. Left them in the dark. Yeah, well, now you're never going to get any interviews with them. And I, no, because by the time I was working on Demolition Man, which was my next game, I was a manager of the department. And I squeezed Adam Stanley values in there in between Twilight Zone and Demolition Man. So was Demolition Man, was that a fun game? It was an interesting game to work on. I've only really worked with two head designers, Pat and Dennis. And it's interesting to work with the different designers because they have different styles of game design. And some have more of an overall vision and very specific things that they want the game to do. And others are more of a, okay, I'm going to paint this canvas for a game. And then I'm looking for input from a lot of people to actually fill in all the pieces on the canvas. And I, Pat's more in the first camp and Dennis's more in the second camp on that. So you've got to flexure artistic muscles and game rules and whatever. And I would say that I'm not very good at it either. Oh really? Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm looking like I'm going to have better. It has its pluses of minds in both ways. Well, if somebody gives me a completely blank canvas, you know, it's, it's, it's a, a little tough. And it, it's an interesting experience too because on, on Demolition Man, I got input, a lot of them put from Doug Watson, who was the, the artist on that game. And he's a, he's a pretty good pinball player too. And he and I went through lots and lots of rules that really sucked. Or I would, where I would mock them up and we'd get them on there and we would play them and we'd be like, well, this is terrible, you know, and that's one of the things that, I never realized about working on a pinball game until I was at Williams that, yeah, if you know the answer, like if you look at a game, it might not take you all that long to, to exactly copy this, this game that already exists. But to create a new one, you throw away two thirds of, of what you're, what you've worked on in terms of rules and stuff. Right. You know, oh, this, this was no fun and that was no fun. You know, Twilight Zone had a bunch of early rules, like the multiball and jackpot rules were really wacky and, and almost impossible to do. And there were something like that on demolition, man, as well. Now the demolition and the fabled demolition home, who's brainchild was that? Well we wanted to do that from the beginning because there were, you know, there were quotes from the movie that were, you know, as an arm-rated movie. Yeah, classic quotes that you couldn't use otherwise. Right. And so when Lyman Sheets started at Williams, I gave him the assignment of doing the home rom for demolition, man, as his way of getting up to speed. Now he had background from, well, Dany East Sega by the time. Right. So, but just to get him familiar with whatever our operating system looked like, the development. Yeah, it was good. Exercise for two birds, one stump. Right. So he went through and he familiarized himself with the rules and who digitized all the voice calls. I mean, you know, obviously that you, you had custom speech for that game from the actors. Right. So obviously you didn't, that you had to steal these from the movie. Right. So you were lifted from the movie and I think in general we get that stuff from the studios. You did all really? Yeah. Or if you, you know, if the movie is already out, you know, you can lift it off of there. So did somebody have to do that or did he just use, you know, whatever the package contained? I don't really recall. John Hay was the sound engineer on that. He gave me a set of roms. Oh, okay. And while he was doing it, he pushed it from six roms into seven. And he said, well, it's on, it's going to go to seven. And it's only for home roms. Why don't I go to eight? And he turned down the compression on all the music. Hmm. To, you know, because, you know, when it's at home and maybe it's the only game that's on, you might actually notice a difference. I can't hear the difference. You can't. Okay. I don't know. I've never really done an A, B. I have. I couldn't notice. Okay. You know. So that's why I take roms. There's probably more in those roms than what was actually used. John just went through and dumped a whole bunch of stuff in. Lyman did a critical assessment in terms of, you know, where would these speech calls actually go? Instead of just dumping them all over the place. Right. And then, and then he went ahead and did the, you know, we, you know, we made copies for everybody on the design team. Did, what about the actors? Did they get that version too? No. No. No. In fact, I don't, no, we didn't make a special, we didn't make a special version for the actors. Because you've done that before, right? That was done for, um, Star Trek. But I don't, I don't believe we did that for any other game in terms of special software. Right. Is that what the Star Trek home thing is all about? Is it, that's for actually the people on the, because that one's sneaked out too. Well, yeah, well, there's sooner than the demo, man. Yeah. There's something like seven or eight versions of home round for Star Trek. Really? Yeah. One for each of the actors because each one got a different one. I've got a different one. So what's the one that's sneaked out? Well, that one has everything in it. Oh, okay. Okay. All right. Okay. So you would give, you know, okay, yeah, that makes sense. That's interesting. So the demo man swear thing. I mean, what was the theory behind keeping that under wraps for kind of, it was just this year when that finally snuck out and thanks to really Mike Wiley was the impetus behind that whole thing, whether we liked it or not. You know, he had a copy and put it for sale on eBay and then that kind of sky, your wheels turned in, right? No? No comment. No comment? Okay. Man. Home. Unfortunately, no matter what I say, no one will be happy with my explanation and somebody will pick it apart. All right. So, yeah, you know, that's smart? No. So, let's just suffice it to say that, you know, whatever the reason was back then, it doesn't apply now. Right. So, you're okay that they're out now? Oh, yeah. No, it's not a problem. Yeah, and in fact, I had intended to let it go a while ago and I just got busy and lazy. So, you're not pissed at Wiley then? No. No. No, my only thing is I feel bad for anybody who might have paid a premium for it. Yeah, I think what he did, he was trying to sell a game, just a regular demo man, which usually sells for $1500 and he got $20000 for it with the home run. So, somebody paid $500 for that privilege. And then somebody else started selling the ROMs separately on eBay and I think that was what finally, that was the straw that just broke the camel's back. Well, I actually tried to get the ROMs posted on the Pimbo database while that option was still. Yeah, they take forever to react to stuff. Yeah, they're slow. I should have done it long before then. I kept meaning to and then I would forget. Right. So, no. It's not on the priority list. It's pretty low. Yeah. So, now, what about flipper codes? What about them? There's a tad flipper code. And is anybody else, I mean, and then I heard the game assumes a different personality. As far as I know, that's never been. Or which game? Demo man. Oh, the home demo. The home demo. Okay. Now, there aren't any specific flipper codes for demolition, man. That make it change speech or hello tad or, you know, it's alone yelling at tad or, you know, or center of bullets, grabbing tad's butt. None of that. None of that. If you do your due diligence and take a look at the difference between the home five ROM and the home six ROM that's posted on the Pimbal database, you'll see the adjustment in there. See the adjustment. There's an adjustment for which team member the game is. Oh, so you mean five was for one team and six was for six. Six removes the adjustment. Oh. So, it's five better than half? Well, some people might think so. I think it's really stupid personally. Okay. I didn't want, in fact, that's why I made six because I took the adjustment out. So really, the version you want to release to the public was six now. Yeah, five. Right. But five got out somehow. Well, somebody bought some team members game. Oh. And then that kind of let the cat out of the bag. Yeah. Because I've only ever seen six. Yeah. I never, I didn't even know five existed home. Now, were you mad about that one? No. No, it doesn't matter. It's all a little point. Okay. Okay, we're going to take a break talking with Ted Estes of all the Pimbal programming department at Williams Valley. The Pimgame Journal is a proud sponsor of Topcast. It covers Pimbal like no other publication can. The Pimgame Journal is America's only Pimbal publication. Whether you're looking for new games or the classics, reports on industry shows or collector expos, insights on a game you want or features to help you fix the game you've got, Pimgame Journals for you. Their website is at PimgameJournal.com. Okay, we're back with Ted Estes of the Williams Valley programming department. Okay. So now in 93, you're basically not doing game software anymore, but you're headed the department. So from 93 to 99, what's going on? What do you... Well, I still did... See, Twilight Zone came out in spring of 93. Right. And Demolishaman was spring of 94. And Roadshow was that spring of 95? No, it was early in that. It must have been fall of 94 then. Yeah. Fall of 94. So that was the last game I've worked on. Was Red and Ted. Did you like that one? It was okay. There's some stuff that I wish we could have done better. There was a... Well... Now, why didn't you go nuts with, you know... You know, you went nuts with Twilight Zone. You went nuts with Demolishaman. But then you kind of backed off on the Red and Ted? It's very difficult to manage the software department and be in development. It's possible. You know, when you're doing game development, there really is a crutch mode of about four months where you're working 70-hour weeks. And, you know, you can't get anything else done. Right. And I even had a futon in my office during Roadshow. And spent many nights, you know, sleeping in my office. That must be good for the panel. Yeah. Well, I didn't have kids then.