Journalist Tool

Kineticist

  • HDashboard
  • IItems
  • ↓Ingest
  • SSources
  • KBeats
  • BBriefs
  • RIntel
  • QSearch
  • NName Review
  • +Health

v0.1.0

← Back to items

Dick Hamill - Recoding Vintage Williams Games

Pintastic New England·video·50m 30s·analyzed·Feb 2, 2026
View original
Export .md

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.027

TL;DR

Dick Hamill presents custom Black Knight recoding with new modes, progressive rules, and modernized operator menus.

Summary

Dick Hamill demonstrates his custom recoding of Steve Ritchie's Black Knight pinball machine, featuring an interposer board with Arduino microcontroller that allows toggling between original code and his redesigned version with new combat modes, King's Challenges, progressive difficulty settings, addressable LEDs, and modernized operator menus. The presentation showcases gameplay mechanics, rule innovations, and technical implementation details while discussing design philosophy around difficulty balancing and accessibility.

Key Claims

  • Dick Hamill's recoded Black Knight uses an interposer board with Arduino microcontroller plugged into the original MPU

    high confidence · Technical description of hardware implementation during live demonstration

  • All of Dick Hamill's code is published on GitHub under GPL3 license and free to use

    high confidence · Direct statement: 'all of my code is published on GitHub. It's all GPL3, so you can use it'

  • The machine can boot original Steve Ritchie code by holding credit reset button, or custom code without it

    high confidence · Demonstrated feature: 'You can reboot this with the credit reset button held down, and it will boot the original Steve Ritchie code'

  • Ball save length and grace periods are more important to perceived difficulty than playfield design

    medium confidence · Ryan McQuaid's assessment: 'the settings are probably even more important' than playfield design for difficulty

  • Progressive preset rules allow different players in multiplayer to have different difficulty levels (easy/medium/hard)

    high confidence · Feature demonstration: 'Progressive presets means, Matt Scott, you're going first. Rules adjustment... Player one in progressive rules is going to be easy. Easy mode. Player two is going to be hard mode'

Notable Quotes

  • “Everything I do is free and open source. I have a website, Pinball Refresh, where I post all the schematics, all of the Gerber files, so you can create your own board set. And all of my code is published on GitHub. It's all GPL3, so you can use it.”

    Dick Hamill@ 1:20 — Core philosophy: open-source approach to pinball recoding and community contribution

  • “You can reboot this with the credit reset button held down, and it will boot the original Steve Ritchie code on original Steve Ritchie chips, everything original. But if you reboot it without the credit reset button, you get this version.”

    Dick Hamill@ 2:20 — Key technical feature allowing seamless switching between original and custom code

  • “the settings are probably even more important [than playfield design]. Like, because there is all kinds of stuff you can do in settings to make a game easier or harder.”

    Ryan McQuaid@ 35:28 — Design insight about how software settings impact perceived difficulty and accessibility

  • “I was trying to faithfully reproduce the operator menus from Valley and Stern and Harry Williams. And then it finally occurred to me last year, I was like, you know, everybody else is doing better operator menus. Why am I doing the old kind? So that's why I decided to make them so that they don't interrupt gameplay.”

    Dick Hamill@ 16:14 — Design evolution: modernizing UX conventions without interrupting gameplay

  • “The tilt warning timer came from watching tournaments where people would put their phone on the glass and I was like, well, it's a pinball machine, we can do that.”

    Dick Hamill@ 30:55 — Community-responsive innovation: addressing practical tournament needs through software

Entities

Dick HamillpersonRyan McQuaidpersonSteve RitchiepersonPintastic New EnglandorganizationBlack KnightgameCasey Dick WhitepersonChippersonPinball RefreshproductGitHuborganization

Signals

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Progressive difficulty presets enabling multi-player games with different rule sets per player as handicap system

    high · Feature demonstration: 'Progressive presets... Player one in progressive rules is going to be easy. Easy mode. Player two is going to be hard mode'

  • ?

    community_signal: Open-source approach to pinball recoding with free distribution of schematics, Gerber files, and GPL3 code; community-responsive feature development

    high · Hamill: 'Everything I do is free and open source' with published resources on Pinball Refresh and GitHub. Tilt timer feature created in response to tournament observation

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Rules/software settings have greater impact on perceived difficulty than playfield design; modern operator menus should not interrupt gameplay

    high · Ryan McQuaid: 'settings are probably even more important' than playfield design. Hamill: decided to modernize menus because 'everybody else is doing better operator menus'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Custom addressable LED integration on playfield ramps and topper; operator menu overhaul to avoid gameplay interruption

    high · LED strips on ramps controlled by game code for color-coding during modes; operator menu accessible without stopping gameplay (unlike original implementations)

  • ?

    technology_signal: Dick Hamill's interposer board architecture using Arduino provides accessible alternative to traditional pinball control systems, enabling hobbyist recoding of WPC-era machines

    high · Hardware demonstration: 'board plugged into the original MPU of this machine and then an Arduino plugged into that. So it's one of the cheapest microprocessors you can get out there'

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.151

0:00
Good morning everybody. Good morning. The topic of recoding game software is likely to generate a lot of questions. I know the last time we had Dick here, he did that. And to kind of co-comment with him about this new game design being revealed here for the first time, we have Ryan McQuaid, who of course is well known here as a graduate of our School of Homebrew Gaming. When you have questions, we ask that you use the microphone on the side. That will help us record both the question and the answer for the future edification of more homebrew game designers. So now I'll turn it over to Dick Hamill to introduce what he did to Steve Ritchie's Black Knight game.
0:55
What did you do? So first, thanks so much to Ryan for being the player on the game so we can get a demo. When I talk about these machines, I can show you a video and we can talk about rules, but nothing hits as hard as seeing it in person. So that's why I wanted to bring a machine here. And Chip brings me these machines. I reprogram them just for fun.
1:16
Just a quick preamble. Everything I do is free and open source. I've got a website, Pinball Refresh, where I post all the schematics, all of the Gerber files, so you can create your own board set.
1:29
And all of my code is published on GitHub. It's all GPL3, so you can use it. You can even, you know, people are out there selling board sets for people who want plug-and-play. So it's all, you know, Wild West. Do whatever you want. I only do this stuff because I enjoy doing it, and I want, you know, to kind of spread around. and nothing tickles me more than to get somebody else's code written against my board sets and then plug them in. That's what I'm here for. And I wanted to show you this Black Knight in person so everybody could kind of get a sense of it. So this is from the ground rewrite with what's called an interposer board. So there's a board plugged into the original MPU of this machine and then an Arduino plugged into that. So it's one of the cheapest microprocessors you can get out there that's plugged into it. that just takes over the bus and plays it in custom. You can reboot this with the credit reset button held in, and it will boot to the original Steve Ritchie code on original Steve Ritchie chips, everything original. But if you reboot it without the credit reset button, you get this version. I've added a couple things to it. There's speakers, there's a wave trigger card to do digital sounds and music, and modes and combat modes and combos and all kinds of stuff that we're going to show you right now. Go ahead, start a game. Wait, we're just diving right into this. Let's dive right in. All right, cool. So we're gonna start with the demo, because that's the fun part. And then we'll do questions and we can talk about hardware after. And so let's dive in, let's look at code. All right.

  • “all the music on this game is by Casey Dick White of Dick White Bat Audio. Casey publishes music to YouTube copyright free as long as you credit Casey”

    Dick Hamill@ 20:17 — Open-source music licensing integration for hobbyist projects

    • Mod Coupleorganization
    Dick White Bat Audioorganization
    3:03
    Let's dive right in. I am Ryan McQuaid and I have read the pen tips for Black Knight. So that makes me super qualified to be here, but I am glad to be here, so thank you for asking me. Yeah, thanks for coming. So you're going to watch me miss a bunch of shots for about 40 minutes. That's the show. That's what we're doing. So check out the skill shot on the upper left drop target. You'll see the top blue arrow is flashing. Do you see it? Oh, yeah, right up there. So there's your skill shot.
    3:31
    This is definitely going to happen on the first try. Oh! But I hit the pop first. It doesn't count, does it? Pop is okay. I think one of the other side drop targets is what knocked out the skill shot. So the goal right now is to collect coins, which he just did by finishing one of the drop target banks. And we know that he's collected coins because the arrows are flashing on the little turnaround shot. When you hit that, that opens the portcullis and also happened to go down the left end lane which started a combo. So he has the opportunity to start single combat. Hit those magnet buttons. This is single combat. So any target bank now is going to qualify death bug. The crowd doesn't like that when you go back in the lot.
    4:21
    This is a combat mode. There are three different combat modes and broken into four parts. So he's finished a target bank, which is enough to qualify single combat.
    4:33
    So now, Ryan, you're going to want to try to hit the lower saucer. Blinking one right there. This is why he's playing the game. Because that would have taken me the whole hour. This will not last. I would have taken out four times before getting that. Okay, so we finished single combat part one, and this brings in, now he's got a jackpot value. So you could qualify three locks and go right to triple combat if you wanted to, but you'd have almost no jackpot when you went into triple combat. The goal is to build your jackpot through the lower combat modes. If we can, what I'd like to do now is talk about the King's Challenges. And the King's Challenge is qualified by finishing any drop target bank three times in a row. Or not in a row, but three times total.
    5:28
    You'll see on the arrows here. Is that going to include the uppers? Ryan, yeah. So you've got one upper. So I've got one on the top right. Yeah. All right, let's try to go for that one. If you can go back up top. Or die immediately. There we go. There's a more typical experience in my play. It's all good. It's on free play. Skill shot in the middle. Skill shot again. Nope. Hang on. Try to be fancy. Did not work. Oh wait, that's a ball saver. I can try again. Actually, you haven't qualified plate build yet, so you're still good. Okay, so there's two. One more and you qualify. King's Challenge. Thank you for that rebound That was just polite So the lit back is the upper left right now See those two flashing arrows? Every time you hit a King's Challenge target You're going to hear an anvil sound And this is adding to his King's Challenge jackpot right now So King's Challenge also comes with double playfield scoring And it takes 30 seconds You're going to see a timer pop up and then King's Challenge is over. He won 60k and this
    6:45
    playfield is going to go back to regular now. So the thing about King's Challenge is that you can stack those with your combat mode. So if you have two King's Challenges, now you've got triple playfield and you can stack that with your combat mode and then all of a sudden you've got triple playfield on all your jackpots, etc. So let's go for another combat mode, you want to take that single... Actually, if you can, lock a ball and let's not take the combat mode this time.
    7:15
    Let's just let it die and get up there for free. Big brain moves. So you can loop around to get that locked. Perfect. So don't hit any buttons.
    7:28
    It gives you seven seconds to choose it or not. Zero, one, and then locks the ball. So now we go through the process again. We want to plunge, finish, drop target bank, do the loop turnaround. Actually, you've already got loop turnaround qualified, so you can just go ahead and do that.
    7:55
    Nope. Oh, magnet! Ah, I whipped it back in there. So a big difference with the magnet is I didn't do the five-second magnet on like Black Knight had originally. Later they did games like Pharaoh and Jungle Lord where it was intermittent. So I did that. So you could build up to five seconds of magnet save by completing drop target banks, and then you can feather that magnet and use it just like a fancy electronic nudge. And you may remember the magnet on Black Knight is so powerful that you can almost dig it right out of the switch area. It's got some serious juice to it. So we got a lock qualified. So go ahead and lock that if you can. There it is. So we're going to defer single combat again and try to get to double combat this time. In the game it's called... Hope it's out here. Okay, never mind. I did nothing and locked the ball. You did. got coins you can do the portcullis which is the turnaround.
    9:14
    Perfect, absolutely perfect. So that lock will carry over into future balls so after you get your coins and you qualify a lock, that sticks with you. Oh and the tilt is generous, so feel free. Who shouldn't have told me that? You're going to regret those words. The chip put the legs on pretty tight, so I think it's safe.
    9:53
    Nice. Go ahead and take this one. So double combat is a different... It said build a jackpot with targets maybe. So this is a two ball multi ball. It's going to be an upper and lower drop to qualify jackpots. The difference here is no ball saves. Oh, good.
    10:15
    And it's over. No, it's not over because you have a grace period. You still have 24 seconds left in your grace period. So if you finish a lower drop, now your jackpots are ready on the upper lock.
    10:31
    You got 10 seconds. Oh, come on. So there's your 10-second warning, and then you get a countdown. No Oh, last second Ah I have failed you I am sorry, my king That was super close, though And you showed the Oh, so The topper is Something I put I was redoing my kitchen So I put that together From some scrap supply It makes a good place To house the speakers And I also threw some lights in there.
    11:09
    There's some accessory LEDs. Nice magnet hit. The accessory LEDs are all controlled by the game code. You'll see that during the combat modes, they're all color-coded.
    11:25
    Excellent. Here's another King's Challenge. So I would stay away from the saucer and upper lock if you can, and let's qualify another lock and bring a King's Challenge into a combat mode. Alright, so I need a drop set plus a turnaround? You got a turnaround lit right now, so just pick that.
    11:44
    Just meander through that. That was perfect. So, Ryan, you've also got... There you go. Yeah, that was intentional. Intentional.
    12:00
    Hit only the left... Alright, it's upper left bank. Yep, upper left, exactly. Oh, come on. And if you manage to get into the lock right now, you can bring this king challenge into your single combat. Oh, yeah, let's try that.
    12:16
    Oh, ten seconds. Ah! I found that the timers make me at least 50% worth hitting shots, you know, as soon as that timer starts going off.
    12:28
    Super skill. Cool. Nice job. And I back down here But I have a ball save Give it to me Yes tons of ball saves So I got the ball saves turned up All the rules are like individually modifiable There's tons of different settings in the operator menus now. And I've also got them broken out into sets of, like, easy, medium, hard. But you can customize after that. So that's what I did today. I put them on medium rules, but I turned up some of the ball saves so that we could see more of the game. No offense.
    13:02
    Let's keep going. Let's see if we can get the triple. So we're just going to defer this. You see single combat is represented by purple light.
    13:11
    But we're going to keep going. So you plunge again and let's get that turnaround for a qualified second lock.
    13:19
    We're on ball three though. I'm on ball three. Don't die. We're up to do it all over again. Turn that up to a nice magnet. I like your magnet saves. Yeah, I mean, I had very little to do with it, aside from letting the button use... I don't know if that was something that they intentionally changed in Williams from... So let's defer this, just, yeah, wait it out. So that combat adieu is yellow. And then we're going to do it one more time if we can. You know what? Trap up when you get a sec.
    13:59
    Nope. Did I jinx you? Okay. Let's see if we can show something fancy. You guys may remember that... Because none of this is fancy enough. You guys may remember that in Williams, as soon as you hit your operator menu, that's the end of that game. I don't even know how this key works. Last time this happened to me, it was Joe Lemire and he slam-tilted it. Oh, that's dead with the plan.
    14:32
    Tip, is this your car key? I haven't seen him yet. All right. I haven't tried it on this machine, so let's see if this works. Operator menu. Press start button to return to game. Test menu. Audits menu. Basic adjustments. So we're going to do basic adjustments. Free play. Ball save seconds. Tilt warnings. Music volume. Sound effects for call outs volume. Balls per game. Awesome. So let's do this.
    15:00
    Let's see as much of the game as we can. I'm going to need you to say extra ball seven times, please, as a group.
    15:08
    Rules, preset groups. There's the rules, preset groups. Rules adjustments. And then here's all the different rules adjustments I have. Drop target, reset. Single signal. Double combat required. Operator menu. Press start button to restart the game. Or operator button. So we're back in the game. We do lose the background music right now. That's a bug I've got to fix. Unacceptable. Unacceptable. As soon as we do something, you know, that starts a new mode or whatever, we'll get the background music back. But we're gonna have sound effects. So now we got tons of balls to work through. Where are we at? You've got two locks engaged. You need another drop target set to qualify your turn around. And then we can get the third lock. What could go wrong?
    16:01
    Oh, come on. And it reset. Of course. You know what? So for the first few games that I reprogrammed, actually until very recently, I was trying to faithfully reproduce the operator menus from Valley Stern Williams. And then it finally occurred to me last year, I was like, you know, everybody else is doing better operator menus. Why am I doing the old kind? So that's why I decided to make them so that they don't interrupt gameplay. You can go change stuff on the fly.
    16:37
    And it was just an adjustment of my thinking of how to do it. For this game, I used the magnet buttons to... There we go. Yep. Going the wrong way is death. So hopefully this...
    16:50
    It's all four. Yeah. Lock's still lit. Skill shot a little lower. Whoa! I hit the glass. Well, that was fun.
    17:03
    Oh, wait, no. Easy mode. Just die. Yeah. Why not? Ball save abuse is fun. So, if you can, before you go in there, see if you can hit drop targets and get a King's Challenge qualified, because we could bring that in, and then you could at least double your jackpot. Actually, you got a decent jackpot value already, I think.
    17:32
    The music is back, and therefore so is my power. Okay, so one more. You don't need to do the turnaround, because you've already got your lock qualified. I'm not down here on purpose. I'm just bad.
    17:47
    Come on. Fuck. That's right. We've got ten balls to work with. What if it's not enough? See, that's untrue. Ah, blue it. So here's triple combat. Love the blue. So any target bank is going to start the jackpots. And the thing with triple combat is jackpots are everything for a jackpot. So you've got spinner, turnaround, Jackpot! Jackpot! Jackpot! And now we're in grace period. We've got ten seconds.
    18:33
    Nope. Ah, you got two seconds. Okay, so before you plunge this time, hit one of the magnet buttons. Current jackpot. In the player display you'll see a flickering number. That's the current jackpot. That's what he's built up to right now. Four hundred and twenty. Yeah. So if you finish the single combat, you get 100k jackpot. If you finish the double, you get 125. But you get bonuses along the way, like drop targets will add to your jackpot during the combat mode. Single, you only get the jackpot increase at the end of the mode. But with double, just by starting it, you're going to get the jackpot increase. So it really makes sense to have started with a single or a double before you go into triple. Because when you go into triple, if you hadn't done anything before that, your jackpots are 25k. It's almost nothing. but now he's bringing, if you were to go back into triple, it seems reasonable on ball six. Yeah, why not? If you go back into triple, now you're at half a mil per jackpot. So strategy is everything. Risk reward is everything. If you play your cards right, you can build up a really good score, but it requires a certain amount of forethought and risking everything for another ball lock.
    19:47
    Still a black knight. You've demonstrated no skill. Oh, I got it. Okay. So I should mention all the music on this game is by Casey White of White Bat Audio. Casey publishes music to YouTube copyright free as long as you credit Casey whenever you, you know, because I don't sell anything, so I always credit Casey. But I'm not, you know, doing this for commercial reasons. But this awesome music that you're hearing is all, you know, copyright free and open source in a way as well. and kudos to that because I've probably heard these songs maybe more than any other human on the planet because I mean I literally woke up hearing this in my sleep last night I just yeah I'm not going to talk about that so we have one lock done no dead bounce you got king's challenge ready is that true maybe I have one lock and I think if I finish that drop up there, I'll get a challenge. You've got one ready. So you see how the green light's up top? Yep.
    21:24
    And that's solid. So that means one lock plus a King's Challenge ready. The other way you can tell is on the topper you see an orange glow. That's a King's Challenge ready. So any saucer or upper lock right now is going to start a King's Challenge. King's Challenge one. Joust. When the play field is calm, hit the center target. So this one, it says when the playfield's calm, hit a center target. So the center target's only lit for reward after you trap up for five seconds, or hit no switches for five seconds. So then you'll see the center target flash, and if it's already down, it's already down. So you might have to, oh, you only got ten seconds. But anyway, each center target he hits now is worth 50k of King's Challenge. So there's one.
    22:07
    And that's the end of the period. He got the payout into his score. and then the playfield multiplier goes away. So again, King's Challenge is you can stack. So there's four King's Challenges on the board. Upper right is Perfection, upper left is Joust, lower right is Melee, and lower left is Levitate. If you can, try to finish this lower left, drop target back three times to get that King's Challenge qualified. Or we can defer it to next game, we're on Ball 9. Either way, that's kind of a tricky drop target bank to shoot for intentionally. Sometimes you bank it off the lower right, you know, go into it. That's a good shot. You know, I'm talking at my skill level. I think you got it covered.
    23:01
    You know, the lean on the machine right now is actually helping that saucer kick out. It is helping. The left lean is definitely helping. That saucer kick out on a flat floor is challenging.
    23:14
    There's some high quality magnet action right there. So you'll hear that little distorted sound every time the magnet goes off. And that lets you know that you're using the magnet safe. So the game also has on the playfield two little 10 inch playfield rails that you may see reflected. and those are addressable LEDs as well, so they also do game code stuff. During the warm-ups for combat modes, you'll see them change different colors, and when Ryan uses the MagnaSafe, they'll flash purple. So it almost looks like the GI is flashing a little bit.
    23:54
    Perfect. So either saucer or upper lock, whatever you're comfortable with. This King's Challenge is called Levitate.
    24:05
    Uh, upper lock would be fine. It would be fine. No pressure. Get a mylar. Should I go for the bong? Yeah. So, this King's Challenge Levitate is just the lower left bank, and you hear that fuzzy sound that's the game pulsing the magnet on the lower left so that every time he's hitting the lower left bank he's risking getting the ball ripped down the out lane by the magnet Actually it helped him that time I think There you survived Perfect You got a combat mode ready up top Okay, so the spinner, if you rip the spinner 25 times, you qualify your 2x bonus multiplier, but you have to collect it on the saucer. So you can't get 3x until he gets 2x, etc.
    25:39
    Another King's Challenge. Every time you hear a Latin like that, it's a combo. There's, I think, nine named combos in the game.
    25:54
    So if you go lock again, you can bring that King's Challenge into your combat mode. Oh, geez. Let's go ahead and do it. come back. Awesome.
    26:33
    Each target qualified jackpot. So this is, again, this is any drop target, or I'm sorry, this is upper and lower. Qualifies your jackpot on the turnaround.
    26:47
    Return to fight. Lock them back up. One more for fun. So as soon as the drop targets You're done upstairs, right? Yeah So the drop targets stay down in these combat modes So if you get a lower bank Then you'll qualify your jackpots up top Okay And as long as you keep in two ball multi-ball You can keep qualifying And getting jackpots again and again One more drop maybe All right.
    27:34
    Perfect. So now jackpot's ready on the upper turnaround. Oh, right, that flipper's up. Oh, come on. Okay, we've got grace period, though. Jackpot's still ready.
    28:14
    Nope. Getting back up is not my strong point. It's not an easy thing. You just set the high score. On ten balls. GC. Yeah. GC on ten balls. That's the secret, everybody. Ten balls. All right. Do we want to do one more game, or do you guys want to move into Q&A? What do you think? I want to do one more game. Let's do one more game. This is really fun. Why don't we bring someone up to play? All right. Let's bring someone up for a challenge. Of course. Two-player game. You suggested. Come on, man. Get up here. Start a two-player. Let's go.
    28:50
    All right. Let's go back to three ball. Just a nice quick one. Hey Scott, I'm Dick. We're going to go back to 3Ball. I'm just going to restart. It's going to be easier. Oh yeah, you guys trust me. Audit's menu. Basic adjustments. Free play. Okay, alright. That's a great point. have to do this because Chip just suggested something really cool. Hold start button to install easy, hold start button to install, hold start button to install progressive presets. I don't know if anybody else does this. Progressive presets will be played during game. But this is something that a friend of ours wanted on the game, so we put it on the game. So progressive presets means, Scott, you're going first. Rules adjustment, operator menu. Now Now, player one in progressive rules is going to be easy. Easy mode. Player two is going to be hard mode. No ball saves. You got no ball saves, no nothing. Okay. But you got everything. I love that. That's an awesome mode to have in a game. Thanks, man. Oh, and one more thing. As long as I'm showing you stuff that I think I've innovated, if you tilt warning during your... It's going to put a timer up, and that's going to tell you how long since the last tilt warning. so if you're playing in tournaments or whatever I know nobody's going to play this in tournaments but it's telling him right now he's got 19 seconds to go since it's 30 seconds since the last tilt warning so it'll just give you an automatic 30 second timer you don't have to pull out your phone and put it on the glass and figure out how long it's been you can go anytime I'm going to steal that but you're getting credit that's a good one so I'm trying to think is there one other thing so the progressive is something that Yeah, it came from our friend Mike. The tilt warning was something that I kept watching tournaments where people would put their phone on the glass and I was like, well, it's a pinball machine, we can do that. So the easy rules means just finishing a drop bank is going to qualify a lot. You don't need to do the portcullis. It eliminates the need for going up and down on the playfield so much. It also increases all the timers. So one thing I haven't talked about is combos. Anytime you get a left or a right in lane, it's going to start a combo, and you'll hear a church bell ring. As you progress your combo, hitting different switches, you'll see shots are lit up, and each combo is named with a Latin name.
    31:39
    And those are relics that you're collecting. And as your knight collects relics, the relics help you, like one of them will hold over bonus multiplier, One of them will hold over a bonus deck. One of them will double all your time. Let's see how I do on three ball without tons of ball saves. So each relic that you collect is helping you in your battles. There's nine different... Go ahead. So if this was a four-player game, how would the progressive work? It would go easy, medium, medium, hard. Okay. So three is easy, medium, hard, and then four is easy, medium, medium, hard. So you can use that as kind of a handicap system. If you have someone in the house that's better or... That's exactly what it is. Or you can draw straws and just get screwed over. Right. I love that. We do get the advantage of having the hard player last so you know what you have to catch up to. And the other reason for that is, you know, when we play with somebody who's really good compared to the other people, is that if you're player four and you're really good, we make you walk away, you know, as soon as you beat the other score. Good call. Because nobody wants the players who are new to the game don't want to sit around and watch you play 20-minute multi-balls, you know. So that's why the hard player goes last is as soon as you pass the score, walk away. I love it. That's good stuff.
    32:47
    Innovations do not always happen on the play field. There's a lot of rule stuff that we still need to work on.
    32:56
    But we're not asking you to walk away from ball one, so you can keep playing this one. So combos can be chained together and every time you advance a combo you'll hear the church bell move down the sequence. It's like the standard, you know, church bell that you might hear the dung dung dung dung. It'll keep going up to 24 rings. If you get 20 rings, nobody's gonna ever get 20 rings, you win everything. So it'll give you all the relics and then you get all the advantages conferred in that. There are combos in the game like if you did right lane so you can press the magnet buttons if you want to try this combat mode. Both at the same time. There you go.
    33:55
    If you did right lane, spinner, ramp, and then around to the lock shot that's like a million point combo right there. It's not super easy to get to. But if you precede that with going down the left end lane and then shatting over again and again in the right end lane and then you advance your combo, that's going to double everything. So just chaining together the combo shots while the combo timer is running is really going to get you a lot of points. In easy mode, I think you get like five seconds. I guess you're still alive.
    34:24
    Yeah, long ball saver on combat mode. Single combat only has ball savers. So that's a win. Single combat won.
    34:42
    So Ryan, one thing I've noticed when I've reprogrammed these games is it changes the feel, obviously, but it also seems to change perceived difficulty of the game. Definitely. Do you find that to be true? Yeah, the difficulty is very heavily linked to the rules, and the reason a lot of these old games are impossible is because there's no ball to. And if you put any modern game on the same exact settings, it feels suddenly just as hard. So, I mean, yes, the design and the layout itself does contribute very heavily to, obviously, to the difficulty, but honestly, the settings are probably even more important. Like, because there is all kinds of stuff you can do in settings to make a game easier or harder, There's only so much I can do on the play field, though, because you only have certain adjustments that the designer provides with you, and a good designer will provide you with enough of those to make a big difference, but not all of them. But if you have access to the software, Ball Saver length, grace periods, that stuff can make a game feel incredibly approachable. It doesn't matter if a new player drains five times as long as you keep giving it back to them. Especially in a game like this where every time I drain I get rewarded and I get to go back up top. Right, right, right. Yeah, a lot of the stuff you want to do, you want to advance is going to be up top with that lock shot.
    36:20
    Cool. Oh, crap. So you see that, you saw that I failed to bong Middle ramp was flashing purple The laser cut ramps are from the mod couple, I think Chip brought this machine that already had those in there
    36:49
    But while I was servicing it one time One of the wires got pulled and one of the LEDs broke. So when I was putting the LED strips on the play field, I was like, let's put new LEDs under there and make them addressable. So that means that the code has control over that red ramp and the yellow ramp as well, or orange ramp.
    37:22
    cannot get back without a ball save Nice bong Okay So that was One of the relics that knights used to be able to carry around was a Toa of a Saint I think that's what it just said. Dedo de Santo. Which would be... I've made them all. Oh. That was... That was combat jackpot increased by 50k. All right. Hit that. See what your combat jackpot is right now, Ryan. With either magnet button. Nothing.
    38:15
    Woo! That's a goose egg. That's hard rules for you. You going to take it? Do it. You're on ball three. Absolutely. Take it. I can do this. Quick point. Now, if you combo the saucer shot, after you get this drop target back, If you combo the saucer shot, you're going to double the reward. So if you can, get it on the right flipper and then transfer it over. There's another way to increase the jackpot here, and that's called...
    38:59
    Okay, so that gave you 50k towards your jackpot. I'm dead. I'm not dead. That was it. It's a tight timer on single combat in hard mode. So you were a victim of the progressive rules. Nope. Oh, and there's Steve's voice. I kept Steve's voice on the outlane stage. Oh, we're playing five balls. I forgot to change it back. I'm sorry, that's part of the basic adjustment. Yeah, let's go. I need help getting back. We're cutting it off. I forgot to switch back to balls per game. But Scott, you're sleeping on your skills. That was great. But see how that evened it out? That was a lot of fun, by the way. Yeah, just the timers and the ball saves and all that other kind of stuff.
    39:52
    And that's a nice little thing you can just easily go back in and just quickly set it right back to normal, no problem. During the game, if you want. Operator menu. Test menu. Audits menu. Basic adjustments. And I forgot. Free ball tilt warning. Music volume. Sound effect. Call out balls per game. I forgot to change this. So the basic adjustments I don't adjust in the rules settings except for ball save. That's the only basic adjustment that comes through. Rules adjustment. Operator menu. Okay. Questions? Microphone? Who else wants to fight me? You could come down to the mic if you would. I'll be there. Yeah. Who did that voice? Which voice? All the voices are me. And so I had a bad cold one day. I recorded all the... Yeah, you know, it's tough. So I did one game where I had AI voice, and people hate it. So I just try to do my best. Now, every sample on the machine is on a little SD card plugged into the wave trigger, and people have done this for other codes that I've done in the past. Take out that card, put your own waves on there. You can put your own voice in there. You can put whatever sound effects you want. Everything's configurable So, you know if you don't like what I did, go ahead and change it. That's cool. I won't offend me whatsoever
    41:15
    Yeah Were you tempted or how tempted were you to change the insert to white so that you could have different color of these?
    41:47
    to the machine. That topper that I've got on top of there is velcroed on. I put a couple of holes in the wood rail, sorry, to mount my little playfield things, but that's it. Everything else, like, okay, so the subwoofer inside is screwed in, but everything else is like, you take that out and you would never know that I touched this machine because I revere these machines too. You know, I like to be able to play them on different code, but I still want to be able to boot up to, you know, Steve Ritchie and play it just like Steve Ritchie's code on the machine the way it was with the exception of a little bit of additional lighting. So this is the machine rebooted.
    42:24
    There's Black Knight. So it's an alternate way to play it. I'm not replacing anything. Good question?
    42:36
    Classic. What do you use for electronic hardware? They're right there. I know, I didn't get here at the beginning, so I'm guessing. Yeah, no worries. So I built my own PCB. This is a slot for an Arduino Mega 2560. The Arduino is not the best microcontroller out in the world, but it's cheap. Well, I was going to say, would a Pi work? A Pi will work. It's smaller. Yeah. At the time when I was doing this, there was a big shortage. So I just went with what was cheap and available. There are better architectures in the world. Like ESP would be better if you put line shifters up to 5 volts.
    43:20
    You know, the library is hardware ambivalent. So I've written the library to work with a number of different, like I've done it with mostly Arduinos. But it would be super simple to write it for a different microcontroller if you wanted more capabilities or more speed. This has plenty enough to do everything I want to do. So I just stuck with that. And honestly, I was going to put the Arduino, the 18 mega chip right on here. The 18 mega chip is more expensive to buy as a component than it is to buy as a full breakout board. So I just put a slap in the breakout board. So all these plans, schematics, everything on pinball refresh. These boards, when I get them done, I get them done like 20 at a time because I'm doing a lot of machines. Maybe a buck 50 a piece. I mean, they're cheap, cheap to make. This machine also has in it a board that I call the accessory lamp board, and this drives all my LEDs. It communicates with the other board via I2C. That takes all of the LED processing off of the main chip, so I can program all my animations for the top or for the rails, for the ramps, for the speakers. All that stuff is done by this board, and this board is really cheap to make. I mean, it makes that other board look like a Cadillac. Yeah, custom and, you know, made from easily obtainable off-the-shelf stuff.
    44:44
    So I do have some surface mount parts on this rev. If you're doing a Bally Stern, it doesn't need anything.
    44:52
    This rev needs surface mount because in the Williams architecture, I have to isolate the 6802 or the 6808 from the bus when I boot. So I had to put isolation circuits on there. And that's all surface mount. There is a through-hole version I call the REV101. I don't use that one anymore because honestly, I don't like the solder that much. So I just could. Do you use surface mount yourself? No, no. I get them built that way. That board cost me $2. Did I turn it off? That board cost me $2 with the parts on it, like with the resistors and all that stuff on it. It's all, I'm sorry, I'll repeat the question. Do I solder surface mount myself? No, I order these to be, at least I have in the past, I haven't checked prices lately. I order these to be shipped with the surface mount components on them and if you do it, as long as you do it like in batches of, you know, more than 10 or 20, like I'll probably spend, I mean at the most I'd spend like 50 bucks shipped to me, you know what I mean? It's cheap. Yeah, well I mean, minus the Arduino. So you gotta put the Arduino on there or any connectors you want on there. But yeah, so... You want to show us some hardware? Oh, if you want to, if it's easy to get the back glass out of there without the rig, can we move the... Yeah. That shouldn't be a problem. I'm going to sneak in back here. I don't want to run over... Do that in custom game. I love the magnets. Yeah, if we want to, if everybody's got any more questions, I'll take those. Do you sell that board? I don't sell anything. So, you know, I'm in this for the love of it, right? I publish everything open source. It's all available on Pinball Refresh. You can build your own. So you use the bonds on there and everything? Everything. The circuit board? Yep. You know, you can see.
    46:50
    Yeah, so I've been using JLC PCB. as of last year. I haven't looked around lately, but I had a whole bunch made last year, so I haven't looked around to see what the, sorry. Oh, no, it's open. It should be open.
    47:07
    When you write the code, what do you have in the app for a baseline computer? Oh, the code? Yes. Nothing. So it's the Arduino, the compiler for Arduino will run on, you know, Linux, Windows, Mac, anything. I usually do it on a laptop and you can literally do it on a laptop that's 20 years old. I do it on a laptop so I can bring it to the machine instead of bringing the board to my laptop, to my computer. So this is all, from the distance, this is all going to look like regular old Williams stuff. This is the regular Williams MPU. This board here is an older version of what I call the RetroPin upgrade and it's just plugged into the processor socket of this MPU. Right here is the original 6808 that came with it. You just pop that out of the MPU, pop it into my board, and then so my board acts as an interposer. If this is all through-hole, you can see, if you choose to boot to original code, it's just going to let this chip boot as if everything was normal. If you boot to a new code, the Arduino is going to take over, isolate the 6802 off the bus. So you can even like read a ROM from the original chipset or read the RAM conditions from the original chipset. Everything, that all works just as it did. On the side here, you'll see that I mounted my little lamp board and that's my latest, yep, that's my latest ALB accessory lamp board. It's the thing I just came out with last year. And that's always on. I've got that running off of an independent power supply so I don't stress out the pinball machine. And from that you can do a couple hundred LEDs, you know, these strip lights like I've got on top of the top or all that kind of stuff. Is the first system 7 gauged out in the hand? Maybe, maybe the first system 7. Before this I've done Stellar Wars, I did Scorpion, I did system six, flash, which can be four or six. I guess cell towers can be four or six. This may be the first system set, but this board works on anything up to 11C.
    49:24
    And I think you can even do like data east on it as well. I had a RoboCop. I didn't try it, but I think you can run it on that. And that's the 103? This is the 102. So 103, I haven't put out yet. I had a request for, like from myself, to put something in the 103. I can't remember what it is. Once I figure that out, I'll put out a 103.
    49:44
    Other questions? Oh, this is the wave trigger board, this little red guy. Whatever. That's the most expensive component right now. It's $60 for a wave trigger, and that does all the audio. I'm working on a Raspberry Pi replacement for the wave trigger because you can get like a Pi Zero that's got plenty of capability for it. I think you can get that for less than $20.
    50:09
    And the only thing I'm working on is trying to get the boot time low enough So that, because I like to have the machine come on. I don't like to wait for a boot sequence. All right, well, thanks very much, Dick. And thanks, Ryan. And Ryan. And Scott for the awesome gameplay. And test player Scott.