Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “These Mechanisms Will Make You Fall In Love With Pinball All over Again”.
Hey everyone tyler with make magazine, and i’m here at maker faire denver and i’ve just been checking out the fun with pinball exhibit. This is an exhibit created by mark gibson and what it is is an exploration of each and every component that goes into these old style, electromechanical, pinball machines. These aren’t the you know, computer and servo controlled, uh machines that you might know from today. But these are all entirely mechanical still powered by solenoids, but all of the memory and state of the game in the machine is stored in mechanisms in the circuit state and just really really simple, mechanics and here he’s broken out every single component of these machines. So you can see how they work electrically and mechanically, so this exhibit is built from retired used pinball machine parts. I restore pinball machines for fun and all these parts that come out of games at one point or another and rather than check them. I’Ve tried to show people how clever and creative they were by letting them interact with them. I i wire them up, i put buttons on them and i try to make them as visible and tangible, as i can to let people experiment and try them out, starting in the mid 70s pinball machines switched over like everything else, from electromechanical technology to solid-state technology, Which essentially means that they started using transistors for everything and since then, it’s all gotten more and more elaborate uh, electric electronics and computers on the inside um. The motion generated in a pinball machine is generally done with solenoids still to this day, they’re controlled by computers. Now but they’re the same solenoids that i’m using here and what’s different is that the control of the game, the rules uh the process, the the progression through the game, is all controlled. With this technology with relays and wiring.
Those are the programs that were available. So you control the game through switches, motors, steppers, wiring and contacts, so the smaller pieces that are just the size of a half a pizza. They are typically one assembly that was pulled out of a game at some point and replaced so they all have some wear on them. They all have some age on them, but the smaller pieces are just trying to show one device how it would have worked, how you would have interacted with it what it would have accomplished in the game for you, the stuff in the middle. That needs a lot more explanation. That stuff is assembled from a bunch of simpler pieces. I’Ve devised these games and invented the rule sets and cobbled them together from pieces from different games um and come up with something kind of new. You know in the maker spirit, a good friend of mine gave me um part of an old baseball game. He just had the vertical head of the game. He, the rest of the game, was lost to history.
It was separated at some point and they were. He was incomplete, he had no use for it and he knows that i tinkered with this stuff, so he gave me the head and i’ve always been fascinated by that baseball running man unit. It’S called, but you only ever see the men themselves above the top. Above the playfield in the games, i wanted to show the beauty and the intricacy of what’s going on underneath, but i didn’t want to just connect it up to some buttons, but you could hit the button and the man would run.
I wanted it to be more engaging and more interactive, so i devised the rules and the mechanisms and how you play that thing from scratch and it took a few iterations to sort of get the right combination of it’s fun. But it’s challenging and it’s interesting and it’s interactive. It took a while to work all that out.
It took about nine months all together to pull that all together. So all of these devices i put up on a website because not everybody can come to maker faire. So i have a website funwithpinwall.com.
It’S all one word run together fun with pinball and there you’re going to find all these devices. They’Ll have pictures, they’ll, be short videos, better explanations and are available here in person. There’S also some background material on the website.
There’S a little bit of educational material. Some resources for people are historians and collectors that sort of thing things that interest me personally, i kind of throw on to give it more context and more background yeah. So there are plenty of good resources online, in particular uh.
If you live in a larger metropolitan area, there’s certainly collectors nearby, so i would start going online and figuring out. If there are people close by or even people online, there are places where you can go and ask specific questions and people will talk you through it and make suggestions. Have you tried this? You can fix that if you show an interest in learning, you get a much better response from the community who wants to help you to learn. If you just got a game and say it doesn’t work, what can i do? I just want to play.
It you’re likely to get less help because it’s going to be harder to teach you how to fix it. If you’re not motivated to learn right and so showing a bit of interest showing i’ve tried this and it didn’t work. What else can i try gets a much better response from the crowd because they want to help you they want to help. You learn right and that’s kind of why we’re here we’re trying to help. You learn something it’s not about learning pinball.
It’S learning that i can study something i can understand how it works. I can decompose it into smaller parts and understand the simpler pieces right. The pinball is really just the hook. It’S the carrot to get you through the door and if i’ve got your attention and looking at something, then maybe you’ll take that away and say well i figured that out that wasn’t so bad it wasn’t so hard. Maybe i could figure that out whatever that is to you.
You know it’s a car, it’s a computer! It’S a how to make a batch of cookies. Maybe i can figure that out right. So it’s more that motivation and curiosity that i’m trying to stir up and not teach you the inside the pinball. The pinball is just a tool.
You .