Author | Lightnews

Louis Koziarz

Louis Koziarz

@koziarz.com

360 followers 180 following 940 posts

Embedded systems farmer. Ex WMS, PLD, Stern pinball. Randomly posting wacky stuff I saved from my time in the coin-op business and most likely retold incorrectly. Stay Strong |✶✶✶✶|

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 4d

Right below that book is another titled "Black Thursday", referring to the layoffs in the WMS pinball department... including the game's designer.

Reposted by Louis Koziarz

Ben 🏳️‍🌈 @bvigeant.bsky.social · 4d

The documentary with the Mortal Kombat Kollection has a ton of great stuff for arcade/pinball sickos like me, like this delightful photo of Roger Sharpe at his office at Williams/Midway.

Pinball legend Roger Sharpe sits in an overstuffed office where ever surface is overed with papers and he has a bunch of cool arcade images and graphics behind him

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 4d

I had two in my neighborhood last night hooting up a storm. Too dark to see them but I love knowing they're around.

Reposted by Louis Koziarz

The Namco Historian @namcohistory.bsky.social · 5d

Concept design for Count Pacula, a canceled video game/pinball hybrid arcade game. The game was developed by Bally Midway, the North American distributor for Pac-Man arcade games in the early 1980s.

#namco #pacman #videogames #retrogaming #halloween

Reposted by Louis Koziarz

Anatoly Shashkin💾 @dosnostalgic.bsky.social · 5d

Something for the font enthusiasts

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 7d

The dream is real, the PinballArtBot (@backglass.bsky.social) is up and running. Do you like pinball art? Follow the bot!

Thanks to @shaneus.bsky.social for the idea and @hgstrp.com for making a kick-ass database source.

PinballArtBot @backglass.bsky.social · 7d

Star Ship, Bally 1976

Star Ship Backglass Art, from the Open Pinball Database (opdb.org)

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 9d

I bet Duncan knows.

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 9d

1999. Steve Kordek looks at the very last Williams pinball machine to roll off the assembly line.

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 9d

Charlie Chaplin's fourth wife enjoys the break from the puzzle maker spotlight once in a while (OONA)

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 11d

Fun trivia: The game over lamp show in TOTAN gets a lot of praise for some reason. Dwight stole it from STTNG and it's literally "blink a random flash lamp and repeat". 🤣

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iyfd...

Tales of the Arabian Nights Pinball Machine

YouTube video by tattyadams

www.youtube.com

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 11d

We also had macros to define "strings" of lamps and then do operations on them. All on, all off, build up, build down, rotate, fill, etc. Most attract modes are just combinations of those operations. Lane Change was a HUGE innovation in 1980s pinball rules, by the 1990s it was one line of code.

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 11d

More than you know! 😆

Lamp handling actually got pretty sophisticated by the time Larry wrote APPLE for WPC. There were multiple lamp matrices blended on top of each other and effects ran on top of those. You could mask lamps out of each matrix to avoid problems like blinking the Extra Ball lamp.

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 11d

I agree with @hgstrp.com that IPDB just isn't worth dealing with, especially when reading about their recent behavior. I'm playing with some code that interprets OPDB's data right now. It should work wonderfully.

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 11d

Seems really stupid that IPDB would claim copyright on artwork that doesn't even belong to them. But I get a bit lost on copyright laws and rules about derivative works these days.

Then again, my work is running in a million Arcade1UP machines with no credit whatsoever. So, fuck 'em all?

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 11d

I'll definitely tinker with an OPDB->Bsky robot, thank you for all of this hard work! I don't have any images to contribute but never say never...

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 11d

Did it actually happen once before? That's interesting. The FAQ seems full of threats but I guess it's because someone tried this.

That said, the IPDB images aren't *that* great. If we did this, I really should find a better source.

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 12d

I might take you up on that. I totally forgot about OPDB, thanks for the pointer on that too!

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 12d

IPDB, not IMDB. Sorry.

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 12d

So I'm pondering @shaneus.bsky.social 's idea of doing a bot that posts pinball images every hour/day/whatever. Scraping them from IMDB is possible but I'm wary of ownership and copyright issues, either from the photog or the factories.

Am I overthinking this? Any other ideas? Should I ask Duncan?

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 12d

Solar Fox was one of those games where the arcade cabinet artwork was 1000x better than the actual game:

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 12d

I was happy to see Stern is still doing it, from Gomez's peek during his Expo talk. Someone needs to tell the new kids how it's done.

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 12d

We used to use an AA55 as a placeholder for future work, and it made the game look more complete when it wasn't. Pat used to call it "flash and trash" but it served a very useful job. And if you forgot to write a real effect, it still looked pretty good.

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 12d

Here's an old #pinball programming tip for all you aspiring homebrew developers out there:

Your lamp matrix is probably represented in memory by a few bytes or words. You can write a really cool effect in under a minute by filling it with 0xAA (10101010) and then 0x55 (01010101) back and forth.

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 13d

I could do it, if there was a reliable way to scrape images out of IPDB and filter out the uninteresting ones. Or if there was manual upload mechanism.

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 13d

Interesting idea... 🤔