Skling !

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/pinball/comments/1lqhtky/pinball_2000_development_lore_part_1/

These are my experiences as part of the Pinball 2000 team. Feel free to ask questions. I’ll gather up multiple answers into one comment like I did with the initial post. Now, without further ado…

Part 1 – Background, seeing the first prototype and joining the programming team

In early 1998 I was working on making a WPC version of Big Bang Bar. I had a Capcom game in my office as a reference, and next to it I had a WPC cabinet with a whitewood made from Capcom playfield parts. I had almost the whole ruleset working, but there was no animation or sound at all. I had jumped at the chance to work on this because I liked the game, I hadn’t had a chance to be in charge of a game’s programming, and I agreed that we could make this game quickly and have it be successful. I was worried because whenever I asked when we’d get the assets licensed from Capcom I got non-answers, but I was really enjoying doing all the things you needed to program a full WPC game.

It was common knowledge that pinball was not doing well as a business, and Neil Nicastro the CEO was not known for his sentimentality. Everyone was head-down on their various projects although I don’t remember exactly what everyone was working on specifically. I knew JPop (John Popadiuk’s nickname) was working on a pinball game with a CRT monitor in the backbox instead of the dot matrix display and backglass. He had a couple of programmers and an artist involved. I’d seen it a little bit and they had some simple gameplay. I thought it was interesting but I wasn’t especially spurred to new ideas by it.

One day I got invited to see something that wasn’t upstairs in pinball engineering. I think it was across the street in the Midway 2727 building but I may be misremembering. Several of us trekked over and into the room. I forget who else I was with but I think Louis and maybe Dwight. There were two cabinets. One was Formula 1 themed with an angled backbox that was partly a mirror. Apparently this was Python’s idea. I never saw it again and I didn’t understand what it was even supposed to be demonstrating. In any case, what we were really there to see was Pat and George’s demo of their holo-pin concept. It was super, super cool even with just the static images of the mech displayed by George’s Amiga. My brain lit up with ideas. I really can’t overstate how strong an impression this made on me. I instantly knew that I wanted to work on this!

Everyone seeing this demo for the first time was similarly excited. It was just electric. This felt revolutionary, a unique moment that the world would never be the same after. When I got back to my office I immediately started thinking of ways to do Big Bang Bar as a holo-pin. I started a text file and poured my thoughts into it. I’ll talk about those thoughts in a later post, but the important point is that I instinctively knew that nothing more was going to happen with the WPC version. Now, part of the reason I’d even been working on Big Bang Bar in the first place was because the other programmers were sceptical about it. I was also a “problem child” who’d not done myself many favours and so people were just fine having me out of their way. That’s important context because later that afternoon Tom came into my office to tell me I’d be working with him on this new thing and, as he bluntly put it there was to be “no fucking around”. I promised him I’d do good work, that I understood his concern and I wanted to earn his trust. With that, my time on what was to become Pinball 2000 had officially begun.

I don’t remember if I had one of the JPop-style cabinets first, or just a monitor and CPU board. There would’ve been some setup but you really didn’t need that much on your Windows machine. Cygwin to run the compiler, linker etc, the RCS client (source code version control), a TFTP server you just ran in the background, and a serial cable. The CPU board had Ethernet and an ISA card to boot it. It would connect via TFTP and download whatever you’d just built. There was a button wired up to the reset pin on the CPU so you just hit the button when the thing crashed or you had new code to try. It could already scan switches and fire coils in order to support the gameplay prototypes JPop’s team were doing. We had circuit boards with a big grid of toggle switches for programmers who didn’t have or need an actual playfield, so I would’ve plugged one of those into it. I didn’t need anything else.

This is how new projects usually start out. You get things hooked up, you get the source code, you build it and you run it. Once that’s sorted out you can start to work. Reading code, making changes, talking to teammates about what was most important. My first tasks were all about graphics, and I’ll discuss that stuff in part 2.

(As an aside, we’d made WPC setups like this in the past. I’d had one on my desk, just a backbox with a power supply bolted to its top. You could plug it into a playfield, a test fixture of some kind, or one of those switch boards. That backbox was where one evening I’d had my first experience with the WPC-95 sound board crashing, which made it blare out a horrible sound VERY LOUDLY INDEED for several seconds. It went off right by my head and I was a bit discombobulated when Larry came to check on me. I think it happened at least once to pretty much every programmer)