Viewing profile — koz1000

As they say, it was a different time. I'm friends with someone that worked at Atari around that era and he'll be the first to tell you it was a very loose atmosphere there.

The amount of homebrew games has been growing year after year, and the results are getting pretty impressive. Here's a review of what showed up at Pinball Expo 2024: https://pinbal…

My last name contains the character sequence "rz". Back in the BBS days this would trigger a Zmodem transfer on certain clients. It made a lot of people upset.

If you ever played a Williams Bally/Midway pinball machine from the 1990s dot-matrix era (Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Attack from Mars, Medieval Madness, etc), all of the artwork…

We switched to C++. Nobody had a problem with the switch, although multitheading became a sticky point with some of the developers so we had to write an API to simulate nonpreempti…

It also ran Williams' line of pinball machines all the way until 1999.

I was working on an 8-bit system back in this same time period. We couldn't afford flash devices and the kit required to reprogram them. But we did a similar trick with an extra wr…

Guess we shouldn't spoil how William Gibson's Neuromancer ends, then.

I worked with erasable EPROMs back in the day. It was a pain in the ass.

And a lot of smaller microcontrollers still use a UART port and serial protocol to reflash the device. It's the lowest common denominator for hardware interface and the simplest th…

And, not you specifically, but you're the guy that ruins RTO for everyone else. I'm hybrid and every Wednesday there's a wave of people that slide in, put in their earbuds, and sho…

Glad you're enjoying it. We had a lot of fun making this one. I have lots of early photos and stories going up on Mastodon. Go check it out.

It's been 26 years. I figure that's long enough. =)

If your NGG is on free play, here's the code to warp to the hole in one challenge (the final mode): Both flippers, then 3L, 1R, 9L, 1R, 1L, 1R. Then hold the left flipper button in…

My kid routinely asked for access to Photos, which seemed pretty benign. Turned out she was screen recording entire Netflix movies and saving them in her Photos cache, not only byp…

Given how people stuff their carts, seems like you could easily bury something expensive at the bottom. If the store is super busy the receipt checkers probably won't disassemble y…

That's right. Bally/Midway left the city for the suburbs during the boom years, with offices in Rosemont and factories in Franklin Park and Bensenville. The Franklin Park factory i…

The more likely reason is that it was a test machine, as shown by the paperwork in the cabinet and the low play count. It was put on location for a few weeks to gather earnings dat…

The EXORciser was also used by Williams Electronics to develop software for pinball machines in the 1980s, as well as the Defender video game. Here's Steve Ritchie and Larry DeMar …

One embedded platform I worked on was developed in the late 80s, launched in 1990, and code I wrote in 1994 is still running. It's a 6809 processor with a little bit of RAM and 512…

Chicago Gaming just announced a non-remake, Pulp Fiction. The designer and programmer are veterans from the Williams days (Mark Ritchie and George Petro) https://www.chicago-gaming…

That's the Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield. They now have the largest collection of arcade videogames under one roof, and they're growing their pinball collection. https://www…

Indiana Jones and all other Williams/Bally pins were written in pure 6809 assembly language up until the launch of the Pinball 2000 project.

Stern tried this a long time ago to compete with Golden Tee Golf tournaments, since those games were paying people cash and killing pinball in street locations like bars. The probl…

Why do all the tech? The goal is to have the ultimate model of just-in-time manufacturing: to never run out of supplies and, without sounding creepy, to know precisely what the cus…