Louis Koziarz

"And make it well done". That's the secret.

Star:Line Chicago@starlinechicago.bsky.social

Maybe there’s a more Chicago thin crust pizza order than “Italian sausage and giardiniera” but, if so, I have not found it

Louis Koziarz reposted

SEGA-16

@sega-16.bsky.social

An amazing image from Twin Peaks, Dune, and Fallout star Kyle MacLachlan's memoir "Fictional Selves" that just shows how awesome Patrick Stuart is.

When I added @pinballflyers.bsky.social to my feed I thought "wow, we really did use a lot of hype in those days. Most of it totally incorrect or ill-founded". Maybe there's room for a new bot that extracts this kind of stuff out of the pinball material. Thinking about it...

Gaming Hell@sarahssowertty.bsky.social

I've been working on-and-off on adding more 'wisdom' to my stream- a redeem that prints a random quote on-screen, with the majority of them taken from US-focused arcade game flyers. They are truly a delight. Profits! Earnings! MEGABUCKS!!!

Louis Koziarz reposted

Ben Collins

@bencollins.bsky.social

Excuse me sir do you denounce the Doobie Brotherhood?

iiseagrant.orgCurrent Data | Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant

If you have a moment send good thoughts to Buoy #45198, stationed off the Chicago lakeshore, who is about to get its ass kicked with these winds and waves. Stay strong, little buddy! iiseagrant.org/45198/

discmaster.textfiles.comCD-ROM

Cheap blue LEDs can throw so much UV radiation that they can get your product rejected from EU import (ask me how I know this). Aesthetics aside, I'd be curious to see what a photometer reads when pointed at this.

Pinhead@psychopsonic.bsky.social

#pinball

Louis Koziarz reposted

Harebrained

@harebrained.bsky.social

These patches showed up at the perfect time. STFU About Chicago- we're in the playoffs!

Louis Koziarz reposted

Jason Scott

@textfiles.com

Those Phil Tippett CD-ROMs that just caused a lot of excitement? Added to DISCMASTER, easily searchable now. discmaster.textfiles.com/cd-rom?searc...

Louis Koziarz reposted

Brandon Sheffield

@brandon.insertcredit.com

Several weeks ago, Phil Tippett's legendary animation studio in Berkeley, CA closed. An anonymous hero noticed a folder of CDs. This turned out to be hundreds of unseen hi-res images and videos from Star Wars, Robocop, Jurassic Park, etc. ~90 isos for you to browse: archive.org/details/tipp...

Looks like Bobby Tables got his first job at McDonald's.

PLD Roller Coaster Tycoon Pinball: The whitewood is flipping and we're coding. Just not a lot of rules yet.

PLD RCT pinball, whitewood time. #2 went together pretty quickly but with the usual Lawlor complement of holes in the playfield that went nowhere. There's packing tape all over the place to keep balls at ground leve.

Paging @darthsigma.bsky.social

arborelia@arborelia.net

I'm working on my post for tomorrow night's Silver Ball Century, and I'm excited to write this one because I get to tell you why the attract mode of Data East's "WWF Royal Rumble" pinball machine has a reference to a Weekly World News article

PLD RCT pinball: The new workshop also gave Krutsch a lot more room to hand model ramps and wireforms.

21 Sept

You help the kid apply to college and you see all the hoity talk about their achievements and academic prowess. Then you get to the first football game and it's "we can't kick off until Goober the Goat rings the highly coveted Ding Dong Bell by kicking it with his hind legs! Yee-haw! (gunfire)"

17 Sept

PLD RCT Pinball: our new offices had a lot more open room for workshop space. The wood router stayed in his garage but all the other metalworking tools came over.

17 Sept

Pat also got a deal on some old lathes and whatnot and one day a truck shows up and we forklift it in.

16 Sept

PLD RCT early days: After moving offices to Harvard we whipped up a quick first whitewood to show shots. Then we started getting the next playfield up after the holidays.

16 Sept

PLD RCT pinball: After Expo 2001 Pat started getting the license in place. Why RCT? I don't totally recall. Pat loved SimCity (c.f. Dialed In) and Gary wouldn't do an original amusement park theme. I think the relationship with Hasbro helped as they sold the game to Infogrames.

15 Sept

Thanks for the reminder @backglass.bsky.social! It's time to keep digging out PLD history and we're up to RollerCoaster Tycoon...

PinballArtBot@backglass.bsky.social

RollerCoaster Tycoon, Stern 2002

14 Sept

The P2K hackers found the serial console but never understood all the things we could do with that. It was an amazing tool and saved our bacon more than a few times during dev and debug. (more)

Coral Rose@mscoralrose.bsky.social

Another bit of magic was the serial console. The kernel routed standard input/output to a serial port. You could printf() to it and game code could register commands. I added a bunch for things like memory tracking or display management. Tom is an actual fucking Unix wizard

14 Sept

I added the UP, DOWN, ESCAPE, and ENTER commands which look silly when you're typing away on the console. But when I created macros in my terminal program to emit those strings, suddenly you had the coin door buttons on your PC's F-keys =) That made writing the test/audit system a LOT easier.

14 Sept

Obscure Pinball 2000 artifact I found in a box today: a custom boot ROM for the SMC8416 network card in our development machines. This would allow us to boot CPUs over the network during development, as well as other things we had planned. 🙁

I asked LED if there was a VidKidz connection to PERC and High Speed, he clarified that he was at Williams at that time when he wrote PERC, and used a Gimix-ed version of that code to write Space Shuttle and High Speed. Then Jarvis used it for F-14 Tomcat.

Which sadly means that most of these disks are probably still the intellectual property of Light and Wonder. Ugh.

RALF's owner also told me he's been in contact with the person that owns the other two Gimix boxes, MYKE and PSINDY. Stuff is getting archived! 🤯

Look closer. Holy shit.

Had an awesome find at #vcfmw today. The old Vid Kidz RALF machine looking all cleaned up and enjoying retirement! He's in very good hands now. www.backglass.org/duncan/gimix/

@retrotechdreams.bsky.social

And the new owner kept the Grand Lizard drop target sticker 😍

Louis Koziarz reposted

Retro Tech Dreams

4 Sept

Remember to pay for WinZip.

Louis Koziarz reposted

Harebrained

@harebrained.bsky.social

1 Sept

This is the patron saint of National Gyros Day. Happy NGD to all who celebrate. #chicago

app.matchplay.eventsMatch Play Events

1 Sept

Twenty five years ago (and one day).

Louis Koziarz reposted

Pinball Map

@pinballmap.com

31 Aug

OPDB has added a "machines that are missing photos" list. If you have very nice backglass imagery of any of these machines, please contribute. app.matchplay.events/opdb/missing...

hollywoodreporter.comTim Curry, Outlandish Star of ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show,’ Dies at 80The three-time Tony nominee terrified audiences in Stephen King's 'It' and was a prolific voice actor as well.

26 Aug

Wrong 80 year-old. Again. Damn.

Ben Collins@bencollins.bsky.social

What the fuck is going on??? www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie...

@kentremendous.bsky.social

25 Aug

The kid has moved off to college and I have inherited a hedgehog.

Louis Koziarz reposted

Ken Tremendous

24 Aug

Wrote about the proposed Paramount-WBD merger and why it is bad across the board.

The Hollywood Reporter@thr.com

"A market ceases to function when competition disappears. And it’s disappearing," contends writer Mike Schur in a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter

bit.lyMike Schur: The Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger Is Existential for WritersLet’s begin with a statement of fact: mega mergers in Hollywood are bad for writers. They’re also bad for actors and directors, for production designers and caterers, for carpenters and Teamsters and electricians and set decorators. They are bad for consumers, who get fewer choices in entertainment controlled by fewer bosses with narrower worldviews. Mergers are bad for local businesses, who lose paying customers from disappearing productions. They are bad for high level TV and film executives, and entry-level assistants, and everyone in between.

12 Aug

It's an interesting historical project to figure out what was the first pinball to have the designer's name on it, and then other team members after that. Kirk goes on about his struggle with Gary Stern to put his name on Stars (1978), and we know that Gary has always been reluctant to do this.

12 Aug

We negotiated to have PLD's company name and logo on Monopoly, which kind of forced Gary's hand. But at this point in history it was a matter of doing whatever it took to keep sales up and the factory open.

11 Aug

Going through my pinball files, I found a photocopied article. It was a 1985 PlayMeter interview with designer Steve Kirk about the "creative crisis in coin-op". It must have been circulated at Williams when it came out. I used to read Kordek's library during downtime and this was in there. (more)

Did any of his predictions happen? Absolutely. Did we ever see his amazing "I've designed the future of pinball"? Can't tell from his work in that era. Maybe we lost something? Maybe it was pinball designer bluster? Probably both.

11 Aug

An earlier interview with Kirk covered his work promoting and running tournaments as head of the Pinball Association of America, which seemed to hold tournaments in the mid 70s. He felt tournament/competitive play was good for pinball and it's nice to see that come true in the 21st century.

It's an interesting snapshot of the state of pinball 40 years ago, and how circular the business is. I'm going to quote some of this later. Kirk was an odd cat and at this point in time seemed to be jockeying for more work and/or recognition. The text is on my github: github.com/lkoziarz/pin...

"Oh but MacOS only needs 256MB to show you the outside temperature so that's a win"