The lighting 'Structure System' is not the LED boards under the playfield. He has this stage-lighting like rig that was a long metal pole that ran along the side of the playfield, up in the air, angled with the glass. It attached to a support post at the front and the back. All the items (lights, decor, whatever) were attached to the pole and (at least in the prototype) secured with thumb screws. The whole thing was hideous, and he seriously thought it was an amazing idea. Space Mission X was going to use it. I think it was on the Kiss prototype too - but since that was a rock-band/stage type thing, it kind of worked with that game. It was still too bulky/gaudy though.

Update: you can see it in this picture from the Kiss Prototype thread. It's not angled up as much on the kiss proto as it was on the SPX game, but you can see the basic structure of the thing.

217868.jpg

Again.. no. It all depends on the relationship between John and his hired help and the conditions under which the IP was created. John wasn't buying stuff lock-stock for licensed used.. he was hiring people to create IP for him. Ownership will depend on the contract terms between the parties... but these are almost always heavily lopsided to the employer.. as is the law for it.

If you get in a labor dispute with your boss... your contribution to the company doesn't magically transfer to you.

Here's the patent for the Pinball Game Truss System:

http://www.freshpatents.com/-dt20150402ptan20150091250.php

I'm always amused by the writing style used in patents - most if it is BS but I am sure is there for a reason.

There was apparently plenty of THAT going around...

Ha. I liked my imaginary fiber system better. i agree those row of LEDs are pretty ugly.

We did something similar but with a smaller form factor. Single screw.

image.jpg

I think John's big lighting idea was more about a system of trusses and such to act almost like stage lighting. I believe he had a domain and website for it at one point.

EDIT: See epthegeek's post above.

Aaron
FAST Pinball

The row of exposed LEDs was new for the kiss proto - the space mission x never had that on it that I saw. Just the big clunky flasher housings and some plastic space ships or something.

There you go. Eric is describing what I was referring to. I agree with Eric, when I first saw it on KISS I thought it was a design choice to match the rock concert stage lighting style and let it go, but as a "product," meh.

Aaron
FAST Pinball

Space Mission X?

Do we have a full list of how many pins John was in the process of not finishing? I've heard up to 7.

Seems like John wanted to stay in the fun kiddie pool of the idea & brainstorming part of production - and not dip his toe into the bloodbath of the other 90%.

That display patent just got non-final rejected yet again, too, so good luck with that one.

His light one may have been paid extra not to publish (which you can do), especially since JJP kind of interfered with the display one a bit.

Edit: OK I see now it was fairly recently published, after the last time I did a search on them. That's going to be a tough sell, too, though.

Space Mission X was the 'retro' budget game that he had in the lobby of his workshop. Plainly visible through the front windows to anybody that went by.
Then there was the Kiss prototype model and the 3 main games. I don't know if any of the others a actually had anything built or not (the bowling girls or whatever it was called?)

Edit: SPX was the farthest along of the non-main games. Hell, it may have been the farthest along of all the projects. Real wood playfield, actual parts, software that you could play a game on. LOL.

Yea, there's clearly illegal activity here. You pay for a product. You never got it. Money crossed state lines so there are federal crimes as well. Wire fraud, etc. I don't understand how JPop has managed to make his victims so docile they're unwilling to get aggressive in pursuing criminal investigations? Maybe this is kind of like a gas station not putting any condoms or sex toys in the machine in the men's bathroom? The people who get ripped off are too ashamed to make a big stink about it? I don't know. I can't seem to explain why there isn't more outrage and an aggressive attempt to go after JPop criminally.

The pixels from adafruit are basically what the first JJP engineer did. Total and complete idiocy to try and use something like that in a pinball machine.

Good job on the locking headers, I hate cable assemblies that don't have locking headers.

Since they are trying to patent what P3 has being doing for several years now, it should be rejected due to prior art.

I'm curious if there's one thing most everybody by now can agree on?

We've seen what kind of game is created when JPop has all the control and responsibility, so can we not refer to games like ToM, TOTAN, CV, WCS, etc. as "JPop games?" Those great games were created by a complete team of people who worked together, took turns respecting each others' area of expertise, compromised and collaborated within a very large company that had been "doing things right" for decades

It seems obvious now, a game "made by JPop" at best, comes out to be an incomplete, un-produced, half-assed conceptual prototype. There's no reason for the Bally/WMS games that he was involved in to suffer the disgrace of his legacy. Many, many great people worked on those games that had nothing to do with MG/RAZA/AIW etc.

Keep in mind that there weren't a lot of RGB lighting solutions for pinball machines at that time. Everyone was basically "rolling their own". I had other ideas of how to do it, but got overruled.

Magic Girl looked like it was supposed to be " Jpop's Greatest Hits!"

I gotta respond to this one. We don't have the proto and I have no clue where it is. As I said it was my understanding they, meaning pintatsia and other folks, wanted a visual pinball. Hence why I said my understanding earlier. I have no skills in making visual pinball anything. Last I heard through the vine it's not even being made into virtual table anymore. I think it was going to take too long and it's shipped back or getting shipped back coming up. Not sure

People are jumping on everyone it seems.

More importantly, whoever makes the visual pinball table doesn't get any monetary benefit. I mean, it's all free stuff given out.

EDit: I took the youtube videos down. Got a PM from someone accusing me of having the game based on me uploading the videos from the show. Yikes. Honestly getting a little nervous since my address is given out frequently for bulb pick ups and wife/baby are home all day.

I'm not sure how we got dragged into this I personally don't have the game or know who has it. My information about the virtual pinball is stuff I heard at the show, just like the videos I posted of gameplay, from the show. Sorry, literally just gave any information I had. Kinda sucks it instantly turned on me into somehow having the game.

In case people super care, I currently have a medieval madness and slugfest. No magic girl.....

It's a shame you got overruled.

Also, I thought this was hilarious.

JPop said: "I may not get to emails for a while as I average 125 each day or more."

My work inbox laughs in his general direction. It gets reset every quarter.

mail.jpg

That quote always makes me laugh too. I would LOVE to only get an average 125 emails a day!

Aaron
FAST Pinball

I'm just amazed John didn't steal Ben's idea about using lasers to illuminate insert lighting and eliminate all the wiring underneath. Maybe he tried and we just don't know about the hundreds of hours he spent on it.

I'm sure that was quickly nixed as it wouldn't have worked with John's first and primary rule of pinball design: Put as much crap on the playfield as possible!

The insert lamp system was created by me . There was a slave controller (arduino) which had its own os on (which i have the source for) and was sent communication from the master computer via serial. This connected to the serial chain of lamps which had WS2801 ics and 5050 RGB leds on them. The system ran at 12v.

I had it running early on during my involvement (August/September 2012 i think). I never had any issues with it and expanded the os over the course of my time there. All the colour data, lamp states, effects and lamp shows were handled on the lamp os system. The main program just sent update messages to it, or lamp show requests.

Other people in the p-roc community have also created similar systems (separately) and also had good success with the concepts.

One of the problems i had with john was getting all the led boards for my prototype. It took forever. Some were early GLM ones, some were cut up adafruit ones, some spark fun breakout boards, some later 'china' made ones. I spent an age wiring it all up so the code development could keep progressing.

Why would anybody want to complete the software for a game they are giving back to JPop?

Small correction: it's a patent application, not issued yet. But I'm surprised it didn't come up in my USPTO search - I guess that only shows issued patents.

I'am going with option #2 too but remember these options are not mutually exclusive. (change "elaborate" to a less glorious adjective though.)

In the interest of transparency. Here's some info for everyone I got from being at the show, which I'm sure some is old:

Markmon does work with PinballBulbs. He is also a programmer. I do know Jpop asked him if he was willing to look at the code and perhaps overall state of the game and give his opinion on where he felt the game was at % wise and all of what needed to be done. He agreed, (this never happened fully though as there was obviously no time at the show). It was never markmon's plan to code this game. Mostly because we knew someone else had already been programming it and there was payment issues. Not interested in stepping on anyones toes. Not his place to step in and understood this. I think it was also more to help bill get an understand of how far along the game was.

There is a local guy in Portland/Tualatin(not sure who he is so couldn't tell you) who does virtual pinball tables. At the end of the show it was discussed that it would be cool if it managed to make it down this guy's way to get made into a virtual table so at least the owners could "play" the game at some point. I think this fizzled though as it didn't initially happen and it does need to go back or has already started to go back, not sure what state it is in since the show. I had 12 games of my own we brought to get loaded up. My opinion is this game is basically poison currently so not sure anyone wants to be part of it or have it in there posession....Surely no money can be made from this game unless it starts pooping money...

As far as I know now the game is in the state of getting back to Jpop and as Bill said, he isn't going through with the project.

The game was definitely visually appealing at the show, but in my personal opinion maybe 60%~ complete. Also with that said I always believe it is the last 10-15% that take the longest in any development project like this. So, it was probably still a long ways out. I do know JJP was met with and given the opportunity to help manufacture the pin. That obviously didn't work out, but I have no idea what the details were. Just that they met up and discussed it quite indepth at the show.

I did hear from some of the later on vendors Bill did pay all vendors needed to get any further work done that was needed to get it to the show. I am just the messenger here providing info that people need. This does not mean he paid all past vendors, I;m sure they will attest to that. It is my understanding the art got partially paid for, ramps and a few other items. There were still tons of folks volunteering for game fixes, corrections etc.

I'll post more if I remember anything, but for now that's all I recall of the "inside" info I hear at the show from others or whoever.

Markmon and I are 2 totally separate people.

1. I have absolutely 0 interest in knowing where this game is.

2. I can almost guarantee Markmon is trolling(have you not read half of his other bajillion posts). I sent him a text this morning to gocorrect whatever is needed

I'm sure the game will hopefully get back to Jpop and get auctioned, bankrupted or whatever is needed.

I just get upset and don't appreciate the company and myself being instantly accused of having this game. You are welcome to stop by anytime and check out all of my 2 pins Oh! I also have a skeelball and 2 racers, but unpin related.

No worries, when all the dust settles you will see we don't have it, don't have a virtual pin from it, or anything else.

Nothing wrong with serial RGB for pinball. WOZ's issue was the driver IC was intended to take a voltage higher than 5 and knock it down to 5... but they piped in exactly 5. Which is why the 7.5v higher voltage fix worked.

WCS TOM TOTAN CV all real JPOP games... just ran through the filter of production, budgets and schedules.

Is StevenP still going to represent him now that he will not be getting a game in lieu of attorney's fees?

Screen grab from http://pinballinventor.org/. "Re-loading..."? Really?

zidware-reloading.PNG

And investors that help fund a startup are 'the most responsible party' when the founders fold up show at 2AM and leave town.

They did not just bump up the supply voltage to 7.5.

Also, I agree there is nothing wrong with serial busses in Pinball, its the WS2801 I have issue with. I personally think it's a great hobbyist driver but is poor for industrial/automotive equipment.

Here is the website:

http://www.pinballtruss.com/

I have been told (about a thousand times) that it was "static buildup" and lack of buffered IC's. Personally I haven't looked into it, but I can only believe what a JJP tech told me until I otherwise evaluate it first hand.

Regardless, the ICs used for the Zidware RGB boards are buffered, so for what it's worth, it wasn't likely to have the same problems. The major issue (for me) was that the 5050 LEDs don't seem to have as good color contrast as the ones used by JJP. The 5050 LEDs are good for one thing and one thing only. Being cheap. So from a BOM perspective, it was likely one of the best solutions available.

The irony is that it's mostly rejected based off of jpop's own prior art (CV patent).

Gerry hasn't been faring too well either.

And what do you consider a more appropriate replacement?

Driving them directly from a custom programmed microcontroller. Cheaper, more readily available, tons of substitute parts, wider range of buss protocols, etc., etc.

I think you mis understood, I was not saying the vendors still have rights to the IP (although I have no idea regarding if they do under the law since they were never paid for their work). My comment was about taking the game and scanning the plastics or the playfield or pull art assets off the computer, would be theft of IP that belongs to zidware and could have value in bankruptcy. =

I'd say it depends on several factors, but I'm very partial to the TI line of constant current drivers. In a system you want to be high reliability, you don't want a serial chain of all the LEDs because a failure takes out the chain. If you know how to do the math on failure modes, you know that a chain of even 64 LEDs has a HUGE chance of failure.

I prefer a Star/Hub configuration where each LED or group of LEDs is independently driven by a constant current driver that also affords some protection against shorts and thermal damage. More wiring but less system failures. You could easily mount a 24 channel hub in a central location and power 8 RGB leds from it.

Something like a TLC5940 would give you a solid entry level controller, programmers just need to work around the way it blanks between frames. For production a TLD5940-EP would be the upgraded production part.

TI makes several constant current drivers, because there are so many different applications.

http://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/power-management/signage-linear-products.page

Something like the TLC5951 would also open up a lot of options.

I was thinking more along the lines of a pinball person who knows all about this shit show seeing it at someone's house and raising some questions publicly. That might cause such a person to be ostracized in the community and/or be unwelcome at pinball shows, never mind any actual legal liability.

But then, like all hobbies, there's various rings of secretive insiders who like knowing stuff other "lesser" collectors don't, so it might be possible to keep it contained. I'd hope not, though. There's a difference between knowing insider industry info, and knowing someone has that game unjustly.

I have nfi what their agreement is or anything like that. There's been no filed change of lawyer, though.

A lot of patent applications simply die after the rejection, especially in times of financial distress such as the last recession.

As I said, I apologize for getting sucked in as well. The secrets on Jpop and all this other nonsense should stop. Pinballbulbs pm'd me and I believe he does not have the game. It's all a bunch of crap that has to stop. People should start being honest at this point as those in the know are only potentially hurting the livelihood of others. I'm guilty as well, as I'm not going to support this secretive stuff any longer. You want to come on and post that you know something and will not share it. Well I'm going to ignore you and boycott your product.

The OCD side of me wants this thread to end at post #15,000.