After a long hiatus I'm finally back into pinball and will be starting to document my Grand Lizard restoration project. I'm a pretty bad writer, procrastinator and even worse keeping up with forum related stuff so I'll apologize in advance if I take my sweet time with this..

Story so far:
I've owned a couple Grand Lizards for years collecting dust in my garage. I got my first GL in overall decent shape, it played good and everything was working properly. The playfield was pretty rough though, the lower playfield was more or less OK but there was quite a bit of wear that was patched with black paint as shown in the picture below:
Patched wear

Upper playfield was worse, way worse. One of the previous owners felt he/she had some Picasso artistic skills and butchered it this way:
Picasso artwork

I loved to play this pinball but looking at that artwork was such an eye sore I had to do something and while aggregating assets for my short lived pinball assets website (long story for another day) I came across a NOS playfield scan for it.

A few months later I found another (this one non working) GL in Craigslist for $200 bucks. Motherboard was missing a chip and the battery holder and the playfield was in even rougher shape as shown in the picture below:
04 (resized).jpg

I primarily got this pinball as for $200 bucks I felt it was a good opportunity to use it as reference while I did the restoration on my working machine and to use for parts if needed.

At this point I forget what broke on my working GL but prompted me to start the project and fix it at the same time. In hindsight that was a bad idea and I think I should have fixed the issue first and make sure I left a working pinball for later.

And so my restoration project begun.. I tore down everything from the working pinball playfield and it sat on my garage for several years like that. I had no GL fun for years

A month ago I decided enough is enough and I wanted to at least get something working so I grabbed the playfield from the non-working machine and placed it in the cabinet of the working pinball and crossed fingers. I checked a few things and once I was comfortable turning it on I did. It almost worked.. but some solenoids weren't working at all. After some debugging/tracing I realized the voltage cable was nipped for some reason.. and there was a blown fuse. After fixing that I got a working pinball!
03 (resized).jpg

Or so I thought.. Well it works, but randomly decides to freeze up and only the flippers seem to work and all solenoids stop and scoring gets screwed up too. If I turn it off and on again it works again for some random amount of time and happens again. This made me realize I'm closer than I thought to having two working GL's though..

I decided not to focus on fixing this issue at the moment as this endeavor gave me enough momentum to continue my original plan of restoring the already tore down playfield!

The plan:
* Scale the NOS playfield scan appropriately and make sure inserts more or less line up with playfield
* Improve playfield scan as much as possible (it looks really good as it is but if I'm investing the time in this I might as well do it better)
* I've priced out a printing service that would do an alternate material similar to 3M control tack for wrapping cars. It was pretty inexpensive so I'll give it a shot ($50) and they said they will drop in a test print on cheap paper for free to make sure things line up
* Sand and maybe paint the playfield to prep it for the overlay
* Clear coat it (With my living situation I can't really do automotive clear coat so I'll probably have to stick to Rustoleum gloss clear)
* Line up the overlay with the soap/water method
* Produce and print decals for the inserts and add to playfield
* Clear sand and level everything

I don't know if this is the right or wrong way of doing it and frankly at this point I don't even care anymore. As I mentioned at the beginning of my post I'm a procrastinator so IMO anything is better than nothing, I fear being perfectionist and want everything done 'right' will just hamper me and I'll push this even longer.

[Next post: Initial tests fitting and scaling playfield scan to playfield]

This is a zoomed out version of the playfield scan:
Zoomed out playfield scan

The original scan is huge, 3058x6343 pixels. While not perfect, it's big enough that it could just work as is. This is a portion of it to show how detailed it is:
Detail of scan

My approach was to load it up in Inkscape (open source vector art software) and scale it more or less to some measurements I took. After that I created a second layer in the tool and started annotating most inserts and cut holes as shown here:
Annotated

I only have a regular sized printer so I grabbed subsections of the playfield and printed them out for testing. I would put it on top of the playfield and shine a flashlight from underneath until things lined up more or less correctly. If you have had any experience with overlays, playfield stickers, etc. you understand my pain when I say it's really hard to make it all fit properly.. It took me about 8 tries to have a size that I'm comfortable with and I'm still not sure this will extrapolate to the full playfield as I focused on the lower playfield since it's the closest to the player and will be the most noticeable if not correct. I figured once I have the test print from the full playfield I can see where everything is at and adjust as needed.

At this point I could (and I almost did) already go to the printing service and get it done. This would be good enough although there are some minor artifacts with the print that I would ideally like being addressed like the black not being really black, shows some artifacts of original printing (as you can see in the black sections of the image above) and some of the planking of the scanned playfield is noticeable and would be effectively copied into mine.

I figured since I have two GL it may be worth the investment to correct as many of these issues as possible since I will use it twice. I didn't want to spend ages fixing the jpg up so I did some research on auto vectorization tools to at least get a vector graphics baseline for my enhancements. This will be the topic for my next post!

[Auto vectorization of playfield scan and playfield art enhancement]

Thanks guys!

While researching auto-vectorization software I came across a few different packages from free to paid. Most of the free ones (especially the web based) couldn't handle an image as large as the one I was using as input but I still tried them with a section of the playfield to compare their results. Most of the software I tried either had almost no knobs to adjust or too many knobs that I didn't really want to spend the time to play with it, especially because it takes a while to process such a large image.

I landed on vectormagic which is a paid software with free version that lets you test it all just without saving the output. The results were very impressive and beyond any of the other packages. I still tweaked the settings minimally but it mostly worked out of the box. The only reason it took a while to get the right results is that every change in parameters triggered a new autovectorization that lasted around 30 mins in my crappy old PC.

Here's an example of a before/after of a couple sections of the playfield:
Before lower
After lower

It preserved the detail on the playfield quite nicely, enhanced the artwork IMO and primarily got rid of the artifacts I mentioned in my previous post. Inserts look funky but I didn't care about those, in the end I will be cutting those sections anyway and use decals. Here's another section
Before upper
After upper

While this is great for artwork, it's not so great for text as shown below
Before letters
After letters

The software tried to do it's best but the print and scan of the playfield aren't necessarily perfect neither, and even in 'decent' looking portions of the letters (like the 'ADV.') the software doesn't know it is in fact letters so it has no special heuristics for them (as expected) and just stick to edge detection/segmentation.

This lead me to pursue my next crusade, figuring out a font that would match as close as possible to the one used in GL so I could overlay and replace all the captions. I knew about a website called whatthefont where you enter an image and it will tell you similar fonts so I tried that. Turns out all the fonts it suggests are not only paid but very expensive for fonts..

So I tested the preinstalled Windows fonts and ended up realizing "Swis721 WGL4 BT" was not bad at all!
Overlay letters

This is were I left off and need to find some time to go through the full playfied. It is quite tedious as the default spacing of the "Swis721 WGL4 BT" fonts doesn't match the one used in GL which I've had to compensate and hand tweak each caption letter by letter (Screenshot above has hand tweaked letters, spacing on MISTERY was too large)

[Next post TBD most likely when I finish going through all the text and fix some minor vectorization issues]

Sorry I completely missed your post. I had no idea about the Northwest Pinball and Arcade show in Tacoma, I would have loved to go, I guess it'll be next time.. Have you ever been to Next Level Pinball? they have over 250+ Pinball's and Arcades, it's pretty crazy, if you are ever in the area PM me please and we can meet up!

Ok I finally managed to get back to the project. I bumped into a few shortcomings and had to cut some corners.. As cool as the auto-vectorization software is, I was having a hard time getting good results opening the exported svg files on other software like illustrator and inkscape. It seems the Vector Magic viewer does handles the vectorized edges better than it can export them. This is not an issue if you export to png but the file size quickly became an issue. I ended up having to split the original jpg into four quadrants of about 1.7k x 3.2k pixels (creating ~200 pixels overlap so I didn't get artifacts when stitching back together). I vectorized them individually and exported in 2x size to 'super sample them'. I finally stitched them back together and managed to get a 5k x 10k image.

I proceeded by opening this in GIMP and create 3 layers, original, blockout sections (layer that held the black patches to 'block' the original text) and the text layer. I finally completed the overlay and I think it looks really good! If anyone is interested in it PM me and I can share either the 'finished' product or the GIMP file in case you'd like to modify other things.

Playfield with improved captions

Next step is figure out how to size it properly. I was able to do tests with SVG as mentioned above in the thread but when importing into illustrator sizing was not preserved. I may just bring this file to the print shop and see if they can help me out with this.

Progress is being slow but the more I complete things I feel more motivated to continue. I've gotten derailed by a couple non-pinball related projects so haven't been able to get back to this at the speed I'd like (I've been pimping out my MAME arcade cabinet and I'm also developing a VR game on the side just for fun.. if I get something presentable I'll share details on that here too).