Chicago, IL
If you're going to make fun of John, I'd appreciate you *not* using a picture I took to do so...
(Topic ID: 203700)
Linked Games
Alice in Wonderland
Zidware Pinball USA, 2013-
Celts
Haggis, 2021
-
Magic Girl
Zidware Pinball USA, 2017
-
Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland
Zidware Pinball USA, 2012
-
Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland (Arcade Edition)
Deeproot, 2020
-
Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland (Xtra Edition)
Deeproot, 2020
Topic Gallery
You're currently viewing posts by Pinsider frobozz.
Click here to go back to viewing the entire thread.
2 years later
1 week later
Quoted from mbwalker:On your Bally Surfers, if the glass breaks...I'm assuming you can replace it somehow?
That frame is bolted together on the underside, with liquid seals along the edges of the glass, etc. So yeah, if the glass breaks it's replaceable, but it's not just "slide in a new one" like on a standard game. Also, the glass is smaller (I believe same width, but definitely shorter front to back).
Quoted from goingincirclez:And you obviously can't tilt the playfield all the way up to service rearmost underfield mechs without removing the glass frame anyway, which goes back to it being heavy, and you'd have to get all around the machine to detach the hinges, as opposed to just sliding out from the front... so it's a different - and arguably worse - kind of access problem.
At least in the Bally implementation, the glass "hinged" like an EM playfield does - it just tilts up from the front and gravity keeps its back end resting on its rails, in this case the edges of the cabinet. Removing it completely for better playfield service access was as easy as sliding it forward and up and out of the machine. And then you could set it down anywhere, even on concrete floors, due to it being all protected inside its frame. There were heavy duty metal caps on the back side that kept you from lifting up on that end when it was in the down position, so location jokers couldn't remove it without access to the coin door and latch.
Whether dr noticed any of that when designing theirs, especially because of the hydraulic struts, is a question we don't have the answer to yet.
As long as we're zooming in on pictures and asking questions, maybe one of the Gang of Six could answer this, if it's not part of the NDA:
This sure looks like the HammerTest(tm) includes a square of plexiglass between the hammer and the playfield. Isn't that what's he's holding with his left hand?
Let's zoom in on the table after that test - isn't that a square of plexiglass sitting next to the hammer?
What about that little rig to drop a ball or weight on the playfield? Did that have its own little piece of plexiglass too? Let's zoom in and see:
Next time they do this, I want to be the one to choose the hammer.
Quoted from Bublehead:A service menu should tell you simple testing info, not a complete schematic built into it. Wire pair color and maybe a location on the playfield using a schematic type grid matrix (So with Locations like A-5, B-23, C-37, Where you divide the Playfield into 5 vertical zones A thru E and then a number representing the inches back from front edge of playfield)
Even better than a grid, what if they showed the actual location on an actual image of the actual playfield, on the screen? Someone should totally invent that.
5 months later
Quoted from frolic:I'm curious if deeproot is actually going to honor their vaporware offer, or if they're going to pretend it never happened.
That was last June - do we know who the "winner" was?
Quoted from Yelobird:Can you please sent me a link to the Stern Warranty page on their website so I can compare how it compares in coverage.
Pick a game, any game. Page 61 for this one: https://sternpinball.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/LedZeppelin_Pro_web.pdf
Quoted from Yelobird:Understood though to my order history I typically receive the Manual Post purchase so seems of little value by comparison After sale. Think that was the focus of concern as of late.
With about anyone but deeproot you could look at a previous game's manual to see their warranty page (assuming they don't change much).
Quoted from Concretehardt:[quoted image]
Back off there cowboy
Haiku is public domain
Everyone can play
2 weeks later
Finally got around to looking more closely at that real estate listing.
Can anyone point out where in that floor plan the manufacturing area is? I mean, a manufacturing area big enough to build production levels of machines, even "production levels" of under 200. Where is the stockroom to hold the parts for production levels of machines? Where are the loading docks for bringing in those parts and sending out those machines? (I only see one loading dock on the entire building, and it connects to their prototyping lab, and is one of those "loading docks-lite" when you are expecting box trucks moreso than tractor trailers.)
That is not, nor could it ever be, a manufacturing facility. Best case scenario, their production is being done somewhere else, a place nobody has discovered yet, the place someone should be counting cars in the parking lot. Worst case scenario... well, we have 350 pages telling us the worst case scenario.
Quoted from frolic:From my memory, the quad/octo manufacturing area WAS shown by Robert during the Deep 6 tour. It was empty space and he waved his hands around about what would be there, but it was implied it was in that building.
Well then, could one of the Deep 6 point to it on the floorplan in that listing? I can't find anywhere big enough to store parts and assemble them, appropriate to the task (not an area with a wall of curved glass windows, for instance), and with the ability to get large quantities of things in and out easily by truck. Which is then, yes, all to say that the Deep 6 were Deep Faked because they were lied to.
Just a clue about how serious they were about their big boasts of doing everything better than Stern et al. They didn't say "we're going to start out small, with less manufacturing space than Spooky Pinball, and try to make even fewer games a year than they do."
Quoted from blueberryjohnson:Respectfully, frobozz, it sounds like you are evaluating the floorplan from an antiquated standpoint. It would be akin to stepping into Jay Leno's garage and pointing out the absence of hay and oats as a 'gotcha' moment.
I know you're being funny (and it is quite hilarious to put all those vaporous buzzwords all in one place like that!) but even if his manufacturing plan involved unicorns breathing in air pollution and pooping out pinball machines, you still have a large pile of large, heavy boxes you need to ship out using traditional non-unicorn-based methods. Which you couldn't do from that building.
Yeah, that lab space is a dandy model shop/proto buildup space. It's nice to have a roll-up door there. But that is no manufacturing space, in any way that would allow any quantities of games to be built and shipped.
Quoted from toyotaboy:It shows a "lab / manufacturing" photo
[quoted image]
The photo looks to be showing the top half of this area on the map:
[quoted image]
It seems to be the only area with a large door opening. If I had to guess, there's a concrete slab outside tall enough to load directly onto a truck trailer. This hardly seems ideal, but that seems to be the only feasible area where they planned to build them
You've got the wrong location in the building. This is what's pictured as the lab area:
floorplan (resized).jpgQuoted from TheCapn:Like I stated earlier I can help here too - just ask the right questions.
OK, in this too-small area deeper into the facility where they planned to octo-manufacture games but it was still just empty... what were their plans for getting those games onto trucks? Wheel them out the glass doors into the parking lot and hope the truck has a liftgate?
Quoted from Drewscruis:I took a few classes on plant layout and material handling in college. If this is their proposed manufacturing facility it has absolutely no flow at all. Where are incoming deliveries going to br dropped at? The shipping dock? The entire design of the place is a mess, that is an office with a pack an play room for r and d....
Exactly. We've all seen pinball plants on Expo tours - this looks nothing like that at all. Yeah, sure, buzzword buzzword new manufacturing techniques buzzword underpants gnomes, but there are inescapable logistics with getting vast quantities of parts in and vastly large and heavy machines out, and they don't seem to have given them even the slightest thought.
1 month later
Quoted from Chalkey:First come first serve basis is kind of an odd way to offer refunds. Like saying they'll only do a few of them or something.
"Until the money runs out" is the obvious interpretation.
Quoted from yancy:Anyone dumb enough to not immediately request a refund upon reading that email needs a conservator in charge of their estate.
And then, as someone predicted earlier, Robert will use that "run on the bank" as an excuse to just throw in the towel.
3 months later
Quoted from TreyBo69:It's ok. I think my memes speak for themselves on my opinion of deeproot and co
Anyhow, here's a video Robert should watch. Free advice on laying out a pinball factory!
That leaves me wondering how those rotisseries with fully assembled playfields make it between the mezzanine and the final assembly room on the main floor. Surely not via that staircase he went down? But even with that possible flaw, they are miles ahead of deeproot!
Quoted from TreyBo69:can we work in a tribute to the environmental themes of Python Anghelo’s Popeye?
Too bad deeproot ditched their animation studio, they could have wasted another couple of years doing art for the full original concept.
http://backglass.org/williams/kordek_archives/python_apopeyelypse_now.pdf
Quoted from TreyBo69:Even the animations are mostly worthless because deeproot chose really dumb themes.
Not to mention their 48 : 1 (or whatever) aspect ratio.
Quoted from theadicts77:Saddening that didn't happen more often then because Pinball Circus is fucking amazing.
Yes, but not in the sense of a pinball company making products to make profits. Rumor has it Williams/Bally/Midway spent over a million dollars in development on that game, built two of them to put on test, where they didn't earn diddly squat, then canceled the project. So it darn well better be amazing, at $500,000 per machine. (And truth be told, it does not have a ton of long-term play value. It's not Orbitor 1 levels of "play a few games and never need to play it again" but it does get old pretty fast.)
3 weeks later
Quoted from EternitytoM83:Is that a wireform returning to a center drain?
[quoted image]
Looks like a little bagatelle upper playfield with three exits - one to the inlane, one back to the plunger lane, one to the outhole. That would have felt good.
1 week later
Quoted from NevadaNutJob:It was more incompetence than intentional scam . Intent matters to me in the final judgement - many will disagree . That’s okay .
I'll buy that with the original JPop/Zidware fiasco. By the time deeproot was taking pre-order money while knowing they could never produce the games and that the SEC was hot on their tails... well, that's intentional scam.
1 week later
Quoted from benheck:Speaking of NDA's, Jpooper told me a story about working on Episode One pinball.
He said that to goto Skywalker Ranch, and look at the stuff regarding the movie to make the pin, you signed an NDA with the penalty being forfeiture of YOUR HOUSE!
Seems extreme but effective. Maybe that's where his love affair with NDA's began?
This is basically true. They didn't say your house specifically, but if there were any leaks, and they could prove they came from you, and they felt that it impacted their revenues in any way, they could personally come after you for all of it. So if they made a couple of hundred million less revenue worldwide because of your leak, your house would be the least of your worries. And that's how serious they were about it - to read the script, you had to do it at Skywalker Ranch, with a physical copy they handed you and took back, and no pictures allowed. You could take notes.
1 week later
Quoted from frolic:He talks about money coming in as if it's income from sales.
"Adding new cases to the pipeline" means "suckering new little old ladies out of their retirement money" ??
Quoted from frolic:He keeps referring to the cash "pipeline". Money he's waiting on to make payroll, pay expenses.
I'm deducing what that really was was the INVESTMENT money from little old ladies, literally showing up and being lit on fire immediately.
There will be books, TV shows, movies about all of this before this is done. It's amazing.
Precisely. Plus, for a supposedly educated person his grammar and spelling are awful.
1 month later
Quoted from ForceFlow:Here's a novel idea--forget about lifting the playfield up. That's a thing of the past. It will have bomb bay doors on the bottom of the cab instead.
Novel idea? Apparently you've never worked on an Atari Hercules! I have nightmares about wriggling under one on a nasty beer-soaked carpet...
1 week later
Quoted from PinballNews:Shurgard Romford
XXXXX XXXXXX
3 Rush Green Road
Romford RM7 0PT
Afghanistan
That's a typo. The address listed is a Shurgard storage building in Romford, east of London in Essex, UK.
Photo credit: Google Maps[quoted image]
Well that's certainly a lot less exciting than the thought that someone in Afghanistan had ordered a RAZA.
2 months later
Quoted from blueberryjohnson:Plenty of opportunities. He just did #3. Someone said "Wow" in response.
Is it pinsiders in the audience or little old ladies?
Quoted from SantaEatsCheese:Agricultural starts in 2017?
5th amendment (what was he doing in agriculture... how?)
Someone pull up that Mueller Corn sign picture....
1 week later
Quoted from JodyG:Which blows my mind they are still using dimple locations and hand drilling to spot playfield features in 2022 and not just having all the holes pre-drilled in a CNC. Some poor schmuck gets to have carpel tunnel frim hand drilling thousands of holes every day.
Not 100% sure how Stern is using their press, but at Williams they used it to pinprick spotting locations and press in t-nuts, on both sides of the playfield in a single operation. Not sure where you get the drilling thousands of holes idea - the pinpricks are to spot the tips of screws that hold things to the surface of the playfield, presumably put in with power tools.
You can use a CNC router to make all those spotting holes, but just picture all the movement on that CNC head, vs 30 seconds to load in a playfield, press it, and then pull it out again. Not having to hammer in all those T-nuts by hand is just a bonus. The downside of course is making all those press plates, altering them if there are design changes, and storing them somewhere when you're not using them. (Not so much of an issue for Williams, as they literally never re-ran games. And note that sometimes when they re-ran playfields for Parts Sales too far down the road, they didn't get spotting holes.)
Quoted from JodyG:but for through holes, jig plates and drills should have been replaced 20 years ago.
That's a 32-year-old video. Wish granted! I seriously doubt Stern is doing anything like that any more. They're using the press to put pinpricks for screw spotting, I suspect.
Quoted from JodyG:Those are insert holes...we all know they are not drilled by hand.
There are more than a dozen holes there. Also, if they can't figure out tooling and machinery to do small holes more quickly and efficiently on a CNC than with a human and a template, they are not trying hard enough. I have a degree in computer aided machining and have been a journeyman Tool & Die maker and T&D CAD designer in a large consumer product manufacturing facility for close to 20 years now, and I feel confidant in my assessment here. If you want to stay ahead in the current manufacturing world, you constantly need to be assessing your processes for improvements. This is especially true with the current labor situation in this country.
Somehow I think we've lost the thread, even on our already-lost thread. The original question was Why the big press? The answer is because that's a much much faster way to do the hundred or more spotting holes (pinpricks) on both sides, than to have a CNC router run around and drive a tiny bit a tiny-bit into the wood in a hundred places. Secondary-operation drilling using a jig plate is a completely unrelated thing.
Quoted from Inside:In other discussion, anyone know what lots were removed? I thought there were 380 lots, now it's down to 371?
Looks like all the 9 removed lots are in the first 100. So probably furniture type stuff. Maybe JPop wanted to keep his desk?
Quoted from richierich85:Hey guys, might be the biggest ask in the world, if I was to bid on the auction can anyone assist me to have something picked up from auction house and I need it dropped off at spookys warehouse... Or can advise on a shipping/trucking company that can do that move for me...... international bidder if i can get help. thanks all
Obviously you don't want to tip your hand what you're bidding on but before anyone volunteers they're really going to need to know the scale. Makes a big difference whether you're talking a box of water bottles or a 2 head CNC router!
Quoted from mbwalker:So TuYo is forking out money to keep some life insurance policies in place. But has Deeproot IP (i.e. RAZA IP) been mentioned at all as an asset?
With the possible of greatwichjohn's mysterious friends, to whom would that IP possibly be an asset? Everyone else would consider it a Superfund site.
Quoted from pinball_ric:I wish I 1) had the money to buy some of that CNC stuff and 2) Somewhere to actually put it. There's some other stuff I'm interested in though
Don't forget the crazy power requirements most of it has too (read the data plates in the auction listings) You're not going to run an extension cord out of your house to your garage to fire those things up.
Quoted from pinball_ric:I actually have a 220v outlet in the garage.. I'm not sure what amperage it is but if I had to guess it's 30amp
The deeproot routers laugh at your 220V outlet. These aren't clothes dryers.
pasted_image (resized).pngQuoted from IMI4tth3w:Pinbar was causing major issues for mechanical engineers since so much of the machine had to be modified (from a standard Williams cabinet) to get that to work.
That brings up a question I had - between the lift frame for the glass and the pinbar, did the size of the playfield glass vary from the standard dimensions? For instance when Bally did their lift-frame games the glass was shorter by a couple of inches. (This is going to be of particular interest to anyone bidding on those crates of playfield glass in the auction. Would suck to truck them home and find out they don't fit any games!)
Quoted from gdonovan:I work in a commercial building with 3 phase and that seems excessive, though my primary area of expertise is not CNC machines.
FYI most 3 phase motors can be internally switched from 460 volt to 208/220 volt moving some wiring leads about.
If you buy both the big CNC routers at the auction you'll need different voltages for each!
pasted_image (resized).pngQuoted from SantaEatsCheese:I want to know the final bid on the water bottles. It's up to $280 for 50 or so water bottles. Someone local is going to snag those and sell them for profits.
They went for $280
Quoted from SantaEatsCheese:Sold for $6525...
Plus 15% buyer's premium
Quoted from benheck:All this equipment but Blobert skimped on a 2 channel Tektronix?
But someone today got it for a dime on the dollar! ($485)
1 week later
Just FYI - from the whole Steve Kordek Archives/Lost Playfield Drawings Of Harry Williams projects, I have a 42" scanner that can do bitonal, greyscale and color of anything 42" or less in one of its dimensions, and about any length in the other. IOW, perfect for full size playfield drawings. I work for free for pinball historical archiving projects. Just an alternative to dumping a bunch of money at Kinko's, if anyone is interested. I can provide references 
1 week later
Quoted from benheck:JFC. If it works that poorly while holding just a piece of wood, imagine how bad it gets with a 30 lb populated playfield and wires hanging everywhere.
30? I'm not sure I've ever handled a playfield that was only 30lb. Maybe Lost World or SST or something. Now let's hang a ST:TNG or Hobbit playfield on that thing and see what happens.
1 month later
Quoted from BMore-Pinball:The best thing they engineered the the lifting glass mech.
You mean, like late-60s/early-70s Bally EMs had?
4 weeks later
Quoted from EternitytoM83:It's partly for the hell of it but mostly because of my obsession with puzzle games dating clear back to Zork.
Zork? Never heard of it
2 weeks later
Quoted from frolic:I suppose for all the possibilities of who was behind this, this makes the most sense and was probably the best outcome, because all others were versions of being trolled by someone.
...or Robert, trying to make another go at it.
Quoted from colonel_caverne:Deeproot, 7 years old
the company still alive (without anything to sell)?
Yes, Rip Van Winkle, a couple of things happened while you were out.
2 weeks later
Quoted from benheck:Reading this LED driver datasheet, man, so convoluted.
Yeah, starting on Page 14 of the data sheet they describe the badly-named "EasySet" serial data transmission scheme. Even if you were going to want to use this chip for some reason, going to all the trouble to communicate with them, why would you intermix these and standard neopixel data transmission chips?!
2 weeks later
Quoted from Haymaker:Regarding his ego, he does mention in the call that hes smarter at pinball than anyone else.
I'm sorry, that statement could apply equally well to either participant on that call, you're going to have to be more specific.
3 months later
1 month later
Quoted from benheck:I can finally make Bible Adventures!
You can also now practice law without a license.
1 month later
Quoted from CrazyLevi:My main worry is that RAZA -which looked like an absolutely terrible game - might possibly be revived.
This alone is enough reason to both distrust and fear this guy.
Pinbar. It's the prospect of the Pinbar being revived that should really keep you up at night.
Quoted from Roostking:I have a feeling the PinBar(tm) is coming back and better than ever!
That's a low bar (no pun intended)
1 week later
Quoted from mbwalker:Turner Pinball dropped a new video. Maybe we should start a thread for TP, if someone hasn't done so already.
There's always already a thread!
6 months later
Promoted items from Pinside Marketplace and Pinside Shops!
You're currently viewing posts by Pinsider frobozz.
Click here to go back to viewing the entire thread.
Reply
Wanna join the discussion? Please sign in to reply to this topic.
Hey there! Welcome to Pinside!
Donate to PinsideGreat to see you're enjoying Pinside! Did you know Pinside is able to run without any 3rd-party banners or ads, thanks to the support from our visitors? Please consider a donation to Pinside and get anext to your username to show for it! Or better yet, subscribe to Pinside+!
