I will sell both the lighted panel and the new plastics with shadow mask, but they are separate purchases.

You can use your existing plastic speaker panel, but you need to take the black stuff off the back. With the lighted panel we supply a plastic razor blade to aid in taking the black stuff off. The plastic razor blade won't damage your original panel, but DO NOT use a metal razor blade or any metal tool on your original plastic speaker panels.

Nearly all games use the same lighted panel. When I list it, I will list it for each game with pictures of the panel on that game. I have most of those listed games. The few games that I do not have, I do have plastics, so you will be able to see them set up and working.

I am not sure if Rick is going to carry the shadow mask plastic panels. The manufacture of the new shadow plastics is through his guy. He finishes a title about every 2 weeks. He has to set up the printer for the shadow mask, so it takes a little while. I have 3 plastic speaker panels in stock now, and will have more when we open in 2 months.

Rick mentioned that he did want to carry a small trial order of lighted panels, but that was over 6 months ago, and we have not spoken about that since.

When we open I will announce on here.

We have a lot of original products that we are coming out with, so many treads should have when we open. Paypal will be payment.

HSII looked great, that was the first one we made. We had very simple panels set up on about 10 of our games about 6 months ago for proof of concept. They all looked good.

The current panel is very, very nice. It is a universal panel, so if the DMD is in the same place (I think T2 is the only different location DMD), and the speaker sizes are the same (Indiana Jones has bigger speaker cut outs, and Star Trek: The Next Generation is square), and it has no panel lights, like Addams Family, it will work in the same game.

I will make a complete list of games the universal panel will work in. Their have been some comments about HHSII, TZ, TOM, WCS. FT. Those all use the same panel, as well as nearly 15 other games.

You could put this in you Fish Tales, then pull it out and put it in your Twilight Zone, then pull it out and put it in your Creature From the Black Lagoon, no problem.

Good questions. This is a replacement of wooden board that supports and speakers and DMD. If you have extra lights, like on Addams Family or Rollergames, those mount on the new board the same way they do on the old board. On Addams Family the * T H I N G * will light up independently with no light bleed between the lighted panel and the * T H I N G * lights just like on the original game. Addams Family took over a month to do, it was a nightmare.

On Addams Family we tried to put color changing lights in the entire board with separate color changing lights for the speakers. Looked great, the white lattice would light up to any color. I think we made 2 prototypes of that board, just to hard, not enough space. we will NOT be doing a full color changing board for Addams Family, but we will have the white board with color changing speaker lights.

BSD. Unfortunately I don't own this game or have a sample, so it is not on our list of games of initial release. If I don't track one down, I may have to borrow someones panel for a deal on a lighted panel. The main panel would be exactly the same as out generic panel, so it won't be hard for us to do.

Another thing about BSD, Flintsotnes and Indianapolis 500, they all have a layer of black on the back of the plastic speaker panel, so they don't light up as bright as the other games, but they still light up and make for a very cool effect.

That was a specific request from Rick at PPS and Stern also commented on this. We did do some boards that had sequencing and triggers from the playfield. We spent a fair amount of money and time working on this. Did a few prototypes.

If we did that, the boards would come out very slowly and would be more expensive. Probably only release 1 panel per month, would have taken forever to get a bunch out.

We have designed the board so you have space, and can get a strip LED from Comet Pinball using the matrix system, so you custom your lighted panel. Parts of the panel can be blocked off or lit different colors. The panel does NOT have switches or anything to do this, but it could easily be done manually.

Also most parts of most plastic speaker panels don't lend well to interactivity. Not much specific on them. Twilight Zone is an exception, and would work very well for game interactivity. Twilight Zone has both the pyramid and and the gumball machine on the plastic speaker panel. You could purchase for less then $20 the lights needed from Comet Pinball. Take about 1 hour, and you could have the gumball machine and the pyramid triggered from the play field, would not be hard.

We have talked about having modules available that would fit in the panel to do those upgrades. If we did that, it would be a long, long time away, because we rather get the lighted speaker panels for Stern, Data East and Sega before we do those updates.

As we say here. You can mod the mod.

Yes, all panels we make will work with color DMD. Yes, the * T H I N G * lights with color DMD will work fine on our panels.

Power supply was one of the big problems. Most games are close to the power consumption, so if add a color DMD you cannot do another mod. We have over come this problem, this panel and some of our other mods that are coming out will work fine in your game with a color DMD.

As we work on more boards we do find easier ways to do things. If we can figure out how to overcome major problems to have a color Addams Family we would love to do it. A couple of the problems is you need a certain depth for light to have a good spread, and RGB LED's need even more depth then white LED's. If the lights are to close to the board, you have hot spots. We did a lot of work with diffusers to try to over come some of our problems, but could not get it to work. Also remember that board that comes with your Bally/Williams game is only .37 inches thick. Not much space to do anything!!

Creature From The Black Lagoon is the only game to have done anything like this. It had at least 3 versions, maybe 4. Of course Mr. Thompson's was a piece of art.

We tracked down any piece of information we could find for that mod.

We tried to find every problem that people had with any of those Creature mods, and made sure we could over come them.

The very fist prototype we did were custom cut for that game with a vinyl shadow mask. We talked a bit with Rick from PPS, and he suggested that going with a shadow mask in a new plastic would be a better way to go, and we agreed.

All of the past Creature Panels had the taillights light up, the UFO may or may not flash, the moon lit and the drive in sign sequenced.

We wanted to make the orange sunset light up, which we think is the best part of the board, when you see it, it looks great. We also wanted to make all of the stars light up.

Creature is one of the few speaker panels that would look better with a sequencer or trigger from the board.

We had a choice, make a few boards look the best they could possibly look or make a lot of very good boards. We choose making a lot of very good boards.

So on our Creature board their are some trade offs from earlier Creature boards.

The Creature board that we offer is our generic board. The entire board lights up. It is exactly the same board you see in these Fish Tale pictures. And this board works on about 20 games. So you lose the sequence sign, but more things light up. And of course with our deluxe board you get color changing speaker lights.

When Mr. Thompson released his lighted panel, you had the option of purchasing a vinyl shadow mask for the back of your plastic speaker panel and you had the option of purchasing the deluxe plastic speaker panel which had a bit of chrome in the silk screened plastic speaker panel. So even with the best past creature panels you could purchase upgrades.

We are having a Creature plastic shadow masked speaker panel being made that will light up the tail lights, UFO, moon, orange sunset, the entire drive in sign and all of the stars.

Attached is a Creature lighted panel that was done in February and is close to what we will offer now. All our lighted speaker panels come with black metal speaker grills the same hole pattern of the original game.

We have made artwork for all of the games that have artwork on the speaker panels, such as Creature, Star Trek The Next Generation, No Fear, Dirty Harry, Flintstones, Indiana Jones the W, the circle and W and may be a few others. These are not available for sale yet. I will need to get these OK's by Rick, and he asked for them months ago, but I have been dragging my feet on that project.

creature (resized).jpg

Yes, we are aware of the color DMD problems with Data East, and when we come out with our panel, we will make it easy to mount a color DMD. The few people that have seen the guts of our panel are impressed.

The panel we make is 100% from scratch except for measurements of the DMD area. Making it to mount color DMD will be very easy for us.

A little bit about the speaker grills. When we started this project, we felt speaker grills would be no problem. Well as it turned out, it was one of the biggest problems we had. I know some people would kill for these, but I can not offer these till I talk to Rick. My fault, not his.

THESE SPEAKER GRILLS ARE NOT AVAILABLE at this time.

These came with the first Flintstone games.

flintstone speaker panels (resized).jpg

Color changing on any lighted speaker panel is not possible at this time. Don't see any way of doing it at this time.

I would say cut it up. We will do all of the Sterns first, and I expect that to take 6 months for art work and printing.

Yes, thank you, should have done this picture to start. 100% glare gone.

fish tales glasre shield (resized).jpg

I am not showing any of the internal workings at this time. The heart of this mod line is at the heart of a few other full lines that I will be coming out with before we open in 2 weeks. When we open I will at that time. Sorry

Don't worry, not hiding anything. As we install this in games I will show pictures. At the time we open we will have these installed in about 20 games, and behind 5 games plastic speaker panels that we don't have games for. You will have 100's of pictures in different games, different angles, different lighting before you make any purchasing.

I will say the lighting system is rather simple. The panel was a nightmare to make. Had over 100 prototypes testing different materials, different lights, different reflections, different angles, different brackets, different mounting, different speaker lighting, different depths. Lot of time devoted to this.

Yes, all good points. We do feel this is one of the biggest bang for the buck, but of course that is our opinion, LOL

We looked at it this way. Many little mods for the play field cost about $100 bucks. For twice that price, you will get something you can see from across the room. Something that when you walk past would make you stop.

This is not for everyone, we understand that. But it gives a choice that has never been done before. We have another line of products that has nearly the impact as this for half the price. We also have another line that we are working on that will have a huge impact for about $100 also. We got a lot of things coming out, so no need for me to sell huge huge amount of these.

Per your comments about other things, YES, YES, YES, a ton of things can be done. We were going to do something special on Funhouse. As a previous post said, not much on that speaker panel. One of our prototypes we were doing had a silhouette of the clock, hot dog, Rudy and stairs in the black area, you could not see them normally. When those were triggered on the play field, it turned on the light to see the silhouette. It was pretty cool.

I would say for 2 months we were experimenting with special things like that. One thing that came out of that was the lighted speaker grill area. which we are very happy with. I know it does not sound like much, especially since they have been available for Stern for years. But for Bally/Williams what a problem. We hated how the speakers were different sizes on each side, they looked bad when lit up. If you look at them now, same stock speakers, same different cut holes, but look exactly the same!

Another thing is the speaker inserts. Again many of those have been around for years for Stern games, but never done for Bally/Williams. Had to start from scratch. Went through many different concepts before we decided on one. They cost a more to make then for Sterns, and they take more labor, but they work and look good.

Once you start thinking about the options their are thousands. Had to draw the line someplace, and we decided to make a lot of product available that looked very good, instead of a few games that looked the best they could.

We have some new lit products lines coming out in the next 2 months. Stay tuned.

We will probably have some color DMD's on games when we open. Not sure which games would be best to show this off. Look at my game list, what would you like to see a color DMD with the lighted speaker panels?

Good questions.

The mod comes with everything to install. NO changes to your game. Use your existing speakers, DMD and H channel:

The lighted panel will replace your wood panel.
1 remote for the basic white lighted panel
2 remotes for the deluxe panel with color LED's in the speaker area.
Speaker grills are installed on both basic and deluxe panels when you get it.
A couple of different sized bolts are required, comes with those.
Power supply system that will work on your game. More details on this when we open.

You do use your existing plastic speaker panel, and you do need to take the black stuff off the back. We supply a plastic razor blade to make that much easier. If you purchased a new plastic speaker panel in the last 10 years, good chance it does not have the black stuff on the back.

An upgraded plastic speaker cover with shadow mask is an upgrade option.

The speaker inserts, which on this game is the jumping fish are sold separately. Will have that for all games.

When you get it, you have everything to install. Just pull out your wood panel out of your game, and transfer speakers, DMD, plastic speaker panel and H channel.

If you google Creature From the Black Lagoon lighted speaker panel, you will see some explanations on install, which are nearly identical to these.

The Stern's use wood screws to mount everything. We changed that to T-nuts so you change your DMD without worries of stripping out you board. you get a lot of extra screws when the Stern come out.

Thank you very, very much. I cannot even explain how much work we put into this. When we show the details when we open, some things are going to be "bang that is simple" but other things people are going to say "how did they do that"

We made panels for 10 games back in February. Then we did Addams Family. Oh my good what a nightmare. I was a bit afraid to do that game. If you look at the attached picture, this was one of our first prototypes of Addams Family. We were happy how the T H and I lit up with no light bleed. But oh my god the shadows!! Shadows under the letters, shadows around the speakers, shadows around the DMD, shadows at the left and right edges of the boards. Their not as bad in the picture as they are in real life. At that time we did a complete redesign. Trashed nearly everything we did.

Our current board uses clear resin around the DMD, speakers and end of the panels. It dramatically reduces the shadows, but they are still visible on a light panel like Fish Tails. Under the resin we have chrome paint, to reflect light up. At the ends of the panel and around the DMD we paint the inside of the resin with a reflective white, then with a coat of black to match around the DMD and ends.

Here is the sequence of making a deluxe board for those who think it is over priced:

1. Route
2. Paint
3. Resin
4. Route gives us clear thin supports for speakers grills, DMD and all edges
5. Route
6. Electronics
7. Other items
8. Resin
9. Route
10. Route
10. T-Nuts
11. Paint
12. Electronics
13. Resin
14. Seal
15. Sand
16. Seal
17. Paint
18. Paint
19. Few finishing steps
20. Then the power supply steps

It is a lot of steps, and I left some out, but like I said, this in not some cheap board that is routed.

We have done this many different ways, but this give the least shadows, least hot spots and strongest mounts.

Yes we have looked at acrylic and other methods, all were price prohibitive.

addams family prototype (resized).jpg

Yes, the one that is on your game now. The Star Trek picture you saw was one from March or so. It has a vinyl shadow mask on that we won't offer. The picture you saw would be the closest to purchasing the new speaker plastic with the built in shadow mask. Don't worry, when it comes time to purchase you will get clear pictures of the game with different options.

Should be open in about 2 months.

The Star Trek lighted panels will probably be $30 more then regular panels, because it is the only game with that speaker configuration. A bit more work.

A couple of panels will probably be a little more expensive. Start Trek: The Next Generation (square speakers), Indiana Jones (larger speakers), Addams Family (*THING*), Terminator 2 (DMD is in a different position), BSD (not expected to be done at launch, but has cutouts) I think their is another one, but I cannot think of it.

Yes, I am sorry if I was not clear. The first bunch of pictures of Fish Tales is with the stock plastic panel that came with the game the last pictures (I think 5) are taken with the new shadow mask plastic.

A panel like this has only been done for one game only, Creature From the Black Lagoon, the 2 most recent options were both for Creature From the Black Lagoon. Mr Thompson panel I believe was $179, if you wanted a vinyl, that was another $15, if you want the upgraded speaker plastic, that would be another $129. Those were about 2 years ago. Also he did not do another run, but no one knows why.

Or if you want to purchase a Creature From The Black Lagoon lighted pane nowl, with no plastic panel, no vinyl and no lighted speakers it is only $399.00:

http://www.pinballdecals.com/CFTBL_TailLightModPage.html

They have them in stock now for Creature if you want that.

Based on those 2 examples, I don't have a problem at the $199.99 price point. When I started this, I was afraid another person would steel my idea, besides patent pending, our panel in now so complicated and detailed, we are not worried about anyone steeling it.

Thanks Art. Means a lot coming from you. When we were doing The Walking Dead prototype for Stern, we used some of your matrix red lights triggered from the play field to make the bloody fingers redder.

I know you are not with Comet now, I hope retirement is good.

Thanks
Dan