So, short story is that I've wanted a WPT for years. I love drop target games and deep rulesets. But theme and limited space meant it was a really hard sell in the house. We've always had games that we wanted to keep more, WPT rarely ever comes up for sale anywhere nearby. I had this really nice restored Xenon which was fun, but I just wasn't digging it enough to keep it, and knew we couldn't fit 5 games again in our available space with that monster. Big head games, we can have 2 and 3 Stern/WPC games. Crescendo and Farfalla aren't going ANYWHERE, so Xenon needed to go so we could have 3 modern games again. My wife and I basically "share" Crescendo and Farfalla, Metallica is definitely hers. Xenon was mine, so I made an executive decision to sell Xenon and try to pick one up from TPF.

Started poking around, and there was a WPT whitewood for sale here on Pinside. It has some extra holes and whatnot from test fits, but I can patch that, and it's a whitewood...I thought about it for a few days, I love wierd playfields (Have a Tron one that's missing all the keylines!), and I thought a bit about possible rethemes. I already wanted to do a custom pin, so a retheme as a first project seemed a lot more doable, especially with a design I already liked. I made a list of themes I'd be willing to put the effort into, and Voltron is the winner. Things I want to do fit well. The existing insert layout fits *exactly* what I need to do this theme.

I'm planning on salvaging as much of the rules as possible from WPT and adapting what I need to in order to fit to purpose, but I *will* be using P3 hardware and having to learn Python, and coding, and write everything. I don't think I can write better rules than Keith, but obviously, things like the LED block display and rules revolving around cards specifically aren't going to work. Probably the biggest change will be morphing the "Drop target poker" feature into some way to collect specific characters for qualifying a mini-wizard, and either changing entirely how the LED block display works or replacing it altogether with a screen. The DMD will be going away and be replaced with a video screen for sure.

I'm announcing this realizing that I have basically nothing done, because I'm a *terrible* self-motivator at times, and if I have this thread, I'm hoping that it will keep me pushing to have something to talk about! I'm starting with art. It's the smallest stretch for me, and gives me time to document all the rules in WPT and figure out what I want to keep and what needs to go.

Ultimately, when I'm done, I would *like* to open-source ALL of my work, so that someone else can take their WPT and turn it into Voltron if they like. My feelings may change on that, as I expect this to be a 2-3 year project because I'm having to fund a lot of expenses I normally would not have, and my personal money situation is pretty "meh" anyways. If I do go that route, I'll probably open some kind of way to make donations for anyone that wants to, but that will only be after everything is released. I'm not going to feel like I'm beholden to anyone to progress on this project other than myself. I work a lot of overtime. Updates will be pretty slow, and probably far and few inbetween, so I'm giving everyone notice: Stay the hell off my theme of choice, thanks!

Currently, I'm planning on pulling one episode from each season for modes, I'd love to have some feedback from diehard fans as to your favorite episodes!

I'll have a little bit more to post tomorrow regarding what I want to do with some of the art direction and sounds, and a basic insert layout, but for now, this is the first completed art (Well, okay, the Voltron logo is done for sure. I may tweak my "company" logo a little bit more.), but I expect that I'll likely have this art on all sides of the cabinet and the backglass, so it got done first. I'll be drawing everything in vector, using primarily Inkscape.

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Lion. I grew up with that, both of my kids have been addicts for either the original series or the reboots.

Where the hell did my picture go...*fixed*

Not using anything from the new series. I haven't seen any of it. Couldn't get to my computer to do anything today....got the day off work so I went to a tournament and took 3rd place after having a very rough start.

Oh, I'll get around to watching it, just have been and will probably continue to be busy.

It's unlikely the game will cease to be a little bit stop-and-go, because I like things like mode starts and physical locks. I know there's no actual physical locks on WPT, but I have some ideas on making that more possible while preserving the layout. Will definitely require adding some new things or moving existing things a bit. I do really like the option on most modern games to skip animations and long multiball starts, so if there's a way I can accomodate that, it will be a part of the code at some point. I want to make good use of video and callouts, but forcing someone to sit through them is kind of like.....why? Because it's easier to not program the "double flip out"? Meh.

Here's what I'm currently working with as far as insert layouts. I marked things I'm not sure what I'm going to do with just yet with what they do in WPT.

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Yeah, I'm going to play around with RGB stuff for sure. Even with colored inserts there's probably quite a bit that can be done that people just don't really tend to think about....kind of how like putting a warm white vs. cool white vs. orange vs. yellow LED under an orange insert will make it look like 4 entirely different colors when it's lit. I think there's room to use RGB even under colored inserts with enough tinkering, but those arrows that are used for the hurryups...90% of the time I see those as being mode shots. Just the basic hurryup functionality in WPT is kind of 'meh' from what I've seen of it...waiting on a bootrom chip to come so I can actually have it working again... pretty sure it's all for the "tricks".. I'm trying not to think about it too much until I can actually get into the last code release for WPT and take a look at what's going on, because all I've seen is code that was 2 years older than the last release. Game bricked when I tried to update with a modern thumb drive..

Guess the question is, when the hell will I get the bootloader chip. John Wart doesn't seem to respond to email, I ordered the thing and paid for it like last thursday, haven't recieved any kind of notification it's shipped... but I've still got a ridiculous amount of work with art to do so it can wait.

Because it's already in the game and I want something to play while I'm doing everything else? To me, there's no point at all to tear this game down until I have at LEAST a VERY solid ruleset in mind along with playfield art. I don't want to tear down and rebuild the playfield to make very minor changes. I don't have the time to waste my efforts like that. I'm not going to be using the original boardset in the end. But I am using it so I have a playable game in my house instead of a BRICK, and to see what rules I can salvage from WPT....

It's not like we can all just conjure 1200 bucks out of thin air for a set of PROC boards, and have the coding knowledge to get something flippable a few days later. I sold off a massive chunk of my game collection to try and fund buying the boards then life slapped me in the face and said "F you bro." and the money went to other things, as it so often does. /shrug

Slack is like online voicechat, right? If so, I very seriously doubt I'll be using that very much. I hate hate HATE talking on the phone. Talking on a 'party line' of sorts holds about as much interest to me as "teabagging" a drum of sulfuric acid. =P

That's good to know. Saves me a little bit of money at least!

What the hell is "BoS"? =P

And I seriously doubt I'm going anywhere. Not sure why anyone would care what anyone else would choose to retheme in regards to cost...obviously I already accounted for that. I got a good deal on a base machine and the whitewood, and I'm pretty good at managing costs in various ways.

What is your issue? You tore that guy apart on his cocktail project too. I appreciate the feedback, but just because you offer it doesn't mean that everyone is obligated to do things YOUR way, or even to use your site. I'll be looking through there once I actually get to more technical things, but why are you tearing me a new one when I've already SAID that I'm going to start with art and thinking about rules, and that I have so much to do before I even get to that point? I want to learn Python, I want to be utilizing the existing frameworks to cut down on the coding side of things as much as possible. I've never coded a single damn thing. I think it would be WISE to learn a bit before just throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks, yeah? I mean seriously...you're on here one minute posting your site and offering help, and then an hour later basically giving me the finger. I'm at work man. I wasn't even at my desk for half of that time, I was out getting my lunch. Come on.

I don't have the money for boards right now. None of them. So in your opinion...what....all progress should just come to a screeching halt because I can't start the way you'd start? Tell me again, how exactly, is doing cabinet and backglass art dependent on having circuitboards? So yeah, if all you have to offer is to throw out how you personally would do things, then get all butthurt when it's not taken as 100% MUST DO IT THIS WAY...then it's probably best to not keep reading here. I'll be happy to get feedback and information if you can keep it positive, but I won't continue to engage in this kind of childish crap...

In more related subject matter..sheesh...it's crazy how much Legendary Defender has drowned out the old series on Google. Even when you can find any stills or source art related to the old series, it's really low-rez and details are indecipherable. I'm predicting lots of time spent scanning things and doing my own screencaps, especially from the first volume of the DVD releases, to find suitable reference art that I can vectorize..

Well, it's "real" in that all the mechs, the cabinet, all the cabinet hardware and everything are going to be used for it, and that the original art on the cabinet is going to be lost? Sure, I'm using the whitewood playfield (assuming there's no horrifically major differences...I was willing to take that risk, because honestly, I like having odd playfields) and not the original one, but it's not like someone could take my original PF and just instantly reconstruct a WPT with it. When I get this thing to the point of near completion, I'll probably sell the PF and CPU boards to recoup some money, and hopefully someone with a trashed out WPT that needs a playfield will finally be able to replace theirs. In general, I'm more of a preservationist than a parting-out kind of person, but let's be honest here..there's plenty of other, nicer WPTs out there. I got what I paid for...a game that's seen some location play but was 100% functional, and barebones. No mods, no LEDs, upper playfield has clearly seen a good amount of play, etc.

If someone's interested in buying the cabinet from me when I'm ready to apply art, and there's someone that actually makes this style of Stern cabinet brand new, then I'd certainly be open to purchasing a new production cabinet and selling mine. It's yellowed and smells like smoke though.

You're one of two people that I've ever seen say that WPT is their dream theme, John.

Whatever man. See ya.

Back on track....

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Details on this thing are killing me. I've had to waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to get Inkscape to fill things in correctly. Vector is so different from raster drawing programs.

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Calling it quits on this one. I can't get it any better I don't think. (Okay, that's a lie, I just feel like I've spent long enough on it and any further improvements are likely to be lost as it's not going to be 3ft. x 3ft. sized. Hell, even most of the shadowing detail I worked on today is lost even at this size..)

Coffin.png

Crap. Almost finished this one today.

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Done with that. Next!

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It'll be there in whatever state it's in, I'm sure....which most likely will be WPT with Voltron cabinet art and not much else. LOL. I think if I can keep the rate I'm going with art right now, and the Lions and main characters don't give me too many fits (Let me tell you how much I HATE HATE HATE drawing hands) I might have cabinet art and a translite done here in a few months. Learning python is not going to be easy, even with all the work the other guys have done for me with things like PyProcHD/SkeletonGame....I'm keeping a text file of callouts and rule changes that I've thought of as I go.

I'm still trying to get a stupid bootloader chip for my WPT so I can actually play with it and document the last revision of the rules. :\

I might be a dickhead, but I'm a pretty good learner. I was thinking something like that, still having the WPT rules playable in some way. I haven't really decided what I want to do with those LED block displays in the window. If I can salvage them with the Voltron rules in some manner, then keeping WPT playable would be a LOT easier. If I replace them with some kind of other display, that's going to be much harder. I would guess probably that Pinmame would have some way to just divert the emulated display to a LCD screen, but I'm not going to let that be a deciding factor in what the game ends up as. Since I won't be keeping the card references in the art, it'll make playing WPT kind of difficult I'd guess.

I'm pretty sure this game was already made and is called Jackbot.

Just noticed something odd as I was finishing this. My reference art for the pink one has no whiskers. Screencaps show it with whiskers, but for whatever reason that piece I had which was from one of the set boxes, doesn't? Odd. I may have to spend some time adding them to see if I like it as is or with whiskers. Oh well, here's the other one!

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