iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 25/09/2026

PLD Roller Coaster Tycoon Pinball: The whitewood is flipping and we're coding. Just not a lot of rules yet.

Pat Lawlor tries the RCT playfield, I'm either coding or reading IRC or both. PLD offices, January 2002. Photo credit @heyrocker.com

We have some dots! Just not a rule. Photo credit @heyrocker.com

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 24/09/2026

PLD RCT pinball, whitewood time. #2 went together pretty quickly but with the usual Lawlor complement of holes in the playfield that went nowhere. There's packing tape all over the place to keep balls at ground leve.

Pat working on Roller Coaster Tycoon, whitewood 2

Some of the ramps and wireforms were already playable at this point.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 23/09/2026

PLD RCT pinball: The new workshop also gave Krutsch a lot more room to hand model ramps and wireforms.

John Krutsch cutting ramp plastics on a bandsaw.

Brass wire being cut and soldered in to shape by hand. RCT whitewood 2.

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- Most importantly: are the two events related? 🤔 The photo editor has been sacked and future PLD photos will have all hands visible at all times.

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All jokes aside it IS a good thing. I used to beg to get an escort pass when the Mrs was flying along with toddlers. Didn't always get one (glares at UAL)

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Well now you gotta buy multiple $17 sandwiches for everyone! This is getting expensive!

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Really craving that $17 Chik-fil-A sandwich (sorry, gift cards don't work here)

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 17/09/2026

You help the kid apply to college and you see all the hoity talk about their achievements and academic prowess. Then you get to the first football game and it's "we can't kick off until Goober the Goat rings the highly coveted Ding Dong Bell by kicking it with his hind legs! Yee-haw! (gunfire)"

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Pat also got a deal on some old lathes and whatnot and one day a truck shows up and we forklift it in.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 17/09/2026

PLD RCT Pinball: our new offices had a lot more open room for workshop space. The wood router stayed in his garage but all the other metalworking tools came over.

Pat Lawlor and Greg Dunlap inspecting... something.

PLD's magnificently equipped model shop.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 17/09/2026

This one? Yeah, it got a little nuts there. But we got Ken Nordine to narrate and that was worth it. youtu.be/H7MkPwkhhsY

youtu.be

Pinball 2000 Revenge From Mars promo video

YouTube video by duncanfbrown

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No that was definitely post-Monopoly. The Croc Hunter TV show was hot in the USA in 2001 and it seemed ripe for a license. Using the ball-eating mech from Nip-It was an obvious toy. I forgot why it fell apart, or maybe Gary's big fan in Australia fucked it up on purpose.

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PLD RCT early days: After moving offices to Harvard we whipped up a quick first whitewood to show shots. Then we started getting the next playfield up after the holidays.

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PLD RCT pinball: After Expo 2001 Pat started getting the license in place. Why RCT? I don't totally recall. Pat loved SimCity (c.f. Dialed In) and Gary wouldn't do an original amusement park theme. I think the relationship with Hasbro helped as they sold the game to Infogrames.

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It's 2.5 watts! You can do everything with that!

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 15/09/2026

Cheap chinesium hubs are so sloppy with timing and tolerances that this will probably work just fine. Probably even better than buying it all from one vendor.

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That was so 2001, man!

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 15/09/2026

Thanks for the reminder @backglass.bsky.social! It's time to keep digging out PLD history and we're up to RollerCoaster Tycoon...

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 15/09/2026

I'll see if I still have my working PB10 in a box somewhere. Frankly this EPROM probably isn't anything special - I think these SMC devices expect a few bits of routing data and not much more.

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I added the UP, DOWN, ESCAPE, and ENTER commands which look silly when you're typing away on the console. But when I created macros in my terminal program to emit those strings, suddenly you had the coin door buttons on your PC's F-keys =) That made writing the test/audit system a LOT easier.

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The P2K hackers found the serial console but never understood all the things we could do with that. It was an amazing tool and saved our bacon more than a few times during dev and debug. (more)

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This was pretty common in the corporate PC market, but networking for coin-op games was the wild frontier. Midway was experimenting with ISDN lines and remote play but it was expensive and the bandwidth was slooooow.

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Imagine an arcade full of P2K machines that ALWAYS had the latest code in it. Pushing high scores was low-hanging fruit. We wanted to do way way more.

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I just ran into Tom Uban yesterday at VCFMW and if I had found this 48 hours earlier I could have asked him to tell me how this thing worked. He architected the entire XINU setup in P2K, it was amazing stuff in a world before embedded Linux really took root.

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Still trying to remember the setup. I believe each developer had a TFTP daemon on their dev machine (Windows-based!) that sat at the fixed 'server' address and then the P2K machine beside us would be fixed at the client address and search for my latest game image at startup.

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Obscure Pinball 2000 artifact I found in a box today: a custom boot ROM for the SMC8416 network card in our development machines. This would allow us to boot CPUs over the network during development, as well as other things we had planned. 🙁

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Which sadly means that most of these disks are probably still the intellectual property of Light and Wonder. Ugh.

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I asked LED if there was a VidKidz connection to PERC and High Speed, he clarified that he was at Williams at that time when he wrote PERC, and used a Gimix-ed version of that code to write Space Shuttle and High Speed. Then Jarvis used it for F-14 Tomcat.

Bummer! Maybe next time. I'm curious why coin-op hardware doesn't have much of a presence at this show other than MAME devices. The spectrum of devices is insane. Like someone recreated Bob Bishop's Tic-Tac-Dough game show set. 🤩

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RALF's owner also told me he's been in contact with the person that owns the other two Gimix boxes, MYKE and PSINDY. Stuff is getting archived! 🤯

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And the new owner kept the Grand Lizard drop target sticker 😍

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 12/09/2026

Had an awesome find at #vcfmw today. The old Vid Kidz RALF machine looking all cleaned up and enjoying retirement! He's in very good hands now. www.backglass.org/duncan/gimix/

"Used for Development by the Vid kids Eugene Jarvis and
Larry DeMar of Williams Electronics Inc"

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I wonder if I have Pat's original gerber file for that board stashed somewhere.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 11/09/2026

WTF! That's so bizarre to steal just that component. Unfortunately I don't know of anyone still supplying those. I wonder if you can repurpose a long-throw opto set from a different game and see if it works with only one or two LEDs instead of four. Sorry about that!

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 10/09/2026

I hear Aerosmith is out of a job since the Muppets stole it.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 10/09/2026

But it's an Android platform on hardware that's typically 3-5 years behind the current smartphone market, due to the glacial pace of development in the auto industry (barring Tesla). Volvo's AAOS platform is so old and slow that they're swapping hardware to a newer model if you complain enough.

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 08/09/2026

I love Kubuntu, I'll install it whenever I can. My company thinkpad is forced to run GDM and I haaaaaate it...

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 08/09/2026

But when your figured is poised over the BUY NOW button with a $10,000 price tag you will watch every single video to help justify that purchase. This was all a lot easier in the old days when you bought the game $0.25 at a time.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 08/09/2026

Now write a desktop app in Qt, which will ignore every setting and make up its own. And you can't change it.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 07/09/2026

I'll hand it to Stern, they figured out how to saturate social media with a new release and get the orders flowing. I see these YT videos all the time and as far as I can tell they're all talking on the same marketing points and it's not worth the time.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 04/09/2026

Fun story: Krutsch lived in my hometown and I went to school with his son. We sat next to each other all the time because of our last names. I got to Williams and NEVER made the connection until I talked to Karl at my 10 year reunion. "You work at Williams? So does my dad!" 😲