Getting Started

The idea to replace paper apron cards with video displays came to me in 2020. I've always thought the apron area in a pinball machine was "dead real estate" and printing attractive paper cards for my games was a big hassle. I also like to see what my score is while I'm playing and finding it on a back box often resulted in drained balls. Putting video displays in place of those cheap cards seemed like a good idea. Right by the flippers, something easy to look at.

Making it happen proved to be a lot more difficult than I expected. They have been done before, on at least a couple occasions, but the content was always lacking. I figured for a display system to be useful it would have to provide active data, like scores, and tie into the host game system.

I was at the Texas Pinball Festival in 2021 and met a couple guys from Fast Pinball. They gave me hope that extracting data from old processors could be done, but didn't seem interested in providing much support. They probably knew it would be a tall mountain to climb. I spent the next couple years learning more about assembly code (written mostly by dinosaurs) and poking at chips on WPC CPU boards.

I had sourced the raw video displays, created an on-top-of-the-apron 3D printed holder and tied them to a Raspberry Pi-4, but getting into the legacy game system (WPC) was probably the biggest hurdle. By chance, I ran across Paul and Max with Warped Pinball. They were developing a module that could read data from a Motorola 6809 processor, which powers most 1985-2005 pinball machines. With their expertise, we've been able to bring this concept alive and create a system that has a lot of potential.

I had a basic apron display cobbled out of parts, running a dual slide show at the Texas Pinball Festival in 2024, just to see if anybody would stop by and check it out. It was funny to watch people. Since it wasn't in a game, they really didn't know what to make of it. We'll be at Pinball Expo 2025 with a fully functioning system in a Fishtales. It'll be fun to see what people think now. Hope to see you there!