GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

Back in May, I got to hang out in California for a couple weeks to attend a couple conferences: Google I/O and IoT World.  I did a couple panels at IoT World, and one of them is already summarized on this previous blog post ; the other one is coming later.  However, as a bonus during my time in California, I also got to attend the Golden State Pinball Festival in Lodi.  Here, they had John Osborne, a pinball designer who worked at Gottlieb from 1972-1984.  The following are expansions of notes I took during his Ask Me Anything presentation. A Bit of Background John Osborne started his professional journey by studying electromechanical (EM) engineering at Fresno State.  This, of course, elicited cheers from the local crowd.  After college, he started working at Gottlieb in 1972 at the age of 21.  Besides Gottlieb, he was also interested in working at Chicago Coin, which he said was sketchy, because the hiring manager's last name was always changing...

From walking the show floor at Texas Pinball Fest 2016, I couldn't help but get the vibe that something novel and big would be in store for TPF 2017 -- something beyond the big but also typical/expected releases of commercial games such as The Big Lebowski and Ghostbusters  (more on those later), but in fact the ushering in of a new era: totally home-brew and open-source pinball.  As the re-themed games became more impressive from 2015 to 2016, and with easy access to leaning about hardware, fabrication techniques to develop new things and restore/renew/improve on old things, and a rejuvenated fascination with pinball in general, it was not surprising to me in the least that we would see someone totally knock it out of the park like Scott Danesi did at TPF 2017 with Total Nuclear Annihilation . However, just in case Scott wasn't there with his amazing game (for which I placed one of the pre-orders slated to ship sometime in 2018), I wanted to produce some work as well in or...

The"maker bone" has bit me pretty hard since 2011 when I began working on LEDgoes/BriteBlox and won 3rd place the Apps for Metro Chicago hackathon with Owtsee/headonout.  And while I've worked on a mixture of side projects for profit and fun since, I can't help but note the urge to do more ridiculous things for myself just to say I did them -- not necessarily to make any sort of profit (in fact, most of my projects sink an enormous amount of time spent over several years before true completion), but for the notoriety. The Actual Beginning Of This Post There... Now that the part Google Plus will post as the headline is out of the way, it seems to me that my coworkers generally love me, and I love them too.  I am seen as quite the maker type inside my area, and have been invited to participate in events even in various groups I don't necessarily belong to because they like to "claim" me.  Often, these are external recruiting events, and I love exuding...

Recently, I dug up an old email where I was musing on the big marquee on an old television game show called The Magnificent Marble Machine .  It was a very fancy prop at the time, as most television shows of the era relied on art cards with big, bold letters that would be flipped, slid, or otherwise revealed by stagehands upon the emcee's verbal cue.    k Slide it, Earl! ( Match Game ) - Survey Says?! ( Family Feud ) - Sources: YouTube, Game Show Utopia This is about as fancy as it got for electronic graphics on game show props in the 1970s ( Tic Tac Dough ).  However, they never upgraded this board during the 1980s... Source: Dailymotion And a couple shots of the Magnificent Marble Machine game board in action.  Looks like a plain ol' marquee, but really an astonishing feat of engineering given normally chintzy television props, especially for its era... Source: Gameshows Wikia Cashing In On a Fad Now, the Magnificent Marble Machine w...

I'm a collector.  My wife doesn't help me with my problem.  It's something I've done since I was young, and growing up as an only child, it brought me joy to share these things with others.  On the other hand, she comes from a big family but has also come to appreciate stuff.  There are things we collect together, such as retro video games, which led us to the Let's Play Gaming Expo which was in Plano, TX on 6/18 and 6/19.  We brought eight of our home console systems with at least one game per system from our personal stash,  and two pinball machines .  (Not to mention the gigantic 100x NES controller.) We have seen a staggering evolution in technology and aesthetics in our just shy of 30 years in existence, and what's more interesting to me about this evolution is the things we don't do anymore rather than the new things that have evolved.  For instance, print media has declined drastically over the past 15 years, pay-phone booths are virtual...