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Episode 9: It's just filling in the dots...
PodcastAnalysis updated yesterday1 hr 43 min listen
Justin joins us to share the world of ColorDMD and tales from trenches.
Highlights
- Justin Kelly's first pinball game was Jurassic Park, purchased around 2003-2004 after his brother showed him the depth of the game's rule set and mission structure
- Color DMD was founded by Randy Perlow and Chris Enright, who created the entire platform including hardware and software from scratch
- Color DMD colorization process involves recording gameplay on a flash drive (like a VCR), then mapping unique dot patterns and brightness levels to identify and color individual frames
- Eric Priepke (EptheGeek on Pinside) holds a record for colorizing Spider-Iron Man (Vault) in 8-10 days, having previously done the original Spider-Man
- Colorizing a typical game takes approximately 100+ hours of work depending on complexity, animation depth, and graphics
- Justin Kelly spent nearly a year on the Sopranos color conversion, though not all full-time, with significant crunch work before Pinnagogo debut
- PDX Monkey is a collector who has owned Sopranos five times, trading for nicer examples, and is a Pinside user known in the community
- Plasma dot matrix displays used in older pinball machines support 4-8 different brightness levels per dot, which Color DMD preserves during colorization
Notable quotes
“I literally just assumed that every single game had a shaker motor, right? So I forget the next game, but I go to buy some Williams game, and it didn't shake, and I'm like, this thing's broken.”
“There's depth to this. Yeah, I get it now. It's not just like ding, ding, ding, hit a ball, get a score. I'm bored, you know.”
“It's a game changer it's jaw dropping it's like a whole new game you know?”
“I didn't want to do some game that everybody was just dying and waiting for... I didn't want to pick one of these titles and then just lag through and just kind of like not... I wanted to kind of pick something a little bit more obscure”
“Every single screen, you have to tell it what screen. the computer has to know what screen it's seeing. So the information comes from the display board on your pinball. It goes into this magical wizard board that ColorDMD built.”
“It's almost like a bit of a puzzle. So in every little frame, you have to find a unique piece that's only exists in that one frame so it knows how to color it.”
“And so the only problem is they were all orange and then all of a sudden it just flashes and everything's in color”
“Well, I guess I know where my next $400 is going.”
Entities
- Color DMD· company
- Golden State Pinball Festival· event
- Pinnagogo· event
- Attack from Mars· game
- Cactus Canyon Continued· game
- Jurassic Park· game
- Last Action Hero· game
- Medieval Madness· game
- Spider-Man (Vault Edition)· game
- The Sopranos®· game
- Pinside· organization
- The Spinner Is Lit Pinball Podcast· organization
- Bill Ung· person
- Chris Enright· person
- Eric Priepke· person
- Justin Kelly· person
- PDX Monkey· person
- Randy Perlow· person
- Seth Holder· person
- Spencer Klingin· person
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