The final day of GSPF 2018 began at 9am but it’s a shorter day with the doors closing at 5pm.
As usual, I headed straight to the Jackson Hall to prepare for the first of the day’s three Pin-U talks.
The team from Spooky Pinball were making their first visit to California and came to GSPF to talk about the history of the company, the games they have built, and to explain how their latest title Alice Cooper’s Nighmare Castle works.
The Spooky Pinball team
Charlie Emery narrated a picture and video slideshow looking at how their games are made and some of the personalities involved such as Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper.
Charlie talks about working with Alice Cooper
Charlie then moved to the Alice Cooper game to demonstrate the shots, and show how the features and rules work.
Audio of this talk will be coming soon.
At 1pm David Volansky took to the stage to explain how to read and use electromechanical games’ schematics.
David Volansky
After examining a number of case studies where faults were diagnosed by using the schematics, David explained how an electromechanical pinball’s electrical system works and broke it down into the key sub-systems such as the score motor and the score reels.
Audio of this talk will be coming soon.
The final Pin-U talk was by pinball repairer, restorer, operator and seller, Chris Kuntz.
The subject of Chris’s talk was Stern Pinball’s Spike control system and to help describe it he brought along a Stern Star Wars machine.
Chris Kuntz
He described the differences between the previous generation of control boards – the SAM system – and then how the first generation of Spike compares to the current second generation which can drive colour LCD monitors.
Chris then moved on to the different types of node boards used in a game, from the core and cabinet boards to the satellite boards under the playfield or mounted elsewhere depending on the model.
Audio of this talk will be coming soon.
One problem with working at Pin-U is missing some of the other events and there are quite a few including the pin-golf tournament and the machine raffle drawings and the Flippin’ Friday

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