Asking questions of a proprietary nature ("How many of game X were produced?" "What games do you have in the works for next spring?" "What game is designer Y working on?") will not get you very far, as Uncle Willy is constrained from answering them.

If you have questions about fixing, restoring, or purchasing an older game, Uncle Willy would like to refer you to Ask Uncle Willy #10.

Question:  I have two Williams Tri-Zone pins, but they have radically
           different artwork. What's the story?

Answer:    Uncle Willy receives many inquiries for information on specific (and
           usually quite obscure) variations in machines, from recent games to
           ones nearly 30 years old.  Games with more than one art scheme,
           games with different mechanical assemblies, and so on. This issue
           has been addressed in one way or another in previous installments of
           Ask Uncle Willy, which are available at the Uncle Willy Archives
           (see above).

           A trip through previous Ask Uncle Willy installments should be
           entertaining, and might provide the answer to your question, without
           having to send mail to Uncle Willy.  For the benefit of our newer
           readers, we'll briefly cover some of that same ground here again.

           As in any creative process, pinball machine designs can undergo
           everything from radical changes to fine-tuning between the time they
           are first conceived, until the time they are rolling down the
           assembly line.  So it's not surprising that some pins out there in
           collectors' hands are early sample games with noticeable differences
           from the pins that later ran in full production.

           As in any commercial business, that which is not important to the
           sales of product does not always merit a lot of time and effort.
           So while it might be nice from a historical perspective to know the
           details behind such last-minute design changes, there was no sound
           business reason to document much of it.  There are books on pinball
           that capture some of this history from the minds of the people
           involved at the time, and a few particular incidents have become
           part of the popular lore (e.g. the Captain Fantastic backglass), but
           sadly most of this minutia is just lost to the sands of time.

           But, Uncle Willy's readers press on, what about newer games whose
           designers are still working at Williams- surely we can get
           information from them about earlier stages of designs, and even the
           information about how to turn our production games back into some
           earlier variant?

           Sometimes Uncle Willy can ferret out the stories behind these
           changes, but there are usually good reasons why a pin's design
           changes before final production.  Williams generally has no need to
           keep detailed technical information about those various abandoned
           stages in the fluid process of pinball design.  Which is all to say
           that Uncle Willy can't always come up with the information you
           request, and you probably wouldn't be happy with the result even if
           you did manage to "de-evolutionize" your machine.

           There are some notable exceptions, for example the Firepower
           target retrofit described by Ted Estes on rec.games.pinball a couple
           of years back.  Enjoy that kind of thing when it happens, and Uncle
           Willy will keep an eye out for more.


Question:  Can you tell me the design team for Hurricane?  For Firepower II?

Answer:    Historically, participants in the design of pinball machines were
           largely uncredited.  Generally any record of design efforts is from
           recollection of those involved, rather than from any official
           records kept by the manufacturers.  Most good books about pinball
           spend some time organizing some of that oral history, and the
           Internet Pinball Database at http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/IPD/
           is also trying to gather all of it in one place.  Uncle Willy defers
           to those sources as being your best bet for that kind of information
           on older games.  Some older backglass art is signed, though not
           always in an obvious manner.  Uncle Willy can, with some effort,
           find out some of this information; see past issues of Ask Uncle
           Willy for examples.

           The practice of crediting designers on the playfield of the game
           itself seems to have started in the early days of Stern, with
           Williams games carrying such credits beginning in the mid 1980's.
           To this day, that remains the best official record of who worked on
           a recent game.  So to answer such questions about a newer game,
           Uncle Willy would have to go track one of the games down and read
           the writing on the playfield.  Since Uncle Willy is pretty busy
           right now, he prefers to leave that as an exercise for the reader.


Question:  Did Steve Ritchie supply the voice for the Black Knight?

Answer:    This kind of information is even less well-recorded in history.
           Usually it's a matter of tracking down someone who was there at the
           time and remembers correctly.

           Uncle Willy has asked around, and was told that Gorgar was hired to
           supply the voice for the Black Knight.  Apparently Jungle Lord was
           on vacation that week, and the Aliens were too busy playing Poker.
           Some days Uncle Willy gets no respect.


Question:  I noticed that Big Guns and Pinbot both have champagne glasses in
           the backglass artwork.  Why?

Answer:    Uncle Willy receives many such letters asking about "hidden" things
           people have noticed various places in pinball machines.  Uncle Willy
           has also noticed interesting things in the art, speech, displays,
           and themes of various pinball machines.  For instance, in the same
           way that Steven Spielberg tends to have references to his past films
           in any new film, those clever pin designers seem to sneak references
           to other machines into their latest works.  Part of the fun of
           pinball is discovering something unobvious in a machine, and sharing
           those discoveries with your friends...so Uncle Willy isn't going to
           ruin all that by listing or explaining any such "easter eggs" that
           he may know about.  Moo.


Question:  Is that Uncle Willy piloting the raft down the stream on the
           backglass of Whitewater?

Answer:    This is a common misconception that Uncle Willy wants to clear up.
           As it states quite clearly in the artwork, that is ``Wet Willy'', who
           is no relation.  Also no relation are ``Wet Willie'' (a rock band),
           and ``Slick Willy'' (some sort of politician.)


Question:  Having studied the Fishtales backglass, I'd like to know if Jim
           Patla really looks like a worm.

Answer:    Needless to say, that's preposterous.


Question:  Was the echo board used in Centaur and Centaur II ever used in any
           other game?

Answer:    Uncle Willy does not claim to know everything about Bally pins made
           before Williams acquired the arcade division, so he waited for Jim
           Patla to wriggle out of his hole after a hard rain, and posed the
           above question.  Jim confirmed that the ``Say It Again'' reverb
           module was only used in Centaur and Centaur II...and then a bird
           swooped down and ate him.


Question:  My Banzai Run display board schematics show connectors denoted
           "player 1" through "player 6."  Was Banzai Run originally designed
           as a 6-player game?

Answer:    Steve Austin meets Banzai Run!  That would have been interesting.
           The real answer, however, is not nearly as exciting.  Those unsung
           heroes of Williams, the folks who design all the great electronics
           that drive the machines, were just doing their jobs.  They try to
           design boards to be as flexible as possible, to allow them to be
           used in as many different products as possible.  By virtue of the
           board's design, it could be used both in pins and in shuffle alleys,
           where 6-players is the norm.  While it would have been possible for
           a game designer to use this flexibility to make a 6-player pin,
           Banzai Run itself was never considered for such treatment.

           Interestingly, Uncle Willy had his head inside the backbox of a
           1972 Bally Fireball the other day, and noticed that the mechanical
           unit for keeping track of the number of players also went up to six
           positions.  Sharing components between pins and shuffle alleys does
           not seem to be such a new concept!


Question:  The test report on my Twilight Zone told me to check the ``Geneva
           Switch.''  I fixed it, but I wondered why it had that name.  (Being
           from Holland, I would prefer the name ``Amsterdam Switch.'')

Answer:    Such a simple question, such a complicated answer...  The quick
           response is that it is the switch that tracks the motion of the
           Geneva mechanism in the gumball machine.  The Geneva mechanism is
           the part of any gumball machine that rotates and allows gumballs to
           drop through one at a time.  Generically, a Geneva mechanism is one
           that uses cams and slots to turn continuous motion into stepped or
           intermittent motion.  Because the history of such mechanisms goes
           back to clock and watch movements, this leads Uncle Willy to believe
           the name "Geneva" is related to the Swiss dominance in the art of
           watchmaking.  However, Uncle Willy could not find that connection
           made explicitly in any of the reference material he consulted.


Question:  I own a Defender coin-op video game.  Can I convert it to be a
           Joust, if someone gave me the boards from a Joust game?

Answer:    While Uncle Willy mostly concerns himself with pinball, he will
           admit to a certain fondness for classic video games.  Especially the
           ones from Williams, of course!  The Usenet group
           rec.games.video.arcade.collecting (rgvac) is frequented by people
           who, like you, want to collect some of these older games.  They can
           help with many issues concerning the collecting of older arcade
           games, and specifically the concept of using a single dedicated
           cabinet to run several similar games, as a way to save floor space.
           There is an rgvac "Conversion FAQ" that covers this topic pretty
           thoroughly, so Uncle Willy will defer to the experts on this
           subject.

           One place Uncle Willy has spotted this FAQ is:
           http://www.multipath.com/d.jefferys/vid_docs/

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