Along with the playfield, another critical component of a pinball machine are the displays. While it's fun to play a pinball machine, and look solely at the playfield; it's nice from time to time to see how high your score is going. This is where displays come in.
The earliest ways for a pinball machine to keep track of your score was a method called "lighted scoring". This involved several sections of the backglass being lit up in different combinations to indicate score; such as 10,000, 300,000, and 2 Million lit to indicate a score of 2,310,000. This method of showing score was common among flipperless pinball machines, and early machines with player-controlled flippers.
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| The backglass from Genco's 1940 machine "Cadillac", showing areas for lighted scoring Photo by Bob Lico |
As time went on, score reels were introduced. These were metal or plastic reels with the numbers 0-9 on them. These reels were arranged in sets, and would spin as a players score went up. Much like with lighted scoring, a game with score reels would only be capable of displaying a score as high as the number of score reels for a given player all displaying 9 (sometimes with a dummy reel(s) showing 0 on the end).
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| The backglass from Gottlieb's 1970 machine "Scuba", showing Player 1 with a score of 7,737 on the score reels. Photo by myself |
While games with score reels didn't have high scores as many folks think of them, there is something considered a mark of skill, "rolling over" a machine. This was done by scoring points that would put a player's score above the "all 9's", causing the score reels to start over at 0.
The next two display innovations, I'm going to lump together, as they work in much the same way. These innovations are the gas plasma numeric and alphanumeric displays. These worked by sending high voltage through the needed segments to produce a given number or letter. This style of display was the standard from the mid-70's through the mid-90's, with the earlier displays only capable of showing numbers, and newer displays could also show letters.
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| The alphanumeric display from Williams' 1990 machine "Funhouse" Photo by IPDB.org |
Which brings us to the choice of display for "Mission: Space Cadet", the gas plasma dot-matrix display, or DMD for short. Much like the alphanumeric displays before it, the DMD uses high voltage to energize sections of the display. In this case, instead of segments like on a digital clock, a gird of dots are used. These dots, and the ability to use different voltages for shading, allow for all sorts of artwork to be shown. Different fonts, text at different sizes, and video can all be displayed on a DMD. The DMD first appeared on Bally's 1991 machine "Gilligan's Island", and would be the standard until the mid 2010's with Stern Pinball's 2016 machine "Ghostbusters" marking the final use by that company, and their switch to small LCD screens.
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| The alphanumeric display from Capcom's 1996 machine "Breakshot" Photo by IPDB.org |
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| A cropped screenshot of "Space Cadet" |
With "Mission: Space Cadet", this look will be recreated as accurately as possible, using a modern, LED-based DMD. By doing this, the color of the DMD isn't limited to the orange color of gas plasma displays, and will give better results when using a colored gel to achieve an appropriate bluish-purple display color.
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| The "dots" for numbers 0-9. |
As of right now, the "dots" (an industry term used to refer to all the art done for a DMD) are done for the numbers as they appeared in-game. Next up will be preparing the lettering for display, and working out all the kinks there.
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