Poibug) who is an aircraft technician with many years of pinball repairs and service under his belt, Paul Garner (a.k.a. Mooseman) – an electrician and generally handy-with-a-tool kinda guy, Chris (a.k.a. The first night was spent stripping the chair down and removing the parts to see what we had to work with and come up with a plan to move forward. The secondary objective was that it would be interactive and, most importantly, FUN! Which pinball? Well it was obvious and agreed unanimously that The Addams Family would be the perfect choice. Our primary objective was to hook up the chair so that it could be used to control a real pinball machine. So with a month to go before the NLP held their annual show as part of the huge Play Expo event, four pinheads met in my garage to dig out the chair and come up with a cunning plan. They had already come up with playing a Flintstones using your feet on a dance mat and putting a Fish Tales side-by-side with its electronic counterpart on Pinball Arcade, with the real-world pinball played via a Playstation joypad. The NLP think-tank had been having a meeting and were looking for novel ways to play pinball. “ Have you still got that electric chair?“, he asked. The chair is still sitting in the back of my garage under even more junk and I get a text from my pinball friend Chris ‘ Poibug’ Williams. He thought that it was quite likely that we could Raspberry Pi some life into it, but he was too busy at the moment.įast forward about eighteen months to 2015. Dr Pinball, who has had some success with his DMD Extender kit. This project could probably take some time.Īt the time I also mentioned it to a programming friend a.k.a. He wished me well in my search but he wouldn’t sell me any of his non-working parts. He didn’t have a good word to say about Nova Productions. I even had a phone conversation with an operator who had three of these chairs – all in non-working condition. I was even searching for non-working examples of the circuit boards as I have some very clever and resourceful friends. I shared my recent purchase with my friends at Northern Lights Pinball (NLP) to see if they could put out feelers to see if we could get the game back to life. I thought I would do some more searching and see if I could find the missing parts, although if I was unsuccessful it still worked as a chair. There had been no point turning it on as it was missing its motherboard. The chair arrived and I placed it into deep storage at the back of my garage, under the usual knickknacks that live in everybody’s over-full garages. When the auction ended the following week I won the chair, and then had to ‘fess-up at home to another crazy purchase. Well, the arcade gods were on my side as not a single other bid was made, and we are talking a cheap opening price. I went home and made by auction bid, crossed my fingers and hoped no one else wanted it. The sellers were keen to let the Ebay auction run its course, and any cheeky offers had been quickly turned down. The chair had sacrificed itself for another. The company had gone bust, nobody fixed the circuit boards, and the story went that this chair donated its innards to help keep another game running. These were produced by a firm in the UK called Nova Productions. This particular example had served its time on location at Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach well, that’s what its stickers said. Sitting in the corner, covered in dirt ‘n dust, sat ‘The Original Shocker’. It was being sold by an amusement specialist who had an array of ‘bandits’, boxing machines and all sorts of other arcade goodies. Having travelled far and wide to buy pinballs, the proximity of a few miles just over the bridge was telling me to get in the car and check it out. It was super cool in just being a chair and would look great in any gameroom environment. I didn’t care that it was a non-working example. The more I looked at the pictures, the more I knew I had to have this ex-amusement machine. The chair was non-working, only a few miles away and, most importantly, cheap. This day I came across a large wooden chair resembling something out of an American prison. I usually start in the pinball section of course, but then I have to scour arcade machines too. The story starts a few years back during a lull at work, while partaking in a favourite pastime scouring Ebay looking for anything and everything – things I must have, things I don’t need and things I never even knew existed.
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