Williams Spellbinder

Spellbinder was Williams game #513 developed in 1982 by Barry Oursler. You can see the IPDB entry here. Unfortunately, it was never produced beyond the concept stage. There are two known backglasses and one known playfield in existence but no code was ever written. Spellbinder was a follow-up to Hyperball in that it used the same cannon-driven gameplay, but it was not as 'video-game-ish', as Hyperball.

Shortly after WMS games stopped making pins, Ted Estes shared with the pinball community some of the fun things he left Williams with when they closed the doors. Amongst them, was an NOS unpopulated playfield and a framed backglass for Spellbinder that was in his office. After many years of talking to Ted about them, in 2013 Ted and I struck a bargain and I brought both the backglass and playfield home to build a game that never quite made it to the production line. Ted also dug through his document stash and found a handwritten set of switch/lamp/solenoid definitions for 'Barry Ball' which he gave me to help get things started.

The Goal

Since Spellbinder was in my personal golden-era of Williams games and I always wanted to work at Williams as a kid, this is my opportunity to fulfil my dream even if it is 30 years later. I hope to build Spellbinder out of my spare Hyperball cabinet and developing the software on original PERC (Hyperball Modified) software platform to keep the game true to its roots. Im going to try and reach out to Barry Oursler to glean any knowledge of his original rules and then I will start building it up. We will see how it goes!

The Code

I have always been smitten with Williams Level 7 games, mostly because those were the games I grew up playing. Secondarily tho, Williams Level 7 games always represented the most advanced technology for the time. The operating system for these games was an offshoot of the code used by the Vid Kidz team (Eugene Jarvis, Larry Demar & co) to develop Defender (Williams first video game). The Level 7 operating system was fast, flexible and quite compact (in RAM and ROM usage). I have been learning how the Level 7 operating system worked for many years and programming games using development tools that I created, namely Pinbuilder which is a set of documents and tools to code a functional pinball machine using the Level 7 system. I did find out that the framework/language created by Larry & CO was called PERC (Pinball Executive Resource Controller). If any of you pinball programmers have any information on PERC I would love to ask you some questions as I still have many gaps!!!

My Development Environment

Back in the day, coding of pinball machines was done on a computer, but utilized an EPROM emulator to dump the compiled program into a live game in order to test the software and make design decisions. In this day and age, with the coming of MAME, PinMAME and Visual Pinball, it is possible to have a completely virtualized development platform. Thanks to the Visual Pinball team making the source open for that project, it was pretty easy to whip this up in a couple of days time.

Building the Game

Here is my process now... I will be uploading pictures as I go.

1. Get Hyperball Cabinet - DONE!
2. Get Playfield and Backglass - DONE!
3. Create Visual Pinball Table for Emulation - DONE!
4. Program game initially for attract mode - DONE!
5. Create game rules and hardware requirements
6. Sand and Bondo Cabinet - this is what Im starting next!
7. Design cabinet art and order vinyl stencils
8. Paint cabinet
9. Fix cabinet wiring and acquire ball hopper (mine is missing)
10. Clearcoat Playfield
11. Wire Playfield
12. Design playfield plastics
13. Program game to rules
14. Create sound effects library (including speech)
15. Program sound ROM
16. Testing
17. Take to Pinball Showdown 2014

Acknowlegements

I owe many people a heartfelt 'Thank You' for getting me involved in this project, it goes way back... Bryan Roth, Duncan Brown, Ted Estes, Larry Demar, Barry Oursler, Paul Wisneskey! Also I owe a beer to the team that developed the Hyperball Visual Pinball table (Gaston, Destruk, TAB and Kristian) since I used that table for the basis of Spellbinder.