Pinball Modding Group

Introduction

 

It is not a big secret in the flipper scene that the original software for the Cactus Canyon has never been finished. The developer Matt Coriale got around 2 weeks from Bally/Williams to complete the whole software, which is, regarding such a huge project, nearly impossible. Matt even left the enterprise before the game was completely finished. In some interviews he described that he was under heavy pressure and how he intensively worked till deep into the night at the code. The simple reason was that the production of the new Pinball 2000 generation has begun and Bally/Williams wanted to have all employees to work on that new project. In fact, it´s a small miracle that the pinball has ever been produced in that period of time. With a production run of only around 925 pieces is that pinball one of the rarest pinballs ever and is getting more and more popular. Unfortunately, lots of formerly planed features have not been implemented into the gaming code and many unused sound and DMD files have been burned into the gaming rom but never appeared in the official game.

 

 

Planned / Changed Features

 

A big mystery was always Bionic Bart, who is mentioned on the instruction cards, but never appeared in the game. The developers already had the idea of implementing this character very early in the project phase and they also tested different scenarios, but unfortunately, they were not happy with any of these. At the end of the development phase, they decided to remove Bionic Bart even that all sound-, and DMD files have already been produced. Because of some misunderstandings at Bally/Williams, they printed the old version of the instruction cards and included Bionic Bart as well, which was simply false.

 

Also the Bad Guy Drop Targets received some modifications during the development phase. The original idea was to use a translucent yellow plastic as the target, which will be spotted from a lamp under the playfield. Unfortunately, the plastic material was unstable and too week, meaning that after a certain amount of shots, the plastic broke away. At the end, the targets have been replaced with standard targets and installed into the pinball. The design team also created decals to be used and did some testing with that. After playing some games on the machine with them, they got the impression that these decals doesn´t highlight the targets very well, so they dropped this idea. You can also read more information on the "Cactus Canyon Owner List" web page.

 

Another secret is the triangle jackpot light in front of the salon entry, which has nothing to do with a jackpot. At an early stage of development, the names for all triangles were still unclear and should later be set. Because of the immense time pressure at the end of the development, they just set the word "Jackpot" in each triangle and that was the way how the playfields went into production. So also the triangle in front of the saloon got that word, which is not really correct. If that insert is lit, then that means that you should shoot on Bart. It would be better if they would have used the word "Shoot" or "Shoot Bart" for it.

 

Additionally, the team had the idea of using a "door lock mechanism" at the entrance of the saloon instead of just using a normal gate. The saloon was only opened if you managed to fulfill a special task. Unfortunately, this nice idea was later be removed, but is still supported from the software and also the wiring is still there. If you are a lucky guy who owns such a pre-production playfield with this mechanism, you could go into the service menu and check its functionality as demonstrated in this video. The whole gameplay on a whitewood playfield will be demonstrated in this video.

 

There are a lot of rumors on the internet, that people asked Matt Coriale to finish programming the software. Additionally, an official petition has been started. One of these rumors can be read on arcadefans.com, where Eric created a post, stating : "When Wayne (another guy) wanted to pay him to finish it up, he wanted 40 grand to work on it. And there's still no way to be sure he'd put Bionic Bart in, as the reason it's not there is that he didn't come up with rules he liked for it.", but $40.000 was just too high and the idea has been dropped. There is a very nice interview posted on "Pinball News" of the whole Cactus Canyon team with additional information and many pictures.

 

 

Development of Cactus Canyon Continued (CCC)...

 

When the production of the Cactus Canyon started, Eric Priepke and his wife went to Chicago to test the new and last traditional DMD pinball Bally/Williams produced and his wife was quite happy with it, so he later bought one from his local distributor before they were officially released. From the start, the software seemed to be unfinished (Missing match animation / Missing sounds / lots of bugs ect...), and that was always kind of a nagging complaint about the game. Sure, it's fun as is, but it was so un-polished compared to most WMS games that it was always a bit of a disappointment. When Gerry Stellenberg released the P-ROC board, he thought someone would finish up CC for sure. After a few years going by and nobody taking a crack at what seemed like an obvious project, Eric decided to stop wishing and started acting. With the P-ROC board in hand, it was now possible for everybody to create his own software for a pinball, so he decided to buy one and started to learn the language Python. Because of a very good documentation, the already released framework by Adam Preble, lots of different code examples and the help of lots of users in the Pinballcontrollers board, Eric got more and more used to the system and started to build up the complete Cactus Canyon code from scratch in Python. Sound- and DMD files have been taken from the Eprom. That whole project could also have been programmed in FreeWPC, but this language is much more complicated and it would also have taken much more time. Additional, there are also size restrictions of the Eprom itself.

 

On 4th Mai 2012, Eric announced in diverse forums the breaking news, that he is actually working on the software and that he already did big steps ahead. The whole pinball world was positively "shocked" and he received lots of positive feedback from people all over the world. He also documented his progress on diverse forums as well as on his YouTube channel. Now everybody got the chance to see how one of the best pinballs will get the software it deserves.

 

On 1st January 2013, Eric released the first code version on his homepage and he also created a new thread on the Pinballcontrollers forum so that people could discuss about it. Rick from Planetary Pinball, who owns the rights of all Bally/Williams related stuff, watched very carefully the whole project and didn´t make trouble at the beginning. This behavior changed and he has forbidden Eric on December 2013 to make the DMD and sound files available on his web page. He commented that with the words "NOTE: Audio and DMD files are not currently available", which is surely a pity. Only the code is still available, but useless without sound and DMD files. 
 

 

Testing, Testing, Testing...

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In the big development phase, I supported Eric as much as I can and did nearly every day a bunch of tests on my pinball. He used the free web bug tracking system from Mantis where I entered and documented all bugs so that it was easier for him to remove the errors in the code. At the beginning, I was the only beta tester in the system, but later on, more people followed like "MrWizzo", with whom I also exchanged emails about bugs, the code and new ideas. Eric and I exchanged nearly every day emails and partially worked together on some improvements and ideas. For example, I created a longer music version for the CvA mode or he implemented the idea, that in the attract mode, the word CONTINUED will only appear when a tumbleweed will pass etc. On the hardware side, Domino and I were working on the Beer Mug mod and Eric extended the software to control the LED inside the mug.

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To better publish the software and for people not having the knowledge if running the code, I developed the "Cactus Canyon Continued Gaming Station", which is a complete Plug´n´Play hardware system where the user got a preconfigured PC and he must only connect it to his pinball. Eric fully supported that idea what you can also read in this extra thread at Pinside.

 

 

The birthday of "Cactus Canyon Extended Edition" (CCEE)

 

Additional ideas have been ignored or not really answered. But Domino and I had the opinion that we could even more enhance the actual code and that was the time when I started to learn the programing language Python. Eric released his code as open source, which means that everybody can take the code and make modifications as long as you make a clear separation between the original and the modified code, so we named our code version "Cactus Canyon Extended Edition" (CCEE) and started to extend the new code with our mods and ideas. The result was a lot of new additions like :

 

1. "Cowboys vs Aliens" (CvA) Strobe Mode Kit

2. Audio Kit, which features Stereo support with 3D sound effects and no modification of the A/V board is needed

3. Shaker Kit, which is a fully configurable Shaker which we developed

4. Rescue the Train mod (RtT)

5. .....

 

We announced these mods at Pinside with a remark to the Cactus Canyon Extended code version. Erics reaction was heavy and in no way constructive because every mod has been criticized. For example, his comment for the shaker kit was "I hope your shaker motors destroy your gaming stations platter hard drives." (Reference) and he started a bashing in diverse forums. One of his highlight statements was "Parasite/ˈparəˌsīt/NounAn organism that lives in or on another organism (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the host's expense." (Reference) because we took his open source code, integrated our ideas and published that under another name but always said that CCEE is based on CCC. With that statement, he criticized the whole OpenSource community and forgot that he is using the open source language Python. We never took part into these bashings and never insult him in any way. I tried many times to get in contact with him to have a talk, which he never answered. His frustration can also be seen on his homepage, where he poses himself the question :

 

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Question : "What's that "Cactus Canyon Continued Gaming Station ?"

 

Answer : "That's a guy profiting off my work by selling pre-configured systems"

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Interestingly, he never mentioned the fact that we send him via PayPal for every sold GamingStation a donation. When the Color-Kit has been released, we also send him a donation for that, what he never asked for, but that was a must for us since he did all the colorization of the DMDs. We didn´t post the PayPal donation receipts because that would be too much, but they can be seen on the internal "Members Area" page. On his homepage was also one time written that people in Europe should contact us, but that has later been removed. Additionally, his posed question written above was answered completely different at the beginning :

 

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Question : What's that "Cactus Canyon Continued Gaming Station ?"

 

Answer : "Only in so much as he's ripping off my code, hacking in some amateurish crap I didn't want in the game and repackaging it as a 'new' thing."

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Unfortunately, he still continues bashing around on the public internet to let everybody know his frustration with rude words against us (Reference). Now he states that we "stole" the DMD files of Betty Bart. The fact is that these DMD images have been in the code folder for over 6 months which was also published under "open source", so how can we "steal" them when they where always already there but not implemented in his code - absolutely ridiculous. Since in our opinion, this is not a good style and far away from an adult behavior. We will not write any comments about that and will also not start any discussions. Again: We did not do anything wrong and if you just read the whole story with a clear mind, every normal person would get the same result.

 

"Cactus Canyon Extended Edition" extends Eric Priepkes "Cactus Canyon Continued" software and includes besides all CCC features more than 80 additional or modified features, which changes a lot the complete game play feeling. We created a complete list of modifications at the end of this article so that you can get an impression of all these modifications. Please keep in mind that this list is still incomplete because we still have new ideas for the future. All mods are described in detail on our Modding News page and all software modifications in detail on our internal homepage.

 

All different CCEE code versions and their corresponding features are on the "CCEE Code Revision Page".