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The horoscope reference is resonating for me.

I know very little about pinball machines, out of curiosity, do some come with any amount of schematics or diagrams?



I have schematics as early as 1937, but the odds that the manuals stayed with the machine are pretty low. (Usually these machines were owned by somebody who had a bunch, and I suspect the manuals tended to get collected centrally.) You can generally buy manuals on eBay, and some are being reprinted by people who own the original IP.

The internet has a lot of scans of wildly varying quality. The AI industry's hunger for data means there has been a lot of progress in OCR and data extraction, so I have notions of taking something like PaddleOCR and trying to turn the scans into a cohesive reference site that will work well on phones, etc. But I'm not sure when I will get to it.

If people out there are interested in working on a project like that, let me know. Email me at william@theflip.museum.


Not OP, but this channel does a lot of walkthroughs of popular machines and explains how those systems work in-game:

https://youtube.com/@papapinball


I also strongly recommend the Technology Connections series on how electromechanical pinball works:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVAUoqtVxFV...

I would love to put them on a kiosk in the museum.




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