PINBALL EXPO 2018 ? SUNDAY

[Rock-ola]

10-21-2018 02:20 PM
Sunday used to be an official show day at Pinball Expo, but in reality in recent years it was only ever used to tear-down the Games and Vendor halls and host the play-offs for the tournaments.

So, we’ll use this report to cover those finals, but also to look back at the contents of those halls and see what was available for show guests to see, play and buy.

Before that though, now that the seminars are over we should say a word or two about our coverage of them.

With the show getting a re-boot, we decided to kick our coverage up a notch and record both audio and video of all twenty-five seminars.  We bought a decent video camera, got a splitter box for the presentation video and added two extra webcams to cover the stage and audience.

It was all very experimental, and sometimes experiments don’t always go to plan.

The main camera died part way through, the USB hub failed, reducing the number of devices we could attach, one of the webcams died, a card reader died, the second laptop we bought off Amazon turned out to be in rather poor condition requiring a replacement to be sent, there were several wider power issues which mean’t we we lost power to the hub and USB supply, and the second zoomable camera we bought had the rather unfortunate feature, when plugged in to a computer, of turning off the monitor and disabling the zoom.  It also had on-screen information which couldn’t be removed.  That meant we had to repurpose the converter intended for the direct presentation feed and use a camera pointed at the screen for that instead. All far-from-ideal, but something was better than nothing.

We were also setting up the AV for each seminar, mixing the audio, taking photographs, processing and uploading them, and writing the reports of each talk while all this was happening.  And, just for good measure, the seminars were usually back-to-back with no time between them to try to make adjustments or work around the technical issues.  We were in the Seminars Hall for seventeen hours straight on Friday alone, finally leaving to get some dinner just before midnight.

So, in summary, it was all a bit chaotic trying to record twenty-five hours of live video in those circumstances, and occasionally things would crash or fail mid-recording.  We did try to keep the audio running throughout, but apologies if those issues affected your enjoyment of the seminar coverage.

Some of the seminar recording equipmentMoving on, there were two Games Halls this year at Pinball Expo.  We looked at the first of these in Saturday’s report, so let’s move on to the second Games Hall which was located where the seminars had been held in previous years.

The entrance to the second Games HallOn the left as you walked through the door was a collection of home-brew and unusual pinballs.

The Custom and Homebrew collectionGreyhounds: The Race HomeGhost in the ShellThe Nightmare Before ChristmasArcherSpinal TapSome rarer gamesWhile the outer edges had the pinballs, the central area was occupied by video games.

Video games in the centre of the hallVideo games in the centre of the hallVideo games in the centre of the hallGalloping Ghost were running a pinball tournament at the back of the hallMore pinballsDerek Fugate has a stand selling pinball memorabilia and collectiblesHe also brought some EM and solid-state titlesMore older machines to playWe’ll be back soon with a visit to the Vendor Hall and details of the Classic and Open tournament results.



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