Project Alice

[MisterTransistor]

Project Alice

 

By Mister Transistor

 

Synopsis - I hope to initiate a historical preservation project to make a virtual version of the 1948 Gottlieb Alice in Wonderland pinball machine that I rebuilt in my youth.  I hope that by posting as many of the pictures of the machine's body and pictures of Alice's original playfield and flippers and bells, etc. available, that someone with more talent than I can pick up the gauntlet and take on a resurrection project to try and re-create the 1948 Gottlieb Alice in Wonderland pinball game in Visual Pinball or possibly Future Pinball.  Thank you!

 

 

 

The History of Alice

 

I first found Alice in the deep, dark basement of the military academy I went to as a boy.

 

 

I attended the Wyler Military Academy in Evansville, Wisconsin - a small town of 2992 people near Janesville.  The only notable thing about the tiny town is that it's where those green water pumps that are at every highway roadside rest area are made, the Baker Monitor hand pump, some models had drinking fountains built in.  Baker Mfg. is located there, and not much else.

 

 

I went there for 4 years from 1972-1976, enrolled for grades 5-8.  The school was an old Seminary from the late 1700's or early 1800's, consisting of 3 musty, ~200 year old, 3-story buildings.  One of them was a Gymnasium building, and that had a dank, dark athletic changing/locker room for football and other sports located in the basement.  In one unused and even darker, danker and mustier room in the basement, I found an old blue Jukebox and a Pinball Machine from the 1940's!

 

They had been down there, unused and forgotten for decades.  The Jukebox was no longer salvageable, but it was the kind with two stacks of records in metal holders like pies in a rack that would swing to the middle and the turntable would rise up to pick the record up from the holder and bring it up to the tone arm.  The main woofer was still intact, mostly, and had a giant electromagnet on it, instead of the usual permanent magnet that speakers have nowadays.  That was fascinating, but sadly I don't remember the make or model of it, probably a Wurlitzer or Seeburg as I recall.  Remember - this was 45 years ago!

 

The pinball machine was much more interesting to me.  It was a 1948 Gottlieb Alice in Wonderland machine.  It was part of a "Fairy Tale" series of games that Gottlieb had come up with in the 1947-1948 post-WWII era.  In fact, it still had its 1949 tax stamp from the State of Wisconsin on it!  Sadly, all the glass in both the main and back boxes had been broken very long ago.  The schematic diagram was still in the inside of the main cabinet!  I was fascinated, I devoured it.  I pored over it, studying the circuits for hours on end, but I didn't know quite what to do next.  But I would think of something.

 

 

At first, I just marveled at the innards, all the electro-mechanical contrivances, steppers, relays, etc.  Then, I started to play around with some of the internal circuitry.  I had some class project that I needed to do, so I decided to make a demonstration seismograph for fun.  I used one of the slam tilt switches, and wired it to one of the solenoids from the machine, and attached a felt-tip pen to the solenoid, then made a drum from a coffee can with a piece of paper taped to it for the recording surface.  It was pretty cheesy, and you had to smack it fairly hard to get it to register a "hit", but it would wiggle the pen with the closing of the tilt switch contacts, and so it actually worked, more or less!

 

That got me totally fascinated by the machine and the possibilities, and I decided to try and make it work once again, as best as I could as a 12 year old - keep that in mind!  I graduated from the Military School when I was 14; my final year at the school was in 1976.  Somehow, I talked my father into making a deal with the Headmaster and owner of the school to actually purchase the old game, after much pleading by me!  They made some sort of arrangement, am guessing probably to the tune of $100 or two, perhaps less.  I never knew exactly what my father finally did pay for it.

 

As I was waiting for the school year to end, when I could then take Alice home with me, I got bored and I started to do some re-wiring on the machine.  I didn't quite understand the main motorized timing wheel and logic relays that are the "CPU" or brain of an electro-mechanical pinball machine, but I did have a level of understanding of simpler things like latching relay circuits.  So, I could re-use the internal relays and stuff to make simple AND, OR type logic circuits and started by wiring up just the flippers at first.  After playing for quite a while with only those working, eventually I got bored again and hooked up a few more circuits.  After that, I got things like the bells going.  I wasn't concerned with scoring yet, I just wanted a machine that played, more or less.

 

 

On the very last day there, somebody brought up the machine from the basement to the Gymnasium in pieces, and unbeknownst to me, some idiot left the playfield out in the damn rain on the fire escape!  I was heartbroken, and very pissed!  I took some pictures there recently, and they have removed that old fire escape from the building now.  Unfortunately being out in the rain screwed up the playfield surface somewhat.  That caused a sort of "bubbling up" of the top layer of plywood that the playfield surface is made from.  Good thing, it didn't affect the entire playfield surface, just a relatively small area near the bottom where the bonus lights and kick-out hole are at.  Sadly, since my woodworking skills were not that great at 14 years old, I look an X-Acto knife, and carved away the bubbled-up raised area of the playfield so the balls would roll over it reasonably well.  Not a perfect solution, and it looked kind of ugly, but it was good enough for me at the time!

 

 

This was about the time that I graduated from Wyler Military Academy, and I started going to a local High School in the town where I grew up.  Alice had moved to the basement in my Mom's house.  My grandfather had owned a restaurant in that town, and was somewhat familiar with the local vending machine and entertainments company, which was probably a branch of the local Mafia.  All I know for sure is that neither my father nor my grandfather would let me work there, and they wouldn't say why!

 

By then I was getting tired of the design of Alice's playfield - I was used to pinball machines with the 2 flippers at the bottom of the playfield, so this old one with 6 flippers, 3 on either side of the middle of the playfield, was very weird to me - plus, there were no Pop Bumpers on the playfield - it was too old, they hadn't been invented yet!  Passive bumpers with old, dead rubbers are really NO FUN.  So, I got bored quickly again, and decided I wanted to either add a pair of flippers at the bottom of the playfield, and then install some Pop Bumpers at the top, or try to find me an alternative playfield that was more modern.

 

The local vending machine company just happened to have an old playfield sitting in the back room, from an old 1958 Williams Club House pinball machine.  Somehow the playfield had been separated from the rest of it, so that was perfect!  Just what I needed - it had 2 Pop Bumpers at the top of the playfield, and 2 flippers at the BOTTOM, just where they were supposed to be!  My grandfather made a deal with them, again at my pleading.  I never knew what he paid for it, either.  I would guess $40-50, perhaps.

 

So, I was good to go!  I had to do some adaptation of the playfield, both Alice and Club House had a similar ball-lifter and trough arrangement, but Alice's was much older and made of wood, whereas Club House was about 10 years newer, and most of the underside ball routing mechanism was metal by then.  I didn't like either one, so I wanted to convert the playfield to use a standard trough above the playfield like more modern games from the 1960's onward use (no manual ball lifter).  The only problem with that was the playfield had a "Gobble Hole" in the middle (I know, that sounds dirty!), that dropped the ball down into the trough, and the ball in play was over at that point.  I had to make that a kick-out hole instead, and then had made a solenoid return kicker at the bottom outlane, all above the playfield.

 

 

So, having modified the 1958 Club House playfield to fit and function on Alice's body, I started to wire it up one circuit at a time as I had previously with Alice.  I found that the newer coils in the Club House game were 48 volt instead of the 24 volt coils and relays used by Alice, so I had to get a main power transformer from a newer game that supplied the 48-50 volts needed for the Flippers, Pop Bumpers, etc.

 

Since the backglass was broken long before I ever got the machine, I had no idea which lamps were the scoring lamps or what.  There was really no way to use them, short of getting a new painted backglass, so I decided I wanted scoring reels for the back-box instead of decade-counting type of discrete lamps.  The last big things I added to it were Score Reels and a Game Counter Reel, both from a 1976 Williams "Emerald" Shufflepuck Bowler type of arcade game, the kind with the flip-up plastic bowling pins.  That gave me a 3 digit score reel counter.  I think there were actually 4 digits originally, and I removed one reel since I only needed 3 digits, I don't quite remember now.  I also wanted a Game Credit counter-reel that was like most of the more modern 1960-1970's type of games had.

 

The original Gottlieb 1947-48 credit display was actually a tiny projector behind the backglass.  The projector was an interesting optical device that was part of the credit stepper unit.  It had the usual increment and decrement solenoids and pawls on it, but instead of the usual type of credit reel, it had a transparent optical mask disk that that had images of the credit count numbers on it.  There was a lamp that shined through a pinhole, then through the transparent credit number mask disk, and then was focused by a lens onto the backglass through a peephole in the wooden backbox.  In the IPDB pictures, you can see the light bulb behind the credit stepper assembly toward the bottom of the backbox, and in another shot you can sort of see the optics that projected and focused the image onto the backglass.  In two of the pictures, one that shows the illuminated backglass and one that shows the tilt display, the projected credit count is to the right of, and slightly above the Mad Hatter's head at the bottom center of the backglass, it is a small 2-digit red number that's very hard to read in the photographs.

 

 

I managed to get the score reels added to the back box and I eventually wired up the old bells and a newer knocker from some newer 1950-60's games.  These bells were all gong-type bells, before the 1970's type knocker-powered xylophone type of chimes the mid 1970's that early EM and later Solid-State machines had.  The pictures of the AST hybrid backbox interior show the massive amount of hand-wiring that was done, all point-to-point strung for each individual circuit.  I didn't know how to neatly wire things yet, and it was all made ad-hoc, and added one at a time.  Some of the original cotton-covered wiring was re-used, but most of the new wiring was using red 16-gauge doorbell/hookup wire, or sometimes lamp cord or even telephone wire, whatever was available to me at the time!  Some of them were soldered, some were not.

 

 

The final part of the story is the motif I finally selected.  At age 10 or so onward I was utterly fascinated by Star Trek and the universe that the show portrayed.  I loved Science Fiction in general, and Star Trek in particular had caught my fancy.  So, I decided to use Star Trek as the primary motif for my game.  Remember, this was a full TWO YEARS before Bally would release THEIR 1979 Star Trek machine!  Also keep in mind; I was only 14 years old then.  I was also fascinated by UV/Black Lights and the fluorescent paints, etc. that were available then.  Keep in mind this WAS the 1970's and there was lots of hippie paraphernalia around then like Black Light posters, UV paints, etc. so I decided to try to make a mostly fluorescent game, which would be a great way to save on wiring up the feature lamps, etc. as they could all be painted on, and illuminated with a Black Light!  This was also a great way to cover up the Golf-themed 1958 Club House playfield and plastics.  The pictures show my final playfield design, sadly after many years of disrepair and removal of a few of the playfield features.

 

 

Sadly, Alice's body met her end on 5/1/2022, as my Mother's house was sold and the contents put up for an Estate Sale, and I'm pretty sure no one would have wanted to buy Alice-Star Trek's old carcass.  Sadly, I was probably the only one it had any value to on this earth.  The final pictures of the Alice-Star Trek hybrid were taken in the basement of my Mother's house a few days before the sale, and I have named them "AST - ..." so I would have some exterior shots of the machine before it went away to the scrap heap.  This got me thinking about this resurrection - Project Alice, since I still had the original playfield and a few other parts.

 

 

I still had the original Alice playfield and I had taken many fairly high resolution pictures (12 MP) of it.  There are some of the remaining playfield widgets but it's pretty stripped-down and hopefully it will be a good subject for making some technical measurements from.  I hope that by posting the pictures of the machine's body and Alice's original playfield and flippers and bells, etc. that someone will be able to try and re-create the 1948 Alice in Wonderland by Gottlieb machine in Visual Pinball (VPX).  After I took many, many pictures at the "golden hour", sunset on Memorial Day 2022, I finally put the old playfield out on the curb for garbage collection, and someone grabbed it before Garbage Day!  It makes me smile a little bit that it will finally wind up on the wall in someone's Man Cave, and won't be going to the dump after all!  Either that or we'll see it on eBay in short order.

 

Project Alice Resources

 

For prior art, there was an old version of Alice in Wonderland that was made for Visual Pinball 9.95 here:

 

https://pinballnirvana.com/forums/index.php?resources/alice-in-wonderland-gottlieb-1948.5795

 

Unfortunately that was made from pretty crummy photographs of the game which were probably all that was available at the time, and of course it won't work in Visual Pinball X properly.  I tried saving it out as a VPX file, but it really doesn't play very well at all.

 

Also, I found this Alice in Wonderland B2S Here:

 

https://www.vpforums.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=16161

 

This seems to be a possibly functional B2S file, but did not seem to work with the converted VP995 version.  So, either it's broken or the converted VP995 file won't work properly with a B2S backglass, I'm guessing.

 

As a possible starting point, there are both VPX and Future Pinball versions of Humpty Dumpty which is a very similar game from the year before.  I somehow have a 3.0 version of it by randr, but now I can't seem to find where it came from anywhere online.  However, I did find a link to an earlier version 2.1 beta of it by randr here:

 

https://vpuniverse.com/files/file/3575-humpty-dumpty-gotlieb-1947

 

A big "Thank You" goes out to the Internet Pinball Database (IPDB) for the collected information and images they have published over the years on all the games and to the individual contributors there.  They have a wonderful hosted set of images for Alice in Wonderland 1948 by Gottlieb.  For credit and reference, here is a link to their database entry for Alice in Wonderland, game (IPD) entry number 47; a few of the images there are referenced in the text above:

 

https://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=47

 

The pictures there can also be a great reference for what the machine looked like, and will fill in the blanks for what the original machine looked like.  There are actually two machines pictured, there is one that was repainted, and looks bad by comparison to the real machine.  That one has yellow trim painted over the original orange body in some areas, and for some reason they even painted over the bumper caps!  The real machine, if you can see from my AST pictures, was only shades of green and orange.  Another great reference from the IPDB is an image of what the shooter gauge looked like for that series of tables.  My gauge was broken when I first got it, and I later had painted it black for the "Star Trek" themed table.  Here is an image of the shooter gauge intact from the similar game Humpty Dumpty.  Here is what the unpainted shooter gauge should look like:

 

https://www.ipdb.org/showpic.pl?id=1254&picno=12823

 

As I said, I hope someone with much more talent than I can take up this as a project.  There is such a great pool of talented artists and programmers who are very adept at producing various Visual Pinball (and Future Pinball!) tables out there, that I hope that there is somebody with the time and ability to make this project a reality.  I have looked at Visual Pinball for quite some time, and although I can make minor tweaks and small mods to tables, but an entire original or reproduction table is way beyond my abilities.  This is why I am publishing and releasing the project to the public, in the hopes that someone will rise to the challenge!

 

Here is a link to my Mega shared directory which contains all of my collected resources for this project so far.  All photos, images and sound files are hereby officially shared and released into the Public Domain for the benefit of this project, in perpetuity.  File naming conventions are typically "Subject NF 1.jpg", etc.  Which the title of the picture is "Subject", "NF" means "No Flash" (or could be "F" for "Flash"), and 1 is the sequence number, etc.  You'll figure it out, I'm sure.

 

https://mega.nz/folder/zCYjibjA#49bo_zhlnAef4dy9euHSQA

 

By the way, I eventually grew up and went to work for Stern/URL/Elektra in 1979 as a Production Engineer, and then went on to work for Taito in 1982 for 4 years as a Customer Service Engineer, so all that early self-taught knowledge and learning with Alice paid off nicely in later life with a great career, eventually!  Thank you for taking the time to listen to my long story.  I also would like to wish a sincere "Thank You" to all the contributors, artists and engineers here who have devoted so much time and effort to something that I love so much!

 

Mister Transistor

 

[scottacus]

Great story, thanks for posting this!  I never knew that there was a military academy in Evansville, only St John's.

 

[JFR1]

Wow, thanks for spotting this fascinating post @scottacus

Fascinating read @MisterTransistor

Any updates?

[MisterTransistor]

On 2/18/2023 at 8:36 AM, scottacus said:

Great story, thanks for posting this!  I never knew that there was a military academy in Evansville, only St John's.

 

Hehe, we used to play St. John's Military Academy in football!  We played full tackle even in Grades 7+8,  wow - that would never fly today.  Some of the other public schools in the area like ABE and Milton were starting to play flag or touch football by then when we played them.  I went up there a few years ago for a driving/photo tour of the old place, it's an apartment building now, I guess.

 

You might not have heard of it since it was pretty small.  The entire school was contained in the 3 buildings I show in the photos, there were only about 60-65 kids in total there in Grades 1-8.  I think St. John's had 100's maybe 1000 students or perhaps more back then by comparison.  Heck, they had their own damn pool!  We were very jealous, we actually had to go via bus to the Janesville YMCA a half hour away to swim!

 

[MisterTransistor]

On 2/19/2023 at 9:09 PM, JFR1 said:

Wow, thanks for spotting this fascinating post @scottacus

Fascinating read @MisterTransistor

Any updates?

 

Sadly, no.  No one has taken up the Project yet.  I'm hoping someone can do it justice in VPX that has more talent than I - for some of the magnificent tables I have seen recently, this should be little more than an afternoon's project!  I'm joking - of course the work done by the many artists here is just fantastic, and they all have my deepest respect; but this should be a relative no-brainer as far as VPX tables go.

[MisterTransistor]

I guess this would be an "Epilogue" of sorts, after a little more than a year, I approached JP Salas about whether he might be able to give this table a shot.  To my extreme pleasure, he agreed and finished the table in amazingly short time!  It was nearly perfect but we had to figure out the rules, how the game operated at the smallest level of detail.  Unfortunately there is not a lot of information out there on this table at all.  There was a short maybe 30 second loop on YouTube showing one in operation, and otherwise the only available information is static pictures either from the IPDB, or from my library on Mega, both posted above.

 

Anyway, as I mention in the Reviews, JP was just wonderful to work with!  After he created the table, we had a week of back-and-forth cut and try testing sessions until we got everything with the operation, feel and the action of the table just right.

 

I can't thank JP enough!  He was very generous with his time and talent.

 

Here's a link to his table : https://www.vpforums.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=17611

 

Thanks again, JP!! 

[Cliffy]

I'm so glad this epic saga resulted in a wonderful vpx table! JPSalas has stepped up once again to at least preserve this fairy tale series game digitally. Thanks to you and jp!

[JFR1]

How cool!!