Informative

Total Nuclear Annihilation Experience

Posted by Scott on March 26, 2025
Posted in: Arcade Posts, Events, Informative, Total Nuclear Annihilation. Leave a Comment

TNA Experience Overview

The Pinball Olympic Stadium in Chicago has the world’s most intense TNA Experience Room. If you do not know what that is, it is a self contained room that Jay Brand (BangerJay) built and I programmed just for the Pinball Olympics.

You can find more information about it here (please let me know if these external links ever break):
https://www.reddit.com/r/pinball/comments/17e9swo/the_total_nuclear_annihilation_full_immersive/
https://www.facebook.com/reel/982567487243878

This room has enough space for 4 players to gather and play TNA in the most extreme pinball environment in existence. This room is completely controlled by the game itself and has over 200 amps of RGB LEDs, 5000watts of audio equipment, and other features like a fog machine and air evacuation system.

As many of you have been asking, I figured I would post this information out here for people to reference on how this was actually built and what was used to interface with the pinball machine. I do not recommend anyone attempt this as it is dangerous and you can easily start you house on fire if something is not hooked up correctly of safely. This overview below is going to be pretty high level and technical. This is also most likely missing information that I can update and add later.

TNA Experience LEDs:

There are speaker light RGB outputs on the game, currently connected to your speaker LEDs.  This is split and attached to a bunch of RGB light strip amplifiers.  Each amplifier can support safely 20 amps at 12vdc (they claim anyway).  Each standard LED light strip reel is about 3 meters, which is about 4 amps (maybe less).  I would probably keep it to about 4 light strips per amplifier just to be safe.  These light strips should NOT be wired in series as they will burn up.  Just wire them in parallel out of the amps.  You will also need a few massive 12vdc power supplies for the light strips.  We are running 3 100amp 12v supplies for the TNA room we just built, but we are planning on adding more.  These power supplies can handle about 4 amplifiers each (again, to be safe).  I did not push these to their limit as I did not want to start the thing on fire.  🙂 Each of the amplifier input signals needs to be put in parallel as well with the signal coming from the game or it will cause issues.  You will also need to hook up the amplifiers to the DC power supply in parallel as well so you are not daisy chaining them together.  If you put them in series, you will burn up wires and could potentially cause a fire.  When assembling this you should current test everything at full power just to be sure nothing gets hot.  Using these guidelines, you can basically add as many LED strips, amps, and power supplies as you want.

TNA Experience Fog:

In order to trigger the fog machine, you will need to buy a couple 12v relays that have 12v capable contactors.  These usually can handle 8 amps max.  These relay coils are wired into the beacon light and will click the relay on whenever the beacon is on.  What I did for the fog machine is I took it apart and soldered some wires onto the manual trigger switch and wired those to the normally open side of the relay.  That way the fog machine would trigger when the beacon activated.  The second relay was used to control the high power exhaust fans (air evacuation system).  This relay coil is still connected to the beacon the same way as the first, but then I wired up a 120v outlet to the normally closed side of the relay.  This means that the outlet is giving line level voltage to the fans when the beacon is not on, but when it is on, it will shut the fans off.

TNA Experience Audio:

I simply disconnected the 3.5mm headphone jack from the back of the LCD panel, ran that though a noise filter and external equalizer.  Then into the PA system.  This disables the speakers in the game and uses just the PA, which is good.  I put an EQ on there because at very high volumes the upper level frequencies were in dangerous ear damage range and I just knocked those down.  

Links:

LED Strip Amplifiers: https://www.amazon.com/BTF-LIGHTING-Strip-Amplifier-Controller-5050SMD/dp/B07T6XVYBN/

LED Strip: https://www.amazon.com/SUPERNIGHT-16-4ft-Waterproof-Changing-Lights/dp/B076VG955L/

100amp 12v Power Supplies: https://www.amazon.com/Version-Adapter-Converter-Transformer-Security/dp/B0BXTBBS9M/

12v Relay: https://www.amazon.com/Electronics-Salon-SPST-NO-Module-Control-Voltage/dp/B01B60BQFA/

TNA Experience Miscellaneous and Safety

You will also need a bunch of wire.  I recommend 16awg wire for the power supply to the amplifiers and 18-20awg for the amps to the led strip.  Make sure you use 14awg or larger for the main line input on the power supplies to the wall.  Using 3 power supplies for the LEDs, you are looking at 3600 maximum watts from the circuit.  That is 30 amps, but it will probably use less than 20 amps.  You will want that on a 20 amp dedicated circuit though for the LEDs.  The fog machine, game, and audio system should be on a separate circuit.

I know this is brief and to the point, but I wanted to just get this out there for anyone curious on what we did.

Again, don’t do this. 🙂

Why Do Pinball/Game Companies Keep Their Licenses Secret During Development?

Posted by Scott on February 5, 2023
Posted in: Arcade Posts, Informative. Leave a Comment

This is an interesting question that I get asked from time to time and I realized I have a much longer answer than just “for FOMO”. So here is a nice blog entry about it. 🙂

If you are unaware, many different types of companies that develop products with officially licensed themes keep said licenses a secret during the development cycle for a number of reasons. This is obviously not limited to Pinball and Video Game companies. I am going to list the main reasons that I know about and have been exposed to below, but there are probably many others as well.

Theme, Licensor, and Competitive Edge

The licensee and licensor usually want to keep product development under wraps to get ahead of competing licenses. This also keeps any ideas/designs secret from other companies until the full reveal. Also, there are unfortunate things that could happen behind the scenes if a competing company found out about a theme. Sabotage can happen and licenses can be swept out from under you if you are not careful. For unlicensed themes, this can hurt the company because others could potentially replicate the theme or design elements.

FOMO / Hype and Stagnation

Yes, it is true, a company will want to manage hype around a product, and this is actually important to help drive sales and keep a professional appearance. If a company announced a theme that excites the community at the beginning of the development cycle of said game, this will generate a bunch of hype only have it die down and people lose interest and move on to something else. Development cycles can be pretty long for Pinball Machines and Video Games. It is way more advantageous to keep this under wraps until the product is just about to be released or fully revealed to the world. This also could expose the company to criticism from the outside due to the long time from announcement to product release. This could, and most likely will, hurt the companies reputation.

Avoiding Leaks

Leaks can be damaging to these companies. If a license is revealed too early, it can result in spoilers, reduced sales, and a loss of excitement for the game. Keeping licenses secret helps to prevent these types of leaks, but it is not fool proof as we all know. These leaks could also hurt the original IP as well as it could be for something like an unreleased movie or any other unreleased content. This could really get a company in hot water and could potentially get the license pulled.

The Community “What-Ifs”

This is an interesting one… If a company announced a theme early before or during development, the game community could start throwing ideas out left and right. These ideas cannot all make it into a machine otherwise it will look like a Homer Simpson car and loose all connection to the designer’s vision of what it should be. This complicates things in other ways too. “Hey, I came up with that mech! Where are my royalties, my feelings are hurt, fuck you X company”

Again, there are probably more reasons that I did not cover here, but these are just the ones that pop out to me as the most important. But as you can see, there is more to keeping these themes secret than just trying to control FOMO and hype. Have a great day everyone!