Something Is Coming — And It's Been Listening to Your Machine

This article is deliberately short on detail. We'll explain why.

For some time now, there has been a second project running on Valère's bench — alongside the boards, the LED kits, and the daily work of keeping forty-year-old machines alive. It isn't finished. It isn't for sale. It doesn't have a name we're ready to say out loud.

But it's real enough that we'd rather tell you it exists than have you find out from a rumour at a show.

The problem we kept running into

Every week we receive the same category of email. A machine won't boot. A display goes dark two seconds after power-up. A coil locks on. A game resets at random, but only sometimes, and only after twenty minutes of play.

And every week, the diagnosis follows the same slow ritual: describe the symptom, rule out the obvious, check the ground, check the connectors, swap a board, wait, try again. Anyone who has restored a System 80 knows this dance. It can take an afternoon. It can take a month.

Here's what strikes us: the machine already knows what's wrong. The information is there — in the voltages, in the timing, in the pattern of which switches report and which stay silent, in the precise way a boot sequence fails. It's all measurable. The problem has never been the absence of data. The problem is that reading it correctly requires forty years of accumulated experience, and most people troubleshooting a machine at 11pm on a Tuesday don't have that.

So what if the machine could tell you?

Not with an error code. Error codes have existed for decades and they're barely better than nothing — "the CPU is unhappy" doesn't tell you which of eleven things to check.

We mean something closer to a conversation. A system that watches what your machine is actually doing, understands the difference between a symptom and a cause, and tells you in plain language what to check first — and what to check after that, if the first thing wasn't it.

That's the direction. That's as much as we're saying today.

Three things it is not

Because guesses will circulate, let's close off the wrong ones early:

• It is not a replacement for understanding your machine. We're not building something that makes the knowledge unnecessary. We're building something that shortens the distance to it.
• It does not change how your game plays. Not the feel of the flippers, not the rules, not the sound, not the plunger. We'll have a great deal more to say about this principle in a coming article, because it matters to us enormously.
• It is not a subscription that holds your machine hostage. These games have survived forty years without anyone's permission. That isn't going to change on our account.

Why we're mentioning it now

Two reasons.

The first is that we'd rather be honest about the shape of what we're working on than pretend our entire attention is on the catalogue. It isn't. Some of it is here.

The second is that the people best placed to tell us whether this is useful — or whether it's a solution to a problem nobody has — are the people reading this. Diagnostics that impress an engineer and frustrate a collector would be a failure. We'd like to avoid that.

Expected reveal: Pinball Expo 2026

Our working target is to show this at Pinball Expo in Chicago, October 2026. Not a mock-up on a slide — something you can stand in front of and try.

That date is a target, not a promise. If it isn't ready, we won't show it. Shipping something half-finished into a hobby built on machines that have run for four decades would be a poor way to earn anyone's trust.

If you have opinions, we want them

Genuinely. Especially the sceptical ones.

What would make a diagnostic tool actually useful on your bench? What would make you switch it off and never turn it on again? What's the fault that has cost you the most hours of your life?

👉 Tell us — we read everything

More when there's more to say.

— Valère, Pinballs Store