Williams Pinball Controller
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The Williams Pinball Controller (WPC) is an arcade system board platform used for several pinball games designed by Williams and Midway (under the Bally name) between 1990 and early 1999. It is the successor to their earlier System 11 hardware (High Speed, Pin*Bot, Black Knight 2000). It was succeeded by Williams/Midway's Pinball 2000 platform, before Williams left the pinball business in October 1999.[1][2]
The WPC System was designed by Chuck Bleich, with its operating system, dubbed APPLE, developed by Larry DeMar.[3]
FunHouse (designed by Pat Lawlor) was the first production game to use WPC,[4] although there are prototype Dr. Dude machines that use WPC.
WPC systems contain several separate printed circuit boards that are characterized by:[5]
- Main CPU: Motorola 6809 at 2 MHz, 8 KB of RAM, and between 128 KB and 1 MB of EPROM for the game program
- WPC ASIC: Williams-proprietary 68-pin PLCC custom chip that implements functions like address decoding, real-time clock, and watchdog
- Sound CPU: Motorola 6809 (Pre-DCS), Analog Devices ADSP2105 (DCS)
- Sound chips (Pre-DCS): Yamaha YM2151, MP7524JN 8-bit-DAC, Harris HC55536 CVSD
- Operating system: APPLE OS (created by Williams, not related to the company Apple, but "Advanced Pinball Programming Logic Executive")[6]
A modem was used on some of Williams test machines to download earnings and other information remotely.[7]