My new project: Beavis & Butthead (updated 9th Dec)

[cooldan]

Reserved for updates: ARTWORK

The artwork is a big part of this project. I will need:

Translite
Cabinet decals x 5 (2 sides, front, 2 sides of backbox)
next:
Side blades x 2, end of playfield decal, front & side of mini-playfield 'cabinet'
Apron art x 3
DMD/speaker panel art
Art for 23 plastics (+ spares)
Art for 5 targets + spinner (+ spares)
Art for 77 inserts (+ spares)
Playfield decals x 2

I plan to use online printers for half the work, but pinball specialist printers for the main bits ie. the cab and playfield decals. This is gonna involve learning how to use photoshop or similar; i have no idea about vectors or layers or rasters or bitmaps ..... but in order to keep control of my project, am gonna have to figure that out. When i take the free images of B&B all over the internet, these smallish files of a few hundred KB or a couple of MB are only a couple of thousand pixels on each side, and when you blow them up to a metre long they look fuc_king awful and all blurry.

I will most likely go for a blue theme, the main translite being the simple image at the top of this thread, the two cab sides also being the boys on their sofa against a blue wall, maybe headbanging away to ACDC and Metallica. not this image, that's some weird fan-art, i want the original Mike Judge stuff. And yes, the blues will match.



The playfield will also feature Old B&B, Smart B&B, and loads of regular side characters (some of whom will have modes). Like Todd, Lolita & Tanqueray, Buzzcut, McVicker, and my favourite ever scene, the desert peyote adventure in film #1. The mini-playfield will be Beavis Multiball based in Burger World, spelling out the main shots ie. van Driessen, MTV, Butthead, Anderson and Daria. When you complete the mini Beavis Pinball you get BEAVIS MULTIBALL, and when you complete all five sofa modes you get a Sofa Wizard Mode. Nothing groundbreaking here. The original 'beer can modes' will now be based on the central van Driessen shot, but i would rather name them nacho modes if i can. otherwise it look all dorky and disorganised. The Wizard mode will be the same as it is on FG and Shrek ie. based on progress in all sofa modes, nacho modes, progress in C-O-O-L multiball and in Titicaca (the Cornholio version of Crazy Chris).... it will be called NEVER GONNA SCORE

It's all a work in progress and i'm enjoying the hell out of it. I really really want to use the DMD for more great art too, and i'll feature the boys in full colour video in at least one, if not two places - a mini TV set somewhere on the playfield, and an LCD screen in the apron. These will probably be random clips from my favourite bits, I doubt i'll be able to link it to the game you're playing as i'm going the cheaper simpler Pinball Browser route. Initial art company has been selected and paid for initial art package of cab decals plus translite. if all good, i'll also give them the work for the rest, otherwise several other options available.

Fingers crossed!

4th Dec art update:
art approved and sent for printing: cabinet decals x 5, translite
art designed but waiting for first lot to arrive before i give the same guy the job (to make my designs professional and resize them, then print): mini playfield decal, end of playfield, sideblades (inside cabinet sides), DMD/speaker panel, main playfield decal, apron art, target art, and insert art. And probably more i've forgotten.

i'm not gonna post any art on here until it's finished, printed, and applied. Partly because i don't want the criticism or suggestions, partly because this isn't a group project but is my baby.

 

[cooldan]

Reserved for updates: PLASTICS

There are 23 plastics that have artwork on them. I scanned each one as jpg and pdf files - one for the new clear plastic parts to be cut out, and the other to be used as art templates for 23 new reverse-printed-clear-window-white-ink-covered decals for the undersides of all the plastics x 3 sets. The first set i'll most likely fuc_k up, the second ones i'll use in the game, the third ones will be spares for when things break. 23 x 3 conveniently happens to be 69. pfffffttttt!



update: all new blank plastics ordered from the excellent @Colywobbles - he's made stuff for me before and i've always been impressed with the quality, so why go elsewhere. i also used a sander to create some 'blanks' from old FG/Shrek plastics, and will be experimenting with ordering online reverse-printed white-backed decals for these, to see how these look and whether they're priced ok for quality and how easy they are to use. i want to get all the plastics finished early doors.

Edit 27Nov: I got my 69 from Col (sorry could not resist) and am very happy with what he has produced. Such quality and such volume, the man must drink pineapple juice by the gallon

 

[cooldan]

Reserved for updates: SOUNDS
(Edited 7th Dec)

There will be music that kicks ass and is cool (like the B&B theme tune, ACDC, Hendrix, Skynyrd, coolstuff fom the films like Chili Peppers etc) and there will be music that sucks (Lesbian Seagull, I'm Gonna Sexx You Up, Yoko Ono, Milli Vanilli etc). There will be mode music and multiball music and sounds for Jackpots and stuff. But the pride of place will go to the call outs from the boys themselves plus a few of their regular characters.



I have collected around 880 already. I still need to make sure they all have the same volume before importing to Pinball Browser. Some will be unusable due to background noise or if technical stuff gets in the way, but i already have several duplicates so i'll be choosing the best i have and going from there. this is very much as amateur project for my own entertainment, so (while my own standards are fairly high) it will most likely never reach the quality reached by the pro producers. The episode where the boys attend a class with a speech therapist was rich pickings, as you can expect, as they continually repeated and perfected such delights as “but_t munch”; “as_s munch”; “bung hole” and “but_t hole” until their teacher was happy with their diction. I said dick. Etc etc.

So far i watched about 44 hours but i have about another 50 hours of material still to explore and rip, and i've not even properly explored YouTube yet or the legions of (i'm hoping) fan art and fan video that will have been produced by millions of nerds worldwide. Beavis and Butthead is a theme has has touched tens of millions of sad bastards around the globe, i'm confident of that. Plus there’s Rule54 of course that we must not speak of here.

@JustLikeMe has been very generous with his time and property and has shared dozens of files with me I’ve never seen before (don’t worry Guy, I’m only talking about the B&B stuff, not that filthy fetish terabyte drive I’m still ‘working through’) so the rarer-the-better rule applies, and if I find something decent from a *really* obscure source, then it’s guaranteed a seat at the top table in the sounds folder, to be hopefully recognised some day in the future by a similarly unfortunate pinhead Buttnerd specialist loser like myself.



The plan for when the game is done (aiming for March 2026) is to keep and play it a while to fix bugs and til I get bored, then lend it out to mates and maybe also to clubs and shows and events to try to get it seen and played; then back to me to implement any feedback, and then away on tour again. Maybe it will get as far as Scotland! Good mates can always have free lends, but I won’t lend or rent it to strangers for cash as that could only go badly.





update 7th Dec: i have now watched around 63 hours of material (22h left to watch before i go searching) and have saved almost 1200 call outs. lots of duplicates though, and some very poor quality. i found an AI text-to-speech thing and was able to create some custom call-outs but they're not very good so i'm still working on that. Also i've added a pile of music to a folder that may be useful at some point - 200 or so tracks (mostly that is cool, also a few that suck).

View attachment AI BH can i say 'pinball info sucks'.mp3
View attachment AI BH pinball info dot com is a forum for butt munchers in the UK, which is in, like England o...mp3
View attachment AI can i say ****ing space monkey.mp3
View attachment AI BH 'Cool Dan', more like 'Prick Dan'.mp3

 

[cooldan]

Reserved for updates: SOFTWARE

This is all new to me. Pinball Browser will replace all the sounds, music, call-outs and DMD from the original files. I'm learning this stuff as i go along.
i've not even got round to downloading this yet tbh

 

[cooldan]

Reserved for updates: DOTS

The DMD design is still to be arranged - I want colour and will need to start from scratch. Luckily Andrew in Australia @Terranigma who sorted out my recent batch-buy of pin2DMD colour screens knows the guy who wrote the original code for the dots on Family Guy and Shrek, so he's gonna ask him. Keep your fingers crossed for me, as otherwise it's gonna be a long hard slog and i'll need a lot of help.

I also posted in Tilt Forum, hoping some Old Timers may hang out there who used to work on dots and fancies a task/hobby/earner to tickle the old grey matter. Many years ago I got surprising input from several recognisable names for another project of some kind on Tilt.

Seeking an oldschool expert DMD designer

Hi all, I’ve not posted here in a few years, but was recommended by Martin Ayub of Pinball News (i’m sure many on here know Martin) to try here for my request: I’m retheming a Shrek into a Beavis & Butthead machine, using Pinball Browser. Here’s a link to my progress thread: My new project...

tiltforums.com

update 4th Dec: the dots will probably prove to be the longest, hardest part. I know, i know - i said "long" and "hard", heh heh huh mmh mmh heh. I've contacted an expert here on this forum and also an expert on Pinside and another one on Virtual Pinball Universe (the best one, ideally the one i can pay to help me out with the original source material from when he created art similar to my own requirements) and waiting with bated breath to see what they say. i expect to be using AI for at least part of this project, another thing i haven't done before.

update 9th Dec: the Pinside guy isn't responding and the VPU guy won't help me, but thankfully i'm getting some assistance from our own resident forum expert @slippifishi . so apparently i now need to choose between 2000 hours via pin2DMD or 200 hours via reprogramming the dots in the ROM but ending up with monochrome dots, both via this PB (Pinball Browser) thing that i'd not heard of a month ago. It's not a hard decision (heh hhehh 'hard') as i can cope with a monochrome DMD and worry about trying to colourise that another day. There is gonna be a colour telly on the playfield anyway playing random B&B moronic scenes continuously, and i hardly ever look up at the screen anyway, so it's no huge loss.

i expect i'll be spending plenty of hours this Dec and Jan learning how to program dots in a virtual table.

 

[cooldan]

Reserved for updates: EXTRAS

i'm not gonna give away *all* my ideas here.
no doubt there will be stuff that kicks ass, and there will be stuff that sucks and looks like it came out of someone's butt.

Update 9th Dec: i scoured the internet looking for playfield toys. ideally i'd just buy the preformed precoloured nice finished toys, but not all of them are around.
These will include Beavis (got), Butthead (got), MTV logo (got), nachos model (getting) ..... but also Daria (bought 3D file, printed and will be painted by @RudeDogg1), and finally van Driessen and Anderson. Those last two, i'm paying the guy who made the Daria file to create them, then i'll go the same route.





some playfield toys starting to arrive -

 

[myPinballs]

Ok so plans are underway…..

Apparently there’s loads and loads more opportunity for call-outs with FG than Shrek so I’ll download the FG ROM to start with. I’ll have a look at Pinball Browser first but if it has limitations then may go to Jim for his CPU setup instead/as well. I’m happy of course to do the bulk of the legwork myself, but am not stupid enough to turn down the option of paying people to do the bits for me that I’m a total n00b at, like the dots..... dependent on me landing this job i'm *still* interviewing for.

I want my game to have all the bells and whistles as I’m only doing it the once. I’ll want background music, multiball music (x5), mode songs, instructions and commentary, random noises, 1000+ call outs, 1000+ DMD images, Easter eggs (a DOHO, cows, flipper code if possible, a dirty pool perhaps) and definitely a mini TV on the playfield somewhere playing video. Gotta have *some* video *somewhere* of the boys' best clips doing awesome stupid stuff that is cool and kicks ass and doesn't suck.

Add your ideas and suggestions here in this thread please. The ones I use that I hadn’t thought of will get a credit somewhere on the playfield or backglass somewhere (or your initials or whatever). unless i renege on that and just steal it and pretend it was my idea all along. what you gonna do then, tough guy? huh? huh? yeah that's what i thought

EDIT: i've so far watched about 5 hours of material and saved about 500 soundbites. I need someone to print my art, and @Colywobbles has agreed to make me some blank plastics. Pinball Browser will replace all the sounds, music, call-outs and DMD. The DMD design is still to be arranged - I want colour and will need to start from scratch.

Printing jobs being quoted for now - i'll provide the graphics files but i'll need a company to make the cab decals x 5 plus the playfield and mini playfield decals, the back of the playfield and the sides too. I've approached Arcade Graphics, Pinball Life, Retro Refurbs, This Old Game, Banners Expo, Bannerbuzz, Pinball Decals Inc and Diginate. The one that demonstrates the best past performance and communication will get all the work.

Then i'll get reverse-printed-clear-window-white-ink-covered decals for the undersides of all the plastics x 3 sets [the first ones i'll most likely fuc_k up, the second ones i'll use, the third ones will be spares]; also decals for the 15 targets/drops/spinner x 3 sets; also for the 77 inserts x 3 sets; and finally the translite.

Latest progress below:
View attachment 292801 View attachment 292802

One note about sounds, usually i and others use wav as the format for saved audio assets in the master/working folder. It's better to save in an uncompressed format though larger file sizes than things like mp3 where you are loosing quality with the compressions.

 

[huggers]

Awesome project this. What a theme as well!

 

[Mooseman]

Why not reach out to very talented pinball artist Brian Allen? If you cross his palm with silver I’m sure he could come up with a backglass design for you. I know deleted member has used him to design his competition posters and T shirts.
The art of Brian Allen on farcebook.
He does a lot of his own retheme drawings for existing games. I have his afm translight.

 

[myPinballs]

The DMD design is still to be arranged

This is the biggest rub going pinball browser route, I hope you can get this guy on board and i would triple check this is viable before adding anything into pinball browser itself as it doesnt sound like a cheap option. Plus unless you are gonna recompile from a stern source point of view somehow new dmd graphics are gonna have to fit within certain frame sizes i would guess like the sounds do. Which will be different to how it was done moving from fg to shrek

Reserved for updates: SOUNDS

Also i assume you know that pinball browser sound replacements have to be the same length in size for what you are changing, so you have to be creative. Having done various GOTG updates it's time consuming so always make sure you create and SAVE a macro file to use as a master processing file as you go. As you'll likely end up starting over a few times. And make sure you use some sound editor that normalises all the volumes/db levels for everything, as if you forget to do this as you go , its well annoying to have to go back and sort later (from experience)

 

[cooldan]

Why not reach out to very talented pinball artist Brian Allen? If you cross his palm with silver I’m sure he could come up with a backglass design for you.

Cheers Moose but the major art is already ordered and is 100% Mike Judge

Latest status:
CABINET
SOUNDS & MUSIC
ART
PLASTICS
PLAYFIELDS
SOFTWARE
DOTS
RULES
EXTRAS

 

[myPinballs]

Anything to show dmd wise yet?

 

[cooldan]

The DMD is gonna be done using VPX and pin2DMD editor using Pinball Browser, creating new animations frame by frame. This part is gonna be slow and tedious, and a steep learning curve.

My next proper post will be in January as I’m away on my jollies now. When I return there will be cab decals waiting for me so I’ll apply those and do a full progress update including finished cabinet.