Williams Pin and Vid serial number cheat site

Nondrowsy

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Maybe this got posted before but I'm not gonna look, if anyone has a williams game that was converted you can use this site to see if for example it's a bubbles or sinistar, or etc..

Example: serial number begins with 621, bubbles... 618, 620, 624, sinistar..

Not full proof but could give some info to those with williams cabs that have been converted again and again like robotrons and jousts. (btw the serial number is stamped to the right of the coin door in most cases)

Have to scroll way down 4/5th's of the page for the vids, but it's got provided serial numbers and pics of pcb's and cabs of ALL williams games, splat, blaster, mystic, joust, joust pin, rat race pin.. , and everything else.

The link to Williams games: http://www.ipsnd.net/Manufacturer.a...1YvGEEl5HiFt6trT11ilIT2MHNlp-5wI_CAUT_4rZsyVM
 
I added all the Williams video games to the site because they ran in the same serial number sequence as all the other (pins, redemption, etc) up through 1984. If anyone was familiar with the old Williams plant on California Ave in Chicago, they had two production lines and those two lines could obviously each run a different game. At the end of the line is where the serial numbers were... they had sequential stickers and put them all over the game and then set up the serial stamper to match and put impressions in the wood in the normal places (Pins: top of cabinet, inside body collar, below front door Vids: under the control panel). The trick is that all the game interleaved... so 321890 might be a black knight pinball and then 321891 might be a Defender video game. I had a special hidden page that showed this overlapping, but the google control I was using doesn't seem to work anymore so I will need to try and get it working again.

Short Story: If you search for 'video'.. you can just see the Williams video games. https://www.ipsnd.net/search.aspx?term=video&type=0
 
The cabinets are unique, so identification is fairly easy. Trying to determine based on serial is not helpful as mentioned above.

~Brad
 
I appreciate your need to only care about cabinets, but there is so much more... the bigger deal is tracking the actual serial numbers when they are not in a cabinet (like for all the game PCBs on Ebay which have serial number stickers attached to them and YES I understand there are flaws using those assumptions but the more data we collect, the better picture we get) and using that data to determine the ranges (production numbers) of both dedicated and kits... for games after 1984, the serial numbers are prefixed with a game number which makes things substantially easier... because you see the game number first 6XX or whatever and then the sequential number like 6XX-00020 (sometimes minus a high number start like 6XX-100020). As I mentioned above, prior to 1984, Williams video games and serial numbers shared a single sequence and no 'hard-cutovers' on sequences specific to a particular game... my classic example is Jungle Lord Pins.. http://www.ipsnd.net/View.aspx?id=1338 If you switch over to the 'Game Traits' tab... you can see that as we added metadata to each serial number, we can now tell pretty solidly that there were 300 Red Cabinets made (sample run)... before tracking this, the guesses were that there were 100-150 Red Cabinets... this effort is pretty conclusive on a better approximation for that.

When you get into Video games specifically, there are obviously many more made... Here is a cool visual where you can see the serial numbers just between 610000 and 650000 from Williams....
1628369587220.png

Diving into something a little more interesting and video game focused... lets look at Sinistar and click onto the 'Game Traits' tab.. http://www.ipsnd.net/View.aspx?id=10007

You can see that we can start to get an idea of how Williams was creating their games with different cabinet styles...

Looks like the first ones outside of the prototypes were Cockpits and Im thinking that those were going to the AMOA show, with the incomplete data we have now, we can assume that there were 617363 minus 617316 (44) cockpits built but it will take some time as more serial numbers are gathered to determine if there were other games built in that range that will break our assumption.

Duramolds came at the end of the run and all we can tell so far is that there were 3 made. Maybe more before and after those, but they haven't been registered yet.

My site has only been collecting serial numbers since 2006 and it started with 5000 imported from the old Internet Pinball Project... we now have 57,939 serial numbers registered, many with photos now and multiple submissions for the same serial number so we can start to see how games move around the world.

1628369866340.png
 
great work, i wish klov was more on it like this. serial numbers have always been a mystery as most are not in order traditionally or accurately of what came off the line. only way to figure that out is what you're doing.
 
bkirby... DONE! http://www.ipsnd.net/view.aspx?id=10003

also @advans13 , I thought of integrating the serial number site with the KLOV id's and using the same engine... it wouldn't be a stretch to do it pretty quickly... I just haven't had the time... after I finish Havoc Promised End, Spellbinder and my Mystic Marathon project, I think that is next in the queue.... probably 10 years away tho! :cool:
 
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