Williams Pinball Controller

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The Williams Pinball Controller (WPC) is an arcade system board 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.

FunHouse (designed by Pat Lawlor) was the first production game to use the WPC System, although there are prototype Dr. Dude machines that use the WPC System.

Some WPC System boards made use of the YM2151 and the YM3012 sound chips respectivly. Producing a sound similar to that of a Sega Genesis until the DCSsystem was introduced later.

[edit] Variations

There are seven variations of the WPC hardware. The original version is sometimes referred to as WPC-89. The variations are as follows:

WPC (Alphanumeric) (from FunHouse to The Machine: Bride of Pin*Bot)
WPC (Dot Matrix) (from Gilligan's Island to Party Zone, plus some of Williams / Midway's redemption games [SlugFest!, Hot Shot Basketball, Addams Family Values])
- Terminator 2: Judgment Day was designed to have a dot matrix display from the start, but it was released after Gilligan's Island, due to T2 having a longer development time than Gilligan's Island.
WPC (Fliptronics I) (The Addams Family; this game is also compatible with Fliptronics II)
WPC (Fliptronics II) (from The Getaway: High Speed II to Twilight Zone)
WPC (DCS) (from Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure to Demolition Man)
- Twilight Zone was designed to be the first pinball machine to use the new DCS system, but due to delays of the new hardware design it was decided to release it on the old hardware (using downsampled sound effects) instead
WPC-S (Security) (from World Cup Soccer to WhoDunnit)
WPC-95 (from Congo to Cactus Canyon)