FAQ

Copyrights and Use of Materials
We believe much of the material was produced by a Chicago company known as Advertising Posters. If anyone has copyrights, the manufacturers or AP would hold them. So what does that mean? We don't know.

However, the question most people really want answered is "can I take your scans and use them for my own nefarious purposes". We don't see any reason why not, assuming you aren't going to charge more than a nominal amount of money for whatever you do. Help yourself. If you do swipe the 300DPI images and start selling them, contact us so we can negotiate a cut of the take (our scotch bill keeps going up).

What do I get if I upload flyers
Not much, really. We'll add your name (or whatever else you specify) to the html pages that contain the images...and that's about all.

We need 300 DPI scans. The nasty trick here is that there can be confusion about what DPI means. We are talking dots/pixels per inch, so if you scan a 8.5x11" piece of paper, the result should be something around 2550x3300 pixels big. At 24bits/pixel, the result is a pretty huge file (25+ MB). However, save it using jpeg with relatively low compression settings, and the result is around 1-3MB.

Another trick is to process the file to remove moire (the polka dot pattern that you can get when scanning certain types of images). If you don't have the software to do this kind of image processing, then we'll do it, but to preserve image quality, crank the compression setting way down.

If you can't scan, but have a flyer that's needed and will loan it to us, we'll scan the thing and send it back. Send an email to flyers@cdyn.com.

What kind of stuff goes on the site
We are mainly interested in the advertising material. A picture of a machine is OK if a flyer is not available, but we don't want pics of the playfield, cabinet, etc. The Internet Pinball Database has that stuff. In fact, we are assuming all the flyer images will make it into the IPD eventually.

There is one thing we'd like you to avoid ... don't scan images out of currently available books. There are people out there spending a lot of time gathering and publishing material, and we want them to keep doing it. In particular, terry cummings at http://1930s.com has been working on the flyers from the early days which he sells in book form. Please don't scan his stuff for this site.

The image is awful!
The 72DPI images have been compressed at a higher level than the 300DPI sources, so there are more artifacts in them. If the image looks horribly grainy, we may have not removed moire patterns correctly, or somehow the scan got botched. Toss us a comment and if possible we'll rescan the image.

I need more information about machine X
If you are looking for manuals, schematics, or parts, the pinball parts suppliers have that stuff.

If you want to know how to repair pinball machines or are looking for more info on pinballs, gun games, bowlers (including flyers we don't have), you shouldn't miss pinrepair.com.

This site also has information on obtaining pinball repair videos.

For bingo machines, the twit who runs http://bingo.cdyn.com/ will dispense incomprehensible information which may make sense after you figure out what the problem was yourself, but occasionally his standards fall and his suggestions are not only understandable, but correct.

Why is the site so crude?
Let's just say the guy who did the html gluing all this together spends enough time pounding the keyboard for paying customers (obviously, they don't pay for web site design).

If you have a suggestion on improving it, zap us an email to flyers@cdyn.com. Keep in mind, however, that everything needs to work from a DVD. That means no search engines or really fancy navigation that relies on a web server to generate html.

What happened to the cd/dvds and the pinball hall of fame?
The PHoF has been open for a long time now, so it's time to send it out in the world to swim for itself. That leaves us with a pile of scanned images, and after much ingestion of single malt scotches, we decided to just give them away (except for commercial use as noted above). If you want to buy stuff that will benefit the PHoF, head over to http://pinballmuseum.org and get some repair videos.

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