Pinball retheme · for Donutland
Retheming a pinball machine, one asset at a time.
Stern's Avengers: Infinity Quest runs on their Spike 2 system. I pulled the asset library out with Pinball Browser, sorted it into sixteen scenes, and I'm replacing it scene by scene with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: the art, the video, the audio, and the six-character system the rules run on.
The asset library
What's inside the machine.
There's no index. Every file has a hex ID, something like Image-124-0x80000002, and nothing tells you it's a trophy room background until you open it. So the first job was sorting: extract everything with Pinball Browser, group it into sixteen scenes named for what's on screen, and keep every original next to its replacement so anything can be put back.
Three favorite parts
And how I did them.
Making the library editable at all
Twenty-one thousand files with hex names can't be worked on, so the folder structure came before any art. One folder per scene, named for what happens on screen: Trophy Room, Quest Select, Gem Awarded, Battle Thanos, and twelve more. Inside each, an Old Bitmaps folder, a New Bitmaps folder, and the Photoshop file that produced them.
Every replacement keeps the original's ID and dimensions, so when it's written back with Pinball Browser it lands in the right slot. The old files stay next to the new, so any scene can be compared or reverted. None of the art works without this part.
Turning the Avengers into six characters from Tears of the Kingdom
The game's progression runs on six character hexes. Collect an Avenger, level them up, unlock their power. I mapped each one to a character from Tears of the Kingdom so the rules still make sense: Hulk became Tulin, Captain America became Sidon, Iron Man became Yunobo, Thor became Riju, Black Panther became Mineru, and Black Widow became Zelda.
Each character exists in four states, uncollected and then levels one through three, with bronze, silver and gold frames. That's twenty-four hex artworks, each built at the machine's original size so the existing reveal and upgrade animations still work. Mineru and Zelda are on the machine now. The other four are finished and ready to upload.
The drop target grid as the Purah Pad
The Game UI scene alone is 156 files: the score bar, the drop target grid, the gem indicators, every state each of them can be in. I'm rebuilding the drop target grid as the Purah Pad, the device Link carries in the game, so the HUD looks like it belongs in Zelda.
The grid is now the Pad's display. The Infinity Gems are stones from the game: the Mind Gem is the Lightning Stone, the Space Gem is the Wind Stone. The files go back into the machine as DDS textures, so each one gets converted after it's drawn. Below, one drop target background, before and after.
On the machine
What's running today.
On the machine today: Mineru and Zelda. The other four characters are ready to upload, and more scenes are in progress. Made with Pinball Browser, Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects, plus DDS conversion for the files the machine reads directly.