Hate-fixing Games

This weekend was PAPA 15. Remember how terribly I did at PAPA 14? I did worse this year. At 80th in C, numerically it's my worst finish ever, though when you take into account the number of players in the division I actually did worse in 2010. And with my last place finish in my division in summer league and -- it can now be revealed -- my bottom 25% B Division finish at Pinburgh, I have been having a pretty crappy year of competitive pinball.

To be fair, I only put in one entry at PAPA because I only went for one day. I decided to try a day trip after I was so unhappy with my performance last year, but I ended up being unhappy going for just one day this year. So I'm unhappy if I go for three days and I'm unhappy if I go for one day.

Ideally, my best course of action would be to figure out why I've been in such a slump (which I think started right after Pinburgh 2011) and go from there, but I don't know if it's that easy.

The best thing I can say about this year's PAPA was that on my one good qualifying game, Monster Bash, I was a Creature and a sax away from starting Monsters of Rock, which would have netted me a $100 bounty. I was modestly happy about that. Also I got to play the new X-Men game, which seemed OK.

So I got home on Thursday after my day at PAPA feeling OK, but my attitude deteriorated along with my position in the standings. Friday I was increasingly miserable, Saturday I was really irritated, and today I feel a little better but still have a core of frustration gnawing at my soul. And the best way for me to deal with that is to get a bunch of crap done around the house.

I've been sporadically working on Doctor Who's reset problem (which it has, in case I haven't mentioned it before) by working through the Pinwiki troubleshooting guide for WPC resets. I went through the first couple -- testing my power, etc. -- but gave up when I got to the point where I actually had to do stuff, like repinning connectors. But one of the items caught my interest, about determining if the thermistor in the line filter was the problem if the game stops resetting after it warms up. So I turned the game on and let it sit for an hour then played a bunch of games on it, and wouldn't you know that crazy gizmo really worked (the right ramp switch works intermittently which made Sonic Booms difficult, but otherwise it was fine). Now, that doesn't mean the problem is the thermistor -- it could still be bad connectors that get chummier as they warm up -- but at least I can play it.

I've also been trying to diagnose Black Knight's fuse blowing shenanigans, but sometimes when I work on BK I make it worse than it was before, and I wasn't prepared for that.

But when I'm irritated I need success stories, so I took on some easy tasks. Last season, when I actually qualified for playoffs in league, one of the prizes I picked (in addition to Roger Sharpe's Pinball! book... extreme score!) were 5 keyless locks for coin doors. I installed those on most of my machines (Eight Ball Deluxe and Comet were left off -- did I mention that I bought a Comet? Probably not).

Then I went for a slightly more challenging job: When I put Eight Ball Deluxe on location for one of the league tournaments last year, I of course had to disconnect the free credit button. When I got around to reconnecting it, I wanted to wire in a toggle switch so that I could activate and deactivate the button without removing the wire. So on Friday I bought a simple two prong toggle switch at Radio Shack and put it in line with the wire I had disconnected from the button. Rather than soldering everything together, I used some conductive wire glue that my daughter gave me for Father's Day... which I'll admit was easier than busting out the soldering station. It works great, so on Saturday I got another switch and performed the same surgery on Paragon. 

I still don't have a really good plan to get out of my slump, but I've got at least a month to figure something out, and at least my games work a little better now.

Entropy at Pinburgh, 2011

I've been meaning to write about my experience at Pinburgh for a while, and considering Pinburgh 2012 is next weekend, I'd better get my ass in gear.

I didn't have a lot of expectations going into Pinburgh based on my PAPA performance. However, I was excited by the prospect of playing so many different games. So excited, in fact, that I built a study guide for myself featuring pictures and instruction cards for as any of the 150 or so games as I could find (which was all but about 3, as it turns out).

Mrs. Entropy decided to go with me, so on Thursday afternoon we had a relaxed drive up to Pittsburgh and camped out in our hotel.

Friday the excitement began around noon. We were split into groups of four and assigned an amusingly named bank of three games to play. Grouping was based on seed, and I was initially ranked #77 of ~170 mainly because of when I signed up. I was interested to see that my first group included Keith Johnson, game programmer, FSPA alumnus, and at the time just announced new team member on Wizard of Oz. Of course, the first thing I asked him was, "Hey! How 'bout that Jersey Jack, huh? Any game details?" He said what was probably the contractually obligated maximum he could say about it, which was next to nothing, but it was still cool that my first group had a pinball celeb in it (and, thankfully, did not include any games he programmed).

Our first bank was Tripping Balls, consisting of Aquarius, Embryon, and Twilight Zone. The banks were basically assigned to Speed, Stamina, and Skill (coincidentally three of Striker's virtues in World Cub Soccer; presumably Strength and Spirit being too difficult to quantify for game picks), generally meaning a short game-time machine (almost always an EM), a longer-playing game, and a game requiring precise shooting. Points were assigned from 3 to 0 based on your score. I don't remember how I did exactly, but I won the group with 6 points (I believe I came in first on Embryon, second on TZ, and third on Aquarius). This moved me up to 37th place.

Second round was Galactic Bloodshed on Stellar Wars, Starship Troopers, and Cosmic Gunfight. The game I expected to do best on, Starship Troopers (since I had played it in league briefly) I think I lost pretty badly. I believe I won Cosmic Gunfight and had a crappy Stellar Wars but rallied at the end. I tied for second with 4 points this time around, so I went down to 65th.

Third was Paleontology on 4 Million BC, Jurassic Park, Bally Lost World. I won with 8 points this time, and I'm pretty sure I did well on Lost World (a game I knew pretty well) with an assist from a Hail Mary Smartbomb on JP, which awarded me a multiball as I was draining my third ball which allowed me to win the game.This bit of awesomeness pushed me up to 21st place.

Session 4 was Swinging Gofers on Safari, featuring Swinger, No Good Gofers, and Big Game. Because the seeding system was sorting itself out around now, I was playing against other guys in the 20s, notably Pittsburgh local Mahesh Murthy (who I always use as an example to my Asian Subcontinent coworkers as a guy of Indian descent who plays pinball) and Robert Gagno (a top-ranked player with autism who is kind of a pinball savant). I did pretty well with a second place finish and 6 points, which moved me up to 16th place.

Ending Day One was Battle the Elements, with Iron Man, Xenon, and my own Quicksilver. As I recall I did not do as well on QS as I would have liked, but finished up with second place and 6 points to end the day in 12th place overall and comfortably situated in A Division.

Day Two dawned with Cursed and Spooky, featuring Medusa, Monster Bash, and Haunted House. One of the guys in my group was Bob Matthews, an older player who is still pretty formidable, so I was surprised to win with solid performance on the latter two games. I remember that my MB score was not awesome, but I learned an important lesson at Pinburgh: In stark contrast to PAPA qualifying, it doesn't matter if you have a crappy game as long as the other guys in your group have crappier ones. I got 7 more points and moved up to 8th place.

Round Seven was Shoot It or Run Away, with Gator, Cheetah, and Big Buck Hunter. One of the players was Eden Stamm from (I think) New York, for whom it was very important that all other players were out of his field of vision. I found him kind of fussy in general, but he is a reasonably high ranking player so who am I to judge. My Gator was poor, my BBH was terrible, and my Cheetah wasn't shaping up too well when it malfunctioned, forcing us to switch to an alternate game, Tri-Zone. This saved my round because I killed on Tri-Zone... my score for each ball was about the entire game score for the best of the other guys. Bowen stopped by and remarked that I had the best score he'd ever seen on the game in competition. It allowed me to end up in a 3-way tie for second place with 4 points, moving me down to 12th.

Next up was Rolling Stones Not Included, amusing in context because Stern had just released the Rolling Stones game but PAPA didn't have it yet. This included Captain Fantastic, Guns N' Roses, and KISS. In this case I think I had a good KISS game, an OK GNR, and a not as good CF. Here I was playing with Robert Gagno and Keith Johnson again. During the GNR game Robert and I were talking and I realized his Achilles Heel: He can do well on games he knows, but he's not so good with ones he doesn't know, especially older non-multiball games. I don't think I was ever able to capitalize on this knowledge, but it's nice to know if I ever need to defeat him in Pinball Battle and I get the game pick. I tied with Keith for first with 6 points, moving me up to my all time high of 7th place.

The Ninth Round was World Speed Records with the 2nd, 3rd, 6th, and 7th ranked players... Mats Runsten from Sweden, Josh Sharpe, and Robert Gagno. All Top 25 World ranked players, and me. ^_^; The games were Supersonic, F-14 Tomcat, and Corvette. My memory is that I took first on Supersonic and crapped out at the other two, and ended tied for second with Josh, and I dropped down to 9th. Full disclosure here: I totally have a man-crush on Josh. He is a great player, friendly, good looking... I would totally turn gay for him. Since he runs the IFPA, these days I email him a few times a year with FSPA league results, and he's always super-nice and helpful. He also gave me and another league guy Cyclopes tips (his Dad designed it) and pointed out that the game is a little uncomfortable for him to play because his Mom is one of the bikini-clad nubiles on the backglass. His kryptonite? I hope to find out... but on the other hand, that would mean I'd be playing Josh Sharpe on his Dad's game, so that's probably an auto-lose for me.

The final round was Flipper Football: World Cup, World Cup Soccer, and Space Race (sitting in for Super Soccer, which had croaked). This was the 9th through 12th ranked players, including Dave Hubbard from FSPA and #3 World ranked Jorian Engelbrektsson. I found Jorian to be a bit of a cold fish... he just put his headphones on and listened to his mp3 player of choice. I choked pretty bad on this one, coming in last with just 2 points.

This meant that I was tied on the line for the finals with a couple other guys, so late that evening we had to do a playoff with the top two making the finals. Good odds, but I was playing well above my station here, so I was a little tense. The game was Medieval Madness, which I have played in league so I was pretty happy with that, but it's also a game that lots of people know. The results -- on video, this is the A Division almost-finals, after all! -- can be seen here. I am an enthusiastic MM player, kind of not letting the ball rest but taking lots of on-the-fly shots. Cayle George and Adam Lefkoff don't think much of this approach in the video's commentary, but it served me well on the first ball, racking up about 25 million. My last two balls sucked, but the first was enough to put me in first place and into the A Division finals... and NOT as the bottom seed, either. I was third from the bottom. ^_^;

So, on Sunday was the finals. I was pretty nervous that morning because, again, I felt like I was playing with the big kids for the first time. My group in the quarterfinals was with Keith Johnson and a couple of other top players. Unfortunately it did not start well. The first game was Jack*bot, which is good because I play that in league. And initially things went great... I was rocking the saucer, getting my awards, and finally I started multiball. But as with my fatal first tournament hubris ("I'll let him pick the game!") I made a mistake. At some point during multiball one of the balls landed in the shooter lane. Now, looking back on it, of course it shouldn't have done that... I know there's a one-way gate there. But in the fever of competition, the thought that went through my head was, "Oh, this game must not have that gate," like this is some crappy location game with parts missing. So I continue my game, the other ball drains, and then I launch the ball in the shooter and finish the ball with a sweet 1 billion+ score. But of course, everyone in my group noticed that I plunged the ball and threw a red flag on the play. A judge was called in because it was a beneficial malfunction, and I honestly could say that 1) it didn't occur to me that it was a problem, and 2) that I didn't realize that such things were bad in tournaments. Being my first tournament and seeing that after the explanation I agreed that it was an unfair advantage, the decision was made to let the others finish and have me replay the game by myself (without knowing their scores). That's what happened, I was probably rattled by making a huge error in my first major tournament game, and I played one of my shittiest games, ending with under 200 million and last place.

Next up was Tommy, a game which I didn't know that well but had taken the opportunity to practice that morning when I saw that it was in the final group. I had a pretty good game, squeaked into second place by 6 million.

The final game was Centaur, one of my favorite games in the '80s... I played it when I should have been going to final exams in college. And my game was transcendent. I could do no wrong. At one point after doing pretty well the ball drained on the right, and as it drained it lit the last of the four bottom lane rollovers and served me up another ball. This is the game I wish they'd filmed (my wife did get a little digital camera video of it, but it's rough). At one point I shot the ball at the inline targets for double the Queen's Chamber, got the ball back to the right flipper, then hit the same shot again. At that moment I felt Joy with a capital J... it was one of those moments when everything is going right and it all just falls into place (and it's in the video, too!). I finished with a 3 million point score, 700K more than the other three players scores combined.


So that got me a total of 6 points for the quarterfinals, tied with Jorian and Robert Gagno. The tiebreaker game was on Tommy, with the top two advancing to the semifinals and the bottom one ending up in 9th place. Pretty much every good thing that happened in that game of Centaur did not happen in Tommy... and as luck would have it, this craptacular game was filmed and posted on the Internet for posterity. As you can see, I just couldn't get anything going and didn't hit any of my shots. I think I got the skill shot on one ball, which is a quarter of my points. 

And so my stunning weekend came to a close with a 9th place finish in A Division. Although half the games in my finals did not go as I would have liked, my performance was so far above what I expected that I was ecstatic. My spoils were $200, which just about paid for my entry fee, tokens, and my meals.

I'm really excited to see how things go at Pinburgh this year... I think I had a big advantage in that in my role as pinball completest scholar I think I was familiar with a lot more of the games than most players were. But with PAPA posting gameplay and tutorial videos of all the competition games, I expect that won't be such an advantage this year. Ultimately, I'm really not expecting to do as well as I did last year, but as always I'm happy for whatever I can get. And for fuck's sake, I'm spending the whole weekend playing pinball with a bunch of cool people at an awesome facility, so really how bad can it be?

Terminator 2: On Location!

So, last time I was talking about Doctor Who, which I finally finished putting back together. Unfortunately, it's very resetty, so I kind of ignored it for a while to mask my disappointment.

But in the meantime, my league held their annual Fairfax Pinball Open last weekend, and I volunteered the Terminator as one of the games. Previously I had taken in Quicksilver and (in December) Eight Ball Deluxe, and they had earned a healthy $50-60.

Of course, having a deadline meant I had to actually finish fixing up the game. There was a bunch of routine upgrades I would have to make to any game going out into the world (backbox lock, a coin door that accepted quarters instead of drachmas or pesetas or whatever, etc.), easy stuff that I just hadn't gotten around to (replacing a temporary alligator clip to the start button lamp with a real connector), and stuff that broke while I was doing all of this (the VUK platform broke off, so I replaced the entire mechanism with the spare from the other game). However, I also had to do some stuff which I had been putting off.

One of the criticisms I got when I took the game to a league party a few months ago was that the flippers were not properly aligned to the little holes on the playfield. I took this opportunity to add a fun upgrade which I'd bought from Pinball Life after hearing about them on Spooky Pinball -- chrome flipper bats and buttons. Much to my wife's chagrin, I'm not a fan of a lot of pointless bling on games, but I felt that they are a good fit for the game what with the T-1000 and all. I don't have a good pic of the flipper bats, but here is one of the buttons.

Another thing I've been thinking about fixing was the Skynet plastic over the right ramp. It rubs against the wireform behind it, so the paint at the point of contact has worn down. I dealt with this but cutting two small pieces of black electrical tape and putting them on the back of the plastic, which worked out well because it not only masks the wear but now it's the point of contact (and can be replaced when it wears down). My picture of the front isn't so good because the tape has different reflective properties than the plastic, but it works very well in low light basement and bar conditions. On the back picture, if you look carefully you can see the square of tape on the upper part of the logo.

But one of the most important fixes I had to make was one I've been dreading for some time... I had to fix the lamp column problem, where any CPU controlled lamp would also cause the corresponding lamp in column 5 to light. Based on the limited trouble-shooting I've done, it was probably a board-level problem, not a wiring problem. My old printed copy of Clay's repair guide indicated that the problem was most likely with the column transistors on the driver board, so that's where I went. I pulled the driver board out and started testing with my DMM. Sure enough, the transistor for column 5 was bad, so I desoldered it and replaced it with a TIP107 that I'd bought about a year ago because I knew I would have to do this at some point. As always, board work freaks me out, so it probably took me twice as long because I was constantly checking and redoing my work. But finally I got something that didn't look too terrible, so I put it back in the game and threw the switch. Success! The lamps on the game worked perfectly.

With everything working, I was able to even fix something I didn't even realize was a problem. At some point while checking the lamps I noticed that the CPU GI in the center of the playfield never lit up. Recall, I had rebuild the GI connector based on my Doctor Who wiring, and I had rebuilt it a second time because I made it backwards the first time, so wiring was a prime suspect. After spending a while debugging and an extremely fruitless attempt to get rgp to believe that it was probably just a wiring problem (they wanted me to go straight to replacing transistors), I found a connector pin out diagram in my printed Clay guide, and sure enough I had mis-wired two of the pins. I rewired it and the GI worked as advertised.

So I moved the game into John's Place on the Washington's Birthday Holiday, came back and actually set it up the next day because I had neglected to bring the legs with me, and my Terminator was out in the world again (the picture below shows John Locke, league member/Lost character/Enlightenment philosopher, playing the game). It was not a tournament machine (not sure why) but was a practice game, and aside from some problems getting it to stay level it performed admirably all weekend. And did it earn! By the following Monday it raked in $112.25 at 50 cents per game (obviously somebody lost a quarter ^_^; ), of which I kept half... that basically paid my costs for tournament, which was a minor consolation because I did terribly. I also got some compliments on it, which was nice. One of the league muckity-mucks said that T2 is a great teaching game for all levels of flipper skills (especially aim, passing, and multiball cradling) and that made a lot of sense to me.

Making Up for Lost Time Streams

There's been a lot of rebuilding since the last post, but I would be remiss if I didn't ramble incoherently about pinball league. I've been playing in a league that's loosely affiliated to the main league, the Terrapin Pinball League. Basically, it occurs at Town Hall, a bar near the University of Maryland when the Terps play a home game. I really haven't enjoyed it... I don't like the fact that it's almost always on a Saturday, which puts a big dent in my day; it's never at a fixed time because the games are at different times; and it seems like most of the people are pre- and post-playing their rounds, so the number of people who actually show up has dwindled... yesterday it was just me. I had already decided not to do it again, but this was the final straw. Plus the fact that it was apparently Drunken Idiot Night at Town Hall really didn't make playing with myself any more fun. And because of the smallish field of players, I might end up in the as yet unscheduled playoffs. However, I might not even be here for the finals because...

In a little over a week I'm returning to the Old Country for my Dad's 90th birthday. While I'm out there, I plan to stop in at the Pacific Pinball Museum, the Musée Mechanique, and Pins and Needles. I wanted to go to Playland Not at the Beach, but they're only open on weekends and I'll only be in the Bay Area from Tuesday to Friday. Anyway, I'm really looking forward to the PPM... they really seem to have their act together, which is a refreshing change from other museums I might have been involved with in the past. Oh, and in the interstice between my wife leaving on Saturday on me leaving on Tuesday, I'm going to head up to Hanover PA and check out the Timeline Arcade, which just opened this week (and they apparently have a Transformers, so I might see fit to take a couple of nut shots at Optimus Prime).

But the point of this blog is repairs, so let us talk about Doctor Who's cabinet swap, which is continuing apace. I ended up sending the CPU board to Rob Anthony, well-known and well-regarded repairer of boards. He did a great job, but sadly for me it was at a great price... but I also decided to have him fix the other CPU board I had, which did add significantly to the cost. But on the plus side, I now have what appears to be a 100% working board.

Everything that's going to be cleaned beforehand has been cleaned, and I've been slowly reassembling the playfield and testing it as I go. Jeez, I thought I'd written about a lot of this, but looking back at my last post I see that I've written next to nothing about this.

So let's discuss one particular event, the removal of the mini-playfield. I've never taken the mini-playfield out of my game because I could never get the screws out... the t-nuts that they were screwed into turned impotently rather than t-nutting in the t-nutty way they're supposed to. The Onlines indicated that somebody -- I'm guessing Williams -- might have glued the screws in. I tried holding the t-nuts with pliers, heating to break the glue, freezing to shrink the part, just all manner of things. Finally, I pretty much got fed up and cut the screw heads off with my wife's Dremel. This did the trick. I did go through 3 or 4 cutting tools (they sell them in 20-packs, so no surprise there), there were a lot more sparks than I expected, and after one broke and embedded in my ceiling I decided to wear eye protection, but man, it's so much easier to remove the screws without their heads. When I finally pulled a t-nut off the remainder of the screw, I could see residue of what was probably the glue in the threads. And two of the nut holes had a trough dug in them by the teeth of the nuts.

Luckily, I can just jump right to the end of the story. ^_^ I bought some replacement nuts at the hardware store -- for a change, it's a pretty common size, not some crazy obscure part that I have to get from Marco or something. Acting on the advice of the guy who wrote the book on the Mini-playfield, I filled the troughs with a mixture of carpenter's glue and sawdust (which he says is stronger than regular wood filler) and set the new t-nuts in place, being extremely careful not to get any glue into the business part of the nut. When the glue dried, I had a nice solidly placed set of t-nuts, ready to bear the weight of the freshly cleaned mini-playfield.

Well, that's it for tonight. There's more excitement to come, and a lot more shenanigans with the mini-playfield. So stay tuned.

Another Awesome Innovation from Stern, the only maker of REAL pinball games on the planet!!*

* Depending, of course, on your definition of the words "only", "REAL", and "planet." For example, if you consider Chicago to be on a completely different planet from New Jersey and Spain, the above statement is true.

But let's dial down the snark to report on this awesome Transformers playfield shot that I saw on Pinball News this morning. The caption in the main article reads: "This appears to be a moving ramp which, when down, allows the ball between the model's legs, or deflects the ball upwards to strike Optimus Prime when raised." Look carefully at the angle and trajectory of this ramp, compared with this shot of the Megatron toy which shows the ramp down. I believe -- and this is purely conjecture -- that Stern may have created pinball's first nut shot.

This is big, pals 'n' gals. Really big. The only thing we can hope for is that the sound effect is a bell ringing followed by the Optimus Prime toy doubling over in pain.

Firings and Wirings

Wow, it turns out it has been a month since my last confession.

The big news in our household is that my daughter, Zoe Entropy, was laid off from her job at the National Pinball Museum in anticipation of their move to Baltimore. Thank goodness, because having to word my blog posts in such as way as to not reveal my complete lack of confidence in David Silverman was giving me a nervous tic in my hand (I believe the medical term is Crazy Flipper Finger). Now I can let fly highly opinionated screeds like this: His business model of complaining, ignoring sound advice, and waiting around for people to give him enough money and publicity and stuff to keep the museum alive just doesn't seem sustainable to me. And even from a human resource standpoint, why lay somebody off when you've got a week of hard packing to do? Lay her off afterwards, dumbass (though to be fair, that may not have been David's decision entirely; the museum's somewhat twitchy business manager is also culpable in that one). Still on staff is Zoe's classmate Kyle, whom I find to be something of a cold fish and a kiss ass.

Either way, Zoe had started thinking about leaving the museum -- I guess living in a constant vortex of chaos and uncertainty at a salary roughly equivalent to minimum wage for a year was not so enjoyable as you might think. And after one particularly petarded incident -- in which Zoe's boss threatened to fire everyone because money disappeared from a donation box on the museum's last day of business -- even I suggested that even if she didn't lose her job she should start looking for a new position, and I'm the one with the most to gain from her continued employment (it sure wasn't her... not at minimum wage, anyway! *rim shot*).

So that leaves me with a decision about my future with the museum. My daughter was never that invested in the pinball life, she was in it for the museum experience -- which as the days wore on became less like museum work and more like wage slave retail work -- so I don't anticipate she'll look back much after she finds a new job. My wife is Done with the museum... when they finally announced the location of the new museum, I conversationally said "Hey, you know where the museum's new location is?" and she flat out said "They fired my daughter. I do not care." I'm certainly not going to be there every week fixing games now that it's not just across the river from my work. There's a big difference between a usually pleasant 20 minute walk (be fair, that's each way) and a 1 hour car ride plus paying for parking to a place where my daughter isn't working.

So I don't know. I don't have quite the same scorched earth attitude that Mrs. Entropy has. My current plans are to see if I can make it up to the museum every month or two to fix games, and if that doesn't work out for them or me, then whatever. And on the plus side, I won't have to put up with Silverman's nails-on-chalkboard effect on me.

And one more thing of interest to the patres familias out there is this: In the last month at the museum's operation, my daughter's boss switched Zoe's and Kyle's jobs (and looking back on it now, that was probably in anticipation of laying her off), which meant that Zoe was not there on Tuesday when I was there fixing games. I think I was there for two Tuesdays without her. And I will be honest, it wasn't as much fun fixing games when she wasn't there. Mostly she would be working in the library -- her actual "office", part of the hallway to the back door, was sans air conditioning and located under a skylight, not so awesome during the second hottest summer on record -- but I could call out to her for help or comment on something colossally silly about a game fix or tell her to call her Mom and say we were going to be late, and that added significantly to the fun. The coldness and the fishiness and the I-wasn't-somebody-whose-ass-he-had-to-kissiness of Kyle actively discouraged that kind of delightful banter. Fixing games is still fun, but fixing them with my daughter was more fun; fixing them with Kyle around was actually less fun.

SO. Enough of that whiny self-involved bullshit. Let's talk pinball. Last time, the score was 3 games playable to 3 games down.

It was time to tackle Paragon. Paragon, you may recall, has been randomly resetting on the first game when it starts at all. I wanted to figure out what was wrong with it well in advance of the York Show so that I could try to figure out if I needed to buy a replacement MPU board there. So I turned it on for the first time in a while, it played then randomly reset, then wouldn't start up. Checking the MPU flashes -- and damned if it doesn't hurt not to be able to link to the pinrepair.com section on that, I will tell you -- it conked out after the third flash, which meant that it was failing while testing chips that are in sockets (!!!). And referring to my printed copy of the pinrepair.com page on the subject :D I learned that reseating those chips sometimes fixes problems with the chips. So I pulled the board, reseated pretty much everything that was in a socket just to be sure, put it back in, and day-yam if that game didn't boot like a charm and play like a champ. I have been playing it since and the game has just been a li'l angel. And even better, now that I'm a better player and can actually bounce pass, my average scores are a lot higher. The only other Paragon I've been playing lately has been one that a league-pal in Baltimore owns, and his is a brutal drain monster. Mine, in contrast, is much friendlier and funner to play, in my opinion. Maybe not so good for gauntlet-style training, but I actually enjoy myself... and that's good in pinball sometimes.

Moving on, Game 5 is Doctor Who, which needs a cabinet swap. I moved the games into working positions (new cab on legs, old cab on the floor next to it), pulled the stuff out of the old cab, folded it up, and have been using it as a table and staging area since. The wiring harness went into the dishwasher, and I installed it, the transformer, and various cabinet-y things. I put the boards that I had in -- you may recall (assuming I wrote about it) that I used the CPU and display boards in T2, then pulled a CPU and the "tested and working" display board out of storage... and in case you're not keeping track like I am, we've just celebrated 5 years of being bitter about that transaction, which I'm pretty sure is a new record.

Plugged everything in, booted up, and it locks up immediately. I don't think I expected that, but it's not new. Unplugging the multi-stop ribbon cable from the display driver board allows the game to boot, which my sources tell me is probably an issue on the CPU board with one of the chips controlling the interaction with the driver board. I'm worried that it's because one of the pins in the plug on the CPU board for this cable has broken off, but I've been told that shouldn't be a problem. Anyway, I decided to leave that debugging debacle for another day and went with my other CPU board. That one booted fine, so I hooked up the DMD for some real display board action. It worked well, although there is still a hint of the emergency light flash on the DMD, so I'm not getting out of fixing the display driver board any time soon.

I knew this CPU was three columns shy of a working switch matrix -- which, I know, sounds like a description of David Silverman (BOOM! totally pwned his ass) -- but testing confirmed this. Since my goal is to fix all of the issues I can find during the cabinet swap, I need to fix this and the display board high voltage issues in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, I've started disassembling the playfield for a good cleaning and debugging. Nothing exciting to report there.

In league news, I failed pretty epically in the finals as usual, taking 4th place of 4 contestants. Fall season starts tomorrow, and I'm hoping my poor Week 0 performance won't be an indicator of future results. We lost Monster Bash, The Addams Family, and Congo, and in their places got The Shadow and Volcano... so I have to level up my Phurba and not trapping on the right flipper skills, respectively. I've also started playing in a somewhat informal league at Town Hall near the alma mater. It's a little rough on me because instead of being at a fixed time, it's either before or after UMCP Terrapin Home Games... which means clowns like me who don't give a hoot for sports spend a lot of time waiting for fellow players who do. But it's an experiment and we'll see how it goes. Games there are Attack from Mars, Twilight Zone, World Poker Tour, Mousin' Around, Strikes and Spares, BS Dracula, and Demolition Man -- several of these used to be at John's Place, so it's nice to return to a couple of old pals.

Silver Lining

Even a craptacular suckfest like my PAPA experience was has to have something positive come out of it, right? Well, it doesn't really have to, but in this case it did. It got me off my duff to do some much needed repairs.

While I was driving back and my wife was kind of dozing, I made a mental list of the things I need to fix on T2. I picked T2 because the other games either have something really big wrong with them or need a lot of work, whereas T2 made for a very concise list:

• Fix the lamp column problem
• The kickback aim seems to be off, sometimes allowing balls to drain while its impotently kicking at them
• Bottom jet bumper doesn't work
• Ameliorate the ridge on the playfield in the left orbit, which seems to be interfering with balls
• Adjust flippers
• Fix Hunter/Killer Jackpot lamps
• Start button light is out (I wasn't sure about this during my drive, but it turns out to have been true)
• Fix flaw around edge of autofire hot dog insert
• Fix flaw on front of cabinet
• Try to do something about lines that are out on DMD

And I added this after I fixed the start button lamp:

• Clean start button

So on Monday night after PAPA I got started. Most obvious was fixing the jackpot lamp board, which really impacts gameplay. I've managed to get it working in the past by reseating the plug, but that didn't work this time so I pulled the whole board. Testing with my handy PC power supply -- that thing is so danged useful! -- showed that there was a bad connection between the last lamp in the circuit and the ground pin. Yes, it's fixable, but is it worth fixing when you've got a spare set of lamp boards in a box? Not really. I pulled the necessary board out, transferred the sockets, tested it, and plugged it in. Done!

Next up was the start button. Did the obvious stuff like checking the bulb and where the wires were going to the coin door interface board. Everything looked fine, but it was getting late so I left it disconnected (and played a few games, so I had to open the coin door to press the start button :P ).

Tuesday night I skipped volunteering at the museum because I was sort of fed up with pinball, but I continued to work on the T2 start button. Since the cabinet area seemed OK, I took a look in the backbox to see if anything was up there, and there was something in the Up position: Following the interboard wiring table (not as nice as the diagrams in the Doctor Who and later manuals, but in this case serviceable), there is supposed to be a 3 pin socket in J136 with one cabinet lamp wire going into it and another in J135. On my game there was no socket at J135 and two wires attached to J136, one of them somewhat haphazardly as though it had been stuck there because there was no place else to put it. That, of course, turned out to be the wire that was supposed to be in J135. Not having any .1" sockets (pins? yes. hole plugs? yes. sockets? no. sheesh) I just alligator clipped the wire to the proper pin, yielding a working start button! It was at this point that I added the last item to my list, because the button plastic was a sickly yellow.

Next I decided to look at the dead bumper. My first guess proved incorrect since the switch test showed that the switch was working fine. But the solenoid test showed that it didn't work, and in fact just clicked demurely instead of a full-bodied whack. I'm not really a pop bumper expert, but comparing it to the working bumpers showed that the metal and bakelite pieces that connect the plunger to the bumper ring was not doing any connecting. The two pieces are supposed to come together around the neck of the plunger like a pillory; however, both pieces were facing the same direction, allowing the plunger to get out of the stocks and wander around rather than being pelted with rotten vegetables like it should. So I disassembled it, reassembled it correctly, and it worked perfectly. Now the action in El Bumperino borders on insane... my bonus multiplication has at least doubled since I fixed the bumper.

Finally on Wednesday night I tackled the jaundiced start button. When I disassembled the button to try to clean it, the plastic with the text on it crumbled. I tried to use a spare button from one of the Doctor Who cabs, but there was some reason I didn't, like maybe it didn't fit or something. So I printed out the word START 3/4" wide on paper, cut a circular piece and put that in where the plastic was. It looked fine and I like the white better than yellow because it suits the game better... though I do notice the grain of the paper, so I may need to replace it with something a little more uniform than 20 lb printer paper. The only problem I ran into was when I put it back together the button would go in but not pop out. After some trouble shooting I found that in prying up the outer plastic I had deformed it, and that was rubbing against the sides of the button housing. I filed off the rough edges and now it works.

And that's what I've done so far with T2. During idle time watching TV, I've been slowly clearing stuff away from and off of the Doctor Whos in preparation for preparing to do the cabinet swap, and last night I put the new cabinet up on legs and repositioned the old one where I can hopefully get to the parts easily.

I was planning to do a lot more pin-related stuff this weekend, but I found out a few weeks ago that stalwart personal finance manager Quicken, which I've been using for 15 years but has pretty much abandoned the Mac, will not run under the new version of the Mac OS. After years of neglect -- and lagging about 3 years behind the PC feature set, which I guess makes the current version on par with Quicken 2004 for PC -- this was the last straw, so I downloaded iBank, a Mac-only product. Basically I got sucked in for two days and actually enjoyed paying my bills in software that functions... the joy of being able to cut, copy, and paste text reliably made me lose track of time. Sorry, Quicken, I'm just not Intuit any more.

And how could I have forgotten this? Before I left for PAPA, somebody pointed out that a picture of my daughter and I graced a pinball article in The USA Today! At first they said I was on the cover, but it turns out I was on page three. I am pointing at a nondescript part of the playfield in Creature (maybe the Snackbar?). The guy took the picture on a day when I'd gone to pick up my daughter from work, but I'd pretty much forgotten about it until the article appeared. The article was sitting out on the desk at PAPA, though I don't think anybody recognized me. :( The most unfortunate outcome? An inmate serving 18 years for dealing crack sent my daughter a letter saying he'd really like to get to know her... and he should be eligible for parole by 2014! What a catch. Does this happen every time you appear in the newspaper? If so, ew!