Slow week

Not much to tell... the week has been focused on getting my daughter back to college tomorrow. That means me watching the dog a lot, which means me not working on the pinball machines a lot. But going up to Gettysburg means a stop at Pizza House, which means I'll get to see how much lower the NASCAR game has sunk.

I forgot to mention that after the Great Doctor Who Board Swap and subsequent left flipper malfunction last weekend, Eight Ball Deluxe decided to show its solidarity by having both flippers go out. I'm hoping it's just a bad connection -- EBD occasionally loses touch with the coin door, so I have to wiggle a connection on the CPU board to remember it's there -- but I haven't had the heart to look at it yet.

The parts from Great Plains showed up yesterday, but of course I haven't installed them yet.

I have to say I'm really loving the TOPcast shows. I've been powering through them, mostly while walking the dog and walking to and from my car at work. I've made it up to #35 with Barry Oursler. A lot of them are really interesting... guys who designed games that I own or really like, and guys who worked in the industry for decades. And I love it when it's inadvertently topical... like listening to Steve Ritchie talk about Spider-man the day I actually played it for the first time. Plus so far there's been interviews with either the artist or designer of all my games except Quicksilver. At the very least, it's great dog walk listening. I'll be kind of sad when I catch up to the current shows... Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and The Writer's Almanac will seem drab in comparison (yes, I am a Public Radio nerd).

Boy, there's something else pinball-related nagging at my subconscious, but I can't quite remember what it is. Well, it will come to me at a point at which I can't do anything about it...

I remember what I was going to write. Last weekend when I was tracking down the bad SCR on Quicksilver, I looked at the manual from IPDb for the schematic only to find that the manual was missing some of the diagrams. It wasn't too annoying -- I just had to dig out my copy of the manual from the basement -- but it annoyed me enough to actually do something about it. So I scanned the three pages that were missing and posted them to IPDb. We'll see if they post them.