The Comedy of Errors, Pinball Style

This was one of those weekends where I ignored my duties as husband and householder in favor of trying to make progress on my playfields. It was especially important that I do this, because 1) I've been obsessing about it for weeks, and 2) It is entirely possible that more playfields may show up soon, so I've got to do something to justify my love.

Our first task was relatively easy: Get the designated playfield (Silverball Mania, which I feel is thematically most appropriate) out where I could work on it. Luckily I've been cleaning up downstairs so this was sort of easy. I moved the partially deconstructed Black Jack from the TV area to the storage room and brought out SBM. Then I plopped down with my power supply and tested the lamps while I watched Beyond the Mat, a documentary about pro wrestling. I'm really not a wrestling fan -- except for a brief, heavily ironic period in the late 80's -- but I do devote a low priority background process to it when it intersects with my pop culture interests. But it's an interesting and occasionally disturbing documentary.

Anyway, so I test the GI and all the feature lamps and I don't even get a simple majority, much less a quorum. I'd say less than 15 of the lamps worked. I'm not sure if the lamps are burned out or the connection/socket/whatever is bad, but it was a poor showing. But for some reason, the bonus multipliers all lit, so I seized on that as my beachhead: My goal was to control those four lights. Originally I was going to control the SILVERBALL lights, but I think two or less of them lit on the first try, so I scaled back.

Next I had to build my interface. Pinmame-HW, which I'm basing this whole thing on (and which has gone offline for some reason), drives everything using the parallel port, so last weekend I took an old printer cable and hacked the end off of it, figuring I would just connect up the wires to stuff and be happy. In the ensuing week, however, I realized it would have been much smarter to connect the stuff to a 36 pin Centronics female plug, then plug an intact printer cable into that. heh.

But for now I'm stuck with my butchered printer cable. So on Saturday night I watched the Spider-man 3 commentary with my wife, and spent pretty much the whole time determining which pin each wire is connected to. This yielded two realizations: that I never want to beep out continuity on a 36 wire cable ever again, and the guy who played the Sandman in the movie has a very dry sense of humor that I appreciate. But I got through it with my sanity mostly intact.

Finally, it's time to get down to business. I attached some alligator clips with pins on them to the emasculated printer cable. Then I had to set up the computer which I've designated as my pin-PC, a P3/coupla-hundred junker that used to be a server at work back when 20 Gb of total drive space could be considered server material. I originally got it for free and was going to install Linux on it, but this project came along and seemed a much better use for it. So I disconnected the keyboard mouse monitor network power from my old Mac, plugged them into this one, and found out that the USB keyboard and mouse aren't supported by the OS (Win 98 if you can believe it) and it won't attach to the network, though it did the last time I started it up. feh. Found USB->PS/2 adapters were located, but I never did get the network to see things my way. But while I was a-dicking, my gaze fell on the bag containing the craptops, two laptops I got from work that I haven't used in, like, 5 years. A laptop, I reasoned, is far superior because I can bring it to the playfield rather than doing any more lugging.

For the record, I shall point out at this juncture that all of these work computers were had legitimately, given to me by IT guys who said they were too crappy even to be donated to charity.

So I pulled out my original craptop and fired it up. This is the computer on which I wrote most of my Visual Pinball tables, taking it with me on the Metro and business trips and to jury duty when VP ruled my life. I had a wash of nostalgia and played my version of Totem for old time's sake. Then I fire up Visual Basic and start looking into writing to the parallel port. Turns out you can't get there from here, and I need a DLL that I can download, but only if I can connect this computer to the Internet. Unplugging the nearest network cable (to the TVPC) I tried and failed to network a legacy computer yet again. Bright idea: Diskettes. So I download the DLL on the TVPC, put it on a diskette, attach the diskette drive to the craptop, and finally I am ready to apply for the permit to petition for a business license.

Dumping the DLL unceremoniously into the Windows System directory, I write a quick program -- here it is: vbOut 888, 15 -- that should light all the lights, plug the cable into the computer, plug the pins into the appropriate sockets for the bonus lights, run the program, and... and... and... bupkis.

So, it's troubleshooting time. Tested the parallel port: 5 V. Tested a lamp with the power supply: It works. Try again: nothing. Measure the voltage in my makeshift cable: 5 V. Measure the voltage in my makeshift cable while it's connected to the playfield: .7 V. Oho!

Now, I am by no means knowledgeable about electronics, but here's what I guess is happening: The parallel port puts out 5 V but low amps, so it can't overcome the resistance of the bulb. The much more robust current of the power supply is what's necessary.

So here we are at the conclusion of The Pinball Comedy of Errors, where it is revealed that in the Italian town of Zaccaria, the five sets of identical quintuplets, each disguised as the opposite sex, are in fact all related, except thank goodness for the ones that had actual intercourse. And now we know that I will have to build the circuit board that interfaces between the computer and the playfield, much as I wanted to postpone it as long as possible.

And now at last our play complete, we've reached our final mark;
Our tale is finally at an end, we've run and run and lost our race.
Perhaps, on your way home, someone will pass you in the dark,
And you will never know it... for they will be from outer space. Exeunt.



Man, that Shakespeare is fucking brilliant!