Pinball Vacation: The Final Chapter

Well, sadly, the Pinball Vacation has come to a close. The last day wasn't quite as interesting as the rest because I ended up having to do a lot of the household chores that I should have been doing the whole time.

I did edit down the pinball music I recorded for Scared Stiff, Monster Bash, and Tales of the Arabian Nights. After Doctor Who, I started recording them in one long file instead of putting each track in a separate file, and that made a huge difference. I could just select a track, paste it into a new window, fade it out at the end, and save it. By the time I did TOTAN I managed to complete 13 tracks in under 20 minutes.

Now that I've had a chance to listen to them, I've found that if the computer was doing anything else -- such as complaining that it's not connected to the network, which it does constantly while I'm in our dining room, the farthest point in the house from the router -- the music slowed down slightly. I also noticed this occasionally on the 80 tracks I downloaded last month. The computer I was using to record was my daughter's old laptop, which is not a powerful machine. So I decided to give it a try on my work laptop, and the results were a lot better... the music was a continuous tempo. Of course, that may also be because I'm using the new pinmame 2.1, but I'm guessing it's the machine speed.

The problem is that my work computer is not supposed to have any program installed on it that aren't approved by the mega-corporation that owns us. To get around that, I set up something I've been thinking of doing for a while: A PinDrive. It's a USB flash drive with pinball programs and ROMs on it. That way, when I want to play on the work laptop I can just pop the drive in, play, then remove it when I'm done. I plan to install Visual Pinball and Future Pinball to the PinDrive. The only evidence that the programs are there will be a couple of entries in the Windows Registry, which I'm hoping the company's auditing software will ignore. This PinDrive is only 128 Mb, though, so my next step will be to get a bigger one.

The other pin thing I did was list some of the Mystery Box items on eBay. I'm curious to see how they sell... so far almost all of them have either bids or watchers. I doubt they'll pay for the Mystery Box, but hopefully eBay proceeds + the useful bounty its already provided will offset the box's cost.

So overall I thought the Pinball Vacation was a success, though as far as the repairs I did went I really feel that I needed to do less cosmetic work and more real work. I mean, it's nice that I connected the coin door switch, but I didn't do anything towards getting the game to stop resetting. Also, I spent all my time on Doctor Who and didn't do anything with the other games... if I had had time on Sunday, I would have done some BK work, but, well, you know. And I reserved my harshest criticism for last: I didn't play any of my own games! I played 4 frickin' games out in the world, but didn't even start up any of my games except for DW, which I only turned on to test. So next Pinball Vacation I take, I need to play the games.