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.