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.