Joe Entropy's Pinblog

Making Up for Lost Time Streams

2011-11-06T21:35:00.007-05:00

There's been a lot of rebuilding since the last post, but I would be remiss if I didn't ramble incoherently about pinball league. I've been playing in a league that's loosely affiliated to the main league, the Terrapin Pinball League. Basically, it occurs at Town Hall, a bar near the University of Maryland when the Terps play a home game. I really haven't enjoyed it... I don't like the fact that it's almost always on a Saturday, which puts a big dent in my day; it's never at a fixed time because the games are at different times; and it seems like most of the people are pre- and post-playing their rounds, so the number of people who actually show up has dwindled... yesterday it was just me. I had already decided not to do it again, but this was the final straw. Plus the fact that it was apparently Drunken Idiot Night at Town Hall really didn't make playing with myself any more fun. And because of the smallish field of players, I might end up in the as yet unscheduled playoffs. However, I might not even be here for the finals because...

In a little over a week I'm returning to the Old Country for my Dad's 90th birthday. While I'm out there, I plan to stop in at the Pacific Pinball Museum, the Musée Mechanique, and Pins and Needles. I wanted to go to Playland Not at the Beach, but they're only open on weekends and I'll only be in the Bay Area from Tuesday to Friday. Anyway, I'm really looking forward to the PPM... they really seem to have their act together, which is a refreshing change from other museums I might have been involved with in the past. Oh, and in the interstice between my wife leaving on Saturday on me leaving on Tuesday, I'm going to head up to Hanover PA and check out the Timeline Arcade, which just opened this week (and they apparently have a Transformers, so I might see fit to take a couple of nut shots at Optimus Prime).

But the point of this blog is repairs, so let us talk about Doctor Who's cabinet swap, which is continuing apace. I ended up sending the CPU board to Rob Anthony, well-known and well-regarded repairer of boards. He did a great job, but sadly for me it was at a great price... but I also decided to have him fix the other CPU board I had, which did add significantly to the cost. But on the plus side, I now have what appears to be a 100% working board.

Everything that's going to be cleaned beforehand has been cleaned, and I've been slowly reassembling the playfield and testing it as I go. Jeez, I thought I'd written about a lot of this, but looking back at my last post I see that I've written next to nothing about this.

So let's discuss one particular event, the removal of the mini-playfield. I've never taken the mini-playfield out of my game because I could never get the screws out... the t-nuts that they were screwed into turned impotently rather than t-nutting in the t-nutty way they're supposed to. The Onlines indicated that somebody -- I'm guessing Williams -- might have glued the screws in. I tried holding the t-nuts with pliers, heating to break the glue, freezing to shrink the part, just all manner of things. Finally, I pretty much got fed up and cut the screw heads off with my wife's Dremel. This did the trick. I did go through 3 or 4 cutting tools (they sell them in 20-packs, so no surprise there), there were a lot more sparks than I expected, and after one broke and embedded in my ceiling I decided to wear eye protection, but man, it's so much easier to remove the screws without their heads. When I finally pulled a t-nut off the remainder of the screw, I could see residue of what was probably the glue in the threads. And two of the nut holes had a trough dug in them by the teeth of the nuts.

Luckily, I can just jump right to the end of the story. ^_^ I bought some replacement nuts at the hardware store -- for a change, it's a pretty common size, not some crazy obscure part that I have to get from Marco or something. Acting on the advice of the guy who wrote the book on the Mini-playfield, I filled the troughs with a mixture of carpenter's glue and sawdust (which he says is stronger than regular wood filler) and set the new t-nuts in place, being extremely careful not to get any glue into the business part of the nut. When the glue dried, I had a nice solidly placed set of t-nuts, ready to bear the weight of the freshly cleaned mini-playfield.

Well, that's it for tonight. There's more excitement to come, and a lot more shenanigans with the mini-playfield. So stay tuned.

Another Awesome Innovation from Stern, the only maker of REAL pinball games on the planet!!*

2011-09-25T08:13:00.002-04:00

* 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

2011-09-18T10:20:00.004-04:00

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.

Silver Lining

2011-08-21T09:34:00.002-04:00

Even a craptacular suckfest like my PAPA experience was has to have something positive come out of it, right? Well, it doesn't really have to, but in this case it did. It got me off my duff to do some much needed repairs.

While I was driving back and my wife was kind of dozing, I made a mental list of the things I need to fix on T2. I picked T2 because the other games either have something really big wrong with them or need a lot of work, whereas T2 made for a very concise list:

Fix the lamp column problem
The kickback aim seems to be off, sometimes allowing balls to drain while its impotently kicking at them
Bottom jet bumper doesn't work
Ameliorate the ridge on the playfield in the left orbit, which seems to be interfering with balls
Adjust flippers
Fix Hunter/Killer Jackpot lamps
Start button light is out (I wasn't sure about this during my drive, but it turns out to have been true)
Fix flaw around edge of autofire hot dog insert
Fix flaw on front of cabinet
Try to do something about lines that are out on DMD

And I added this after I fixed the start button lamp:

Clean start button

So on Monday night after PAPA I got started. Most obvious was fixing the jackpot lamp board, which really impacts gameplay. I've managed to get it working in the past by reseating the plug, but that didn't work this time so I pulled the whole board. Testing with my handy PC power supply -- that thing is so danged useful! -- showed that there was a bad connection between the last lamp in the circuit and the ground pin. Yes, it's fixable, but is it worth fixing when you've got a spare set of lamp boards in a box? Not really. I pulled the necessary board out, transferred the sockets, tested it, and plugged it in. Done!

Next up was the start button. Did the obvious stuff like checking the bulb and where the wires were going to the coin door interface board. Everything looked fine, but it was getting late so I left it disconnected (and played a few games, so I had to open the coin door to press the start button :P ).

Tuesday night I skipped volunteering at the museum because I was sort of fed up with pinball, but I continued to work on the T2 start button. Since the cabinet area seemed OK, I took a look in the backbox to see if anything was up there, and there was something in the Up position: Following the interboard wiring table (not as nice as the diagrams in the Doctor Who and later manuals, but in this case serviceable), there is supposed to be a 3 pin socket in J136 with one cabinet lamp wire going into it and another in J135. On my game there was no socket at J135 and two wires attached to J136, one of them somewhat haphazardly as though it had been stuck there because there was no place else to put it. That, of course, turned out to be the wire that was supposed to be in J135. Not having any .1" sockets (pins? yes. hole plugs? yes. sockets? no. sheesh) I just alligator clipped the wire to the proper pin, yielding a working start button! It was at this point that I added the last item to my list, because the button plastic was a sickly yellow.

Next I decided to look at the dead bumper. My first guess proved incorrect since the switch test showed that the switch was working fine. But the solenoid test showed that it didn't work, and in fact just clicked demurely instead of a full-bodied whack. I'm not really a pop bumper expert, but comparing it to the working bumpers showed that the metal and bakelite pieces that connect the plunger to the bumper ring was not doing any connecting. The two pieces are supposed to come together around the neck of the plunger like a pillory; however, both pieces were facing the same direction, allowing the plunger to get out of the stocks and wander around rather than being pelted with rotten vegetables like it should. So I disassembled it, reassembled it correctly, and it worked perfectly. Now the action in El Bumperino borders on insane... my bonus multiplication has at least doubled since I fixed the bumper.

Finally on Wednesday night I tackled the jaundiced start button. When I disassembled the button to try to clean it, the plastic with the text on it crumbled. I tried to use a spare button from one of the Doctor Who cabs, but there was some reason I didn't, like maybe it didn't fit or something. So I printed out the word START 3/4" wide on paper, cut a circular piece and put that in where the plastic was. It looked fine and I like the white better than yellow because it suits the game better... though I do notice the grain of the paper, so I may need to replace it with something a little more uniform than 20 lb printer paper. The only problem I ran into was when I put it back together the button would go in but not pop out. After some trouble shooting I found that in prying up the outer plastic I had deformed it, and that was rubbing against the sides of the button housing. I filed off the rough edges and now it works.

And that's what I've done so far with T2. During idle time watching TV, I've been slowly clearing stuff away from and off of the Doctor Whos in preparation for preparing to do the cabinet swap, and last night I put the new cabinet up on legs and repositioned the old one where I can hopefully get to the parts easily.

I was planning to do a lot more pin-related stuff this weekend, but I found out a few weeks ago that stalwart personal finance manager Quicken, which I've been using for 15 years but has pretty much abandoned the Mac, will not run under the new version of the Mac OS. After years of neglect -- and lagging about 3 years behind the PC feature set, which I guess makes the current version on par with Quicken 2004 for PC -- this was the last straw, so I downloaded iBank, a Mac-only product. Basically I got sucked in for two days and actually enjoyed paying my bills in software that functions... the joy of being able to cut, copy, and paste text reliably made me lose track of time. Sorry, Quicken, I'm just not Intuit any more.

And how could I have forgotten this? Before I left for PAPA, somebody pointed out that a picture of my daughter and I graced a pinball article in The USA Today! At first they said I was on the cover, but it turns out I was on page three. I am pointing at a nondescript part of the playfield in Creature (maybe the Snackbar?). The guy took the picture on a day when I'd gone to pick up my daughter from work, but I'd pretty much forgotten about it until the article appeared. The article was sitting out on the desk at PAPA, though I don't think anybody recognized me. :( The most unfortunate outcome? An inmate serving 18 years for dealing crack sent my daughter a letter saying he'd really like to get to know her... and he should be eligible for parole by 2014! What a catch. Does this happen every time you appear in the newspaper? If so, ew!

Epic and Most Egregious PAPA Fail. Ever.

2011-08-20T10:08:00.002-04:00

There are some weekends when tournaments go well for you, and there are some weekends when they don't; this last weekend at PAPA was of the latter sort.

You know, even though I said that all I was hoping for was to break into the top tercile of C, I was kind of expecting to do a lot better. And maybe that was my problem... I looked at how much better I've been playing in the last year and projected that forward, showing a much better showing.

Anyway, the trip up was OK. We left a little late, but it wasn't like I was on much of a deadline. When we got there, though, I was a little drained. Played a few games to warm up -- which is usually sort of pointless, as my play is usually randomly good or bad based on factors I am unable to fathom.

So, our C Bank consisted of Addams Family, CSI, Iron Man, Terminator 2, The Simpsons Pinball Party, The Rolling Stones, Twilight Zone, Wheel of Fortune, and World Cup Soccer. Kind of a mixed bag for me... Addams and TZ are games I have done well on, but generally others do better. T2 I own, which as I've pointed out in the past is a mixed bag. Stones has been very good to me in league, and I've played World Cup in league and sorta know what to do, but our is so crappy that I rarely deal with it. IM is always pretty brutal, WoF I've played and gotten the GC on the game at Volleyball House, but I couldn't tell you how or why... I just looked up at the end of the game and had 105 Mill. And CSI I'm just not that familiar with.

So for my first round I went with IM, T2, Stones, WoF, and World Cup; I did poorly, encouraging (my score was basically the total of three skill shots and one 3x Jackpot), poorly, poorly, and pretty good for me, respectively. So I put in a second entry, swapping out Soccer with CSI on the theory that if I didn't know it, most other people probably don't either. I managed a respectable IM score, but just about everything else was junk.

I also put in a Classics II entry which was not great, which landed me at 114 out of 128. Considering classics is all skill levels, I usually don't expect much. I play largely for fun and because it helps my World Pinball Player ranking, because C Division isn't counted.

Part of the problem was I felt out of sorts all day. I had a dehydration headache despite drinking water and Gatorade. Even my for-fun games weren't that impressive, though I managed a pretty good White Water game.

After a while I pretty much gave up. The wife and I went to the hotel, then wandered around until we found someplace that wasn't decorated in decaying steel-town chic for a nice dinner. That night I studied the CSI rules.

On the plus side, I did find a roll of tokens that someone had lost, and greedily kept it for myself.

The next day I was up early and ended up wandering around Carnegie trying to find milk for my cereal. While I was walking I found a little rubber snake on the ground, which I was hoping would augur great things for that day and ended up keeping it in my pocket for the rest of the trip... let's see how well that worked out.

So I showed up at PAPA World HQ and dawdled a while before I threw in another entry. The highlight of that one was an IM score that was 150K less than my previous respectable one, and a bunch of crap. I did put in two Classics IIIs... one was kind of a junky one on Mystic, Embryon, Gorgar, and my personal fave Tri-Zone... this was a little sad, because I had some great practice scores on the latter three that morning. After I saw how all the cool kids were ganging up on Embryon and especially Mystic, in my second entry I swapped them out for Evel Knievel and the EM Safari and did pretty well... had a good Tri-Zone which was 8th place overall, Safari was #24 and Gorgar was OK, and I ended up in 36th place out of 117.

Then it was dinner time and I had decided to go to the league dinner -- this turned out to be on par with the rest of the weekend. I talked my usually non-sociable wife into going, and aside from some brief conversation about anime with another guy, generally just watched the TVs in the restaurant (we later found out she was getting sick, so I can't completely blame her). I was seated next to someone who wasn't particularly talkative that night, someone who is like nails on chalkboard to me, and a guy who hadn't even played in league for 9 years who I could not communicate with -- didn't understand my jokes and couldn't fathom anything I said. My wife and I split a meal and our two halves together were what I expected our portions to be. And I still had my dehydration headache. As soon as our bill was paid I was out of the door like a shot. Then we ended up taking some wrong turns thanks to detours, so after dropping my wife off at the hotel I didn't make it back until 10 or 11.

It was time for a change in strategy. First I took some aspirin and started chugging water and Gatorade to deal with my headache. Clearly the games I was playing weren't going my way, so I tried out a Simpsons they had on the floor and I couldn't stop -- granted it was set to Novice settings, but I ended up with the GC and actually made it to Alien Invasion, way better than I've ever done before. So my final entry was an all-Stern lineup: CSI, IM, WoF, Simpsons, and Rolling Stones. Even with the upper playfield left flipper being too weak for me to get more than one ball locked despite numerous shots, I still managed a #29 score. I finally had the Stones score I deserved, which was good for #34. The other scores were junk. But when the dust cleared, I ended up in 50th place: Not just in the top tercile, but in the top quartile! That's a full 8% better! Well, OK, it sucks, but it sucks less than my next lowest entry, which would have put me around 66th place and have been a major disappointment. And on my gigantic 27" monitor, my entry shows one line up from the bottom of the first page. That's good for something.

I was thinking about parlaying my newly energized self into another entry, but I got wrapped up in a good game of Tales of the Arabian Nights (high score #1!) and half missed/half ignored the closing of entries around 2 AM. So my finish was a little disappointing, but at least I moved forward and out of the 60s.

The next day we packed up and got ready to go. My wife was really not feeling well and Ol' Scruffy at the hotel desk would only give us an extra half hour to get out of the room. But get out we did, we made it over to PAPA and I watched the A Div finals, which featured some pretty awesome play and an actual nail-biter final game where any of the top three guys could have one it and it wasn't decided until the last ball. We left pretty soon after that -- my wife didn't even feel like playing a closing game of Pang Pang Paradise.

I ended up driving the whole way home, which I didn't really want to do but kind of had to. About halfway home I realized that I must have left my PAPA swag bag with my t-shirt back at the hotel. Eh. It was pretty typical of the entire weekend, and 1) It wasn't that great a bag, unlike the awesome overnight back we got last year, and 2) I'm a little sad about losing the shirt, but on the other hand I don't need any more reminders of how sucky PAPA 14 was for me. On the plus side, the last hour of our drive home it was thundering and lightninging constantly, which was kind of cool.

And just to top off the suckiness with a suck cherry: I had scheduled Monday as a vacation day but ended up having to work half a day because we had a deadline to meet the next day. And while I was unpacking the car I discovered that I'd left half our supply of Gatorade at the hotel too. It just keeps on sucking.

Off to PAPA for the Weekend!

2011-08-12T06:15:00.003-04:00

Well, Mrs. Entropy and I are heading off to Pittsburgh today for PAPA 14. I'm hoping to actually break into the top tercile of the bottom tier, but we'll see. I did have a bit of existential doubt about whether my nice finish at Pinburgh morally obligates me to compete in the B Division instead of my usual C. I put the question to the FSPA league mailing list, and the response that put be over the edge came from the guy who pasted my ass to the wall with Gorilla Glue on Monday (which caused me to go from 1st to 3rd place in our last night before the finals... nice). To paraphrase him, basically PAPA divisions are bosses, and to level up you need to beat the first boss, in this case C Division. So I've decided that to move on to B Div I should put up a decent showing in C, not this 61st/62st place bullshit I've done the last two years. I've got high hopes: C Division's games this year include Rolling Stones, which has served me well in league this season (with the possible exception of last Monday night); Terminator 2, which of course I own (and got a whopping THREE Super Jackpots on the same ball a few days ago, despite the lamps that indicate where to shoot being out and having to use the lamp column display problem to figure out which of the jackpot lights is lit); and Wheel of Fortune, which I have the high score on at Volleyball House (though to be fair, to this day I have no idea how I scored so high). So as I say every year: We shall see.

And since I've got a theme going here, these are this week's museum repairs: My two undisputed successes are I replaced a broken drop target on Big Bang Bar and I fixed the lamp board on Indiana Jones. Sadly, the drop target was just a blank one I found in the bottom of the cabinet, not one with a decal on it. The IJ lamp board I pulled and took home, fixed and tested in Wednesday night (there were some burned out bulbs, bad connections, and one or two sockets that had broken and needed resoldering), then Zoe Entropy installed it (!!! The issue is following in the footsteps of her sire) Thursday when she went in to work. I glanced at it when I went in for some pre-PAPA practice after work... there are still a few bulbs out, and I'm suspecting they're bad connections at the plug. But the resoldered lamps were working, so you can tell if you've spelled the ENT of ADVENTURE.

I also looked into a "weak kicker" on Safe Cracker. That turned out to be a perfectly good but poorly aimed kicker, which was kicking the ball into a wireform, which caused the ball to rattle back and forth in the lane, slowing it down to the point where it couldn't make it out of its lane, giving the impression of weakness. 50K rgp poster Lloyd T. Olson suggested I bend it slightly to the left to re-aim it, so I'll try that next time I go in (probably NOT next Tuesday, since we have a big project to finish at work and I'll probably be in a post-PAPA pinball funk). While I was in SC I checked a switch it said was bad, which turned out to be a drop target whose spring had come off. I reattached it, and in the process found out how difficult SC is to work on... it's tiny size makes it so everything is packed in so tightly that it's virtually impossible to do anything without taking a bunch of adjacent stuff apart.

And in the Good/Bad Omen Department: When I went in the the museum last night I did some pre-PAPA flipping. Largely sucked, but did get my first Super Jackpot on Creature, and it would have been doubled except that the museum's game only registers 1 letter for each ramp shot instead of the usual two (or three if you're Bowen) so it takes twice as many ramps to spell Creature. Anyway, hopefully that is the foretaste of victory and the crappy other games I played were not the anticipation of suck. Again, we'll see in about 8 hours.

All I Do These Days is Museum Repairs

2011-08-07T10:55:00.002-04:00

Well, not all. I have gotten my basement closer to being a usable arcade... Eight Ball Deluxe and Terminator are set up, though EBD leans like a mofo and the leg with the greatest influence is hard to get to. Really, so is Paragon, but on a lark I turned it on last night and it was acting kookier than usual. It acts like it's in attract mode, but when you press the button it makes the start-of-game sound & deducts a credit, but then doesn't do anything else and continues in attract mode. In league news, I've been in the unprecedented (for me) position of #1 in A Division for four straight weeks, and with one week to go I am mathematically assured of getting into the playoffs. I've got a 6 point lead over the #2 & 3 players so it's feasible that I could be #1 in playoffs even with a mediocre score for week 10. I think that gives me valued game picks in the playoffs, which is always fun... as well as something I haven't gotten for some time, since when I've actually made the playoffs I've usually been in last place going in.

So, at the museum on Tuesday I got a few more things done. I spent most of the time bending the diverter linkage on Indiana Jones into a workable facsimile of what it should be, and that fixed it. When I tested it I made a few shots to the Path of Adventure, which cleared the switch errors; now Indiana Jones is credit-dot free. ^_^ I also changed tactics with the sticking left flipper and changed the coil stop -- albeit from what turned out to be a somewhat rusty mechanism that had mushroomed, so I had to clean and file it down somewhat -- which did the trick. My new theory is that the coil stop had become lightly magnetized over time, and that was causing the plunger to stick to it. Spent some time giving it a bit of a makeover... I replaced the shredded plastic posts around the INDY lanes with better ones that I cannibalized from T2 leftovers. And I replaced a couple of GI bulbs and tried to get as many of the lamps replaced as possible. Unfortunately, there are a couple of sockets on two of the boards that aren't making good connections, so I'll probably bring those boards home on Tuesday and re-solder them (this worked pretty well with the STTNG big lamp board, and I'm hoping for similar results).

Speaking of Star Trek, I've gotten kind of tired of the slingshots popping out of the rubber. One of the things I've noticed about the museum's games is that a lot of them have slingshot rubbers that are about 1/2" too large, so I'm constantly tucking the kicker back into the rubber until I get tired of it and replace the rubber. Unfortunately, the meager parts store in the back had only one 4" rubber, and that was clearly intended to be a reference piece. However, they sell rubber in the gift shop -- at prices that are a little steep imo -- so my daughter found the 4" bag and gave me two.

And finally, the Avatar Link gate wasn't staying up because a little donut attachment that holds the gate up had fallen off, which I figured out from comparing the assembly diagram from the downloaded manual to reality. I found the sheered off screw that probably was supposed to be holding it on, but not the part itself. I'd been in contact with the Stern Tech Support guy and he said that he would send me out the piece because it was still under warranty. However, I played the game on Thursday while waiting for my daughter and the gate was staying up again... I'm guessing that the real repair guy had been in and fixed it somehow. Anyway, I'll look at it for sure next Tuesday.

So next week is going to be too too fun: Week 10 of league on Monday, pull and fix the IJ lamp boards on Tuesday, relax on Wednesday (phew), return the (hopefully) fixed boards on Thursday, then toodle up to Pittsburgh on Friday for the weekend at PAPA. And that's a Full Week of Pinball for you.

More Tales of Maintenance

2011-07-31T09:44:00.004-04:00

First, another fan-gush for Wizard of OZ... just read about+saw the playfield pic on Pinball News, and it looks pretty darn cool. Definitely a welcome departure from the current generation of Stern "make this shot three times to start a mode" design philosophy... not that I dislike the last couple of years of Stern games, but seeing WOZ as it develops makes me think I've been missing the variety that comes with a second pinball company.

Last Tuesday I took another day off to work on games at the museum. It turns out my timing was poor, because that happened to be the day before Mrs. Entropy's birthday -- which I also took as vacation, by the way -- but she saw me wanting to spend most of the day at the museum as an indication that I didn't want to spend time with her. How she leaped that chasm of faulty logic to arrive at her conclusion I'll never know, but I managed to smooth things over mainly by pointing out all of the times she's wandered away from me physically and mentally which I did not take as an indication that our marriage was over (such as her fanatical devotion to a zombie podcast or the recent binge of Facebook games, which she basically spent the entire month of June playing).

So, maintainin' the games: Based on my data set of two, my day-long binges seem to always involve one game that is a huge thorn in my side. This time it was Indiana Jones, on which I had my own personal pinball adventure. The problem that kicked things off was a sticky flipper, which I worked on for a while and managed to not fix. But I also looked at the test report and found that the game reported a whole bunch of switch errors on the mini-playfield. When I tested them they worked fine, but then I noticed that the diverter that sends the ball to the Path of Adventure vs the ramp was not opening all the way, which kept the ball from making it to the mpf. Taking a look, it appeared that the diverter had become disconnected from the linkage to the coil and some goofy jury-rigged solution on it. I looked up one part of the linkage on Marco and it looked fine, then spent a bunch of time trying to make the jury-rigging work until I finally gave up. Later, at home, I had the presence of mind to look up the other end of the linkage and found that what I thought was jury-rigging was the actual part, which may have broken but was reparable. So if it's still messed up on Tuesday, I have a picture of the part as it's supposed to look, so I should be able to fix it accordingly.

After that miserable failure, I moved on to another personally irritating project: Black Knight. Instead of a spinner, the museum's BK has always had a roll-under gate; this makes it somewhat re: tarded because when it lights for 2,500, a roll-under will give you two or maybe three scores, whereas a spinner will give you whole bunches. Luckily, I had a spare spinner assembly! You see, when I got my BK 10-ish years ago, it had the wrong spinner on it. So I got a correct one on eBay, but that auction was for the entire spinner assembly and I just needed the thing that did the spinning. Synchronicity! So I bought a BK spinner sticker set at the former Pinball Wizards show in May and I found the spinner stuff I had bought while organizing the basement a few weeks ago. I installed everything, spent a little more time than I expected adjusting it, and at the figurative end of the day I had a Black Knight with the proper parts.

While I had BK open I decided to run it through some diagnostics because it's a little wonky. Surprisingly, the switch and solenoid tests passed, but the lamp test had some issues... but they turned out (as we can see on the right) to be strictly regimented issues, which I suppose are the best kind of issues to have. So the lamps that are out either fall in one of two columns or one row, which should make trouble shooting a little easier. But that's a job for another day.

Then there was some this and that things I did: Avatar's flipper was supposedly sticking, but I couldn't reproduce it, though I did find that the Link gate wasn't staying up... need to look into that. I tried to fix the dollar bill slot on Breakshot but to no avail. I retrieved a stuck ball in the traditional position on Guns 'n' Roses, on the plastic next to the lower pop bumper (clearly Slash was remiss in his play testing). I think that was all I did. If I ever get another full fixin' day at the museum -- and I'm unlikely to, at least in its current location -- I'll have to try not to get stuck on one particular game to the exclusion of all others. o_O;

The Extremely Productive 2.5 Hours

2011-07-24T00:33:00.002-04:00

But first, the coolest news of all: The guy who operates most of the games at our league just sent an email that he's putting a down-payment on a Wizard of Oz and is going to put it on location at one of the league joints when it comes out in December (ish). Another guy in our league is buying one, but he lives about 2 hours away from me, so it will be nice to have one a little closer.

So I went to the museum on Tuesday for my volunteer stint and got a ker-app load of stuff done, including a bunch of interesting fixes.

First, I reattached the subway ramp to Star Trek: The Next Generation, which has been quite the thorn in my side (and probably warrants its own post). Spoiler alert: One of the divertors broke off and a fixer in my league welded it back together for me. Anyway, it worked great. The only things really remaining were the right flipper wouldn't hold and the spinner didn't work -- very annoying for me, because Warp 9 is my new favorite mode in ST -- and probably caused by the same thing since the spinner is part of the flipper switch circuit. A quick look showed that a wire was dangling off the right flipper coil, so I quickly re-soldered it and that fixed both problems. Star Trek is now working for the first time in at least a month!

Next the Black Knight challenged me. It made annoying sounds during attract mode and would not eject balls when the game was over, which if there were no balls in the plunger trough kept you from starting a new game. The Internet told me that the sound problem was most likely an issue with the connection from the sound board to the CPU, so a quick un/re-plug job fixed it for now. I wasn't able to reproduce the ball restart problem, so hopefully that was a temporary problem (the Internet has an answer for that too, resetting the game to factory settings, so we'll keep that tucked away until we need it). It's working well enough for now, but it has a lot of switches and lamps out which will be annoying to fix.

Since WHO dunnit was right next to BK I decided to fix a problem that's annoyed ME, the center targets not working. I opened it up and found that the screws holding the target bank were loose in the playfield, so the cam that raises and lowers the targets had come out of the slot, and pulled a wire from one of the targets for good measure. Soldered that and filled the screw holes with wood putty. After it dried I reattached the target bank, and now it works great! It has some switch and lamp problems too, but those are for another day.

Game Four was a special request: A guy from my league who hangs out at the museum a lot mentioned that the extra ball/buy in button didn't work on Twilight Zone. Opened up the game and found that the button was loose in its housing, so I just snapped it snugly in and it worked. While I was there I re-glued one of the goofy after-market toys that the museum curator loves to put on his games -- this isn't the Smithsonian, after all. It's a TV that's supposed to show video clips from the show, and it doesn't even work (but that's not my problem). I just re-glued it to keep it from interfering with the game.

The final game fix of the night was Guns N' Roses, which I've grown to like lately... like a lot of DE/Sega games, I've found it grows on me. But I've noticed that the Guns ramp has stopped scoring. It turns out the plug on the upper switch had come out (are you sensing a pattern here?) and just had to be re-plugged in, though because of the location of the switch I had to get my daughter to hold up the playfield while I reached around and reconnected it. During testing I scored a Jackpot on said ramp. Yay for me!

And that was my exciting day. I took next Tuesday off so I could go in and work on games for the whole day, which I did once before and had a huge amount of fun doing. And seeing a variety of issues is really helping me stretch my repair muscles more than they've been stretched before. I heartily recommend volunteering to fix pins at your local establishment.

Volunteering

2011-06-28T23:38:00.001-04:00

A few months ago I put in an application to volunteer to fix games at the National Pinball Museum. I interviewed with my daughter, then museum director David Silverman asked me a few questions, then I got the job. So for the past couple of months I come in after work on Tuesdays and fix games.
There's a guy that fixes the games, but from what I've seen he fixes games like an operator fixes games -- so if the ball doesn't register when you shoot it into Rudy's mouth, so what? You can still play it. That's what the ball search is for. I try to get the games into the kind of condition I want them in when I play them.
At first I came in figuring I'd use the museum's tools, but with the exception of a very nice soldering iron the museum's tools are either terrible or missing (for example: There are I think three sets of socket wrenches on the shelf, but not one driver that works with any of them). So next week I brought in my tool box. Then I discovered that the museum also didn't have a partiuclarly good collection of spare parts. So next week I brought in my parts box. Now I just have a luggage cart with 4 tool/parts boxes on it, plus my laptop which I've loaded up with manuals and reference. If I had infinite time and patience, I would probably organize the tool area into something that people could actually use.
Typically of any collection of games, every game that needs fixing is a rabbit hole that you just keep falling into. So for example, Funhouse. It had two problems listed: Rudy's mouth and the P target didn't work. I also wanted to fix something I thought was kind of stupid: David loves to put add-ons in his game, and in Funhouse he'd attached a promotional plastic to the left slingshot. But he'd attached it in such a way that the ball would sometimes hit it.
The P target was easy: One of the wires had broken off, so I resoldered it. Rudy's mouth was also pretty simple: Of the 6 screws holding the kicker and Rudy's head to the playfield, there were only two installed, which caused the kicker to droop so the switch wouldn't close when the ball was in it. A quick look in the cabinet turned up the other 4 screws, so I screwed them in. Problem solved. Although I wanted desperately to remove the promo plastic, instead I just raised it up so the ball wouldn't interfere with it.
While I was digging around in the cabinet for the screws, I found an envelope. Inside were a set of Cliffy Protectors that David had ordered almost 10 years ago and never installed. So I installed the hole protector (the ramp protectors were a lot more involved).
Finally, I noticed that the mylar on the playfield was bubbling up, especially around the clock inserts. Not much I could do about that, so I had to leave it.
When all was said and done, the game was pretty much working correctly. It didn't even have a credit dot! I pointed this out to my daughter, and she didn't realize what the credit dot was. So a few days later she asked their tech about it, and he said that the credit dot doesn't necessarily mean the game is broken, because it can come on if someone hasn't hit a particular switch for a while (!!!). So when my daughter told me that, my first thought was: Yeah, dumbass, so why don't you hit that switch and see if it still works? Like I said, he fixes games like an operator.
Tonight was an extra big night: I spent 4 hours in the trenches. The autoplunger wasn't working on Guns 'n' Roses, which turned out to be a blown fuse (and of course, that particular fuse wasn't in the fuse box, but luckily I found one sitting on a work table), and while I was in there I replaced a bunch of burned out bulbs. Next I worked on Indiana Jones, which was ejecting two balls into the plunger lane. I was worried that it was a bad opto board, but the switch test showed that the trough switches were working fine. A little more poking around showed that there was a ball in the idol lock, for a total of 7 balls in a six ball game. Removing one ball fixed that problem.
The left flipper on Jurassic Park wasn't working, and a quick inspection showed that a ball was trapped in the raptor kicker (this has happened before). The flipper had basically fallen apart, so I just fixed the nut and screw out of the cabinet and reassembled it. I freed the ball and repositioned the kicker, hopefully for good. I also installed a set of Cliffy Protectors which I had ordered. Nice!
The lockdown bar on Stargate didn't close, and they had taped the door closed. Turns out the bar just needs to be whacked down smartly before it would close. I also retrieved the lock pieces from the cabinet and put it back together.
Lights Camera Action also had a non-working left flipper, and the problem was pretty much the same as Jurassic Park, but in this case the linkage had fallen apart and I couldn't fix it without a new one. Since it was getting late, I noted it on the fixit list and moved on to the last game, Barb Wire. Balls keep getting stuck in the Retinal Scanner, and the problem turned out to be a flaky connection to the kicker. I noted that it should probably be resoldered.
And other than being particular long, that was my day fixing games at the NPM. There were a few more that I wish I was able to get to (I also bought a protector for Star Trek TNG and newer Funhouse protectors which I wish I could have installed, and I'd really like to tear into Star Trek and fix a bunch of crap on it). Ideally the museum won't close for good next Monday so I'll have another opportunity to finally get more of those games tuned up. Of course, what would be best would be if I could just take a game home every few weeks, give it some TLC and care for it like a game should be cared for, then return it to the museum.

9 1/2 Months

2011-06-24T14:55:00.003-04:00

I am a nut for to-do lists, so much so that I save them. Here are a couple of items from the last months:

Christmas 2010 - Blog
Feb 2011 - Update blog
3/4/11 - blog!
5/6/11 - start bloggin

Etc. Unfortunately, blogging is always harder than not blogging, and the longer you don't blog the larger the backlog of things to write about becomes... I'm reminded of a diary that I kept religiously in the early 80's that eventually became a many pages long to-do list of things to write about, until finally I got to the point where I couldn't remember what my cryptic comments meant.

But there comes a time in a boy's life when he has to shit or get off the pot... so be prepared for me to take a massive dump on you, my loyal readers.

Here's what I've done lo, these many months, in no particular order:

Got Terminator 2 up and running, even to the point of it making its public debut
Loaned two games out for a league party
Did not make the league playoffs for the first time since I started
Participated in the Pinburgh tournament against some of the best players in the world, and came in ninth (yeah, you heard me... Ninth, bitches!)
Added mapping to the Pinball Locator
Got my league back to reporting our stats to the World Pinball Ranking website
Was solicited to help bring the PARS rating system back to life
Organized my basement to the point where I could actually get to most of my games, but then a bunch of stuff happened that made it all fall apart
Attended the opening of the National Pinball Museum in December, which my daughter was instrumental in getting to happen
Started volunteering to help fix games at the National Pinball Museum, which is fun and educational
Mourned the possible closing of the National Pinball Museum in July, which my daughter didn't really have much to do with
Got a crapload of new playfields for my playfield project, which I have non-bindingly vowed will move forward this year

And there's probably a bunch of other junk which I can't remember. In the next few days/weeks/months I'll probably write about one or more of these things and a few more besides.

So, to subtly reference the massive dump metaphor one last time: Let's get a move on.

My goodness

2010-09-05T01:24:00.000-04:00

I really haven't written very much about the Terminator, or anything else. Here's where we right that wrong.

After fixing the plugs, I plugged everything in. Unlike Doctor Who, T2 had all the wires and plugs it should have had. Williams clearly learned a lot about manual writing in the year between T2 and DW, because the extremely clear diagrams of the boards showing the plug positions with a listing of the plugs and their wire colors is not there. Instead it's a text listing of the plugs in what must have seemed like an orderly tabular fashion, but in reality makes it really hard to find stuff. So I used the DW manual to connect just about everything, then puzzled out T2's manual for plugs DW didn't have (like the non-Fliptronic flipper connectors).

I was reluctant to plug in the playfield, so I tested voltages and stuff as I plugged, and nothing seemed completely bizarre. To summarize a long evening of booting and plugging, at the end I had a lit machine with a more or less working DMD (it did to the whoop whoop whoop because the board is the one that delivers too much power to the DMD). To the right is what it looked like after I put everything back together. As a bonus, all the solenoids worked and pretty much all the switches, too, except for the ones in the dead column (known problem with the MPU) and a switch that just wasn't there. The drop target wouldn't stay up, but just about everything else worked. I even played an impromptu game, only slightly hampered by missing flipper lanes and ramps that weren't connected to their wireforms.

So we have a more or less working game installed in its new cabinet. The next step was to move it from the boiler room to its permanent home, next to Eight Ball Deluxe. That doesn't leave a lot of room to squeeze between the game and the basement sofa, but I'm thin enough to pull it off. It also helps that we had to move another sofa our of the rear of the basement, so I had to clear a path, and I used that excuse to organize the pinball area and label boxes of parts that are sitting around. This has been a huge step forward for me... I can actually find stuff relatively quickly when I need it.

Now it was time to strip down the playfield for cleaning. This was also kind of a preview of the sort of cleaning I'll need to do when DW moves into its new cabinet. I took lots of reference pictures as I disassembled, and labeled parts and put them in bags as I went. If I had had the space, I would have laid the parts out on a table in a forensic reconstruction, but sadly the best I could do is array them on various pinball machines.

In the end, what we were left with was a mostly stripped filthy playfield (I removed the wood sides and backsplash after this picture was taken). Now kids, if you're cleaning your game, you'll probably want to strip all the parts off the game including the undersides. But I am lazy and hate to solder, plus the underparts are relatively clean, so I wiped them down in situ and only removed problem parts, like the drop target assembly that wouldn't stay up.

Now, if you zoom into this picture you can see a couple of flaws in the playfield. The worst is missing paint on the top of the auto-fire hot dog, but if you look closely you can also see some kind of goober build-up behind and on either side of the white targets, and on the left side of the Chase Loop you can see where some clown put two wood screws and a rubber in the place of a lost metal wire. I'm kind of expecting the last two to be covered up by ramps and plastics.

So in our next episode we'll talk about the actual cleaning process.

In other pinball news, I ended up finishing 3rd in league, so I did not completely humiliate myself. It was basically a contest between two guys, and me and the other guy were fighting for the bottom. He normally can beat me on any game made after he was born (I have beaten him on Strikes and Spares, for example), but I had an excellent game and crushed him on Attack from Mars, 6 billion to 1 or so... and that one game has been my nemesis all season, with me not scoring more than 400 mil.

My daughter is chugging away at the pinball museum. Her boss is kind of a dick, very difficult to work with, and worst of all doesn't realize that he's difficult to work with. He takes every perceived slight personally, which means he's alienated the local league and the other museums, which he should be bending over backwards for. I basically sent out an email to the league guys suggesting that we extend an olive branch to the museum via my daughter, but when she brought it up to him he got mad that he hadn't heard from the league in months (mainly because he didn't listen to the voicemail on his phone) and he said that we were just out for freebies (which she didn't say, I think he was projecting his own fears on us). She called me in tears because she didn't know what to do... it's so obvious that he needs the support of the local community, but he's mad at us for basically imagined reasons. I tried to calm her down and said we could discuss next steps when she got home, but luckily he came back later and she was able to talk some sense into him -- that we weren't out for free memberships, we wanted to HELP and VOLUNTEER and LEND HIM GAMES THAT HE DESPERATELY NEEDS. So she got permission to open negotiations and send out a special newsletter targeted to the local community. She's also going to meet with a league bigwig for lunch and talk about stuff, and I offered to pay for the lunch to make it look like the museum is buying him lunch (because if you've got a big deal donor/helper, you want to treat him with kid gloves, including dropping 20 bucks on lunch. Cheez!). Anyway, the whole incident gave me new insight into the Arab-Israeli peace process.

FAIL

2010-08-15T19:22:00.000-04:00

Just checked the PAPA scores, and it turns out there was a miscoded entry which was re-entered and dumped me down to one below last year's rank. It's sad; oh, so sad.

Why I haven't done any work on the Terminator

2010-08-15T11:44:00.000-04:00

Or blogged about it, for that matter. It's because I've been a busy little barracora lately, and for a change it's mostly pinball related.

My goal was to finish my first major update to the Pinball Locator before I went to PAPA, and gosh darn it I did, by about 2 days. I reformatted the database to make it easier to wrangle, point-coded about 80% of the locations and added a distance search, revamped the add and edit functions to make them faster and easier to use, added a search by count of games by location, and I carry the search parameters around so you can refine your search easier & you can return from an add or edit to your previous search and see your updates immediately. And since the heavy lifting is out of the way, I can now easily add much smaller features and not go another 2 months without an update... or at least not for a while, anyway. Reaction so far has been positive... some people pointed out data errors, which I fixed last night. And there are a few bugs... the game count doesn't recalculate properly and if you edit the last item in a search you won't return to that item when you're done. I should be able to fix those today or tomorrow.

And then I went to PAPA on Friday. This time, Mrs. Entropy went with me, which helped a lot on the hell-ride coming back. My stated goal was to defend and exceed my mid-60's title from last year. I put in a pretty good entry that got me up to #6 in C Division, then did two crappy entries that didn't do much. I had only dropped to #9 when we left, but by the time we got home I was down to #17. Yesterday I watched as I sunk lower and lower on the list, and when I went to bed I was one below last year's place. Somebody did me a favor in the wee hours, though, and when I woke up I found that I had tied last year's ranking. I didn't exceed it, which was sad, but there's always next year.

One thing I did do better this year was know my games and what to do. I looked at the C Div games before I left and familiarized myself with the rules to a game that I didn't know (Creature from the Black Lagoon). When I got there, the first thing I did was do a practice game and scored a healthy 144 mil on a game that I used to just flail randomly at. If I had done that well in the tournament, I might have managed a healthy top 30 finish, but I couldn't get my multiball going.

What I learned this year is that next year I need to stay the whole weekend. Getting one fairly good round on Friday is fine, but you need to prune and maintain your entry with subsequent entries like you would an ornamental shrubbery. Plus you get to goof off & play pinball all weekend, not just for one day, and leaving early Sunday evening will probably make the return trip merely a purgatory ride.

Mrs. Entropy had a good time. Revenge from Mars -- her go to game -- wasn't working so well, which forced her to get out and play some others. I need to break her of the habit of double-flipping, though. She ended up having a pretty good time, and we had some chats with other league members we met there.

Sadly, the cool poster design I blogged about last month was not the default t-shirt.

My daughter, in her capacity as Assistant to the Curator of the National Pinball Museum, revealed to me that the inventory of games she's been undertaking shows that they are a little short of newer games for their pay-to-play area. I suggested she might talk to some of the big deal collectors and ask them to loan some machines to the museum. I suggested that I might be able to temporarily part with Eight Ball Deluxe and one of my DMD games (if I could get either of them working reliably). So we'll see how that plays out. By the way, I am full of good ideas for the NPM: I told Zoe last weekend that she should get some flyers to the PAPA people so they could include them with the tote bags they give out to entrants. She did and they did, so hopefully that will get the word out a little more to the heavy-duty players and the rest of us.

And finally, league: I finished in the top 4 of A Division, just barely squeaking into the playoffs. I basically need to do OK, have the person below me not have an awesome night, and have the person above me have a crappy night. I did, she did not, and he did, so I'm in. Of course, I'm competing agains two PAPA B Division finalists and an A Division competitor (#65 out of 80, but that's in frickin' A), so I'm pretty much just hoping I won't soil myself. I think I get some game picks, so I ran some preliminary numbers and I have some ideas of what to do.

Now I have to go finish cleaning the Terminator.

Dun dun dun dundun. Dun dun dun dundun.

2010-07-21T18:13:00.000-04:00

Yes, that theme music in the title means that I'm finally going to talk about the Terminator 2 rebuild.

The installed varistor

Reviewing my old posts, I had set up the cabinet and replaced the crazy foreign plug on the line filter with a red-blooded American plug. To finish the line filter, I had to take out the 230V varistor and replace it with a more appropriate 130V one to protect the game from our pansy-ass domestic voltages. Luckily I was able to find one at Radio Shack, since protecting circuits from line surges is a pretty common application... I didn't find one at the RS that's down the street from my house because it sucks pretty bad. However, I went up the the RS in nearby Olney which not only had everything I needed but also had a graybeard working at the counter who understood my Battery Club jokes (those cell-phone shilling chumps at my local store probably weren't even born when the Battery Club was discontinued). He actually told me that the Derwood store was supposed to be closed a few years ago, but they had one good quarter which saved them. Since then they've gone back to their under-performing ways, so I won't too surprised if our local Shack is given the shaft. It'll be no big loss.

Matching serial numbers, bitches!!!

And to finish off the line filter I repinned the plug to the transformer in the tradition butterfly pattern. I had kind of a hard time pulling the old pins out... I think I used a small screwdriver to do the job. But once that was done I crimped in new pins and was done. Originally I was going to use a line filter that just needed a new plug and not all of the conversion stuff, but when I started gathering the pieces I noticed that its serial number didn't match the other parts I was going to use. So I got tough and did the full conversion. Yay for me. On the down-side the other one had a better power switch, and it had a service outlet which mine doesn't.

Then I fed the line filter in and attached it to the cabinet. I also put in the coin interface board and selected and attached a nice coin door.

Note the transformer with the crazy
plug on the right. Also visible: A printout
of the crappy cell phone pic I used to
put everything back.

Moving in a semi-orderly fashion along the power train, I put in the transformer. Continuing a proud and storied tradition of crappy half-assed operator fixes, two wires had broken off the transformer plug and had been reattached with a freaky little microplug that I pulled off when I first saw it and could never reattach. So that had to be pulled out and repinned which again took a while because I didn't have the proper pin-pulling tool. Once that was done I put the transformer in the cabinet and did a quick voltage test, checking the values against what Doctor Who was putting out. Some of the voltages were disturbingly different from DW's values, but I decided to forge ahead and hope for the best.

GI plug before... burnt out.

The last step was installing the head-to-cabinet wiring. This last was a little dicey because I only had crappy cell phone pics of the cabinet before I took everything out, but I managed to get it all put together to my satisfaction. Also, the GI plug on the wiring harness had pretty much disintegrated, so I had to build a new one from scratch. My master-level crimping skills stood me in good stead, even when I realized that I had built the plug backwards. Lucky for me the GI plug is 12 pins of the same wire, so I only had to pull out the middle 5 pins and reverse them.

GI plug after... clean!

And that's pretty much most of the work I did on the cabinet. Next time I'll discuss plugging everything in.

Hole E. Crap

2010-07-18T23:54:00.000-04:00

After a while, you'd think that I would realize that the longer I go between blog posts, the more crap I need to write about backs up in the tubes. And just so you know: I'm just going to stop promising the T2 post, because there's a lot other stuff to write about and not enough time.

Like: After weeks of pissing people off with teasing Facebook posts, Stern's finally going to announce their Fall title tomorrow! How. Cool. Is. That. Unless of course it's a sucky theme like Wheel of Fortune.

And how cool is this: Daughter Zoe Entropy is now the Assistant to the Curator of the National Pinball Museum (not, sadly, the Assistant Curator). Here's how that happened: A few months ago, one of the guys at league mentioned that the museum will be moving to a more permanent location (it's currently in a shed in the guy's back yard, albeit a very nice multi-room multi-story shed with a kitchen) and asked for volunteers. At the time I had a soon-to-be-graduating college student with a major in History, an interest in museum work, and no prospects to speak of. So I mentioned that she was qualified to do actual museum and historical curation, and the league guy said he would mention it to the museum guy. After a few months and some discreet inquiries she finally got an interview -- I had her study the Pinball Compendium and discussed pinball history with her in the week leading up to the interview, but it turns out she needed next to none of that info (by the way, when linking to this book I noticed that there's a new Pinball Compendium volume for EM games... I did not know that).

She went on the interview and she was pretty much what he needed -- a "Girl Friday" with organizational skills and experience in history & preservation -- and the museum parts of the job are just what she was looking for. Unfortunately for the last two weeks she's been mostly helping him get organized, because he's a pretty chaotic person. She showed me his list of the 900 or so games he's got... it's in a Word document, the columns are created by repeated spaces with lines drawn on the page, and different manufacturers are denoted by the font of the game's name. She is going to be moving that data into an actual database program. Appropriately enough the day after I heard about that I read this XKCD comic.

So except for the parts where he gets a little shouty things are working out. She's only getting minimum wage, but it's better than what she was earning before that, which was nothin'.

And because the museum is getting ready to move to Georgetown this Fall, Mrs. Entropy and I made the pilgrimage to the current location to have a go at the games. They were mostly in nice shape and a lot of fun. There were a lot of nice EM games in great shape, and I finally, finally, finally got to play Big Bang Bar and Kingpin, plus an Addams Family Gold. My wife played a lot of Revenge from Mars because that's her go to game. A couple of the games ejected too many balls into play, Kingpin included... but it was a lot funner than it seemed from the Visual Pinball version. And BBB was a hoot to play... some people say it's overrated, but I loved it.

And: Updates to the Pinball Locator are chugging along. With the help of the Mrs. I cleaned up the search page a lot, and I enabled a distance search feature. I just have to implement Find, Add, Edit, and Delete using the new database format and it should be sweet.

And Finally: I found a link to the PAPA 13 poster the other day and it is frickin' awesome! It's like Cute and Metal had a baby. Wearing that on a shirt will just make me enjoy life more.

My Reward

2010-06-13T10:42:00.000-04:00

I figured out what my problem was with running the Pinball Locator locally this morning... the table that stores all the pinball data didn't have all the right fields with the correct names and types. There are some subtle yet irritating differences between how my machine and the live server work, and I'm having a really hard time believing that it's because I have a newer version of PHP. For now I've just got an ever-growing set of includes to deal with the differences, so we'll see how that goes.

As a reward for getting the core functionality of PL running locally, I treated myself to some time reading Pinball News' Iron Man rule porn, which was just published today. And it's just like real porn, because 90% of the rules they talk about are unattainable to schlubs like me. ^_^

I Contribute to the Pinball Community!

2010-06-12T23:19:00.000-04:00

OK, this isn't about T2, but this all happened kind of without warning.

About two weeks or so, I was on RGP and there was a post complaining about the Stern Pinball web site search function. Well, when I went to look at it, it was none other than the good ol' Pinball Locator. I defended it as best as I could, then fired off my semi-annual letter to Ken at PinballRebel.com offering to fix some glaring issues. To my shock and awe he responded positively. This time I took a different tact: Rather than honestly conveying my skill set (I don't know PHP because we use Javascript and JSP at my work), I just told him I know PHP. This was apparently what he was looking for, and after a brief negotiation he sent me the Pinball Locator source files.

Well, yay for our team! It took me a couple of hours of monkeyin' around to get everything up to the point where I could run the site on my computer. Mac OS X comes with the Apache Web Server, but you have to turn it on and activate PHP. Then I had to install MySQL and a program to monitor and query MySQL. Then I had to figure out what the heck PHP was doing (honestly, it's nothing surprising... after 34 years of programming in a dozen or so languages there really isn't a lot that can shock me in a programming language). The biggest problem ended up being that I can't seem to access the database from PHP... it doesn't give me an error message when I run a query, but it doesn't do anything either.

Anyway, I fixed the glaring issues and sent the files back for review. I'm really anxious to see how it works out... just in the past week I've come up with about 10 neat new features, and I'm sure Ken's got a bunch as well. Fun!

Time Out for Fun!

2010-06-08T22:11:00.000-04:00

The Terminator rebuild is proceeding like gangbusters, but since there's a lot to write about and it's really late, I thought I'd post this cool stuff that I just got.

A few weeks ago, Boing Boing had a post of cool video game propaganda posters. I thought they were pretty amazing, so I ordered them as soon as I had some free money from our larger than expected tax refund (plus Zazzle, the printing company selling them, was doing a Tax Day 10.40% off sale... I've since found that they have better sales, like 40% off, so be patient).

The artist, Steve Thomas, has put out more since I bought these, and he's also got some cool Solar System travel posters that my wife really likes.

I framed them with cheap frames on sale from Michaels and hung them in our living room just before everyone arrived for my daughter's graduation. I opted for the pretty big size, 2 x 3 feet, for maximum impact. Of course most of our family didn't realize what they were, but my wife and I like them for their sublime blend of extreme subtlety and awesomeness.

Here's the Joust poster, which was the one pictured in the Boing Boing post and pretty much immediately sold me. I loved the Joust video game as a youth.

I put the Donkey Kong poster over the couch in the most prominent position, not because it's my favorite but because it's the one that most people will be able to figure out.

Dig Dug is, in my opinion, the least obvious, as evidenced by the fact that my daughter thought it was Speed Racer. Why would Speed Racer be pumping something and have a Pooka reflected in his visor? I believe this reflects poorly on the quality of the education that we just paid so dearly for.

There are a bunch of other posters... some I didn't care much for (like Tron) and some I like but just came out, and I've pretty much used up my free wall space. If he comes out with a Crystal Castles poster (unlikely, I know) that would be an auto-buy, but otherwise I'll just wait until he finishes the series and decide then.

OK, next time T2 rebuild stuff for real.

A hollow voice says "PLUGH".

2010-06-04T16:29:00.000-04:00

Yes, a title that's a bizarre and/or obscure 70's/80's pop culture reference means it's Tech Tip Time!

While my Dad and brother were here for my daughter's graduation, they were casting about for something to do on an off day (funny/irritating story: My Dad said he wanted to take a Dan Brown tour of locations around DC featured in The Lost Symbol (Robert Langdon, No. 3). There didn't appear to be any pre-made tours, so I bought the book from Audible [yes, I know, it was infected with DRM] and listened to it, taking detailed notes about locations in the book. When I was done, I wrote up a pretty-much complete list, sent it to my Dad, and blocked out an unused day for the tour. So when my Dad gets here, I asked him what he wanted to see. He told me he didn't want me to go through all the trouble, and that he only wanted to go on an actual packaged tour. So since we didn't go on the tour, we had an off day.) and I happened to mention that I was planning to splice a power cord with a legitimate 3-pronged plug onto the European plug attached to Terminator 2. My brother scoffed at that, saying we can just pick up a plug a The Home Depot that he can attach in five minutes with just a screwdriver. We did and he did, and it was pretty easy. After they left, I decided to do the same thing to Paragon, because the ground had been cut off by a previous owner and it's been on my list to do for quite some time (and as I've mentioned before my wife and daughter were grounding it themselves for a while until they learned not to reach back while they're watching TV).

Here's the original plug with the ground cut off. You can see that I helpfully label all of my power cords to avoid confusion at the power strip.

So first, I cut the old plug off and teased out the three wires. Since this vintage 70's era plug didn't use the traditional black-white-green wire color scheme, I made note of which identical black wire went to which side of the plug, even though I don't think it makes a huge difference.

I pulled the back off the new plug, which exposes the connectors. This is a really good time to feed the power cord through the back of plug before you attach the wires (I was feeling pretty smug for not forgetting it this time, but when I changed the plug on T2 again I did forget and had to detach the wires). Then I stripped the ends off the wires.

With the back of the plug on the power cord, I attached the wires to the business end of the plug. There's a little gap that you can feed the stripped wire into, then you just tighten the screw to close the gap.

Put everything back together and we're done! Look at that beautiful three-pronged outlet... just look at it.

And as a special bonus...

RARRR!

This was super-easy and fast... so much so that I didn't hesitate to change the plug on T2 for reasons which will be benounced later. Things are moving apace on T2, so I'll have a lot to discuss if I can find the time to blog this weekend.

He Powers Up... And It's Good!

2010-05-31T23:42:00.002-04:00

As usual, I'm kind of constipated with news. But the good news is that I've assembled T2 to the point where the power driver board is getting power, and nothing blew up. So yay.

Tonight was the optional Week 0 of league, but Mrs. Entropy made it clear that I would not be honoring our nation's fallen soldiers by going to a stinky old bar and banking pinball scores.

I did sneak out yesterday and play a few games of NASCAR at Sole d'Italia. I'm kinda bummed that they got rid of Family Guy... I'm finding that although I liked NASCAR when it first came out, it's not holding my interest. And why does the garage not work on any of the games I play? And why doesn't the software see that the garage is disabled and give you the awards for, say, hitting the test car a bunch of times? Or maybe it's awarding them and I didn't notice. Anyway, I played for a while and by the end I was kind of hoping I wouldn't win any free games.

Anyway, I honest to gosh mean it when I say that the next post will feature some for real pinball fixin' stuff.

The End of an Era

2010-05-19T21:35:00.003-04:00

My daughter graduated from college last weekend, which means one thing: I won't be going to Pizza House to play pinball any time soon.

Graduation Weekend was hectic, as we should have expected. A bunch of plans (cleaning the house, making gift bags for the family, etc.) came off a little half-baked. Family members cancelled (my brother, somewhat predictably), did stupid-ass shit (my father-in-law, who had my bro-in-law drive him 10 hours across the Midwest despite being sick, which made him more sick, so he spent the weekend in a hospital with pneumonia), and did stupid-ass shit that cost us money (my goofy sister-in-law, who ignored all the emails, Facebook posts and phone messages about the plane ticket my wife bought for her and purchased her own, which we only found out about the day before she left, by which time it was too late so we ended up donating $300 to the Richard Branson Naked Supermodel Water Skiing Fund). But Zoe Entropy did graduate (.02 grade points away from honors :( ) and moved out of her campus housing for the last time.

I didn't get to play any pinball during the weekend, but I had to drive the SUV up to pick up the last of her stuff on Monday, so I took the opportunity to make my last visit to Pizza House (at least for the foreseeable future). Happily, the high score that I set on NASCAR three years ago is still there. I put a dollar into Austin Powers and played four or five games until I was replay percentaged out. Then I put a dollar into NASCAR and played eight or nine games... every time it upped the replay beyond my score, I would match or get a special. I finally played my last two games and walked away, and as I opened the door I heard it match, but I kept walking. I kind of would have liked to go into town and play a game of The Champion Pub, but I had to get home.

I remember when I left school -- I remember it very well, since I did it three times in the 17 years it took me to get my Bachelor's degree -- and I felt the same wistfulness when I left Pizza House for the last time. Now granted, only a little of it was because of the pinball... Gettysburg College was this place I'd been coming to for four years, and now I was going to stop coming to it.

And THAT got me thinking about the time my Mom was at UCLA Medical Center about 8 years ago getting surgery for the cancer that eventually killed her. While she was under the knife, I got tired of waiting and took off, exploring the buildings that I'd attended class and goofed around in 20 years before. Of course I ended up at the arcade, a shadow of its former self but still with a couple of ratty old pins in the corner. There was a Getaway, maybe a South Park, and a few others that I don't remember. It was comforting to play pinball in a familiar surrounding.

I really don't know where this is going. Usually I can tie this all up with some kind of clever narrative thread, but I can't, so I'm just going to stop.

Well, enough of this. Next time I'm going to write about an actual useful electrical technique that I learned from my brother while he was here for the graduation (the reliable brother who actually showed up, of course).

Disparate but not Serious

2010-05-09T23:13:00.003-04:00

I've been pretty busy lately, but the pinball is taking the backseat to life. Mostly it's cleaning and getting the house ready for my daughter's graduation -- yesterday I spent about 2 hours cleaning bathroom floor grout -- but I'm also serving as Mrs. Entropy's surrogate daughter, since her own is spending Mother's Day on a Senior Trip to the beach. So I had to make breakfast, make dinner, do some gardening (which, to be fair, I was going to do anyway), and watch Fringe episodes with the wife. These are all fine things, but not really pinball things.

However, these are the pinball things that have happened. In league I got into the VA playoffs by having a pretty good final week. Since I was in A division, the playoffs were kind of a foregone conclusion, but I did my best. I even did some practicing in Visual Pinball to learn the rules of the games I was weakest in a little better. My weakest game was High Speed II, and I was happy after a few VP games to have gotten 300 M on it, almost 10x my highest league score. Then in Allentown, I played one that was there and busted out another 300 M, and on a real machine to boot! I felt I was ready. So what happened? Nobody picked that game against me. So much for pathos. Anyway, I had one 4 point game of WHO Dunnit and three third place finishes for a third place overall. That ended up being OK because I got the prize I wanted, a copy of Pinball 101 (and a new toolbox). The guy who finished third in B got the same DVD, so obviously we intend to study up and improve our games. But, ya know, it was fun. The end of the season party was last night, and this time it was only about a half hour drive away. The guy hosting had a great selection of games, including Voltan Escapes Cosmic Doom, which I played a few times as a youngster and co-did a VP adaptation for, but have never played as an adult. There was a pinball scavenger hunt and a get the closest score contest, but I didn't do well in either. I did have the most frickin' awesome game of High Speed, scoring 3.5 M and getting multiball twice, which is really good for me since I have trouble getting the ramp shot. There was one of the nuttiest games I've ever seen called The Wiggler. The steaks for dinner were good, too. And one of the guys in the MD league who got a full set of 6 digit Bally displays for free brought one for my Paragon, which has a display with a segment out. Good times.

Allentown was OK. I went on Sunday, because Saturday was our anniversary. Sunday kinda sucked. There were half the games and half the flea marketers, and none of the vendors had much that I was looking for. I had my aforementioned awesome Getaway game, played some Iron Man (which was good... people say it's just the Austin Powers playfield, but the game feels different enough to me). I chatted with a guy that I'd met at the Fairfax Open. I was happy to see that the guy with the Future Spa with the messed up playfield finally fixed the gate (I had left a note suggesting he fix it a few shows ago... maybe he took my advice). There were a few more games that were pretty interesting... I'll probably mention something about them later.

I did talk to the guy who sold me the LEDs for Quicksilver, and the LED manufacturers as a whole apparently worked with the Alltek Systems guy to solve the flickering light problem by either a) soldering a diode on every feature light, or b) buying a new lamp driver board. I wasn't aiming to buy a new lamp board, but the guy offered to sell it to me for 20% the $100 list, and since I hadn't found much else at the show to buy I went for it. This, of course, is waiting until after graduation...

Not much progress on T2, aside from selecting a line filter and teasing out the wires to install a new plug. I used my new tiny camera to see why the speaker panel wasn't fitting correctly, and it turns out that just bending the brackets was all it needed. I ordered some parts for it, including 3 of the 4 ribbon cables from Great Plains, still the best price on cables by a dollar each.

I've having very good luck with my Fish Tales playfield. It was missing its reel, and I was kind of disparing finding a new one. But a guy posted the reel and motor on a Mr. Pinball classified and only wanted $60 for it, so I yoinked it up. Then I posted a WTB on RGP and Mr. Pinball for the brackets that held the optos, and I got a response from a guy who had parted out an FT who still had the brackets. We're currently negotiating, but he sends me only one email a day... why is no one as eager to finish these transactions as I am?!?

More as I have time and remember all the stuff I was planning to write...

The Slow, Inexorable March of Progress

2010-04-23T21:39:00.004-04:00

I feel like I'm getting next to nothing done on the pinball front, mainly because I am. We've got less than three weeks before people start arriving for my daughter's college graduation and our house and palatial grounds are in quite the state. My wife has been sick with pulmonary issues for going on three weeks now, so a lot of the work is falling on me. So it kind of sucks to be me right now.

On the plus side, Mrs. Entropy and I went to see a Kevin Smith Q&A last night, which was pretty cool. Not really pinball-related, aside from him mentioning The Accused once, but there it is.

The Doctor Who power driver board problem ended with a whimper, not a bang. I ended up re-swapping the new board back into the game for testing, but once I did that everything worked fine. I guess it was a bad connection... and the real way to fix that is to replace the connector and the pins, but that's way more effort than I'm prepared to exert at this time. So I'm leaving it be until such time as it becomes necessary to do something about it. Go Fightin' Procrastinators!

I started setting up the T2 cabinet... I would say "she's got legs, you idiot", but I've used that joke already. I installed the legs, attached a new backbox latch that I didn't remember buying, then screwed in a backbox bolt that I had around (I'm hoping to get a second one in Allentown next weekend)... for whatever reason, I had three sitting around in a parts bin, and I used two on DW once I found out I needed them.

Anyway, I was going to put on the speaker panel and mount the backglass, but for whatever reason the speaker panel doesn't fit properly... the metal hooks don't fit snugly on the wood, but instead hang up on it... and since the speaker panel won't go down all the way, the backglass doesn't fit properly, so it's all a mess. I have to look carefully at why the speaker panel doesn't fit, maybe file down the wood or something.

League has had its ups and downs. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be in the playoffs in MD... going into week 10 I was #4 out of 4 with a girl 1 point behind me (or should I say, a girl!?!), so I needed to have a good week. Unfortunately I had an OK week... I held my own on Doctor Who (for whatever reason I can't do crap on that particular game despite having no problems getting great scores on my own) and came in second. Next up was an awesome game of Shrek... when my third ball came up the other two guys had 50 Million and I had about 1 million, but then I did a spectacular 76 million point ball (including an extra ball). When I was done, people actually applauded my performance! *blush* That was good for first place. Then I came in second on Eight Ball Deluxe, but finished a distant third on Six Million Dollar Man (damn you, Steve Austin!) for zero points. So when the unofficial back of the napkin scores were toted up, I had 9 points and Rebecca's 11, so it looks like I lost out by one point. To a girl!?! The official scores haven't come out yet, but I'm not expecting much.

In VA I'm doing OK but I definitely don't have a lock on a playoff spot yet with one more week to go. Because I had a couple of sucky weeks, I actually played in the bottom group, even though I'm in A division. None of my group was there, so I ended up playing alone and pasting everybody's saved scores, getting a 19 out of 20 points. And unlike earlier in the season, this time I actually deserved it... two of my scores were pretty good, and the other two were reasonable. Unfortunately, now I'm being accused (good-naturedly? maybe...) of gaming the system by deliberately losing so I could play in the lower groups and get big scores. These people clearly think I have a much better understanding of the scoring and grouping dynamics than I do... for example, I can't figure out why I'm still in A after a couple of losing weeks. So anyway, now I'm #2 in A but with a couple of guys nipping at my heels point-wise, which means I'll have to post some solid scores on Monday to avoid being taken down. We'll see how that goes... usually when the chips are stacked against me, I have a history of choking on my own vomit.

But to end on a positive note, in practice on Monday I scored a career best 650M on BS Dracula... I think I stacked up several multi-balls, which is the way to get huge points on that game, and I was within about 40 mill of the high score.

Frenzy o' Bloggin'!

2010-04-12T06:18:00.004-04:00

Boy, it has been a while since my last confession. After a week of allergies I got up at 4 this morning feeling clear and unable to get back to sleep. I took care of a bunch of morning duties, then found that our hot water heater was once again failing at its primary task... which means that all the time I'd allocated for a hot shower is now available for the titular Frenzy o' Bloggin'.

We got a crapload of snow in the Mid-Atlantic region this winter, so it was mid-March before the weather improved and the mud abated enough to allow for all that cabinet sanding I needed to do. So I moved and cleaned until there was space for all of the cabinets to exit into the backyard. It helped that I had just gotten about 15 sq ft of new real estate in my basement because we replaced our indoor fuel oil tank with a new one outside (not only because it was 10 years beyond its 40 year warranty, but also to solve the problems of our boiler not starting in the morning when you want to take hot showers after being sick for a week... oh, yes, believe me I am bitter). I stripped the cabinets as much as I was going to strip them, then took them outside one at a time and sanded.

Overall it went pretty well. I started with the T2 cabinet that looked like it had spent some time at sea. The inside sanded up just fine... I used one of my wife's palm sanders and got the job done pretty quickly. Sanding the bottom was another story... little chunks of wood kept dropping out of the cabinet sides, probably because the water messed up the integrity of the wood. In the end, it looks a lot better as long as you don't peer at the sides too carefully. The good T2 cab and DW went pretty well, too. I wasn't able to sand off some stenciled text on the bottom of T2, and there were some stains on the inside of DW that I couldn't get out... possible leftovers from the soda that apparently was spilled in there at some point. But they all look way better than they did before, and sanding the bottom was a lot faster than the evening I spent scrubbing the grime off the DW with 409 and a Magic Eraser. I'm pretty happy with the results, and when I was done all of the cabs were parked in the space where the oil tank used to be, somewhat out of the way. And the space near my games where the DW cab used to sit is now clear, giving me an extra 9 sq ft of extra floor space. Time to buy a new game!

Another project that I needed to get around to was testing that hacked up driver board I got back in November to free up the DW driver for use in T2. I took out the board that was in DW a few months ago, put in the new board, then let it sit for a few months. Finally this weekend I got up the gumption to do something about it. Following Safe Standards of Behavior for Strange Boards (you don't know where they've been!), I only plugged in the power plugs from the transformer and measured voltages at the plugs where power comes back out. Everything looked pretty good, though I was a little worried about the 50V coil power showing up as 72V (I've since learned that this is normal). So I plugged everything else in and was happy to find I had a completely working game!

Almost. :P The one thing that was weird was the flippers seemed less powerful with the new board. This was especially noticeable when hitting the Cliffhanger Ramp from the upper left flipper... whereas before you could make a good sturdy shot up the ramp, now the same shot barely got the ball around the loop. Several games worth of testing showed that it wasn't me, the flippers were just slightly weaker.

A trip to RGP was extremely unenlightening. It seems like no one read my entire post... I mean, I am a trifle long-winded, but still. Everyone -- even Clay/Shaggy! -- wanted to convince me that the problem was caused by dirty optos. So I swapped the old board back in and the problem magically cleared up. I was kind of despairing, but then rgp mega-poster TheKorn came through with some potential goods, saying I should check the connectors and fuses because they may work but might have problems when push came to shove. It does give me more board troubleshooting to do -- and I need more board troubleshooting that I need to do like I need more holes in my head beyond the ones I already have -- but at least it's something to go on.

Finally, league update. I was ever so briefly #1 in A Division in the Virginia League, largely through dumb luck. Guys I was playing against had terrible weeks, one guy didn't show up, etc. I couldn't really expect that to last for a whole season, and it didn't. I am now just outside of playoff contention, and with 3 weeks to go I don't hold out much hope. In Maryland I had kind of a funny week... since I was sick, I decided not to go and used my saved scores. The guy who got to pick the first game picked one that I didn't have a saved score for, which gave me a forfeit. But then, the next two games they played were OK scores, but way better than the other two guys did. My saved score for the final game was crappy, but my two middle scores were enough for the win. I'm squarely in B Division playoff contention with just 2 weeks to go... though I gotta say that I had my druthers I'd druther t'were t'other way around... the MD prizes suck compared to the VA prizes.

Fairfax Pinball Tournament: Epic Swag!

2010-03-11T21:40:00.002-05:00

Here's some extra post-tournament coolness: When I opened up the envelope containing my $62.50 in prize money, I found it contained a coupon for a free pre-registration package to PAPA! Yoink! That's a $35 value. I was not sure if I was going to go this year because it's such a long drive, but now I can't afford not to go! I immediately registered.

Then I asked the lovely and talented Mrs. Entropy if, since she enjoyed the trip to the Silver Ball Museum, she might want to accompany me to PAPA. And she said yes! Not only will it be more fun with the wife along, but she's a lot better at nighttime hell drives than I am. So if we go as a day trip, it won't be as rough on me.

And finally, when I went to pick up Quicksilver on Monday, it had earned just over $52! I gave half to John, which brought my total income from the tournament to $124 in cash and prizes, or about $80 after expenses. Sweet.

To top it off, Wednesday's league night was an ass-kicking, but for a change it was me kicking the ass instead of my ass being kicked. I didn't stay for the final reckoning, but I got 4 points on all my games, which is the maximum score you can get. Yay for our side!

Fairfax Pinball Tournament: Epic Recovery!

2010-03-07T08:56:00.002-05:00

Sometimes all it takes is the right state of mind. And in this case, I more than made up for my sucktacular first day at the tournament with a completely unexpectedly good finish.

Here's what happened. Mrs. Entropy is away at the Ladies and Gentlemen of the 1860's conference with our daughter, so I'm home alone with the pets this weekend. I put Darwin into overnight dog storage for Friday night, because I correctly predicted that I would be home late. But I expected to be finished pretty early at the tournament on Saturday, so I took him on two walks (with a little running thrown in to make him extra tired) so that he'd sleep while I was gone. I left at about 3:30 to get down to John's Place before the playoffs started at 5.

I will say that in retrospect, the initial omens and portents were favorable: I found 37 cents on the ground in various places throughout my day, and I'd had good practice games at home on Paragon and Eight Ball Deluxe (Doctor Who is down for board testing). And then at the bar in a practice game on Strikes and Spares I put up a score of 500K to beat Justin, who is a _way_ better player than I am (last Wednesday in league he smacked down the King of Payne in Medieval Madness with an amazingly relentless assault on the castle).

My standings had improved relatively. Whereas on Friday I had been #8 of 10 in B Division, at the end of qualifying I was #10 of 19. Still out of the top half, which meant I was in single elimination... if I lose one best of three match, I'm out (the top half was double elimination, meaning that if they lost they would play winners in the loser half).

Things were not looking good in general, because the bar was having serious power issues. Games were resetting right and left, and somebody mentioned that even the street light outside was flickering. This worked out pretty well for me Friday, because Monster Bash reset on a crappy game and my next game was a lot better. But Saturday it was nuts. They even had Quicksilver turned off, despite the fact that it uses 1/3 less power than a comparable pinball game (I was going to cite a link to that in my blog, but I guess I haven't blogged about it... when I replaced the GI in QS with LEDs, I did a before and after comparison with a power meter and discovered the power savings).

Anyway, so my first match got under way with the #19 guy. I was extremely nervous and tightly wound, because I knew from keeping score for him that he had not developed his competitive skillz, and in spite of my "here to play not to win" philosophy, losing to him would have, to quote my college French professor Mlle Schoonmaker, sucked dead donkey dicks. I need to retroactively amend my philosophy to say that I'm here to play not to win, but not to crap out in the first round either. I just barely beat him on Mousin' Around (another terrible game! what is it with me?), Big Buck Hunter, and some third game which I forget.

By then the power problems were out of hand, so they called a break so they could deal with the problem and I went to dinner with Brian, who I hang out with when I can... he came in first the season that I came in second, and we seem to be pretty evenly matched. By the time we got back, they had pretty much fixed the power issue by bringing in a generator.

The guys whose match would result in my next opponent apparently did not have a dog to get home to so they took their good old time playing their match. But by the time they finally got back into playing, I had entered a state of mind that was extremely conducive to my pinball playing: I didn't really care if I won or lost, because both were good things. If I won I got to advance, and if I lost I got to go home and take care of the dog. Once there, I was nigh invulnerable.

The loser of that round had my same first name and owned a Quicksilver too, so it was the Plate o' Shrimp Lattice of Coincidence round. I think I won that one 2 to 1, and I didn't need to finish my last game because by the time I hit the third ball I had beaten him, including another good game on Strikes and Spares.

Now the pace picked up, because I knew almost everyone I played after that and they were aware of my urgency to not clean up dog poop when I got home. Next up was Ken, who plays in Baltimore. We pretty much trade off beat downs... sometimes I'll school him soundly, and other times he'll knock me off my high horse and make sure it tramples me in the process. I won that 2 to 1, and again the denouement was on Strikes and Spares. This time, I destroyed him utterly and salted the earth he lived on. I frickin' turned over the game and lapped him on the fourth ball. He recovered somewhat on his final ball so that I only almost beat him by a million points, 1.2M to 270K.

By now I was feeling pretty good. I was not scared at all. I just felt kind of... invincible. I had a very positive attitude about it. I think I could have taken on Lo Pan in a game of Chinatown or San Francisco if I had to.

Next up was Brian for 4th place, and I pretty much toasted him on bread, 2 to 0. He had watched me roll over SandS so he knew to steer clear of that train wreck. I think I beat him on Who Dunnit first, getting that ol' reliable spank mode Penthouse Party and becoming Roof Champion. The last game he picked was Sorcerer, and I managed to pull ahead on the last ball so I didn't have to finish that game either.

Then I went against Ralph for 3rd place, a guy I met for the first time on Friday but a lot of people knew. Ralph must not have been watching my previous Who Dunnit game and he picked it. It was touch and go until the last ball, when I got Penthouse Party again for a billion points. I didn't finish the last ball on that one either. I think I won that match 2 to 0 too.

And on to Kendall for 2nd place. He plays in the VA league and is working on a homebrew pinball project like I am, though he's a lot further along. He had a bad game of Sorcerer, then an awesome come-from-behind game of Monster Bash. However, that loss allowed me to pick... wait for it... Strikes and Spares for another erect nipple victory, 500K to 2 or 300K.

And finally, there could be only one. I was playing Jason for first place, another guy I'd never met before but everybody seemed to know. Since he was in the double elimination bracket and I was the plucky newcomer from the bottom, I had to beat him twice. He picked Big Buck Hunter Pro and I managed to pull off a narrow victory there. There was one awesome moment: He hit the Ram target and it kicked the ball straight down the middle. He looked at it dejectedly for a second, then said, "I got ass-rammed!" Working as I do with a lot of Indians, that just made me laugh and laugh. So he picked the next game, which was No Fear. Now, he had put up 1.5 bill on his first ball against Kendall earlier, but this time he just couldn't get it started. He got an easily beatable 450M, but unfortunately for me I couldn't get it started even worse than he did and took a loss.

And here we come to what proved to be my fatal mistake. I lost the game, so I could take a game pick or an order pick. Looking back at this narrative, that choice would be obvious: Strikes and Spares. But because my nascent strategic pinball mind has apparently not developed to the level of even basic common sense, that never even occurred to me. I thought back over the games and what I came up with is how well I did when other people picked the games. So I picked the order and allowed him to pick the game (in retrospect: Fuck you Robert Frost and your road less taken!). He picked Getaway, which was in the bar portion of John's place, hoping that the smoke and incredibly loud and mostly bad karaoke would distract me enough. It didn't really, but even though he did a beatable score, I came in about 8 million short for second place in B Division.

But despite that, I was so happy with my performance. I had six straight wins in single elimination, I played great most of the night, and I placed second when the most I was hoping for was to get through a few rounds. Everyone I played were great sports, we all had a great time, and we got to play a shitload of pinball.

After that we goofed off, watching the A Div players duke it out and playing games here & there for another hour or so until they got around to giving out the prizes. For second place, my prize was $62.50, which pretty much pays my expenses for the tournament and then some. But that also means that I am now a Professional Pinball Player. If/when I go to the Pro-Am Pinball Association Championship in July or August, I can hang out with the Pros and totally snub the Ams. Yeah! I'm quittin' my job tomorrow and following the Dream!

To add a cherry on top of my victory was the fact that Quicksilver -- WHO DID NOT DIE! -- got a semi-permanent fix to the flippers from Scott, the guy who repairs the games for the league. (I'm all about the movie quotes today.) It was turned off initially, but it was on for the bulk of tournament play.... and Scott even put a couple of bucks into it at the end of the night, probably because he was learning and trying to beat the game (they have one at PAPA, so it could show up in championship play some year and it never hurts to know the spank-worthy shots to make, such as the sweep shot on the center targets when 20K per target is lit). I'm going to pick up the game tomorrow after work, and in theory I'll get a little more cash from the quarters that QS has been taking in all week.

And when I got home (9 hours after I left) Darwin had been a super-good boy and managed to keep his wits and bladder about him. So all in all, it was a very good day.

Fairfax Pinball Tournament: Epic Fail!

2010-03-06T12:39:00.002-05:00

You know, it's a good thing that I go to leagues and tournaments to play rather than to win, because if I went to win I would spend a lot of time sorely disappointed. On the first night of the Fairfax Pinball Open I suck so hard I created my own gravity well. My two qualifying scores put me at #8 out of 10, though to be fair if the qualifiers today stink up the place I could end up in a better seeding position. As it stands now, I'll probably be in the lower half, which means I could move up in single elimination if I play well; however, based on last night's performance, that's unlikely to happen.

There was also a classics tournament, and I was eliminated in the first round, losing the first two games so we didn't have to play the third. The first game was Mousin' Around, which I picked because it's usually a good game for me. There was a bit of an irregularity, in that I scored an extra ball but the game was set not to award them, so I started playing it (and got the skill shot!) before I realized it was the other guy's ball. But I did the right thing and trapped the ball s

o my opponent could continue playing his ball. I doubt it made a difference in the outcome. Losing the first game means I got to pick the second, so I picked my own damn game, Quicksilver, and proceeded to lose. To be fair, both games were pretty close, but it was not one of my finest hours.

But I did do some volunteer scorekeeping, and did OK under the fairly light load. Today (Saturday) is usually when the biggest turnout is.

And just to give me that extra bit of bile in my mouth, Quicksilver developed flipper problems in its first day on the job in 25 years. The left flipper has some loose screws that probably need to be tightened by replacing them with bigger screws and could use a new coil stop. The right flipper is just weak and might have a problem with the EOS switch. The repair guy said he'd try to take a look at it, and since it's scheduled to be used in the one-handed mini-tournament, hopefully he'll look at it early today. And the gameplay is not very tight... it's got a low angle and the slingshots require more effort to fire than they should. I'll need to deal with that when she comes home. But here is a picture of it on site next to the engorged areolae of Strikes and Spares. A lot of people told me on how nice the game looks, especially with the LEDs, and I was happy to accept all compliments on QS's behalf.

But overall, it was pretty fun talking to people. I met Trent, the #7 ranked player in the world (I looked myself up and it turns out I'm in the high 1,400's), and Koi Morris, who it turns out I'd played a game of Maverick with at Allentown a few years ago (and it actually ended up in the blog... go to the end of the post to see). There was a guy there from my hometown of L.A. who edited reality TV shows for a living and came out specifically for the tournament.

I did get my first, second, and third runs at Big Buck Hunter Pro. My first two games kind of sucked, but the third was OK. I enjoyed it, but I didn't feel like investing $1 per game because I was already smelling up the joint.

And that was pretty much my day. Today I'm heading down in the late afternoon for the playoffs, but I'm guessing I'll get single eliminated pretty fast and I'll make it an early night.

On Location

2010-03-04T20:29:00.003-05:00

Well, everything went pretty well. As I mentioned, the game was loaded up, and the next day I drove the car and pin to work. After work I drove out to John's Place, getting there a little after 7. Only two other people were there, so I started unloading everything myself and setting it up. I did get some help when I lifted the backbox onto the game, but otherwise I got everything put back together in about a half hour. I was going to get help putting the back legs on, but then somebody pointed out that there was a pinball cart available. Boy, did that make things easier. In fact, later I realized that I had put the front legs on the back, so rather than adjusting the feet I just put the game on the cart and swapped the legs in about 2 minutes. Suddenly a cart seems like a good use of $300.

The game didn't get a lot of play while I was there. A couple of people played it after league, and a few told me how nice it looked -- it is a visually striking game, and it helps that at the time it was sitting next to Cyclopes, which looks like it was drawn by a 12 year-old on a textbook cover. I don't know if they're going to use the game in the tournament or if it's just going to be there for practice. The tournament starts tomorrow, so I'm going to go after work.

One funny thing that happened on Monday was the comedy of errors continued and I finished the night at #1 in A Division. One of the guys I was supposed to play against didn't show up and had no pre-played scores, so he forfeited. By dumb luck, one of the games we played was Mousin' Around, which usually does pretty well for me in league play, and the remaining guy I played against doesn't do well on it at all. I won one other game, and he beat me on the other two but not spectacularly, so I ended up in first place. I expect that to last exactly two weeks, but only because we have the Monday after the tournament off.

My baby is leaving home... sob

2010-02-28T21:09:00.002-05:00

I really haven't been posting a lot lately because I really haven't been doing much. It just hasn't been a good pinball year. Work on T2 is stalled because I need to sand the cabinet, and I can't do that while it's cold and there's almost 2 feet of snow on the ground (OK, there isn't that much on the ground right now, but there has been that much this month, and there's still a non-zero amount as I write this). And that leaves league stuff, which is that I'm #2 in A in VA and #Crap in B in MD. If you're surprised by the former, don't be... it was largely dumb luck. I had two average weeks and most of the guys I've played against had crappy weeks. I expect to be beaten back down the ladder soon.

And there's actually news, but I'm going to hold onto it for a while because of this:

The league sponsors a tournament every year that is coming up next week. League members usually bring in extra games, but the problem is that most of those games are trapped in basements by the aforementioned snow and mud caused by the melting snow. The guy organizing was lamenting this fact, and I mentioned that I have one game that is not in my basement, Quicksilver. So before I mentally talked myself out of it, I volunteered to bring it and leave it at John's Place for a week.

Now, for some context: Quicksilver has not been on location for about 25 years, and has been in my possession for 24 of those years. It has been moved a couple of times, but always in a truck... never in my SUV. I have never removed the game's head. Even when my wife and I promoted it out of the basement, I kept one bolt in the head and pivoted the head to get it through the too narrow porch door. But I had agreed to do this knowing that it would be a great big anxiety-inducing adventure.

So this weekend I got it ready for Quicksilver's location comeback. Two of the player displays had problems, so I replaced them with displays from Eight Ball Deluxe. This proved problematic, until I realized that I needed to jump pins 11 & 12 of the Bally displays to get them to work in a Stern game. I tested the coin mechs, cleaned out the coin box, set it to 50 cents per game, verified that the tilt worked, replaced most of the LEDs with normal bulbs because I didn't want to annoy paying customers with the flickering, changed the door lock from the identically keyed one to a unique one, zeroed the audit statistics, verified that the backbox lock worked, removed some magnets I had stuck on the coin door, cleaned some strapping tape residue that's been on the game since we moved to Maryland 15 years ago, changed the replay scores, printed a new pricing and replay card, switched the game to 3 balls, cleaned out the coin box, and gave it a quick cleaning.

Then I did the unthinkable. I removed the head. I set the backglass aside for safe keeping, panicked when it slid down and fell on the ground (thank gooseness it didn't break), and put the backglass somewhere safer where it couldn't fall. I started unplugging plugs from the boards, labeling them as I went. I also had to unscrew most of the wire holders to get the wiring out, and when I rescrewed them I left one end open so I could re-thread the wiring easily later. I didn't realize this, but I had to unplug just about every plug in the backbox, including the displays, because it was all cable-tied together (and I had to cut a few ties before I realized this). I dropped the wiring into the body, unbolted the head and... took it off. It was extremely nerve-racking.

With my wife's help I removed the legs -- the leg bolt-sized socket wrench I got as a prize in last season's league was great for this, btw. Finally, after my wife had cleaned out the SUV, I loaded it up and it is there now.

And tomorrow is Take your Pinball to Work Day. We will find out how it goes.

Where's the knob marked "VOL"?

2010-01-02T13:45:00.004-05:00

Happy New Year!

WPC audio boards seem to be a lot harder to find now than when I got my first one for Doctor Who a few years ago. After I got the driver board and spare CPU for T2, I went for weeks without a nibble about audio boards. The pinball repair guy at league says that since no one's made a replacement for it, the supply is drying up. In December one showed up on eBay in the UK but with shipping the final price was over $100. But as luck would have it, one showed up domestically on eBay in the middle of the month, and I was excited to see that it had a terrible title that was not conducive to saved searches... "Williams funhouse pinball soundcard". It missed my "wpc board" and "pinball (sound,audio) board" searches... but luckily I managed to catch it in my Funhouse net. It was a three day auction and it hardly got any bids. So I swooped in at the last minute and nabbed it for just over $30 with shipping. It took a week to arrive, but that wasn't the seller's fault -- the Post Office seemed to just give up about halfway through the holiday season.

I finally got around to trying it out last night in Doctor Who. It was deja vu all over again, because my daughter was watching a Doctor Who marathon on BBC America in honour of David Tennant finally regenerating out of the role... it was just like the old days when I had first gotten the game, which I would work on while the show was on.

The auction had said that you couldn't turn the volume down more than half way with the board. When I plugged it in, I found that I couldn't change the volume at all. After some repair guide reading, the problem appeared to be a failure in the potentiometer chip that controlled the volume, and a quick post to rgp seemed confirmed that. Luckily, while waiting for an answer to the post I found that Marco carries the chips for about $6... I wish I'd known that a few days ago because I had just ordered some stuff, but there you go.

While I was testing the board in Doctor Who and before I had read that in the guide, I could tell that the sound was different, but couldn't pinpoint it. It turns out that there are two versions of this audio board, one that was used from Funhouse to Party Zone, and the other for the rest. The difference is in the resistors used to balance the speech and music... lucky for me, since the board came out of a Funhouse and is destined for a T2, since they use the same board.

And it turned out that my first pinball game of the new year was on DW while I tested the board. It was a pretty good game, too -- I killed off two rounds of Daleks on the first ball -- and it was strange because I was actually playing it half-heartedly from off to the side because I didn't want to move a parts cabinet that was temporarily parked there. I'm hoping that bodes well for my gameplay in the New Year...

Romantic Pinball Road Trip

2009-12-29T09:45:00.003-05:00

For my birthday in October, the lovely and talented Frauline Entropy gave me the gift of pinball: A weekend driving around with her playing pinball. After some strategizing and research, I opted for the following itinerary for the weekend of December 4th:

Friday: Drive to New Jersey, stay in a Bed & Breakfast
Saturday: Spend the day at the Silver Ball Museum in Asbury Park, NJ
Sunday: Drive to Castle Video in Branchville, NJ

We also had some other alternate locations for Sunday in case something didn't pan out.

Our B&B was the Lillagaard, a late Victorian affair in nearby Ocean Grove. It was a couple of houses from the beach -- not that the beach in December was such a draw -- and about a mile from the SBM. It being the off season, we were one of only two couples there, the other being a grumpy gus and his wife who seemed to spend most of their time watching Fox News in the common room. The B&B was a lot of fun... kind of creaky, a lot of exposed pipes, kind of shoddy remodeling workmanship coupled with some nice flourishes, a coffin-like shower, and I was able to steal unsecured wifi sporadically from a nearby house. Friday we arrive after dark and ate dinner in an old drug store turned sandwich place a few blocks away. It was rainy and windy on Saturday, but that was no problem since we planned to spend the day inside playing games. The SBM was pretty cool... it was in the basement of a hipster clothing and record shop, and had about a hundred games set up, mostly EMs, a few early solid state games, and an Attack & Revenge from Mars for the kids with short attention spans. There were also a few random arcade games, like puck bowlers and putting games. Admission was $20, the games were mostly in good condition, and a lot of them had toppers with a blurb about the game. We pretty much spent most of the day there, though my wife goofed around in the town for a while. I did get a couple of high scores, which was cool. And the most amazing thing of all was that Mrs. Entropy had a good time... and no one was more surprised than she was. She really enjoyed the puck bowler, but ended up spending a lot of time with the from Mars brothers. At some point she even admitted that she wouldn't mind having them in the house! So now all I need to do is find an unused $6000 and 20 sq feet of floorspace and we'll be in good shape. We ate lunch at a surprisingly tasteless organic food coffee shop, and after I finally conked out we browsed a paranormal bookstore that was doing holiday photos with an abominable snowman, then ate dinner at a much better place than the organic place.

Sunday was a sunny but cold day, so we goofed around along the boardwalk for a bit. Then we drove about 2 hours to get to Castle Video, which is part of a mini-fiefdom consisting of storage, movie rental, and what looks like a couple of other small businesses. But the guy likes pinball, so he had about 15 games set up, mostly Williams and a few DE/Sega games. Again, my wife had a lot of fun, though she got spanked hard by a couple of games so she gravitated to the more accommodating games, like Whodunnit. I again put up a few high scores, most notably on Fish Tales where I scored a massive (for me) 300 million. I like to imagine the chagrin on the faces of the pinball league that meets at Castle Video when they wonder who that Joe guy is on a bunch of the machines. After that it was too late to go to any of the other stops, so we just headed home. All in all we had a pretty good time, and who knows? Maybe Mrs. Entropy will even accompany me to a show some time. This year the Saturday of Allentown falls on our anniversary... perfect for another Romantic Pinball Road Trip!

And speaking of gifts, for Christmas my wife got me an extremely cool baseball jersey from the Pacific Pinball Museum. I love PPM's art... I bought a copy of their Art Nouveau-style poster for the PP Expo a few years ago, and this year they posted the poster as a pdf for free. I printed it at 11x17 on one of the nice color printers at work, framed it, and hung it downstairs in the pinball area. Sweet!!!

I like the cut of that doctor's trim

2009-12-28T09:08:00.006-05:00

A bunch has been going on, but it's mostly newsy stuff that's not terribly interesting. For example, yesterday I found out that the Funhouse machine in a local gas station was gone... not sure if it's gone permanently or not. Came in third in VA league after an awesome semi-finals and terrible finals. Just to shake things up, in MD I managed to choke in the semi-finals for an anemic 5th place finish.

Last night I finally got around to replacing the translite glass in Doctor Who. For pretty much as long as DW has been set up, I've been using a piece of poorly cut lexan for the translite glass, with various sizes of Williams translite trim to hold it on and (what I now know to be) a Stern lift trim at the bottom. While lighter than a real glass and perfectly adequate when I didn't have one, this wouldn't do... especially since the Stern trim had a habit of falling off without a lot of provocation. Well, I got some real glass at Allentown this year, and I bought some real Williams lift trim from Marco a few weeks ago, so all the ducks were in a row.

I was able to reuse the side trim that was on the lexan because that was about the right length. The top trim on the lexan was actually two small pieces that I'd cut off the sides to make them fit, so I discarded those and cut a new piece using our Dremel. I also Dremelled the lift trim and those both fit pretty nicely. Then to make everything super-nice, I cut notches in the back of the top piece so the side trim would nestle snugly. As you can see from the picture, it's a pretty good fit... the other side, not so much, but it's good enough for something nobody ever sees. I'll do the same thing with the T2 translite glass, which only has two trims holding it on (and no lift trim, which made it a bitch to remove the first time). Unfortunately, I only ordered one lift trim from Marco, because I wasn't sure it was the right one. So I ordered another one from them this morning, and felt stupid because I had to pay for shipping again (I did manage to find one other part I needed, but that was of little consolation).

Marco actually did well by me with the previous order. I also got one of the plastics that gets shot up by the cannon on T2 and replacement decals for the drop target. I was going to make my own decals for the target, but Marco had them for $2 a piece, so after the Who-mobile incident I figured that was cheaper than doing it myself. When I got them, the decals sucked... it was blurry and the part number lettering was a sucky computer font, not the basic sans-serif of the original. I was literally able to print a better one using the image that accompanied the description on Marco's website. So I called up Marco and a very nice pinball parts lady helped me. After I described the problem, she went to the folder where they kept the decals and saw that there were two batches, one normal and one that sucked ass. She said she could see why I was unhappy with them. So she told me to keep the crappy ones and she sent me two of the good ones for free. Yay for Marco!

Quick! Tell a Lie!

2009-11-29T08:10:00.002-05:00

Here's an actual blog-sized post, not the bloated Proustian epics that I usually write.

I've been using the fully working WPC CPU in DW for about a month now, and the game pushed me up into the expert bracket right about the time that Boing Boing published this link a few days ago about auto-percentaging in pinball. Coincidence? I think so!

Of course, we've known for a while that DW was a smart cookie since the old CPU changed the W-H-O ramp rules to account for the Hang-on switch not working. The game has permanently upped the replay score and lowered scores on ramp shots... not quite as lowered as the DW that I play in the Baltimore league, but it's getting there. Interestingly, even with the adjusted scoring my top scores -- top, mind you, not typical -- are still in the 1/2 billion range... probably because I'm learning to exploit certain money shots more effectively, like the Sonic Boom.

2 T2: Misjudgement Day

2009-11-28T22:50:00.006-05:00

I am in a crappy mood today. Aside from Thanksgiving, which seemed to go pretty well, I haven't gotten much done this weekend and what I have gotten done has been pretty sucky. So I thought I'd just make everyone feel sucky by posting an entry.

Like Doctor Who, the two Terminators kind of appeared out of nowhere. There was a liquidation guy up in PA who was eBaying over 100 pins in various stages of working-ness and Europenosity (that is to say, some worked, some didn't, and a lot of them were 220V). It looked like the guy had bought out an operator or collector that had gotten a bunch of container games and was in the process of fixing them up. I had been keeping an eye on these games as they appeared, because a lot of them were pretty interesting... most went outside of my price range, though. It finally came down to a choice between a pretty complete Dr. Dude and two Terminators being sold together. I think The Dude abided for a little less than I would have paid for it, but by then I had already set my sights on the 2T2s. I won the auction for $535, and buyer's remorse set in immediately. ^_^;

They guy lives near York but since he wasn't a pinguy he wasn't going to the show. And since my SUV only holds one pin on a good day, I decided to pick the first up the week before the show and the second the day of. Logistically this was a stretch because my daughter had our SUV and we had her newly purchased used car because her school won't let her park with temporary tags. But luckily the license plates arrived the week after I won the auction. My lovely wife and the dog decided to join me if we added some sightseeing to the agenda, so on Saturday we went up to Gettysburg and dropped off my daughter's car, picked up our SUV, and headed east towards York. I picked one of the games at random and the guy helped me load it up. We stopped at a really nice dog park in York and had a picnic lunch, then went on to look at a Victorian mansion in Oakbourne which I think my wife found on the Internet while looking for God knows what. Really, this place has to be seen to be believed... it's like a miniature East Coast version of the Winchester House. The most striking feature is a water tower that is designed in the style of the house... that's me in the picture. It was a really weird and cool place. After that we headed home. Considering it was primarily a pin-centric trip, we all had a pretty good time.

When I went up for the York show, I left at an ungoshly hour so I could pick up the second game -- I had to load it myself because the guy was out of town -- and then toodle over to arrive at the fairgrounds as close to opening as possible. The only real problem was that he said he would shrink-wrap the game so I could load it easily and he didn't... I ended up using an extension cord to keep the head from falling off while I lifted the game onto a dolly. But after some struggling I got it loaded up. There was also an ethical conundrum... in addition to my game, he had left out about 10 others, with random circuit boards and translites strewn around an overhang next to his garage. It would have been the work of but a moment to get a few extra parts while I was there, but I chose civilization over anarchy and left with only what I had paid for.

So now we get to the games themselves. They have no boards in either of their heads. One has all of its ramps, the other doesn't. The one on the left looks like it was operated by a Charles Dickens character... it is worn, filthy, has electrical tape splices, and the faded cabinet looks like it was stored in water. Every time I touch the front or back of the playfield my hands come back grimy. The one on the right is relatively clean, is in an unfaded but not perfect cabinet, but is missing paint over the auto-fire insert. Neither has the Hunter-Killer ship, but one has the wire that holds it (yay?). Everything on both games within the line of fire of the cannon is beaten to shit, though the nicer game is in marginally better shape. Both are 220V.

The plan -- and I did have a plan, believe me -- is to combine them into one game, sell the spare parts, play the game for a while then sell it, hopefully netting a tidy profit. I'm pretty sure it's possible, but it will take a lot of work. The biggest hurdle I have is to NOT keep the second playfield for the playfield project... I keep thinking that maybe if I sell enough of the cabinet parts I could keep the playfield, and then I flagellate myself to purge myself of the unclean thoughts. I really can't afford to keep the playfield.

I've started looking around for replacement boards. Part of the plan -- I did mention the plan, didn't I? -- was to fix and use the spare CPU and display boards that I bought for DW, which would mean I'd only need to get the driver and sound boards. The driver board was no problem, and within a week I had bought a hacked but theoretically working rev 3 driver board from eBay. It won't work in T2, but I have a rev 1 board in DW, so I've use the 3 board in DW and the 1 board in T2. As I mentioned elsewhere, I also picked up a third and blessedly working CPU board. Both boards were a little over $100 each... the CPU was a bargain, and hopefully the driver board will turn out to be as well. And I just review an earlier post and found that I pretty much said all of this already. Well, I guess it just bears repetition.

My initial decision was to use the filthy playfield with the parts from the clean game; so I stripped it down and threw all of the appropriate parts into the dishwasher. Once again, the Shag came through for me... the disgusting wiring harness came out of the washer looking like new. The wires actually had colors instead of being uniformly London Blitz gray. I gave the denuded playfield a few weeks ago and gave it a thorough cleaning this weekend. As the grime comes off, it's pretty clear that it's not the better playfield. So far the only problem I can see on the clean game is that wear spot, but on the dirty playfield the area around the bumpers is worn through the mylar, the "Timer" insert has lost paint, and it looks like the area above the auto-fire insert has been touched up. There's also a scorch mark on the underside where it looks like a flipper coil 'sploded. Yeesh.

And that's pretty much where I am right now. I'm kind of bummed about the playfield being in as bad a shape as it is, but on the other hand if I go with the clean playfield I won't have to transfer the parts, which was something I was dreading.

I think my next steps are to get a cabinet ready to go, buy some legs (there are some on sale til the end of the year from an arcade supplier with an office in Baltimore... good timing), switch it over to 120V (luckily I bought a US line filter when I was acquiring DW parts), and see how far I can get until I start a new round of What Am I Missing Today?

But now I'm exhausted AND in a crappy mood. So all of this will have to wait for another time.

We give thanks... for Pinball

2009-11-26T19:44:00.004-05:00

You may recall that last month was my birthday, and for reasons explained in previous posts we celebrated late. Well, my wife gave me a pinball-related gift this year: A weekend driving around playing pinball. It was kind of an interesting idea. I scoped around a locations within a few hours and came up with two options: The Silverball Museum in Asbury Park, which just opened fairly recently... I think I heard about it on rgp. They look pretty EM heavy, but whatever. A guy in league and he had been there and it's pretty neat. There were a couple of other options which I got out of the Pinball Locator, but I decided on Castle Video in Branchville, NJ. They are weighted towards new Stern and WPC, so that will balance the museum nicely. I was thinking of a third or fourth stop -- Eight on the Break in Dunellen, NJ and the Pinball Parlour in Earlington, PA were what I was thinking of -- but decided that the former doesn't have as many games as Castle Video (though they have a few nice ones CV doesn't have) and I've been in the latter a few times now and their hours make it hard to swing. We're going up the weekend after Thanksgiving and we'll stay in a bed & breakfast near the museum. Should be fun!

League is going well-ish. I'm in first place in VA and have squeaked into the top five in MD. I'll definitely be in the playoffs in VA no matter how badly I do next week, but it could go either way in MD. I seem to play for crap when the pressure's on, but we'll see how it goes. If I could just play as well on Doctor Who there as I do at home, I'd be in pretty good shape.

I'm going to try to discuss T2 in my next post, but first here's a useful thing I made. I got the T2 ROMs from reliable ROM source John Wart Jr. and wanted to test them just to make sure. So I got out a WPC CPU board, plugged in the ROM, and used my power supply and some alligator clips to connect it up. This is always very stressful for me, because I'm worried that the clips will short against the wrong pins or something. So last week I decided to get the ROMs for Fish Tales and came up with a bright idea. I made a connector for the CPU's power plug so that I can easily attach the power supply's clips to the proper wires (color-coded, smart me!). It works great, and it's one less thing I have to worry about when I test CPUs.

The White Rose pinball show was fun. I got to play a bunch of games, I ignored the crap and enjoyed the non-crap. I was kind of disappointed at the shopping, as I didn't find much that I would need for T2. But I did invest in a full set of LEDs for Quicksilver. I did see one of the guys there from league, but he was just there to pick up a game so we didn't interact much. I picked up the second T2 and the Fish Tales playfield, and I sold a guy a pair of gold legs (painted, not real ones) that were on the first T2 for (what turns out to be) the bargain price of $10. I had my after-show Roburrito which was tasty. Some guys there had a solid state repro of the EM game King of Diamonds, which looked and played beautifully. It was a few thousand dollars, though, kinda out of my price range at this time. I think they plan to make other games. That's about all I can think of, other than the flyer in Roburrito for someone selling a hearse for $1200 ("Want a sick ride?" it said). It would probably be good for hauling pins...

Halloween at Castle Entropy

2009-10-31T23:11:00.003-04:00

Halloween sucks for us. We live on a busy street with no sidewalks, so we've gotten about 3 trick or treaters in the 10 years we've lived here. And with the Entropy Scion at college, we don't even get a little run off from her holiday. Mrs. Entropy and I carved our pumpkins, watched a little Anime, and ate most of the good candy ourselves. Boo hoo.

On Monday I bought a new WPC CPU board that was advertised as 100% working on eBay for just over $100 + way more shipping than it should have been. Although I've been burned by the "100% working" ploy, in this case it was truth in advertising. I plugged it into Doctor Who and it seems to work pretty well. I can hit those ESCAPE targets now, and it certainly makes the Hang On shot actually scorable. There's one opto that I know is out (the right-most gray button target) and the right bumper doesn't seem to be working, but these are minor things. I played a few satisfying games with the new board. I also bought a new power driver board, a somewhat hacked rev 3 board which can't be used in Terminator, so the idea is that DW is going to donate its rev 1 board to T2 and use the rev 3 board. That's assuming the new board works, but testing it is a lot more effort than a CPU. Plus that wasn't sold as 100% working, it was "functional when it was pulled out of a BSD."

I really need to narrate the T2 story, but that will have to be another time. However, Shaggy has come through again with another wonderful dishwasher tip: Throwing the wiring harness in. I ran both of the T2 cabinet harnesses through (each as their own load, in deference to my wife who doesn't want Pinball Grime on her dishes) and they came out really nice... one was already pretty clean, but t'other was filthy and that looks really good now.

Wednesday's league was good, I think it was 3 wins and 1 loss. Pasted them on Mousin' Around with a season high score... MA is proving to be my goto game for decent scoring. There's one in both locations now, and it tends to be pretty good to me. My loss was on Fish Tales, which I just can't get started on in league... every other FT likes me, but the one at the Volleyball House has it in for me. I typically hit the boat ramps repeatedly to activate the Monster Fish award, but I have a hard time getting 3 ramp shots. The bad news about Monday league is that my complete destruction of my group last week has pushed me into A Division. Kinda cool when looked at from a distance, but up close it could spell my doom... the A Team seems to be a lot better than I am, so I'm really not sure how well I'll do.

Birthday Pinball Extravaganza!

2009-10-26T22:47:00.002-04:00

Yesterday was my birthday, and my wife gave me possibly the best gift of all... she kept my sister-in-law and the boyfriend-in-law busy while I goofed off alone in the house with the dog. We actually kept my birthday a secret from them... my sister-in-law has an uncanny sense for coming to visit at the worst times. Once my wife told her specifically not to come around a certain day and the sis-in-law came during that week. This time we didn't tell them not to come, we just lamented their timing. It's not because I don't like my wife's sister, it was just that I had no desire to celebrate one of my rare prime numbered birthdays (47) with my wife's sister's boyfriend, who at the time was a complete stranger. So I informed my wife that we would celebrate my birthday after they left, and she was OK with that. And now that I've met the bf-in-law, I feel it was the correct course of action. I mean, he's OK, kind of monopolizes the conversation with stories of working for the Oakland city car barn, but he's not a guy I really want to party with. It's sort of like listening to my Dad's WWII stories, only boring and with no familial connection.

Anyway, so I thought I'd check the FSPA pinball location database to see if there was anything around other than Sole d'Italia's Family Guy. Well, there was! A Fish Tales in the Potomac Community Center, only one of my favorite games on a street that I take home from work when the Beltway is backed up (more or less every day)!!! E. Yoink. Exclamation. Point.

So I drive down there and the game's in great shape! It's there with a bunch of video games in the game room. They keep them turned off so parents can regulate their kids' gameage. FT kinda was a little tilted in the wrong direction so the ball goes SDTM a little more than I'd like, but cheeze! I got a couple of free games, and at one point I had six three foot kids clustered around watching me because the Halloween party had just let out. That was kind of funny. Anyway... frickin' awesome. A game I like on my way home from work. A great surprise on a largely covert birthday.

But the hits just kept on coming today! In league, I was 2 points away from a perfect night! I came in demonstrably first on three games and second on the fourth... recall that when the 2nd and 3rd scores don't add up to the first place, first place steals third's point. I was making my shots... jumps in No Fear, 3 or 4 Borg shots in a row in Star Trek, an awesome Penthouse Party in WhoDunnit... and if I had kicked ass on Twilight Zone (possibly by getting the extra ball that was lit but I couldn't seem to hit), I could have done it. I feel bad for the guy in my group that came in 3rd on all three games, because I think he got 0 points (*cringe*). But I can't feel too bad for him, because he was 3 points behind me in our division. Honestly, I think I could have handled him getting a few points instead of me completely destroying him, but I guess that's the way the pinball bounces. Now if I can just do that well in the Wednesday night league, maybe I'll be getting somewhere.

Barfin' up a blog entry

2009-10-24T23:45:00.002-04:00

I'm really tired after a long day running around Gettysburg with my wife, daughter, dog, sister-in-law, and boyfriend-in-law. Much time was spent in strained silence while the bf-in-law, dog and I rode around by ourselves while the ladies kept their own car. I see it as penance for buying a crapload of new pinball stuff.

Yeah, I said a crapload. A pair of Terminator 2 parts games from eBay, a nearly complete Fish Tales playfield from rpg, and a mostly incomplete Bally Playboy playfield from Craigslist. Yoink!

More fascinating blow-by-blow accounts will follow, but I thought I'd open the blogging floodgates to try to get the flow of information moving again. Sadly, even though I haven't been writing, things have continued to happen.

Let's start with easy stuff. I did decide to do both the Virginia and Baltimore leagues after all. I failed pretty decisively for the first few weeks, but I've been surging in VA so now I'm #1 in the hood, G. Last week in MD I had my first really good week and moved up into the top 5. (Both of these are in B Division, of course.) MD is an interesting league... it's in an old warehouse that's been converted into a mecca for Volleyball, and in the corner are the league's pinball machines. It's an odd place to play pin... last week, a guy was playing Shrek and a volleyball bounced off the playfield glass, barely missed his head, and landed in the kid's play area. He didn't even miss a beat and kept right on playing... I think he ended up with a pretty good score, too. They're doing construction so parking is a bitch. Overall, they're nice guys... I think they're a little more competitive than the VA gang, which would explain why I'm on top in VA and in the middle there. I don't know if I'm going to continue two nights a week after this... I'll probably alternate between the two depending on how I feel. VA is more convenient to go to after work, while MD is more convenient from home and I work at home most Wednesdays. It's also rough on the finances, because each league is $60 minimum per season. But we'll see.

And I see by the clock on the desktop that it's just past midnight, so I am now more or less 47 years old.

Pinball Elbow?

2009-09-20T20:44:00.003-04:00

So, my right arm has been hurting for a few weeks... mostly one of the muscles in my forearm hurts when I pick up something heavy, or when I was doing my squeeze ball exercises in the car. I finally went around to going to the doctor and after a few probing questions she said it looks like Tennis Elbow. When I told her my major arm activities were mousing and pinball, she said she thought the twisting in pinball was causing the problem. At this point I told her she was thinking about foosball, not pinball, and described the flipper motion. She agreed that that probably didn't cause the problem, but suggested I lay off while under treatment (consisting of an anti-inflammatory drug, a cream, and wearing a brace).

So I was pretty good and didn't do any pinball until last night, when I went to the end of the season party for the pinball league. It was at a members house, a crazy big affair in the semi-rural suburbs of Virginia. They had tasty Mexican food and a basement filled with pins, almost all 90's and 00's games with a decided bias toward Pat Lawlor. One of the few exceptions was a 1934 World's Series, which was actually kind of a blast to play. There were two contests. The first was a Safe Cracker Assault the Vault challenge, where they inserted a magic token into Safe Cracker, which puts it into Assault the Vault mode, a 90 second ball free-for-all, and the highest score wins. I didn't win that. The other was way more fun than it sounds: Cashball, which was basically a half playfield that Williams put on top of a slot machine (probably to use up pin parts after they got out of the business). It basically autoplays a simple game of pinball, shooting the ball around a track with flippers and autoplungers. Various things get you extra balls, and each time the ball goes through the playfield everything is worth more points. The only interaction you have with it is shooting the ball, which you can get a skill shot. So I didn't win that either, but at the end of the evening I played a few more games... and on the last one I spanked it within an inch of its life. I got about 3-4 extra balls. The highest score had been about 2,700 and I scored over 11,000. The guy who owned it said he'd never even seen a score with 5 digits before. Sadly, there was a bug in the high score function so although it showed I had the high score, it didn't display it properly. Anyway, it was a lot of fun.

So on the way home from the party, I noticed that my arm was hurting more than it had been since I started treatment. At that point, I was willing to give my doctor the benefit of the doubt. In the long run, I don't know what I'm going to do about that... league starts tomorrow, and I'm even thinking about doing the Wednesday night league in Baltimore too (subject to my wife's approval, and she wasn't too keen last time I mentioned it). Also, I'm wondering how messed up my arm will be after the pinball show in three weeks. Anyway, we'll see how that goes.

I did have an anemic start to my eBay season... sold 4 out of 9 things for some decent change, including a part I bought for $5 which sold for $17. To add insult to the buyers' injury, I sold a second one I had to the second highest bidder for $16. And I've still got one left. Sweet! But then I spudded last week and almost got there this week, but no go. I would like to sell enough so that I've paid off my debt to the family by the time the show rolls around (about $100 to go). eBay has not had much I want to buy at prices I can afford lately... I don't know if it's the new fees or the changes in seller agreements or what. It doesn't really bother me since I'm still making money, but the guys on rgp are always bitching about it. Well, I suppose waiting for next week to sell means I can get more stuff ready.

Andannuderdendum

2009-09-03T07:15:00.002-04:00

This just occurred to me... swapping out the #44 bulbs with #47s in Paragon shouldn't have taken it from anemic to super-bright just on the merits of lower amperage. Now I think that one or more of the old bulbs had probably aged to the point where their resistance was higher than it should have been... one or two of them had the chromed surface of a bad bulb. In deference to the late Michael Jackson, one bad apple DID spoil the whole bunch, girl.

Andthendum

2009-09-02T08:57:00.003-04:00

And then I remembered what I was going to type last night, but forgot.

My wife wanted me to play some Katamari on the Playstation over the weekend, but before she made it down to the basement I popped in the Williams Pinball Hall of Fame (follow the link... Amazon has it new for $5.50! Score!). I'd been thinking about PHoF since I read that the PS/3 version is supposed to have Medieval Madness, Tales of the Arabian Nights and either No Good Gofers or Monster Bash depending on who you listen to. I'm leaning toward NGG, though I don't consider that a big selling point... I'd think that MB would require a license from Universal Studios, which would be tough to swing in a low margin game like PHoF. Anyway, I ended up having a pretty good time playing... I finished a few goals and unlocked a wizard mode or two. I still haven't unlocked the two hidden tables yet, so I'll keep plugging along. Williams PHoF seems easier than the Gottlieb one, mainly because the goals in those damn EM tables spank me silly. Get a special in Ace High and Central Park? Please. Give me full-sized flippers and then we'll talk.

Either way, I'm eager to get more PHoFs, even if I have to sacrifice and buy a PS/3 in order to do it. I'd really like a Bally edition, but unfortunately Bally has some really good games that are unfortunately licensed properties (like Wizard! and Captain Fantastic). Fireball should be doable, though. I saw a thing online that said PHoF was actually a surprisingly good selling game, especially given the apparent lack of interest in pinball as a whole. I'd like to believe that's a simple classic games = awesome : new games = suck equation, but I just don't see that. Anyway, hopefully the prospects for new versions with more manufacturers or more games are good.

The other thing I forgot was I attempted to fix a physics problem with Eight Ball Deluxe over the weekend. The trouble is that the easiest shot to hit the Eight Ball target -- from the lower left flipper -- almost always causes a SDTM drain on my game. When I played an EBD at PAPA, I noticed that machine didn't have that problem. My puny brain reasoned that the problem was either that there is some physical object which causes this (either the clear plastic the ball rolls off of or the post at the bottom of the 8 ball target enclosure) or my machine was not in balance. The latter seemed likeliest, as I think I've only formally balanced one of my games (Quicksilver, when it was kicked upstairs to the living room). So Saturday night I decided to see what I could do. A level told me that the player-side legs were definitely off center by a bit. I tried turning the feet of the legs, but they appear to be a little rusty and wouldn't turn. I didn't want to turn this into a big production, so I cut up some cardboard squares and shoved them under the errant leg. The result? Maybe it's a little better, but not much. I think I'll need to watch it over the course of many games, and possibly take the glass off and study it in depth... probably I should keep records of how many times I lose the ball from that shot and why.

OK, this time I've said everything I wanted to say.

#2!

2009-09-01T21:58:00.002-04:00

The pinball league finals were last week and I came in a solid second place. I did great in the first half when I was playing against the other top five finishers in my division, but I pretty much choked for most of the second half with the top three. But I'm more than happy... this is my first time, so second place is good enough. I will say that there was some pretty good pinball going on... one guy who'd been knocked out of the A-Division finals was playing Twilight Zone and got Lost in the Zone in two subsequent games. Then there was the guy who almost rolled over Strikes and Spares in one ball (~900K points).

Points were given out depending on your place, and there were prizes with point values, so the end of the night was basically the shopping segment from Wheel of Fortune (the game show, not the pin). I got a framed Whirlwind translite, a Williams window sticker, and the rest on a gift certificate for the Spiegel Catalog.

I got some repairs done over the weekend. Black Knight has blown the playfield light fuse, so I replaced that. I also finally replaced the upper ball lock plastic which I've had for years but never gotten around to. The sound on Eight Ball Deluxe has been goofy, and it got to the point where it was saying the wrong things... it would say "Get the 15 ball" instead of the 8 ball. I reseated the J2 plug that goes from the CPU to the sound board, and that fixed it... so that's basically two connectors on the CPU with problems I'll need to address at some point.

Then yesterday I started thinking about Paragon's weak feature lights, and rather than fixing the power board I decided to take the easy approach and replace all of the #44 bulbs with lower power #47 bulbs to see if that helped. I ended up swapping almost 50 bulbs, and that did the trick. It's still not great when doing the lamp test, but during normal play the bulbs are nice and bright, even when the Paragon letters are flashing. It was an easy fix that I should have tried sooner.

The next couple of weeks are going to be busy... eBay season is starting soon, the White Rose show, the next league season, the league party, plus my usual crapload of non-pinball related activities. sheesh!

Results!

2009-08-19T13:59:00.003-04:00

Well, I came to PAPA last weekend and ended up having a lot of fun. I went up on Friday. It was a pretty long drive -- over 4 hours with limited stops -- but when I got there it was pretty impressive. It's basically a huge carpeted warehouse filled with lots of fairly well-maintained pinball machines. The center area was roped off for competitions, but all the other games were available for play, usually for 50 cents each. Then off to the side there was the big board showing scores and standings. There are a handful of video and novelty games for the kids, too.

The collection is pretty awesome. A lot of them are organized by theme, so you have a Space area (with Space Shuttle, Space Station, Star Trek, Attack+Revenge from Mars, Space Invaders, etc.), a Zaccaria section, an early EM section, etc. I got to catch up on my recent Stern games (24, CSI, and Batman) and play some super-rare games (Varkon, Blackwater 100, and Joust to name a few). And to contrast the lame-ass crap that you see at shows, all of these games were in perfectly reasonable working order -- maybe not all perfect, but highly playable. I can't think of one game I played that was mechanically not up to snuff.

The competition went OK for someone who didn't care whether he won. I entered two tournaments, "Classics" and the lowest division... if I had managed to make it to the playoffs in C division, I would have had to have come back on Sunday, but I didn't think I would and I solidly met that expectation. Classics was mostly EMs and a few early SS games, and I was in the top 8 for an hour or so. I ended the day in the top 25% out of 100 players, which I thought was fine. I even had a top 10 score on one of the games, but that was balanced by my bottom 10 score on another. In C Division I can in just out of the upper third, and playing a couple of sucky games didn't help... I only got points for two of my five games, Batman (which I did spanked in practice) and Doctor Who (with which I was able to use secret techniques gleaned from playing at home, namely racking up a huge playfield multiplier then starting multiball). Both games I finished in the top 40. Overall, I had a good time and I thought I did fine for my skill level.

I did meet up with a couple of people from the league, which allowed me to have the novel experience of actually hanging around with people at a pinball-related event. I even got to play a few games with a guy in my division, which was pretty fun. We played a few games of Joust, which is a blast with two players... you play 3 normal balls, then the game spews all the balls out onto the playfield for 30 seconds of nuttiness. I was invited to join the group for dinner, which was nice. It did keep me out later than I would have liked, because they were all staying in hotels and I had a 4 hour drive ahead of me. So as soon as we got back, I jumped in my car and drove.

The trip back was hard but not the helldrive it could have been. Towards the end I was stopping every 30 minutes or so just to keep myself in drivable condition -- not helped by all the budget-related rest area closures. I finally made it home at 2:30 AM.

Next week are the league finals, so we'll see how that goes.

And one final note, on Saturday I beat my current high score on Paragon with a score of 962,000. I basically got the 40K super bonus on the first ball and the 5x multiplier for most of the balls. Assuming uniform scoring and adjusting that to a 3 ball game, that would have put me in 4th place for that game in the B Division at PAPA. Sadly, I checked the Classic Joe scoresheet from my youthhood and found that my top score for the Big P was 1.02 million, so I have a little farther to go before I can do le Danse Superieur on my 18 year-old self.

Consolation Prize

2009-08-12T18:16:00.002-04:00

Possibly as a way of making up for my lousy performance at the pinball league, I finally beat Davros on Doctor Who last night... just once, and there weren't any crazy multipliers at work, but I managed to do it.

ugh

2009-08-10T22:17:00.002-04:00

Week 9 was a bad week, and I just got home from Week 10 and it sucked pretty bad, too. My warmup games were crap, and my league games were crap. Luckily the other guys in my group were mostly playing from crap as well, because it was like a toilet backed up or something. It was made worse by one of the guys in my group listening to his iPod the whole time, which I found kind of rude. I should still be able to get into the playoffs, though.

Next Friday I'm heading up to PAPA for some pin in the 'burgh. Hopefully I'll play better than I did tonight.

I did have a lucky Doctor Who repair incident. I started playing a few nights ago and I'm surprised I hadn't noticed it before, but there was only a screw where there should have been a post and bumper at the bottom of the Repair Targets and the Hang On corridor... looking at an old picture confirms it. Anyway, I must have whacked the screw askew with a well placed ball. Luckily, my basement was arranged such that the spare playfield was right behind me, so I took the post & rubber off and put it on in the working game. Problem solved!

Longtime readers will be tired of this refrain, but I'm starting to get a hankering to work on my playfield project again. I even rearranged things slightly so that Silverball Mania, my designated experimental playfield, is set up next to the desk. Something's bound to happen now!

Whoa.

2009-07-31T22:28:00.003-04:00

Week 8 of the pinball league went better than expected. I am still in first place and got a pretty good score, considering I wasn't even there. Jack*Bot was one of my group's games, so my triumphant 4 B point score was counted, and I stole a point for that as well. My group also had Mousin' Around which was a good score, I just barely eked out a win on Skateball, and even my old nemesis Star Trek gave me a second place finish. That plus 4 bonus points (apparently, the match points are considered a virtual fifth machine and a scored accordingly... yoink!) gave me 16 total points out of a maximum (?) of 20. I'm now at #9 out of 19. I guess I'll find out next week if I'm going to move up to Division A or stay in B for the whole season.

The big question is whether my performance of the last few weeks is because of the practicing I've been doing. Honestly, I don't know. I feel like I'm playing better now that I've learned some of the advanced techniques and put a name to some that I already used. And I tried keeping track of my scores when I played at home, but I didn't stick with it so it would be hard to judge from that.

Now I'm getting super antsy to find out how I do in the last two weeks... will I continue doing well? Choke? Become so smug that collapse in on myself and start to burn? Probably it will be some combination of those, but I'm really interested to find out.

On a side note, we also went to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I was pleasantly surprised by it, because it certainly wasn't what I expected. I guess the filmmakers took advantage of the fact that this was basically an all-talking exposition book to make Harry Potter and the Extended Surreal Tone Poem. The entire movie was like a dream... kind of a nonsensical dream if you haven't read the book, because they had to leave so much out to fit it in 2.5 hours. A pretty bold choice and extremely cool for a big movie franchise... especially since it looks like they intended to do that, as opposed to the second Transformers movie, which apparently is an attempt by Michael Bay to remake Dali & Buñuel's Andalusian Dog with giant robots.

How'd THAT happen?

2009-07-26T09:21:00.002-04:00

I'm not really sure how this came about, but I am #1 in points at the pinball league. I think it's just a matter of luck and a handful of good scores on key machines. The league scoring has this rule for "point stealing", where if your score is greater than the sum of the two players beneath you, then you steal a point from the lowest scorer. For example, normally you get 3 points for 1st place, 2 for 2nd, and 1 for third. But if player one's score is 5000, P2 is 3000, and P3 is 1500, since 5000 > 3000 + 1500, P1 will steal P3's point, so the points will be P1 = 4, P2 = 2, and P3 = 0. I think P2 & P3 can steal from P4, but I'm not totally sure how that works since I thought P4 gets 0.

Anyway, I'm not sure how long I'll be on top or what that will get me if I manage to stay. I'm definitely at the top of the B Division, so another good week or two will move me up into the bottom of A Division, where the players are WAY better than I am.

This week I'm not going because tomorrow is my wife's birthday and league night probably wouldn't go over so well. So a few weeks ago I pre-played all 9 games and those scores will be used for this week. I did pretty well on a few of the games, so I'm hoping my group will get Jack*Bot (4 billion points!) this week instead of, say, Star Trek TNG (FAIL).

Not much going on in the repair world lately. I'm kind of focusing on striking a subtle balance between getting the house clean and sitting on my fat lazy ass, so there hasn't been much time for anything other than furtive practice games here and there. I have sold a couple of spare parts by answering Mr. Pinball want ads to the tune of about $50. I also traded a work table in my workspace in exchange for milk crates full of my records that were in my wife's workspace, which definitely worked out better for her. But the lost work area did give me a little extra storage space so I could move three rogue playfields from in front of a file cabinet into my area. It also got the playfields out of our basement's flood plain, so that's good news for sure.

By the way, the Nintendo DS games that I found a few weeks ago? Instant Karma did get me after all... knocked me right on my head. Last week I carried the Super Mario 64 DS cartridge in a backpack pouch separately from my game case, and something happened to it so now it doesn't boot. I guess in a way Karma had already gotten me when I tried to play Sonic Chronicles, because that game was so bad that just playing it was like being punished.

Training? Luck? Or some third alternative...?

2009-07-05T14:09:00.003-04:00

I forgot to mention that since I started training, I've become the Loop Champion on Doctor Who twice in as many days. I honestly can't attribute this to anything I've been doing, except possibly that I'm getting better at the shot. I even hit it enough times in a row to get the ramp door to close, which is the game's way of saying "Cut it out already."

Still no sign of a Davros Multiball, though.

We're gonna need a montage

2009-07-05T00:07:00.003-04:00

League continues. I went up in the standings after the first week, down after the second, up after the third, and I lucked into going up slightly last time because I got extra points due to my score on WHO dunnit being greater than the 2nd and 3rd place players. I also decided to go way out on a limb and register for PAPA in August... I'm going to go for one day, mostly to play, but also to see how I do in a real tournament setting.

However, I'm starting to run up against my inconsistency as a player. I haven't really competed against similarly skilled players in at least 25 years... not since my days in the UCLA game room between classes and playing Blackout with me mates in the old King George V Pub between dart games. Since then, I've mostly played alone and I've been focusing on touring each game's features rather than scoring boffo points. Being an irregular player wasn't really a problem, because if I goofed up I'd just play another game until I was satisfied.

But with all this competitive playing I'm doing lately, I'm suddenly motivated to improve ma skillz. So like Little Mac before me I have to go into training.

I started by watching some videos by this guy Leo Something-or-other. Unfortunately, there was very little useful information... they're geared mostly towards the novice player, with just a few advanced tricks.

A more helpful resource has been ipdb's playing skills pages. Novice and intermediate were pretty obvious, so I started trying out the advanced skills. I did the Chill Manuever last week during a league game on Jack*Bot so I can at least do that, even if I can't necessarily do it reliably (and it's hard to practice because none of my home games have a post). I've done the Bounce Pass and Hold Pass, so those are a matter of learning to use them consistently in play. The one thing I did learn is something I don't think they list (but Leo shows): Passing the ball between flippers by holding the ball then quickly flipping so the ball goes up the inlane then back down with enough velocity to bounce to the next flipper. I practiced for a while with the glass off so I could try it multiple times, and I've gotten reasonably good at it.

The thing I really need to work on is shaking the machine to influence the ball, something I've never done much. I'm trying to work on the Up Push when the ball is in the slingshots and nudging when the ball is near the in/outlanes. Yesterday I nudged when the ball was past the switch in the outlane, but today I was doing it before it hit the switch... still too late to do anything, but I'm doing it earlier. I'm also not positive that I'm doing it in the right direction. It helps that I haven't hooked up the tilt on Doctor Who, though shaking the machine in any way causes the Dalek Dome to move around since it's not screwed down.

Finally, I've started keeping track of my scores so I can try to see trends, hopefully improvements. I used to keep a list of my high scores when I was a kid... I still have them, in fact... I think the high score on Quicksilver is from that list.

Now I'm going to fade out in my montage... If you fade out, it seems like more time has passed in a montage. Montage!

Theft, And Wandering Around Lost

2009-06-27T23:20:00.005-04:00

First, a quick pinball repair tip. I was talking to Scott, the guy who cares for the games at John's Place where my league night is, about my sticking Who flipper. He suggested using a little teflon lubricant where the big metal thing is hanging up on the End of Stroke switch. When I mentioned that I had thought lubes verboten in pins, he said this stuff was OK. The Internet confirmed his recommendation, so I picked some up from Radio Shack in a handy pen dispenser. I just tried it tonight and it works great. I applied a few drops sparingly to the big metal thing, worked the flipper action a few times, then played a sticky-flipper-free game. Thanks, Pinball Repair Man!

My work closes early on Fridays during summer, so I took a pinball road trip to Loudoun County, VA, where there were a purported five locations with games. It took about 5 hours and I ended up driving about 100 miles, but I managed to investigate them all. Four of the five were still there, and I spanked three of them, getting high scores on a Family Guy, Revenge from Mars, and almost a billion on old-school Indiana Jones.

Now, to be fair, RfM and IJ were 5 ball games, and instead of specials they gave out extra balls. But still... where is this kind of playing on league nights? The locations were two bowling alleys and two pizza places. One pizza place had a Road Show and Hurricane, which was awesome until I started playing them: They were in terrible shape. The bulldozer didn't register hits in Road Show, and Hurricane had bad switches and weak flippers. Barf. I won't even Google Map the location because the games were so bad. On t'other hand the second pizza place, Lovettsville Pizza & Subs, was frickin' awesome. This place is in the middle of Bugfuck, VA, but the games were in awesome shape. Three of the four games were working, they were clean (!!!), and they were all 5 balls. Granted, it was cramped because apparently the Little League season had just ended and the party was there. But I was really surprised at how well the games were maintained, especially coming from the previous pizza place. I also found a bunch of Gameboy games in one of the bowling alleys, and instead of turning them in I kept 'em. Probably bad in the long run karmically, but what the hell... until Karma strikes me down, I'll be playing Mario DS.

I did a little more work on the Google Earth KML file of pinball locations... mostly in the form of correcting issues with the Pinball Locator database. Here is the file if you want to download it (right click and save as... no browser I've seen knows what to do with it). Note that it won't work in Google Maps, because GM has a 60-200 point limit and this file has 850 or so active sites.

At first I offered the file to the Pinball Rebel himself, suggesting that he could post it on his site. But he did what he usually does: Send me two emails, then just when I think we're making progress he stops replying. This same thing happened a few months ago when I mentioned that I might be capable of fixing some bugs (a few of which I consider serious) and adding a spatial search to the Locator. I don't know if the Rebel has a short attention span or if he and I email in different dialects of the English language... if I were to go to Texas speak to him directly, we could probably hash it out pretty quickly. For now, if I can't get my point across to him in two emails, I'm pretty much doomed. Whatever.

Finally, I made a Mr. Pinball Classified sale today. A guy in Florida needed a transformer and everything downstream from it to the wall socket for a WPC game. I didn't think I had a spare transformer, but I had the rest, purchased years ago from my old pal Pinball Chuck (who is selling again on eBay, I was happy to see) for something or other. Anyway, even though this FL guy is working on a "Black Knight" (I'm assuming it's really a BK2K) he went for it, even after I raised the price from $10 to $20 (the receipt was in the box when I found it, and it looked virtually brand new, so I couldn't let it go for the lower price). But then as I was looking for the post where I mentioned this purchase, I found a reference to the High Speed transformer...! So I went downstairs, and what I thought was the Data East transformer I pulled out of Doctor Who was the one from HS. So I just emailed back the guy to see if he's interested. Looking at some of my other posts, transformers sell for some serious shekels, so if FL Guy is interested I might get some serious bank. w00t!

Happy Bloomsday!

2009-06-16T23:01:00.003-04:00

Today is Bloomsday, when fans of James Joyce celebrate the day that Ulysses takes place. My wife had her own version of Bloomsday today because she had an appointment with Dr. Bloom. That has nothing to do with pinball, I just thought I'd throw that in.

I saw a great eBay auction description for a prototype Doctor Who game. I personally don't think it's an actual prototype, because the pictures of the Dalek motor assembly look exactly like the Wobble Head kit that I bought last year. But here's the description:

Up for bids is a fantastic operating coin operated arcade pinball machine called "Dr. Who" by Bally in 1992. Plays and functions extremely well including the davit robot topper which is a mechanical moving topper as it turns it's head left to right vice versa while lights up duration it's vocial animation! Sheldon found on Dr. Who machines as it was a prototype that never made it to the regular production due to production costs and Bally was looking for ways to trim production costs hence the mechanical topper. In the production version machines has the non-mechanical davik robot that just lights up during vocial animation. Believe me, it makes the game so much more animated and exciting to play with the mechanical robot instead of the regular version which is a dud (boring). Any questions let me know as the photos should answer your questions as photos of the motor inside the davik robot body are present as well as those showing the different positions of the davik head in mechanical motion while speaking w/ lights.

I have sheldon seen a description that I enjoyed so much. I think if the guy was trying to sound like a foreign scammer, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

I was kind of bored at work today, so while I was waiting for compilations to succeed I took the data from the Pinball Locator, geocoded it using one of my company's products, and turned it into a Google Earth KML file. The initial results were pretty satisfactory for the amount of time I spent on it... certainly easier than writing a web page to do it, which was my original plan. There are a few data errors... for example, you can see on the pic two spellings of Crofton Bowling Center that register as two separate locations. The most discouraging thing about the project is that there don't appear to be many pin locations nearby that I haven't visited. :( Anyway, I'll probably refine the process a little and maybe post a cleaned up version somewhere when I'm done.

There is Madness in Town Square

2009-06-13T09:14:00.002-04:00

So I did go to the Virginia pinball league night sponsored by the Free State Pinball Association, and I did not turn around and go home or die or embarrass myself or say too much that I'm likely to regret. Good. For a person as notoriously lacking in social skills as I am, that's a huge win.

I showed up a few minutes before 8 and got signed up. I pretended that I actually was capable of normal social interaction and met a few people, most of whose names I forgot within seconds. I paid some dues then gravitated to the other noob for a little strained conversation, though a few guys took the initiative and talked to me, which was nice.

They started a few minutes late with a crowd of 20 or so. They explained the rules, which are more complicated than "play games, write down scores" but not overly so... certainly easier than bowling. We were cordoned off into groups of four and the games were allowed to begin. My group's first game was Strikes and Spares, and despite being distracted as always by Ms. SNS's stunningly erect areolae (curse you, Kevin O'Connor!) I was pleased to win just barely. That was followed by Skateball, then the Prominent Nipple theme was broken with Bram Stoker's Dracula, and finally Mousin' Around! I did adequately, usually a second or third place. With that we were done for the week, so I hung around for a few more minutes and then left.

I had fun. I plan to return. 'nuff said.

After quite some wait the LEDs finally arrived. I think I'll fully illuminate this subject in its own post, because it's kind of a big topic and I haven't fully investigated it yet.

And yesterday, after the Most Triumphant resolution to a client problem that's been weighing heavily on my soul for a week (who would have thought that a corrupt positive sign would prevent "0" from being converted from a string to an integer? Thanks, diligent Windows XP programmers!), I rewarded myself with a pinball game. I went to Beltway Chevron to play Funhouse -- I wanted to play a 4 player game so I could hear all of Chuckie's player nicknames -- but it was turned off. So I consoled myself with a couple of Family Guy games at the Italian restaurant. Who wants Chowdah?

Miscellaneous Love

2009-06-06T22:03:00.002-04:00

I'm going to take a moment and mention some progress I've made on my work area. Longtime or diligent (or both!) readers will recall this post from about a year ago detailing the disaster area that was our basement. On the right is the current state of my work area... there are a bunch of boxes out because my daughter is making cleaning up her summer project. But you can see that I have a desk and some space to work. I can walk around without juking or turning sideways too much. I've even put up some posters (one is even framed) and placed the pachinko in what I think is a reasonable place. As soon as I get closer to being done, I'll have to take a picture from the same angle for some before/after action.

Forensic analysis of this picture will indicate that I'm using a different camera. That's because my beloved first digital camera, the Canon PowerShot S30 that I bought 7 years ago for almost $600, has done broke. It was actually pretty handy because its interminable shutter time and 5-10 second lag to write pictures to the memory card made it so no one cared if I just kept it downstairs with my stuff. Now I have to use my wife's camera, which is a lot better but in slightly higher demand. *sigh*

OK, so repairs on DW continue: I forgot to mention that I installed the new playfield glass switch. I cut the old switch off and soldered on the new one, then spent about ten minutes adjusting it so the switch actually closed when the glass was in its normal position. Now it works great! One small step for me, one giant leap toward total pinball legitimacy!

I also had some excellent troubleshooting action. At some point -- I think it was right after I added all the stuff to the coin door -- I looked at the playfield and said, dagnabbit I'm tired of the right side extra ball lanes being lit all the time! That and some of the Time Expander lights just never seemed to go out. So I did a little lamp testing and found out that no matter what light was lit, the lights on the same row in columns 2 (where the right lights are) and 5 (where the lower row of Time Expander lights are) would also light. Clearly we had a short. I even used the Pinball Repair Guide's troubleshooting technique of pulling the light plugs from the power board and checking them for continuity and got connections where there shouldn'ta oughta been none. So, bad diodes is a possible culprit and easiest to check, so I checked diodes in column 2 until I came to the Doctor 7 lamp, which for lo these three years has been hanging impotently under the playfield without a bulb in it. And the odd thing is I've been looking at that light the whole time and just mentally bleeping over it because I'm usually under the playfield trying to fix something else. It turns out that socket was hanging against another wire and was causing the short! Hey! Cause and effect! So I mounted it to the playfield and put a bulb in, and two magical things happened: The column 2 lamps no longer lit with the other bulbs and the previously non-working Doctor 7 backbox lamp lit like the real McCoy... the real Sylvester McCoy, that is! hyuk hyuk. So all this time I was thinking it was bad traces or a problem with the transistor, and it was really just two stupid lamps in series.

Fresh from that triumph, I did the same thing for column 5 but ran into a problem: Just like the Doctor 7 lamp, there is a bulb that's out in column 5, the right lock on the Mini-playfield. The problem is that I can't get to that light without disassembling the MPF, and disassembling the MPF is a big chore that requires me to have easy access to both sides of the playfield -- I need to unscrew screws and while doing so keep the things the screws are screwed into from turning... not easy to do by yourself while the playfield is in the game. I think I'll just wait until the great cabinet swap and deal with it then.

And speaking of which, I had some goof off time last week, so I decided to clean the underside of the new cabinet, which had some scuffs and 17 years of dirty finger grabs in its Convenient Lifting Areas. First I used various household cleaners like Simple Green and 409 without much luck. Then I mixed some Pine-sol and water and that did a lot better. I finished off by scrubbing the really filthy parts with one of those Mr. Clean micro-pore sponges, which really got the job done. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures since the camera was broken, but I figure I can take some detailed shots when I clean out the inside.

Finally, I'm going to attempt a rare social thing: On Monday I am going to go to League Night at the Virginia branch of the Free State Pinball Association. Hopefully I can actually talk to people who actually share my interests; worst case: I'll end up standing quietly off to the side like I imagine high school dances would have been if I ever went to one, which I didn't. Boy, 46 years old and still an awkward teen. Nice.

Awkward Teen Hunger Force. Number 1 in the 'hood, G.

Coin Door Love

2009-05-27T20:25:00.007-04:00

The next major zone of repairs was the coin door. The first step was to un-crimp the crappy job I did on the test button wires and use the crimping tool to make a set of nice, honest crimps. Also, I put them in the correct plug slots, so now the buttons won't be reversed. Testing had revealed that one of the coin slots had all of its parts, so I wired that up to the coin switch pins. Finally I had created a makeshift lamp circuit using old light sockets, wired it to the GI pins on the coin door board, and stuck them to the coin mechs using sticky foam that I picked up at Target. I tested and everything worked so well, I turned free play off and set it to 1 credit per quarter and 3 credits for two.

My coin door lamp circuit went through several iterations... I had to recall what little I remembered of my Electrical Engineering class in college. First I tried out the lamps in series, and that gave me one anemic light and one barely lit one. I went through three revisions.

    /-- + Lamp - --\
V --                -- Gnd
    \-- + Lamp - --/

This is the classic parallel circuit, but had too many wires that would clutter up the already cluttered coin door.

Then there was an interim design which I've forgotten. I took that, removed some useless connections, and wound up with this:

V -- + --- +
    Lamp  Lamp
      - --- - --- Gnd

I liked this one because it was nice and spare... no Y intersections and a minimum of work for my meager soldering skillz. You can play follow the wires on the picture above to see how it played out in the real world.

When I switched off free play, I also made what (to me) is a change I never thought I would make: I reset the game to 3 balls per game.

Gasp.

Now, you have to understand that 5 balls per game has been Holy Writ since I first started playing 30 years ago. But the more I've played DW over the past few weeks, the more I've realized that it's designed to be a three ball game. With five balls, I end up getting too many features on a regular basis. And I have to say that since I made the switch my games are just a smidge more satisfying in a somewhat hard to quantify way.

Also, I have added a new item onto my list of things to do by summer's end: I'm going to swap the game into the other cabinet. I've been planning to restore the red areas of the cabinet sides using some kind of decal something-or-other that I was going to make myself using the other cabinet. I felt a kinship to the old cab because I still believe that it was originally a prototype with the moving Dalek head. But a few weeks ago wife said something that infected my mind with the idea of using the new cabinet, and the infection spread, reproduced, and eventually overpowered my loyalty to the old one. I mean, the new cab has all of its red in unfaded glory, fer cheese sakes. It has more flaws in it than the old one, but I now think those will be easier to repair than the Rube Goldberg decal thing I had planned.

And finally, here's what happened when Rosie discovered that I had connected the Dalek head:

Backbox Love

2009-05-24T00:01:00.002-04:00

Like I said, I've been actually getting a lot done on Doctor Who. First up, I decided to work on problems with the backbox, all lighting related: There was a bunch of GI out on the backbox light board, the Dalek GI was out, and only two of the Doctor lights worked.

First I decided to do something totally unrelated to lighting and reconnected the Wobble-head. That was pretty easy, but then I decided to ready the dome to be screwed back on. I noticed that if the dome was lined up with the screw holes, the eye stalk would bump into the inside of the dome when it moved. That didn't seem so cool, so I tried adjusting the mounting nuts to make the Dalek lean back, hoping this would reposition the eye as well. It didn't really. So I repositioned the dome so it's hanging over the top of the game slightly and left it at that. I emailed the guy who made it and he said he had never heard of this problem. In a world of mass conformity, I suppose it's comforting to be unique.

Next I moved on to the various GIs that were out. I checked voltages at the points where they exited the power board and didn't get much. Then I jumped a working strand of lights with a non-working one and that lit them... but then the stress of all those lights running on one circuit blew out the working strand. I think I lamented for a while, then looked up GI problems in the pinball repair guides. Mostly they focus on complicated stuff like replacing burned connectors and stressed circuits. That didn't sound so cool, but buried in the tough solutions was a relatively easy one: Replace the fuses. I did that, and now all my GI works fine. This imparted a valuable lesson to me which I knew but had forgotten: Check the simple stuff first. *sheesh*

Finally I pulled the light board for the 7 doctor lamps on the display mount. Six of them work when the display is face down, but when it's mounted in the game, only two work. I connected the board up to my power supply and found a legitimately bad twist-out light socket, which I replaced. But the Doctor 7 lamp worked when I tested it, so I surmised that it was a bad transistor on the power board or something. I put the board back in and was rewarded with six working Doctors, which I chalked up to yet another bad connection. Sylvester McCoy would have to wait for a future repair session.

And those were the backbox repairs. Mostly successful, can't complain.

From Allentown to Our Town

2009-05-17T10:00:00.003-04:00

Fortunately/unfortunately a lot is going on and I'm not writing any of it down.

Went to Pinball Wizards in Allentown two weeks ago. The night before I checked rgp to see if there were any up-to-the-minute reports, but all I found what this noob report. I was surprised that he did not point out that when he was walking around the Flea Market in the rain, he got wet.

Drive up was uneventful, except for seeing a truck shedding a retread and an Amish guy driving a buggy.

Spent yet another all-time low amount of money, $50 including admission and a pita sandwich at the Middle Eastern place in the farmer's market. There just wasn't much on my list... my games are working too well these days, or I already have the parts I need to fix them. There wasn't anything in the flea market that really jumped out at me, even though I brought a fat wad of cash with me after last year's Doctor Who incident.

There were some pretty good machines there, and several that were comically malfunctioning... such as the Funhouse that didn't have use of its left flippers, or the Mystic with no feature lights. But after so many years -- I think this might be my 10th year going to the show -- since I assume there will be a whole bunch of crappy games, I'm not as annoyed as I used to be. As with bad movies, the key is low expectations.

I did finally get to play the new Indiana Jones game, which I found reasonably fun. Unfortunately the sound was turned down too low for me to hear what is reportedly the worst Sean Connery impersonation that anyone has ever been paid to do. They had a CSI there, but it had a crowd and I didn't have a chance to play. And I did get to play the aforementioned Mystic, which I was looking forward to because I hadn't played it since my college days and I had co-done an adaptation of it in my VP salad days. I was kind of cheesed that it didn't work, because its tic-tac-toe conceit relies pretty heavily on feature lights. But I amused myself by sending a text message to my wife with a picture of the game and the text "Why are they hurting the Mystic?" which is hysterically if you've see The Fall.

I toyed with the idea of buying LEDs for Paragon to reduce its power needs, and even went to the point of trying to estimate the number of bulbs on one that was there, but when I showed up with cash in hand to the people hawking them said they were out of the #44/47 bulbs. Later I was sort of glad, because fixing Paragon's power problem by reducing the power consumption of the machine isn't really fixing it, it's just putting the problem off by a few years. Maybe that's cool for the National Debt, but this is pinball, which is serious. But that got me thinking about LEDs, and I think I'm going to buy some and install them on Quicksilver. Partly for fun, partly on the off chance that in a few years incandescents will be impossible to find, but mostly because QS is the most visually striking of all my machines and LED bulbs will probably make it more so. Their other-worldly glow is well-suited to the game and its theme of big-headed naked women in a dimension of liquid mercury.

On the way home, I finally stopped at Pakha's Thai House Restaurant, which is located outside of Harrisburg. I've been passing this place every year since it opened and have always been curious about it -- I wouldn't expect Dillsburg PA to be the center of a huge Thai community -- but the food was pretty good and pretty cheap. It appears to be where all the cool kids in the Harrisburg area hang out, and based on the photos behind the cash register, the Fox 43 news team from York is quite enamored with it.

Secrets of the Mystery Box... Revealed!

2009-04-26T17:08:00.004-04:00

J.J. Abrams: I have two things to say to you: 1) It's awesome that you cast Simon Pegg as Scotty and the guy from the Harold and Kumar movies as Mr. Sulu; and 2) Stop reading now, I'm going to reveal the contents of the Mystery Box!!!

This is it, sorted into various boxes by type. Starting at the bottom plastics and circuit boards, which isn't so much a type as it is a box of the stuff I put on eBay. In the second tier, we have a CD box of all the magic nuts and screws, targets/switches/locks, followed by flipper parts (Darwin contributed the ball to this box, it was not part of the Mystery Box), and 53 pinballs in various conditions. In the top row are miscellaneous junk, plastic posts of many colors, larger plastics including a whole lot of bumper caps, and leg bolts and larger nuts. Not shown are the light bulbs, which were a motley collection of #44s, #555s, #904s, and two #89s.

So was it worth it? Well, most of the plastics sold on eBay, with the best performer being the guy in the middle right, an Elvira plastic in really nice condition that went for $13. Overall the highest priced item was a Williams relay board (not shown because it was probably under the BS Dracula graveyard) which went for $27... pretty good for an untested item. Overall, after expenses I made $80. I figure that there were about $5 worth of working bulbs, and I've already used a 904 in DW... not bad, since I was planning on picking up lights at the pinball show next week, and now I don't have to.

A lot of the stuff is unusable, but over time I'll probably be able to dip into it for various parts. I may also see if I can mix up some of it into some little mystery boxes of my own and sell them as lots on eBay... my conscience would demand that I sweeten them with some better stuff, though.

So, along with the roughly $5 worth of fun that I estimated I got out of pawing through the box, so far I'm up to about $90 worth of goods and services from the $96 I paid for it. And I now have a huge supply of odds & ends, which has already served me well more than once. Overall, I am reasonably satisfied, as I have been the author of much larger fiascos.

I also got around to listing the High Speed backglass. A guy wanted it on Mr. Pinball, so I sent him an email but I made the mistake of making a scammer joke ("I am from London in UK and I only accept Western Union payments... just kidding, I'm actually in Maryland."). It turns out he was one of those guys who only reads the first part of an email, because he replied back and said he'd found one in the US. Oh well. But since I had the pictures ready to go, I turned around and started a 5 day auction on eBay, which I usually don't do but I wanted it to finish with plenty of time so I could offer free delivery to the pinball show. I'm hoping that a local snaps it up, since I don't relish packing it for shipping. A guy from Canada asked if he could pick it up, which is a 9 hour drive one way. His max bid was only $5, though, so it doesn't look like he'll get it. I'm hoping to get about $75 for it so I can have a little extra boodle to take with me to the show.

Also on Mr. Pinball, I posted an ad for a Lotta Fun backglass again, hoping someone going to the show would respond in the affirmative. No such luck though. I also successfully avoided another round of boneheaded scammer emails by putting the following in my ad: "Note to scammers: You must be at least as smart as I am to successfully rip me off. If not, I will waste much more of your time that you will of mine."

In repair news, my crimping supplies arrived but I haven't done anything about it yet.

Also, I was going through my old saved links and found this one about DW mini-playfield problems. Rereading it, I realized that this guy was describing my problem exactly. So I decided to do a quick round of testing, with an eye towards asking Pinball Resource to bring a motor with them to the show. And what did I find? A completely working and well-behaved mini-playfield. W? T? F? I really don't think fixing the power to the CPU board would have fixed this, so I'm kind of at a loss. I plan to turn it back on and try it out in gameplay tonight to see if the failures come back.

We went up to visit my daughter at school yesterday, and basically checked out for 20 minutes to play a few games of The Champion Pub. I've been prevented from doing so for the last couple of visits, so I had to play the Bastard Card or face the prospect of the school year ending without me playing any games of it. I had fun, beat a few boxers, lost to a lot more, got two replays, and had a hard time in the dark bar with no GI.

There is more to write about, but it's getting late and I have to walk the dog before it gets dark.

A Shocking Development: Repairs of Actual Substance!

2009-04-11T22:46:00.007-04:00

I was going to write about the Mystery Box, but some actual pinball fixin' has been going on, so I feel obligated to discuss it.

Doctor Who is back up and running, thanks to the Shaggy Repair Guides, specifically the section on WPC resets. Basically, I worked through the steps and was fine until I got to the point where I measured the voltage on the CPU board. Instead of being the healthy 4.95 VDC on the power board, it was a slightly anemic 4.87. The next step was to reseat J101 on the power board, and that didn't help. But reseating J114 (the power->CPU connector) got me .01 V back. That was a step in the right direction, so I reseated (resat?) J201 on the CPU. That put me up to 4.92 VDC, which is just good enough to keep the game running. To celebrate, I played what turned out to be a pretty good game, making sure to whack the flippers more than usual to put as much stress on the system as possible. It played like a champ, albeit a champ with a bunch of features disabled. And fate rewarded me for my work, because I got the Doctor Cow Easter Egg for the first time while I was playing.

However, that is not the end of the story. As the repair guide says, reseating the connectors is not the fix, it's an indication of the problem. I need to level up my connector skills and replace J114 & J201. To do so, I ordered a crimping tool, connectors, keys, trifurcons, and etc. from the fine folk at Great Plains Electronics, who is on spring break right now but will be back Tuesday. So April will be Connector Month here at the Pinblog, because I need to fix this, redo the coin door connector, and finally get around to fixing the MPU J3 connector on Eight Ball Deluxe, so I can play more than one game at a time without reseating it. Yeah, baby.

This brings me to a painful topic, but one which I think needs to be addressed at this juncture: What I need to fix to get Doctor Who fully functional. They are, in no particular order:

Replace the connectors listed above.
Fix the column that's out on the CPU. I think I just need to flow some solder between the encoder chip and the resistor that precedes it, but it could be more complicated than that.
Fix the miniplayfield so it raises and lowers properly. This could be as easy as replacing the opto, or it could be much worse.
Fix the gray time expander buttons. I believe one of them has a bad opto, and I think the other appears to have a problem at the opto board.
Reconnect the wobblehead, which I disconnected until the reset problem was dealt with. Hopefully replacing the connectors will bump my voltage up to a healthy 4.95 V, because I honestly don't think 4.92 V + flippers + a functional miniplayfield + that crazy moving dalek is going to cut it. No sir, I just don't like it.
Lower priority items: install the new playfield switch, install a more effective backbox lock, replace the bogus plexiglass with actual translite glass (which I have prepaid for and should pick up at the Allentown show in 3 weeks!).
Give the game a thorough cleaning.
The unknown... things I don't know are broken yet, things that will break in the future, things in the scary darkness beyond the light cast by the single 555 bulb I'm holding in my hand.

So that's what I'm up against. Let's set a hard target of trying to finish this all up by the end of summer. OK, that's kind of a pretty flaccid target, but for a professional procrastination proponent such as myself, that's as hard as its going to get.

And as if that's not enough, I've got eBays going for a bunch of Mystery Box stuff, and they're up to $50 with a day to go and lots of watchers. So it's possible that I may be able to pay for all these repairs, as well.

Pinball Vacation: The Final Chapter

2009-04-06T21:40:00.001-04:00

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.

Pinball Vacation, Day Four

2009-04-05T01:02:00.002-04:00

The saga continues...

Today was the first sunny day of reasonable temperature that we've had for the entire week, so I was obligated to run out and do some yard work. We also went to a local park and perambulated about. And on the way back I convinced Mrs. Entropy to stop in at Sole d'Italia for some Family Guy pinball!!! Yes, it's one of the rare occasions when I played pinball with my wife... it wasn't a huge arm twist, since it was just slightly out of the way and she likes the show. I got a free game and she made what I thought was a respectable novice score, but she is a perfectionist so wasn't happy with her score. Regardless, at least I got to share my interest with the spouse, which is not always easy to do as we have somewhat mutually antagonistic hobbies.

In the repair corner today, I verified that the playfield switch will work with the hardware I have, but didn't install it since I didn't want to bust out the soldering iron. So the primary job was making a connector for the coin door test buttons. I would like to stand here and say that I added connectors to my pinball repair skill set, but it's only partially true. I did get some EP, but I don't think I managed to level up.

So I had a Molex .156" plug empties and a bag of Trifurcon terminals that I'd bought a few years ago. First I cut the plug to size, 13 pins. I don't have a crimping tool, because I rarely spend money on tools until I know I'm going to use them, so I did my crimping with needle-nosed pliers. The final score was Joe 2, Crappy Crimps I'll have to redo at some point 4. Then I inserted the first terminal into the plug and immediately discovered that I had was orienting the plug to the pin listing in the manual, which meant I put pin 3 into slot 11. At this point I discovered the importance of having a terminal removal tool, which I plan to buy at the same time I get a crimper. But get it out I did, and inserted everything into what I thought were the correct slots. I plugged it into the board and it fit very nicely. I turned on the game to test it and found that the buttons were completely backwards... the test button added service credits, and the service credit button got me into the test mode. But I did do it, I learned from my mistakes, I know what tools I need to get to do a better job next time, and I didn't hurt myself in the process. I've had far worse days doing pinball repair.

Pinball Vacation, Roman Numeral III

2009-04-04T00:33:00.002-04:00

As previously mentioned, today was a road trip. I was plannin' to take two road trips durin' my vacation, but scaled it back to one so I could spend some time with my wife. Today I headed up to Winchester, MD, to verify two entries on the Free State Pinball Association site... I made this same trip about a month ago, but the first stop was only open M-F and I couldn't find the second. This time I went on a Friday and got better directions. The first stop was Ellie's Carry Out in the charmin'ly named town of Finksburg. There was a T2 there 6 months ago, but it has been replace with a Mousin' Around. While I do appreciate how that game ties in with yesterday's "dropped g gerund" theme, I was a little disappointed. To use an analogy, it's like I went there expectin' a classic Williams game and got a mediocre late model Bally game instead. I played it, had a fun time, ate a pretty decent BLT, so no big loss. The second place was a wash... no pinball in sight.

When I got home I did my civic duty and updated the FSPA site, then spent a half hour or so on the Pinball Rebel Locator site enterin' as many Maryland pinballs as I could remember, includin' addin' 20 of the 25 games there and correctin' the existin' entries (c'mon, guys, BK ≠ BK2K).

OK, I'll stop the Journey thing now.

Today's pin work ended up as gratifying as yesterday was frustrating. I started doing some work on the playfield glass switch, but after taking the newly installed glass bracket off I sort of stopped. Instead I put tops on as many of the pop bumpers as I could easily reach (the main ramp blocks one). I also started goofing with the backbox lock again and found that the coin door lock I was trying to use was too long. Luckily, one of the locks from the Mystery Box was not only short but it also had a key, and after fiddling with it for a while I found that it worked just fine. I even managed to find two security bolts in the huge container of hardware I salvaged. I was extremely happy that the Mystery Box has actually paid unexpected dividends. I even put a lock on the coin door, so that game is ready to be put on location!

I was looking at the calendar today and marvelled that there's only one more month until the Pinball Wizards show. Since it's always the first weekend in May, there's always a chance that it will fall on our Anniversary, May 1st... which in fact it did in 2004. Although I could try to go to the show instead of taking Mrs. Entropy out to dinner, I'm guessing that would be a non-starter in our house. In 2004 I went on Friday April 30th, which was generally unsatisfactory because of shorter hours (4 - 9 on Fri vs 10 - 7 on Sat), and the general suckingness of starting a 3.5 hour drive at 9PM, which got me home around 1 AM. Sadly, it will happen again next year... I might go on Sunday (10-4) which gives me an extra hour, but I'm guessing the flea marketage will be poor at best. White Rose is just the opposite: Friday is 10 - 8, and Saturday is 9 - 6, so I go on Friday and take the extra hour. Does anyone else put this much thought into these kinds of things?

Pinball Vacation, Part B

2009-04-02T23:43:00.005-04:00

Here's a perfect example of Why I Suck: I'm running errands today in the car, and on the radio comes Journey singing Don't Stop Believin'. Now, a normal person my age would think about high school, that party at Biff's house in our Junior Year, driving home with friends after watching, oh, I don't know, Comin' At Ya! and hearing that song. What's the first thing I think of? The freakin' Journey arcade game, where you controlled the band members with their little digitized heads as they flew around killing aliens with their instruments. That's me in a nutshell.

Btw, here's an interesting fact about Journey, a band which I largely avoided in the 80's thanks to Punk Rock and New Wave. I did an analysis of their song titles and lyrics when a friend loaned me their greatest hits CD, and I found that they almost never write ing, always in'. I mean, Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'? Come on, are gerunds so terrible?

So. Pinball Vacation Day 2... or shall we say, Day 2 of the Pinball-iday? (Yes! *fist pump*) I have to put this in the frustrating and somewhat productive pile.

Again with the music, I rerecorded the Doctor Who music, as well as a new recording of Star Trek TNG. ST took twice as long as usual because it has a lot of music, and then I got hung up on the zillions of speech calls. I also mixed together the weird high pitched reedy music I mentioned yesterday with normal music. The result was a horrible, horrible thing, discordant and strange, like the soundtrack to Tim Burton's Doctor Who.

I had a frustrating time with the coin door. I cleaned off the French door and then found that the screw holes to attach the door to the frame are slightly different. So then I went back to my old door, only to find that a metal tab that holds some wires hit the door switch mount and kept it from closing. So I bent that down a little and that worked, so I now have a functional coin door.

Then I got the bright idea to replace my broken launch ball button with a new one I bought a year or two ago from Pinball Resource. How hard could that be? First, I couldn't find a wrench big enough to unscrew it. After I gave that up, I managed to get the plastic nut off with my fingers. Then I found that the threads on the new button didn't extend past the wood of the cabinet (I later found this wasn't necessary, as the assembly snapped in). So then I swapped the new button cover with the old one, but then I couldn't figure out how the switch attached to the button shaft. After puzzling over that for a while, I thought I'll just use the entire new button assembly. But then I found that the holes on the switch didn't match the corresponding pegs on the mount (of course, I just now realized that I was trying to put it in upside-down, duh). So finally I ended up Krazy Gluing the switch to the shaft and calling it a day. As the before and after pics below show, it does look a lot better.

Stay tuned for Day 3, which may just involve a Road Trip...

Pinball Vacation, Episode 1

2009-04-01T23:10:00.003-04:00

So today was the first day of what I have decided to call my Pinball Vacation. I actually have a bunch of other stuff to do, like clean the house, catch up on laundry, and take the dog to the vet for his annual physical; however, Dog Care, Cleaning, and Laundry Vacation just doesn't play well with the whole pinblog theme. For more on those subjects, feel free to browse Nikki's Blog. Extra special bonus: Nikki delves into her fertility treatments in loving detail, another topic I am also unlikely to cover with sufficient depth.

So the verdict on Day 1: Success! I started off easy by completing a long simmering project, collecting and editing the Doctor Who pinball music. There was a bit of panic early on when I realized that I hadn't recorded the DW theme, which is pretty crucial. So I set up one of the old laptops and re-recorded it while I ate lunch. I also took the opportunity to record music for Scared Stiff, Medieval Madness, Monster Bash, and Tales of the Arabian Nights. Each one took about 15 minutes to record. Editing the files took about 30-45 minutes, not counting a couple of early false steps caused by Audacity being kinda goofy. Here is the result... it sounds pretty good, but there is a click at the beginning of each track that I'm not happy with. While I was recording, I found slightly higher pitched versions of a lot of the DW music... now I'm starting to think that those are separate tracks intended to be played through the smaller speaker to give the music more depth. Not today, though.

Just that would have fulfilled the terms of my contract, but I pushed further... rargh! I decided it was time to do something about the coin door on DW. Currently, the coin door switch consists of the two wires shunted together, so when I want to "open" the coin door, I disconnect the wires. Also, the coin door buttons are sitting inside where the coin box goes. All of these are connected to the Coin Interface Board using alligator clips with pieces of cardboard in between to keep them from shorting. Calling it half-assed would be an insult to partial glutes everywhere. I would say that it could not possibly be more than 18%-assed.

So I pulled the door off, and pulled the frame of the door off the old parts machine. I also disassembled the door & frame that I bought on eBay a few years ago that I got the buttons from in the first place. Amazingly, none of the frames or doors are remotely similar. The frame from the parts machine has a mount for the door switch, the others don't. The eBay door has a mount for the buttons, mine doesn't. My door has two quarter coin mechanisms, the eBay door has one solid state mechanism for Francs. None of the coin units look like they will work on any door but the one they came from. Quel dommage! Anyway, I'm done for tonight, but the plan is to use the parts frame with the switch mount and the eBay door with the button mount and just accept the Franc slot for the time being, then jettison the alligator clips in favor of a real connector. And I have to take the dog to the vet, get some laundry done, and go with my wife to see Monsters vs Aliens. Zut alors! Oh, and get used to the Franc slot so I can stop ejaculating in French.

J. J. Entropy's Mystery Box

2009-03-28T10:01:00.008-04:00

J. J. Abrams of Lost and Alias fame has a Mystery Box, which he bought years ago and has never opened. He keeps it on a shelf in his office, and to him it represents hope and potential. He never intends to open the Mystery Box. This, to me, pretty much explains Lost and why if you watch it (I don't -- I watched 11 eps and stopped for no real reason) you should never expect to have any of the bizarre things you see on the show answered.

I mention this because in the week after I won my own personal Mystery Box of pinball parts that I bought on eBay, I was quite the giddy goat... I was thinking about what was in it, I was planning what I would do with the items I could identify, I was wondering if I had made a colossal blunder or if the contents of the box would allow me to make my fortune in the world. I was in a heighted state of awareness, my pre-frontal cortex was active, and I was doing all the things that the disembodied head of Dr. Ryuta Kawashima tells me I should be doing in Brain Age. But above all, I was filled with thoughts of -- dare I say it -- hope and potential just like J. J. Abrams.

But here's where J. J. Abrams and J. Entropy differ: He uses that sense of wonder to fuel his work, whereas I would get sense of wonder fatigue after a few days and simply open the damn thing. My work (computer programming) and my hobbies (pinball being the one that impacts this blog most often) don't rely on mysteries, they rely on solutions to mysteries. So when the box arrived on Tuesday, I pretty much tore into it as soon as possible on the day it arrived (after walking the dog and discharging whatever other duties I had as the pater familias).

So, what's in the box? Well, I think if we opened J. J. Abrams' Mystery Box, the contents would be very similar to mine. There's an enticing layer of interesting parts on the top, which make up about 1 pound of the box's total weight. Under that is 29 pounds of metal parts, consisting mostly of old pinballs and leg bolts. Remember how I said I would get $50 worth of enjoyment from digging through the box? Well, it's more like a tenth of that. If I were J. J. Abrams and this was what was in my box, I would probably end up bitter and kill off Kirk, Spock, and McCoy in Star Trek.

But I hyperbolize for comic effect. Actually there are some pretty interesting things in it. I did have some fun pulling out playfield plastics and identifying them with the help my pal the Internet. There are a few circuit boards, a lot of pop bumper plastics, a few targets. The biggest thing is the graveyard from BS Dracula. I had great luck cleaning the grime off of a lot of stuff using the dishwasher technique. But the big question is will I be able to sell enough of it to make back my $100? Probably not, but we can always hope.

I have a couple of days off next week, and I plan to do at least one pinball-related thing per day.

In semi-related pinball news, I've seen most of the TV shows and movies that pinball games are based on -- the exception being horror themes like Freddy and new stuff like CSI and 24 -- but I'd never gotten around to Terminator 3. Well, I was working my way through the Terminator series on the off chance that I see Terminator: Salvation this summer, so I finally watched it last night. Man, did it suhuhuhuhuhuck! Especially after watching the first two movies, which were both great, T3 paled in comparison. It was dumb and illogical and poorly thought out and had any number of problems. The writer and director were a couple of good time charlies that felt that the path to success for this movie was to take elements that worked in the other two films then just turn them up to 11 and add as many effects as possible. My verdict: Terminator 3 is the Highlander 2 of Terminator sequels.

Repairs, and the usual junk

2009-03-19T21:18:00.007-04:00

I'm not sure whether I should post more or just lead a less eventful life.

But I should start with some actual repairs I did to a machine. My daughter brought home a bunch of her friends for Spring Break and while they were here they played some pinball. While they were playing Quicksilver I noticed a bunch of lights that were out on the playfield. So after they left I decided to do a little routine maintenance on it. First I lifted the playfield and wiggled the lights -- it turns out they were all just bad connections. Then while I had the glass off I wiped all the dust off the playfield. After that I dug out the Stern lightning spinner that I bought a few years ago and replaced the Middle Earth spinner that was on the game when I bought it.That was an easy and gratifying fix, so I moved on to the ugly-ass "Tokens" stickers that have been on the coin slots since forever. I disassembled the coin slots -- fairly easy, just two screws and friction hold it together -- and pulled the tape off to reveal another quarter plastic and a 25c plastic. Nice! After a half hour of serious goo-gone work to get the tape residue off and running the plastic coin slots through the dishwasher, the whole assembly looks a lot nicer.

Two easy fixes that only took me 23 years to get around to!

I picked up some more pinball music. At some point I found the secret website where a guy was selling music from all of the Williams System 11 games -- I'd heard about it on TOPCast but only managed to find it a few months ago. I immediately Paypalled $5 to the guy and heard nothing for about a month. Then I got an email asking if he had sent it to me, and then about a month after that I finally got it. It's good! Two CDs and very complete.

Then a few days ago I was browsing around at work while waiting for my program to compile and found this site of more modern music. There are about 80 files, which is great, but I have a few problems with them: The sound quality is a little irregular, and some of the music has odd tempo problems. I don't know if that's the guy's computer or how Pinmame is playing them. They don't have gameplay sound effect mixed in, which I kind of like. But my biggest problem -- and one I can fix myself if I get around to it -- is that they are largely unedited. Most of the cuts are about 1:45 minutes, which is fine for main play tunes but awful for shorter cuts. Really, you don't know pain until you've heard the 2.5 second Mola Ram clip from Indiana Jones played over 40 times. Choose Wisely, indeed. But you can't complain about free, and there are lots of great tracks that are neglected in the other collections I have, like Attack from Mars and Cirqus Voltaire. Overall I now have over a day of pinball music, though there are a lot of dupes.

With all the pinball-related traveling I've been doing, I've run up against the limitations of the FSPA's where to play pinball database. So I put out a call on RGP for larger and more national sites; I got a disappointing two responses. And neither of them have what I need, a distance-based search. I mean, knowing there's a pin in King of Prussia PA doesn't do me any good if I don't know where that is. I was toying with the idea of writing my own database, but at this point I'm thinking more along the lines of adapting a spatial search to the larger of the two (it also has URL-based search params, which are easy submit). Anyway, that's my next timesuck which will hopefully yield dividends.

Finally, the other day I got an eBay impulse buy. eBay's suggestions of other things like the one you're looking at are usually pretty far off the mark for pin-related swag, but on Sunday it popped up "30 lbs of pinball parts", which which at the time was priced just under $30. The thought of getting a big box of pincrap and sifting through it for days struck my fancy, and the seller chose to end the auction in the middle of the day on a Monday which is great for guys like me with access to the Internet at work. I bid and won for $65, which shipping the whole thing was just under $100. I reckon I'll get $50 worth of enjoyment just pawing through it and figuring out what everything is and whether it works or not. I plan to resell what I don't need on eBay, so I anticipate the triumphant return of the Dumbass Industrial Average to track my own personal price to earnings ration.

And really, don't I just need more things to distract me from fixing my games? I most certainly do.

Trespassing against those who would trespass against me

2009-02-28T22:18:00.006-05:00

February has been a singularly un-pinball month for me. I spent pretty much all of my free time watching all 69 episodes of Battlestar Galactica, plus the mini-series and movie so my wife would have someone to talk with about the last 4 episodes. Mission accomplished!

I did finish the Who-mobile stickers to my satisfaction... I had to reprint them a bunch of times because I couldn't get the color quite right. They turned out looking really nice, imo. Since I assumed that since my game didn't have them out of 8,000-odd machines there must be several people out there who needed them, so I put them on eBay and Mr. Pinball with hubristic visions of an early retirement from the proceeds! Unfortunately, I appear to have overestimated demand by all of them. No one has bought any of them, though I have gotten a few polite inquiries. I must say, I was disappointed, but kind of "meh" disappointed, not slash my wrists disappointed. And let's face it, my game now has its Who-mobile stickers on it that look great.

My other pinball activity of the month was messing with Mr. Pinball scammers. At the same time that I posted the stickers, on a lark I put up a wanted ad for a Lotta Fun backglass. I got one actual inquiry (same machine at my price point but a slightly different backglass, so I passed) and a crapload of responses from clowns trolling for easy marks. They were so pathetically obvious that I couldn't imagine anyone being fooled by them... so for fun I played the part of the eager, yet naively enthusiastic buyer. My wife thinks I ended up having too much fun doing it. ^_^;

Dumbass #1, "Jack Lawson":

Hello,i am located in uk,london and i have
the 1959 Bally Lotta Fun Bingo backglass
you need in good working condition,if you

are interested contact me for price
and shipping arrangement.

Regards,

Jack Lawson.

When he said that the backglass was in "good working condition", I knew I had a live one. So I asked for pictures and he said:

I AM SORRY MY KID MESSED WITH MY CAMERA,IT IS IN A PRETTY BAD SHAPE HOWEVER I WILL SALE THE BACKGLASS FOR $150 INCLUDING SHIPPING.

Darn that kid! So I asked him how it looked, including specifics about details that were on the backglass (clowns) and some that weren't (a ringmaster).

the backglass is in a perfect condition,no paint is missing from the cards,the clowns and ringmaster are all intact,the electronic devices are in good shape so you won't have to worry about any repairs.

At this point I let fly the insults.

Sorry, I can't do this with a straight face any more. It's so obvious that you have no idea what you're talking about and you're trying to rip me off. If you're going to try to pull this kind of thing off, you should at least know something about you're trying scam people about.

Thanks for the laughs.

He actually replied to this by saying "Thanks", which I thought was very polite of him, then finished things off with this bizarre coda:

i am sorry,i have problems with my memory,i comes and goes off,please i am sorry for the embarrassment this may have caused.

Dumbass #2, "Michael Henwood":

Compliment of the season,I am Michael Henwood from UK,... I saw your
wanted ads Listed on this web ..do you still need it ..I have it for sale and in good condition,please I only need a serious buyer,because I have much Emails from unserious buyers and please if you are one of them..Don,t Bother to write me,i have many experience in international shipping, so shipping will be very cheap from my side to your doorstep,i accept paypal., wire transfer , as soon as I hear from you Iwill email you pictures and asking price, my Phone number is + 44702 4093669 ..call me or you can reply via email..Thank you

I'm not sure what season, but since this was on the 11th maybe he meant Valentine's Day. I asked for pictures and price and got this.

Thanks for your email, attached is a pics of my backglass remove from 1959 Bally Lotta Fun Bingo, in good excellent condition, asking price is 100 pounds and i will need your complete home address to calculate the shipping cost to your doorstep, thanks and let me know what you thik

This was accompanied by a picture of the backglass from IPDB. Obviously, I thik he was trying to rip me off, but just to make him squirm I asked for closeups of the damage to the glass.

Thanks for your email, I am sorry ,i don,t pictures of the paint flaking on the lower right side, but i am assuring you that the backglass is in good condition, shipping and insurance to your doorstep will cost additional 50 pounds, total package to your doorstep will be 150 pounds, payment is by western union money transfer, as soon as your payment is receive, i will ship the backglass to your doorstep and i will email you the shipping tracking numbers

And so it was time for my denouement:

Yeah, I didn't think you'd have closeups since you got the picture off the Internet Pinball Database. This was slightly better than saying you couldn't send me pictures because your camera had broken, but not by much.

I think the problem is you scammers need to be smarter than the people you're trying to scam, and you're pretty clearly not. Honestly, does anybody really fall for this shit?

The trouble is, each time after I flamed the guy I would think of some new wrinkle to try, so I had to keep hoping for new victims.

Dumbass #3, "Morris Jacobs":

hello
my name is Mr Morris Jacobs from London , England. i have what you are looikig for. please feel free to contact me.

I didn't even think this guy would pass muster because he didn't even mention what I was looikig for in the email. He replied with a picture -- again from IPDB -- but of a totally different bingo game, Lite-a-Line. I very politely informed him of his mistake, and he gave up. Inwardly, I cursed him because I still had another gambit to attempt and he had inadvertently thwarted me. And unfortunately, he was the last guy (or for all I know it was the same guy). So I put another want ad on Mr. Pinball, this time for a Paragon playfield (again I got one legit response, go figure). But then I struck paydirt!

Dumbass #4, "Frank Geddins":

I am Frank Geldins from the UK.I saw your Wanted Ads on the internet and i want to let you know tha i still have for sale.Please get back to me if you are still in need.

Scammers take note: It's generally a huge tell if you misspell your own fake name. Frank responded with the picture at right of the entire working game. I was shocked to find that Frank had clearly learned from the mistakes of his peers... this was not a picture from IPDB! However, Google "paragon pinball" and look in the images and this is the third picture. See the gray rectangle on the right? That clever scamp covered up the word "SOLD" that's in the original. However, I played dumb and continued our correspondence. Frank gave me his address to send the Western Union moneygram in London. So I said:

Actually, how much would it be without postage? My son is going to school at Oxford and could pop over to London and pick it up from you directly and pay you in cash. His schedule is pretty open... what times would be good for you?

Note that this is almost not a complete lie, since my daughter did attend school in Lancaster last semester. As expected, Frank didn't think much of this.

Thanks for the mail.I would not welcome anybody to my house as am really a strict business man who do business all around UK.I do not have that time to welcome persons to my house and if your son wants to come and collect from my house i think that would be very impossible.Get back to me ASAP.

So I did get back to him ASAP.

Really? Because I think if you were a legitimate businessman instead of a strict one, picking it up in person would be perfectly reasonable.

The truth is, I knew you were a lying sack of shit from your first email, and your picture of the game that you pulled off the Internet (you did cleverly white out the word "sold" from the image, I will give you that) was pathetic at best.

Thanks for the laughs.

Once again showing that this guy -- and I'm positive it's just one guy -- politely thanked me and said he "really appreciate". So I just snuck in a final dig:

No problem... just trying to waste as much of your time as you're making me waste of mine.

And with that I brought my career as a scambuster to a close. As usual, it takes so little to amuse me.

Now that I've successfully discharged my husbandly BSG duties, I'm hoping March will come in like a pinball lion and I can get some actual game work done. As interesting as Travels with Joe is, the blog is here to talk about the games, so I should do that at least every so often.

Superbowl of Wandering Around Looking for Pinball!

2009-02-01T21:46:00.002-05:00

This has been a finding pinball weekend.

I went up to visit my daughter at college this weekend for an exchange of prisoners: I gave her a bunch of stuff she forgot/left/couldn't find before leaving, and she gave me the Netflix disc she took with her three weeks ago and still hasn't watched and season 1 of Battlestar Galactica... I need to start watching it because my wife is obsessing on the new episodes and needs somebody to talk about it to, so February is the month when I have to watch all 60-something of them.

Anyway, so we went to dinner at The Pub, which is just a block and a half from her dorm. And to my pleasant surprise, The Pub had a Champion Pub! It had a strobing display and a slightly weak right flipper, but it was in OK shape otherwise. I had the restraint to not play while my daughter sat idling... I waited until I dropped her off, then went back a played a few unremarkable games.

So today was another in a series of pinball odysseys. Today I headed over towards Anne Arundel County to verify some old FSPA pinball locations. The first stops were in College Park. One wasn't there, but the other was Town Hall Liquor Store and Lounge, which had a Doctor Who, Addams Family, and a turned off Demolition Man. It's kind of a creepy location, and I never went there when I went to school at U of MD because I always thought of it as the place where all the homeless guys and alkies hung out. I did pretty good with DW, almost beating the Emporer Dalek stage in multiball, which is better than I've done at home.

Next up was the Crofton Bowling Center, where they had a Roller Coaster Tycoon with a non-working right flipper and a NASCAR with a few flaky switches but otherwise in pretty nice shape. I won a free game but gave it to a kid that was watching me play. After two years of playing Pizza House's loser NASCAR, it was nice to play one that had all of its parts and has been cleaned.

Then I made a stop that I have been looking forward to, Happy House Pizza, which had a Tales of the Arabian Nights. No GI, strobing display, dirtier than all get out, but perfectly playable and a load of fun. They had a Stern Harley Davidson, but I didn't play it.

The next stop was a bowling alley that was supposed to have a SW Ep1, but it was gone. But on the plus side, I stopped at a convenience store and they had my soda, Vault Zero.

So I went on to my last stop, good ol' Crab Town USA. I didn't have a lot of time since I wanted to see some of the Superbowl. So I played a few games... Twilight Zone, KISS, BK2K, Pinbot, and Fish Tales, plus a bonus game of Punch-out. Everything was in surprisingly good condition, though Fish Tales had a big chunk of plastic on the playfield which eventually blocked the lane and the ball got stuck. But this time I noticed there were little request forms on the wall from the operator, so I left a note for him.

And then even though I'm not a big football fan, the Superbowl was actually worth watching until the end. So overall it was a pretty good day!

Doing Things! To Pinball Machines, Even!

2009-01-23T23:34:00.004-05:00

OK! I've actually done stuff to pinball machines lately, so here they are:

One of the projects I've been working on has been replacements for the missing Who-mobile stickers on DW. I scanned the one on the ramp from the parts game, double teamed it with Photoshop and GraphicConverter, and went through about a zillion printing tests. The photo at right shows an early test for size and color. I finally arrived at one I'm satisfied with, so I printed a bunch on the nice glossy paper. This weekend I plan to run some endurance tests on them, possibly give them an extra seal depending on the results of the tests, turn them into stickers, then cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. I plan to make a few extras and share my bounty on eBay and/or Mr. Pinball. When I have something worth showing, I'll post a pic or two.

While I had the glass off, I decided to take care of a few odd cabinet-related jobs that have been sitting around for a while. I replaced the molding in back that holds the playfield glass, because my original one was cracked and I had two to replace it with (I had forgotten about the first one when I bought the second). I put a lock on the coin door... not because it swings open like my Black Knight's does, but more because it should be there. Both of these items got me thinking about other things I need, and while browsing around Marco's site for tangentially related things, I was stunned to find a backbox lock assembly. Since mine is completely missing, yoink! I think I had searched for the backbox lock on Illinois Pinball's site, but nowhere else. I ended up buying the lock plate (I have a spare lock) from Bay Area Amusements... it was $1 more than Marco, but BAA had the playfield glass switch in stock so I went with the dealer who had a quorum of items. More toys!

Like Stephen Colbert, I have been a strong advocate of Wrist Health in pinball since discovering that doing squeeze ball exercises reduces the amount of wrist soreness after pinball shows. Lately, though, I fell off the wagon because I was let down by my tools. I had an awesome balloon filled with sand, which was great until it broke. Then I had a green ball filled with little green beads, which was fantastic until a hole opened up and the green beads started emigrating... I tried to re-patriate them, but like the INS found that it was a losing battle. I got a free gel-filled ball from a vendor at my company's user conference in May. It started off feeling like a breast -- the squeeze ball's Hellenic Ideal, imo -- but a few weeks of hard-squeezin' segmented the insides, which left it unpleasantly mushy and definitely non-breast-like. Then I tried a foam ball someone had at work, but after two weeks the painted exterior disintegrated and I ended up with green flecks on my pants. Finally I tried an inflatible dog toy, but it deflated under the constant pressure. Plus it was ribbed for a dog's pleasure but not mine, and it hurt my hand. So at last I decided to lay down sheckles for the real deal, and after a fruitless retail search I found one at Amazon that I kind of like. It's egg-shaped and comes in five levels of firmness. I chose medium, and two weeks in it is holding up pretty well. My only complaints are that it is a little smaller than I would like and it can be very cold after a night in the car with the temp in the single digits.

All for now, hopefully more sticker news soon.

MLK + Barack Obama = 4 Day Weekend!

2009-01-19T13:59:00.005-05:00

Today is Martin Luther King Jr Day, and tomorrow our office is closed for the Obama Inauguration because we're right across the river from DC. It's a four day weekend! Thanks, Black People!

It kind of got me thinking about how white pinball is. Black people are not well represented. I can think of a handful of black sports stars (Ali, Shaq, Michael Jordon, Frank Thomas), a few movie stars (Wesley Snipes in Demo Man is the only one I can come up with off the top of my head), and I think there's a guy who could be on the Funhouse backglass. That's about all I can think of. I really don't see a lot of black guys at pinball shows, either.

There are a couple of Asians (San Francisco and Chinatown are a few I can think of). Arabs ostensibly have a few games like Ali Baba, but most of the "Arabs" are white women in harem garb. Forehead dot Indians are pretty much gross parodies, like in Ace High (and again, surrounded by white women). Feather Indians were popular in the 50's and 60's, and they were mostly benign portrayals, surprising given the number that cowboys were shooting on TV and in movies. There were a couple of Noble Savages like Totem in the 70's, but nothing particularly modern. Hispanics have a few EM games maybe... all the ones I can think of (El Toro, Spanish Eyes, Toledo) are more Spanish than South or Central American. Australian Aborigines have Boomerang. That's about all I can think of. With the exception of Totem, all of these are EMs. In general, a pretty poor representation of the world's people.

Enough of that silliness. We took my daughter back to school last week so I snuck over to Pizza House for a game of NASCAR. They had fixed the ball lock switch, but now the switch for the hole at the top of the playfield is broken. My ego is gratified that my high score is still there, though.

I was watching the extremely terrible Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and that featured two pinball machines in supporting roles: Black Knight and Vector. When I see pins in movies, I always like to see what machine it is... I'm still trying to figure out what the EM game is in My Name is Earl. I think the solid state game is Dragon.

Today I took advantage of the Federal Holiday and finished up my Montgomery County pinball tour. I went to Beltway Chevron and played Funhouse, but the kickout was weak which caused some pretty bad drains and something seemed to be blocking the ramp entrance. I was doing OK, but then I locked up the machine: I got a two ball multiball and suddenly the flippers stopped working and it wouldn't do the ball search. After waiting I turned it off and on again. Then I went up to Max's Kosher Deli to play The Simpsons Pinball Party, but both lower flippers were dead. I did have an OK but expensive hot pastrami on a kaiser roll, though. And people wonder why no one has pinball machines any more... anyway, I was so annoyed at my bad luck that I stopped in and played a few games of Family Guy on my way home.

OK, you say, but what about fixing up games, which is what this blog is supposed to be about? Well, I'm using this weekend to work on some projects, so next post we should have something worth reading.

Roman Numeral Two

2009-01-09T23:17:00.002-05:00

Yes, it's my second post of the month. My reader Lunchbox asked if the last week's entry meant I would be posting more often; clearly, the answer is Yes! So far!

Today I attempted another pinball mini-break after work. During a lengthy compile I started checking locations near work, and thanks to the FSPA I found two available in Falls Church, about a mile or so apart. First I went to a Bowl America where they had a very dirty Sopranos for 50c per game. Unfortunately, the only Big Pussy to be found was me... I sucked pretty heavily so I only played once. My second and final stop was at the Lazy Sundae Ice Cream Shop, which not surprisingly was closed. The Simpsons Pinball Party therein taunted me silently. In all, somewhat disappointing, but look at life as a journey it's not so bad. In this case, it was an almost pointless journey that included taking the wrong freeway during rush hour, but it was a journey nonetheless.

I've been pesimistic about the future of pinball in general lately... partly it's bad economy scenarios playing out in my head, partly the Stern layoff news, and partly thinking about CSI. Everybody has been trying to be encouraged by the old saw that pinball traditionally does well when the economy goes south, but here's my problem with that: In past recessions, pinball was in a lot better shape than it is now. There were multiple manufacturers, there were fewer distractions to the potential player, and you didn't need to spend 20 minutes on the Internet and drive for half an hour to find a game. So I don't think the current recession is going to revive Stern, and I honestly don't expect Stern to make it through 2009. Obviously I'm not happy about that, but I don't see another outcome. Plus, CSI? It sounds like the genius who thought Wheel of Fortune was a bankable idea was working overtime. It doesn't help that my opinion of the show is not high... Mrs. Entropy and I watched one at her sister's house and it was one of the dumbest things I've seen on TV for years.

Luckily, after years of being a capital-I Iconoclast, I'm used to the things I love failing miserably.

But enough moping! Let's have some reasons to be cheerful, part 3!

Um. I can't think of any. Sorry.

Well, let's address this: Lunchbox states in his comment that he doesn't have time for his pins and is thinking of getting rid of them. I respect your right to decide the fate of your games, sir, but I beg you to give plenty of serious thought before selling. I have been a pinball owner lo these 23 years now, and there are times when my collection has lain fallow for incredible stretches of time. When I'm distracted -- any shiny object will do -- months will go by when I don't even think about my games. I think between 1987 and 1990 Quicksilver was parked in my parents' garage on a dolly. Even when I'm in a non-playing stretch or when it seems like all the games are acting up, I'm frequently comforted by the fact that I could play them. Potential pinball can keep me going through rough patches. So just think about it.

Happy Holidays!

2009-01-02T23:55:00.005-05:00

Yes, it's happy holidays Chez Entropy, as you can probably tell from the festively decorated Quicksilver in our living room. It's hard to see, but I even made a little Santa hat for the backglass lady... since she isn't wearing a stitch of clothing, the hat should keep her warm as temperatures plummet.

This year the holidays consisted of me and pinball not quite seeing eye to eye. There was the usual amount of panicking and throwing things around, then my brother-in-law from Indiana came to visit with 12 hours notice, then I got sick, then I had to compress all of my vacation chores into about 4 days, and then it was January 2nd and I had three days before I went back to work. About all I'd done so far was more basement cleaning, which hasn't yielded a usable work area yet (though having to beat a path through our basement for a new washing machine did help a lot). It's getting there just not fast, and at this point I'm kind of at an impasse. When I go down to clean I wander back and forth trying to figure out what to do next and after 45 minutes of puttering I give up. I'm going to make an attempt at building playfield storage and I hope that will break the stalemate.

So today was the self-declared pinball day. At first I was going to give a little love to the pinball operators of Montgomery County by touring all of the known games on location (except for the Creature in Montgomery Mall that is inside a theater which requires admission). Then I cut the NASCAR at Chuck E. Cheese because I didn't feel like being treated like a pedophile when I went in. Then I cut out the Funhouse at Beltway Chevron because it was too far south. But finally I got some action. I played Pirates at Dream Wizards and did OK even though the auto plunger wasn't working. I stopped by Max's Kosher Cafe which is walking distance from where I used to live in Wheaton but they closed at 2 today, probably because of that darned Sabbath. The I went up to Sole d'Italia and played Family Guy, revelling in the fact that the sound was turned up and the restaurant was empty, so I could actually hear all of the game's sound effects. Since two pins was a pretty pathetic showing, I fired up Paragon and Black Knight here at home and played a few forgettable games.

Another location story: A few weeks ago my group at work went out bowling, and there was a NASCAR there. The game was filthy, but you couldn't tell because the gameroom was not well lit and the GI was out.

For Christmas, my wife decided she was going to surprise me with a pin-related gift and got me cabinet stencils for Eight Ball Deluxe and Black Knight from a guy who seems to be the stencil-kit king on eBay. It was a nice gift, something I need, but also in line with her agenda to make the games look nicer. As usual she got me another big gift so I felt like she spent too much on me. It's also a huge time suck, and the cabinets on those games don't look that bad... the game that really needs it is Quicksilver, which has a bunch of dings and strapping tape damage. But since it's my lowest production game (only 1,200) that's not going to happen. I could also use one for Lotta Fun, since it's been painted over, but I've resigned myself to making that one myself. So at some point when I do a huge overhaul of the games I've got the stencils for those two machines ready to go.

And while 2009 may not be the year I get around to stenciling, it will be the year I get off'n my butt and fix up those games. It's resolved and everything, along with a couple of other project that have been waiting in the wings. So if my next couple of posts don't show some real movement in that regard, feel free to kick my ass. Hard. With, like, boots and everything.

Vacation, all I ever wanted

2008-11-30T21:24:00.002-05:00

Don't kid yourself: Blogging is a lot of work for something you don't get paid for. I'm only doing it now because I'm at the end of a week of vacation and I got a lot of stuff done around the house, so I feel like I earned some non-productive blogwork.

It's also tough because I just haven't been doing a lot of pinball lately. I have been slowly pushing stuff back and forth in my basement to try to get my wife and I separate but equal workspaces. Getting those spaces up and running is one of the goals of my vacation (including both the week that just past and most of December... we've been trying to get a project out at work this year, so I haven't taken a lot of time off). I did a big push in my wife's space this week, because in order to clean out the dining room for Thanksgiving I had to transport a lot of the stuff into the basement. Remember when I said that cleaning our house is like playing Sokoban? Well, this is case in point.

Currently I'm at an impasse with the cleaning. I'm out of space in the bedroom that will become my wife's space, and when I moved all of the pinball stuff into my corner I ended up with almost no space there. The best solution would be if every room in my basement were about 5 feet wider, but for now we'll leave that for my next vacation in a week and a half.

But this is a blog about Pinball, things related to Pinball, and things largely unrelated to Pinball... I've covered the latter pretty thoroughly, so let's talk about the first two.

I went to the White Rose Pinball Show in York, PA in October. Usually I complain about the overpriced junk, the non-working junk, and the just plain junk at that show, but the Hershey show caused me to reevaluate just what a crappy pinball show is. By contrast, York was great. I had fun, played some interesting games, and had a good time. Surprising fact of the day: I barely spent any money. Being dormant in the pinball department has put me in a position of not needing any parts, so I didn't have anything to buy. I think I spent about $40 the whole day, a new record for me.

One fun bonus thing I did in York: I left the show around 8 and was hungry. Usually I end up stopping at an Arby's or something on the way home, but this time I made up my mind to try something different. Right about that time I passed a burrito place about a half mile from the fairgrounds called Roburrito's. I negotiated a series of right turns and went in. It turns out it's like a punk rock burrito place... as a child of the '80s L.A. music scene, it's just the sort of place I would eat burritos at if anywhere around Derwood had the temerity to be like that. It was a good burrito, made better with the selection of hot sauces they had available. Yay!

One of the big pinball auctions showed up at the MD state fairgrounds in the last week of October, and since it happened to be on my birthday I got a free pass to see what was up. The last auction I went to -- in the same building that the York show is in -- was not so much a game auction as it was a crap auction... they had 4 Gorgars in various states of repair and about a hundred beaten down cabinets from late 80's and early 90's D-List video games. This show was much better. A bunch of pins, mostly Stern and 90's games, but a smattering of EMs and early 80's games. There were also a lot of reasonable quality vids from the past 30 years. I took advantage of the games set to free play and left a little before noon. There was nothing I really wanted to buy, but I had a pretty good time.

So, we're up to date. Hopefully I will make progress on a workspace and be able to start fixin' pins and workin' on some of my secret projects before the end of the year.

November Will Be Magic Again!

2008-11-02T00:48:00.005-04:00

Why settle for Change when you can have Transfiguration?

Not as poignant as Republicans for Voldemort, I admit. I made this sign a few weeks ago as more of a Dada Art Project than any kind of real political statement. I had it next to our first actual political yard sign, but my wife forced me to move it because she felt people would think we were making fun of the real candidate. Re-elect Fudge was out for a week or so, then we got two inches of rain and it turns out I didn't properly seal the sign, which turned it into abstract art. ^_^;

* Hero of the Beach *

2008-10-05T08:30:00.006-04:00

Forgot to mention two instances where I saved the day for pinball.

When I first went to find info on the Hershey Gameroom Show, the street address on Mr. Pinball was missing a letter, making it unfindable on all of the mapping programs I tried. So I emailed Mr. Pinball and he corrected it.

And way back in August of last year I blogged about the IPDb not having the correct lamp pages for Quicksilver. Well, last month I finally got a response:

Changes you submitted to the Pinball Database for the game
titled 'Quicksilver' have been accepted in whole or in part
by an editor!  Thank you for your submission!

The following changes were made because of your submission,
and may include additional corrections and listing changes
made by an Editor:

add new file Stern_1980_Quicksilver_Lamp_Driver_Schematic.jpg
 - Lamp Driver Schematic []  [#3643]
add new file Stern_1980_Quicksilver_Solenoid_Driver_Schematic.jpg
 - Solenoid Driver Schematic []  [#3644]
add new file Stern_1980_Quicksilver_MPU_Schematic.jpg
 - MPU Schematic []  [#3645]

You can see these changes at http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?1895

I am remiss in my blogging duties

2008-10-05T00:39:00.003-04:00

Yes, it has been two months since my last confession, but honestly there hasn't been a lot going on. There's been some progress on the work area, but not so much that I can really brog about it (brog == my neologism of the day: blog+brag). Ditto on the games... most of them are buried under the detritus of the cleaning effort.

I did go to the Hershey Gameroom Show two weeks ago. Whereas previous shows had multiple vendors and were more gameroom-oriented and not pinball specific, this show turned out to be nothing more than the Pennsylvania Gameroom Warehouse parking lot sale, albeit in a dumpy old agricultural fairground building. Lots of pins, mostly 90's but a few before and after, and one or two vendors that might have not been PGW front organizations, but that was about it. The flea market consisted of two vendors, both of whom were most likely guys who shovelled out the PGW dumpster. It was like going to the Republican National Convention.

Here's my problem with the pins that were there: Most of them has been lovingly restored cosmetically and were achingly beautiful, but most of them couldn't play for crap. Bad flippers, non-working switches, bad displays, games that rebooted, and so on... and all priced a few hundred dollars below PGW's showroom prices. Would I pay $2300 (marked down from $2700) for a Black Knight 2000 that spit out all of its balls? How about the T2 with one of the plastics on the playfield? Or Hurricane with a bump where the lower ramp connects to the upper that slowed down the ball and caused it to drop off the ramp SDTM? They obviously spend all of their time getting the games to look good at the expense of basic functionality. IMO, you can't have one without t'other.

However, it was worth the trip for one thing: They had a working Lotta Fun. I played that a bunch of times so I could experience what my game will be like when it's fixed up. I also got plenty of cell phone pics of the backglass so I can try to reproduce it -- at least so I know what numbers correspond with what lights (I wish I'd taken a real camera, though). I was also surpised to find a modern Gottlieb game that I actually enjoyed playing, Title Fight. I has some fun in the old school section playing Centaur, Xenon, and Silverball Mania, all canted at bizarre angles on the uneven exhibit hall floor... Xenon was so far off kilter that the ball would stop in the tube.

I didn't buy much... my biggest purchase was a copy of Mad Dog and his Art, Gene Cunningham's somewhat amateurishly made love letter to pinball uber-artist Dave Christensen. I'd been meaning to buy a copy the next time I made a Illinois Pinball run, but it was there and I wasn't buying anything else so I went for it. It's a little disappointing... I'd like it to be about twice as long with more pictures, especially of the playfields. Maybe not worth the ~$35 price, but it's not a travesty, either.

Moan moan moan. I don't have a lot of good things to say about anything, do I?

Next weekend is the York show, which should either wash the bad taste out of my mouth or poison my perception of pinball shows forever.

Another example of how my life juxtaposes rather nicely: I was listening to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the ride, and that same week I had Netflixed the first season of Pushing Daisies, both of which are narrated by Jim Dale. As my mind wandered during the drive, I kept thinking Jim would say, "The facts were these: At this point Harry Potter was 16 years, 51 weeks, 3 days, 5 hours and 23 minutes old."

Here's the thing that I noticed about Pushing Daisies after watching all 9 episodes in a two week period: The costume designer loves the cleavage. 'nuff said.

I also don't think I've mentioned my latest acquisition (aside from the usual small pin parts that I've picked up here and there when eBay exudes them): After looking for ages online, I finally got a pachinko machine from a local garage sale in July. My wife alerted me to it, so I stopped in and took a look. They were asking $25, and it had no balls and was missing parts. While I was looking they offered $15. I thought I'd make them sweat, so I left and ran some errands, and when I came back they asked $10 and I took it. I bought a load of balls on eBay, but I want to clean it up before I set it up. Another wonderful project that will fill my copious free time!

Short, yet action packed

2008-08-01T23:10:00.003-04:00

This is going to be a short post because I'm tired and my hands are sore. My group at work is being beaten down by an impending release date so I'm working a lot. My wife got a job last month as an activity coordinator for an assisted living facility, which is good for us financially but she now spends a colossal amount of time on the computer researching activities for the old folks.

I did block out a bunch of time to work on the Doctor Who Dalek Wobble Head kit. It arrived about a week after I paid for it, then it sat around for a few days. Since I don't have a lot of free time, I started doing micro bursts of work on it -- removing stuff one day, fitting it the next, drilling holes the day after, etc. This put me in a pretty good position when my wife's dad and brother showed up for a 2 day visit, which kept her occupied so I could devote some large chunks of time to the process.

Installation was generally pretty easy. I liked the shunts they had to attach new wires to the boards... you plug in their plug to the appropriate location, then plug the real plug into that. Very slick. Of course, since my wiring is different from a standard game I had to do a little fiddling about, but nothing more complicated than before.

Of course, it wouldn't be my Doctor Who if something didn't go wrong, but I did get it to the point where the head would run in test mode. Here is (I think) my first ever blog video:

I'll go into the mighty saga of what went wrong, what went wrong with the going wrong, and what happened when things just fell off a cliff in a later post. It stopped short of the game being left a smoking ruin, but just barely.

But I'll go out on a high note. The state is building a new highway near my house which they've been planning on doing it for almost 50 years now (literally -- it was first proposed in the 1960's). One of the houses we looked at before buying this one was demolished as part of the construction. So a few months ago the dog and I decide to take a walk down the cleared path of destruction where it will be built, and it was kind of fun. So a few weeks ago we wanted to take another walk and see how things are progressing... but this time, we did so when there were a couple of workers doing things on the site. We stayed well out of their way and looked around some more, but it was hot so we turned back after a short trip. So, about three days later, signs such as the one pictured showed up around the entrances to the job sites. I am 100% confident that the signs appeared because the workers saw me walking around and figured I was there to deliberately hurt myself and sue the state or to steal a couple of the 50 foot concrete and steel beams they're using to make the bridges. There are also a group of security guys driving between the job sites on weekends. Regardless, I am partly bummed that we can't walk there any more and partly elated that my actions appeared to have caused such a kerfuffle.

Joe Entropy: Making a difference in the community.

Many are called, few have chosen to pay $300 for a moving Dalek head

2008-06-22T01:26:00.010-04:00

As the title indicates, yesterday I got the email offering the purchase of a Doctor Who Wobble Head kit. Of course, I had already talked myself into buying it, so without much ado (other than finding a browser that the site worked with, newly downloaded Firefox 3.0 not being among them) I plunked down $290.75 and eagerly await my booty.

That not being chump change, I feel like I should actually install it promptly. This has lit the fire of righteous fury under me to create a work area in which I could actually do the work necessary without injury. That means the timetable for the swapping of my wife's and my work areas suddenly has a deadline, and I work great with deadlines.

So let's throw shame to the wind and turn the camera towards the parts of the basement that I usually aim it away from. On the right is my wife's work area. In all fairness, this was briefly organized, and over time has become a desperate cry to be featured on one of those HGTV house cleaning shows. And after it became slightly messy, anything even vaguely craft-related was just tossed in, sort of like compound interest for disorderly spaces. Note the exposed sewer pipe in the background... if that isn't a blog post that's just waiting to happen, I don't know what is. Not shown: The partially collapsed drop ceiling!

On the left is my personal superfund site. And this is after some organization earlier in the year... it used to be worse. And while my wife's area is a collaborative effort, this room is pretty much all me because I'm the only one who can squeeze into it without knocking down precarious piles of stuff, thereby blocking the escape route. So you can see this is a mighty labor that even Hercules would pale at. Say, speaking of the labors of Hercules, maybe I can clean my wife's stuff by breaking the sewer pipe and the resulting river of filth would carry away the mess.

And of course it wouldn't be a blog post without a few new purchases. Here's a mostly populated Pin*bot playfield that I got a few weeks ago. It's pretty thrashed cosmetically, but I figure if that's a problem I can move everything over to the unpopulated playfield. Getting this was kind of a pain... the guy who sold it to me was in California and had never sold a playfield before, so he lacked the basic shipping skills, namely accurate pricing and the acquisition of cheap boxes. The original shipping estimate was $140, but I asked if he could do UPS which should be ~$70. He said fine, so I bid and won. Then he sat on it for a few weeks, during which he said he was trying to get a box. Finally he bought a $15 box, which I called bullshit on and suggested he go to a bike store where they'll give you bike boxes for free (like I said, he was new to this). After much haggling, harsh words, and a few angry tears he finally got it to UPS and they wanted to charge him an oversize box fee... hello? Measure the frickin' box BEFORE shipping! So he cut the box down to size at UPS and shipped it for $75. When I got it, it was basically floating free in the box with a handful of styrofoam appliance packing pieces inadequately protecting it. I could reach into the box and touch the unwrapped playfield. I wanted to kill the guy. By dumb luck it did arrive in reasonable condition, but I think I'll be buying my playfields locally from now on.

This just arrived this week, bought from the guy who sold me the non-working "100% working" WPC display board a few years ago. It's the base and functional parts of Rudy's head on Funhouse. The picture was terrible and the description was practically non-existent (the title was "Funhouse pinball Rudy part" and the description was "You are bidding on a Funhouse Pinball rudy parts". Seriously.). But I won, and it actually turned out to be better than I expected. It's got the jaw piece, the kicker, and three of the four coils. If I could get the jaw motor and gear box, that's really all I would need to play the game, since the face and eyes are all just eye candy anyway.

I don't expect to be buying much for a few months, since eBay season has come to an end and the wobble head has put me either really close to or slightly over my debt ceiling of $1000. So it's as good a time as any to get organized so I can prepare for the new fall season, when I'll have to sell a bunch of boodle to return to solvency.

5 minute post... Go!

2008-06-08T01:34:00.002-04:00

Last minute addendum! I forgot that for the first time, I won a door prize at the pinball show! Obviously, it's not a pinball machine or flat screen TV, since I probably would have remembered that on the first go round. It's a Pinball Wizards tiny travel alarm clock/calculator/
world time zone thing. I don't know what I'll do with it, but how can I not use it? It's a Major Award!

Actually, one place I could use it is in my new work area! My wife complained that she doesn't have a place for her crafts today... actually, she does, but it's a disaster area (to be fair, not entirely of her own making). We were going to set one up for her in the laundry room, but it's not an ideal space (near water and generally filled with dirty clothes), and it's currently piled to the ceiling with eBay packing supplies and boxes. So she said today that she wishes she could have a room for her crafts. After some negotiating, it was decided that I would move my pinball stuff out of the fake bedroom in the basement (fake -> no closet) and move her craft stuff into the bedroom. She would be away from water and have a whopping two windows for light; I would have a large work area near my games that is convenient to our primary drain pipe, so when it bursts it can spray warm effluent all over my $1000+ collection of playfields!

More on this story as it develops...

Lucky!

2008-06-06T23:16:00.002-04:00

My lazy ass is still catching up... 100% of this post is vintage stuff.

I suppose Mrs. Entropy is very tolerant of my hobby. Financially she can't really say much because she spends a lot on sewing, knitting, et cetera, though I'm currently outspending her by almost 2 to 1. She's sort of accepted the amount of space the games take up, and was even willing to allow Quicksilver in the living room, mainly because she likes the art (as I believe I've mentioned before, she's pretty non-committal on Black Knight, Doctor Who, and EBD, but she is heavily irked with the way Mr. Barbarian is drawn on Paragon... he has the body of a dwarf and his right arm and wing are not anatomically possible). She's even sat with me a few times and watched This Old Pinball vids and Pins and Vids 2 & 3... on the last two, she even asked for more information about Wizard Blocks, and was kind of interested in the process of manufacturing Big Bang Bar. And a couple of times she's been very helpful in reading part numbers out of game manuals while I type them in to Illinois Pinball's search engine. My sense is that a lot of Pin Wives are openly antagonistic to their hubbys' hobby.

But realistically, I could probably use some actual friends who play pinball. I think the last time I had friends to play pinball with was high school and college, which is kind of pathetic... and not tele-pathetic, either. I've thought about going to one of the FSPA nights, but they don't meet local to me any more and the remaining meetings are a pretty big schlep for me, though the one in Virginia is only about a half hour from my work. And in addition my meet & greet social skills are poor at best and I worry about what to talk about when the subject of pinball has been exhausted. I think I'm
at my best when people need something from me and are forced to seek me out. Well, that sounds kind of pathetic too. -_-; Anyway, I honestly don't know what I'm going to do about it, but I supposed we'll see.

But enough about my tedious life. As previously reported, I went to the Pinball Wizards show in Allentown and had a pretty good time. I probably say this every year, but it seems like there was a lot more junk this time... games with whole flippers not working (I'm looking at you, Tom Tom!), games that were pretty much never turned on for the whole show, features not working, blah blah blah. But there were a few standouts... I enjoyed playing Gottlieb's Roller Coaster, an early 70's game with proto-habitrails. And I had a hella fun time playing Balls-a-Poppin, a 1956 game with multiball and an auto-plunger. The big surprise this show is I spent less than $100. Now, this isn't for lack of trying, I just don't have a lot to get these days that they sell at shows. Classic Playfield Reproductions came down from the forests of Eastern Canada for what I think is the first time (at a show I've been to, anyway) and they had a grab bag of repro plastics for Pin Bot that I needed... I had to force my brain to remember which plastics were missing on the playfield I had just bought (a populated one this time -- like I said, my ass is lazy, and I am behind; I ended up buying one or two that I had, but in general did pretty well and only didn't buy one). Out in the flea market I picked up a Funhouse subway ramp and a crapload of plastics (several almost complete sets) from a guy for a pretty good price... I had to run back and forth between a parts Funhouse and the ramp, trying to make sure that it was indeed the ramp I needed. I also speculated and bought a beautiful TOTAN subway ramp for $10, hoping I could sell it for more on eBay... which in fact I did, I cleaned it up Sunday, posted it, and it sold for almost $16... I probably made only $3, but small victories count, too! I also put up a few of the extra Funhouse plastics -- a set of the pointing hands -- and that sold for $3 or so, which is bonus since all the plastics together cost me $17. And, of course, I delivered the High Speed cabinet to the guy's proxy... that's a first for me, actually bringing something to a pinball show.

It was not all coolness, though. Harshness came in the form of a Doctor Who parts machine that a guy was selling for $250. I dithered about it for a while, then looked around for an ATM so I could come up with $$$, and in that time someone more decisive bought it. It was a relatively unfaded cabinet, it had the Dalek on top, but the rest was wrapped up so I couldn't see it, but I find it hard to believe that I couldn't have gotten that much and more for it on eBay. And I've had good luck with the parts DW and High Speed that I wanted to see if I had actual instincts that I could use to help pay for my purchases. So, that's this year's One That Got Away.

In an attempt at sociability I did speak to a couple of people, and played a doubles game of Maverick with a guy who I was initially beating but who proved to be a pinball savant. I don't think he totally pasted me, as my last two balls were pretty good, but he was definitely out of my league.

I think the rest of the day was pretty uneventful. Anyway, it's getting late so it's time to wrap it up.