30 Pound Christmas!

My remaining purchases arrived this week, especially 30 pounds of transformer and other stuff. I looked through the pinballchuck stuff and I can probably use some of it, but I'm not sure how much. Ditto with the Hurricane playfield parts. I do feel like a dumbass, because the flipper coils that looked orange in the auction picture were actually red, which means they probably won't work. For all I know, the entire flipper assembly is different. I wouldn't know, because I didn't compare the parts list (like the coil part numbers) until I saw the coils I bought were red.

Anyway, so this weekend I'm really honestly and for truly going to get Doctor Who to the point where I can determine its workingness. I actually got a start this weekend while my wife was watching old Daily Shows, cleaning off the accumulated detritus, labeling the plugs, and removing the boards for pre-test cleaning (the power board is especially dusty).

Buying spree!

Well, it has been a while since my last post. Since then I got a lot and nothing done.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this, but at the show there was game -- Disco Fever of all things, with a somewhat less than cool hand-drawn backglass and I don't think it had the groovy banana flippers -- being run by a PC. This was an idea that I've had for a while, but didn't have the technical wherewithal to accomplish (my last experience with electronics being EE labs 15 years ago). Well, obviously somebody had done it, because there was the game, though I didn't see anyone actually playing the game, so it probably wasn't 100% working. Anyway, a quick search of the Internets found Pinmame-HW, a hardware interface between a custom version of Pinmame and a playfield. This fascinated me for a while, and I have mentally corrected what I consider to be flaws in their system. And I dropped about $30 at Great Plains Electronics (I bought the DrWho cables from them) on enough parts to partially implement their design. Now that I have the parts, of course, I'm stalling... that Big Fear I mentioned. What I have to do is have No Fear (pun intended). Anyway, hopefully I'll get started on that at some point... I plan to try hooking it up to my spare Eight Ball Deluxe playfield and see what happens.

In the purchasing department, I just got finish spending $160 or so on eBay. I have finally purchased the Holy Grail of my Doctor Who, a proper and working WPC transformer. Actually, after two months of bupkis, three showed up in one week, and one with awesome s/h! I didn't get that one, but I got the next one, which is costing me $41 to ship (with my other auctions, but still). I bought six items from one guy who was parting out a Hurricane: the transformer (yay! $61), a set of the backbox speakers with wires ($11), some playfield parts which may or may not be of any use to me ($4), a complete set of flippers & hardware ($20), the insert that goes between the bottom of the translite and the top of the speaker plate ($1!!!), and the plumb bob for the tilt ($3, like I need that... I don't knock games around like some people do). He was also selling the bracket for the translite, but that went for $44, which was more than I wanted to spend.

Well, let's get our outrageous hyperbole straight. The Holy Grail is probably the motor & cam I need for the mini-playfield. The transformer is probably more like a shard of the True Cross, or maybe the Spear of Longinus... something like that.

The other guy who was selling a transformer ($11 to ship! Can you believe it! I shoulda bid more aggressively) also sold me a second Bidirectional Motor drive board and a coin door interface board for $3 + $4 s/h. The former I bought a few months ago for $30, so I can't believe I can't resell it for more, and the latter -- the last item on my list of stuff I need, since I don't have a set of coin mechs -- was a whim. Mainly I got it to see if I can resell the motor drive board. The guy I bought it from had terrible auction titles and descriptions, and I think that hurt his sales accordingly. F'ing Mr. Postman delivered that stuff today (along with my daughter's new laptop for college, eeyow! how am I going to pay for that $1400 worth of tasty Dell goodness?).

OK, I tried to find a link for my Mr. Postman comment, but apparently no one on the Internet has seen Quadrophenia. Sorry. But it did remind me to put it in my Netflix queue. ^_^

My last purchase (for a while, I hope... I'm deficit spending as it is) was another great pinballchuck deal, this time playfield parts from a Judge Dredd. Since the Judge and the Doctor are kith and kin -- both English Science Fiction characters and WPC games, released within a year of each other -- I'm hoping to be judged not needing any more playfield parts. I actually tried to buy chuck's Doctor Who playfield parts auction, but was outbid. Then when I tried to buy the parts I needed from the winner, he said he would contact me when he got the goods and never did. So what should happen when I win this auction? Somebody emailed me wanting the exact same thing! Karma being what it is, I intend to do my best to help this guy out. I'll probably also offer unneeded parts to the other bidders. Why? 'Cause that's the kind of cool guy I am!

So that's all the purchases. Other than that, I got nothin. I was going to try to set up the pinball games for my daughter's graduation party (if only to give my brother-in-law a chance to play some Eight Ball Deluxe, which he played as a youth -- as it was he watched a lot of TV), but the chaotic cleaning of the house and setting up nixed that idea. The closest I got was unplugging Paragon, which both my wife and daughter say has been shocking them when they touch the metal while trying to pet the cat who sleeps on it. The kids didn't care... the closest they got to pinball was when two of them played a half hour of PS1 Dance Dance Revolution, which they could do thanks to my basement cleaning.

I'll write more when the new toys arrive.

My nipples explode with delight!

Bless me father, for I have sinned. It has been a week since my last confession.

The Pinball Wizards show was pretty good, though I took wrong turns in both directions. There seemed to be a lot less overpriced crap in need of repairs this year. I did get to play Xenon for the first time as an adult (yay! but it kept rebooting in the middle of games! boo!), and there were a couple of other good games there. By a bizarre quirk of fate (that I helped along after I noticed it around 4 PM), I didn't play a single EM game, just solid state. Sorry, EM fans, I came of pinball age in the late 70's & early 80's, so that's what I like.

In the quest for Doctor Who parts, I was extremely disappointed. After spending colossal amounts of time figuring out what I need (esp. playfield parts), almost none of the vendors had anything. I ended up getting rubber and a DMD, that's how desperate I was for stuff to buy. I did get new bumper caps, too. The flea market, though always interesting, didn't have anything I needed.

My record for pre-show purchases was .500. Once I found the playfield glass guy (my cell phone couldn't call his for some reason) that went pretty well... $28 seems to be a good price for glass. I was not as happy with the guy with the legs when I found out that I could have bought a set of brand new legs in the show for what I paid for the old rusted ones. (I also didn't have the temerity to ask him if he was a furry). I also ended up buying stuff from one vendor only to find that I could have paid less at another. >:( I also bought leg bolts and levelers.

On the plus side, there was a Doctor Who there, so I got a bunch of pix of the speaker cover and the stuff on the playfield I'm missing. This is the first time I've used my wife's 8 mp camera, and it acquitted itself with aplomb. I'll probably start small and make stickers of the Who-ship for the ramps, which I'm missing.

One thing at the show which I found terribly interesting was someone connected a playfield to a PC running pinmame to (reportedly) great effect... I don't think you could actually play the game, I'm not sure why. This is a bright idea I had a few months ago, and I'm glad someone has actually done it. I trolled on the Internets and found the Pinmame HW page that tells how to do it. This is now Interesting Project #789 on my list. It's really appealing to me because I don't have a lot of space, but I can definitely store a playfield a lot easier than I can store whole games.

Well, now I have all the major boards for Doctor Who, and it should be ready for a partial test... so what do I do? Dither and avoid it, of course! The Big Fear that I'm going to goof something up has risen up, making me find many excuses to avoid working on the game. I did start testing the electrical problems on Eight Ball Deluxe, and developed an obsession with pinball music.

I have been listening to a CD I got at White Rose for $2 with mixes of pinball music. So I looked around, found a couple of sites, and sucked them dry. First I got all the multimedia files on IPDB, which has some good mixes and an interview with Pat Lawlor about TZ. Then I found Brendan's Arcade Basement that has zipped WMAs... they're mostly pretty good, though they tend to cut off abruptly at the end. He had a link to CGMusic, which I guess is a guy who used to work at Williams. These are much easier on the ears. They're in streaming mp3 format, but I had iTunes play them while recording with the insanely useful WireTap (which records in aiff, but I then have iTunes convert them to mp3s), so now they're residing comfortably on my iPod. All told, I have about 7 hours of pinball music -- some dupes, but a lot of good stuff. But there's plenty missing... newer games like Scared Stiff are not well represented. C'mon guys! I demand to hear Elvira making thinly veiled blowjob jokes! So I guess Interesting Project #790 is to record and mix them myself. ^.^;

Excessively uneventful

I just need to point this out... Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children finally came out domestically and we watched it last weekend, and the coolest part comes after Tifa battles the bad guy with the moussed hair. The music is a piano version of the FFVII battle music, then at the end of the battle, we hear the end of battle theme, and it's the ringtone on the bad guy's cell phone. Awesome!!!

Sorry for the trufan gush there. Very little has happened with Doctor Who. Mostly I've been taking carefuller inventory of the missing/wrong parts on the game and honing my shopping list for the Allentown show, which I'm going to tomorrow (eee!).

Hey, I just realized it's been a while since I wrote. I got the last backbox board from an eBay auction last week from the guy I got most of the other boards from (I was happy to note that shipping costs were much, much more reasonable and he used Priority Mail this time). I ended up paying more than I wanted, because the auction ended late on a work night, so I told my wife my max bid. Well, she goofed up and bid too much, but it was only $4 than my max, so it's not that bad. To make things worse, she got me a $40 PayPal gift certificate for our Anniversary, which I found after I paid for the auction. :( There was no joy in Mudville that morning...

I got my first income from the game... I sold some of the sockets I got at auction to the other bidder for $4. YESH!

So, I packed up the car with lists, directions, notes, sample parts, beef jerky, Lo-carb Monster Energy drinks, a couple of tools, my Harry Potter book on CD, Pinball's Greatest Hits CD (remixed music from Pinball games for $2! Neato!), and my wife's camera is charging. Yay!

Not much to report, but I'll probably end up writing a lot about it

Not much happened this week. I bought some screws that I used to mount the boards in the backbox, then lightly plugged in as many cables as I could find plugs for. I didn't want to plug them in fully since I want to be able to disconnect them when I get power in, so I don't end up sending 100 volts to the CPU or something because the power driver isn't working properly.

A guy at work who builds his own amps and stuff loaned me a catalog of electronic parts, thinking I could find the transformers I needed in there, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it.

The Fliptronics II board arrived -- this guy actually used Priority Mail -- but I haven't done much else besides mount it.

Hey, for fun I wrote a Firefox search engine for Internet Pinball Database. I still need to read how to make it general enough to release, though.

A few weeks ago a guy advertised playfield glass on Mr. Pinball, so I reserved a pane for delivery at Allentown... Doctor Who won't run without glass on it, to avoid people's hands being crushed by the mini-playfield (mine doesn't have the motor to crush anybody's hands, but the game probably doesn't take that into account), and I'm hoping the game will be running before the York show in October. Last night I saw another guy on Mr. Pinball guy selling pinball legs, so I reserved four rusty ones for $5 each... we'll see how well they clean up. I checked the guy's website, and in addition to pinball he also makes pretty good full-body character costumes... I especially liked his Banana Splits Drooper and Bender from Futurama. He advertises that he's Furry friendly, which made even my quiche-eating California-liberal brain go "ewww!! gross!!"

I'd like to try to plug the various voltages into the game to see what works tomorrow, but we'll see if I have time. Most of this weekend has been taken up already with driving to my daughter's new school, Gettysburg College, for Get Acquainted Day. Of course, for me it was You Better Find a Shitload of Money Fast Day, but then when is it not that day? Also, the house looks like crap so I have to get some cleaning done. And I really need to sell some stuff on eBay. I need to watch a Netflix so I can get it back in time to (hopefully) get Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children (for that matter, I need to finish Final Fantasy VII ^_^; ). The yard needs mowing, the cats need ironing, etc., etc. Really, my weekends need to be about a month long.

Epiphany in the Shower

This morning in the shower I had a thought that probably should have been obvious last night... my game has the wrong transformer in it. Now I have one more thing to troll eBay for.

I should have know that going to Home Depot (notice I'm leaving off the "The" to show my contempt) for bolts was a waste of time. I can never find specific nuts & bolts there or at Lowes or anyplace.

Whoda thunk?

Did you know that pinball machines have about a million plugs? I didn't. ^_^;

I started identifying plugs, carefully determining wire color and writing the socket it goes in, and after about 10 realized that it was kind of pointless. I could do a lot better by mounting the boards and plugging the plugs into them... that way, I don't have to identify the same plug twice or search desperately for an unidentified plug only to lose it when you turn to read the manual.

So then I decided to find only the ones that matter for the task at hand, namely the guys that go to the transformer. What I found was that there aren't enough wires coming out of the transformer to power the game... in fact, there's a 12 pin socket coming from the transformer and a 15 pin socket going to the backbox. As the kids these days say, wtf?!? This prompted a change in stragedy... I got a good idea of which pins should have which voltages, so I'm going to measure them and see if they're correct. I'll also measure some of the random wires that are hanging around and see what's up wit them.

A few more positive notes... since I was messing with plugs, I installed the board s under the playfield and plugged them in, and placed the under playfield ramp (with only one screw, which is all I had handy). A couple of eBay auctions flew by... they weren't my style (actually, they went beyond what I was willing to pay). I did buy a working Fliptronics II board for $51... they generally go for $80, so the savings offsets the fact that I won't need that board for a while.

Tomorrow I plan to go to The Home Depot and pick up a bunch of bolts so I can mount the boards in the backbox. I plan to get enough that I can replace missing bolts in my other games as well...