My baby is leaving home... *sob*

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"?

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

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

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!

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

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

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...