FAIL

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

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.

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

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

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!

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!

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.