Gasp!

This is my first post using my new Christmas present, a spankin' new 20" iMac, which is pretty darned sweet.

The big news is that I have officially received my last part to get Doctor Who to work. I was emailing about this and that with the guy who sold me the speaker grill and mentioned that I had the mini-playfield motor but needed the cam. A little while later he emailed me back with a cam, but not the cam... it was one from the Ringmaster in Cirqus Voltaire. I told him, no that's not it, but thanks for looking... I had done all this myself, so I didn't expect anything. A few minutes later he emailed me another cam, and that was it! It was just $15 from Illinois Pinball Co., and I'd never found it because it's listed solely by its part number (A-15035) and name (CAM ASSY) but not by the game, and there was no picture. I had to change my pants, I was so excited. I ordered it that night and it arrived a few days later. If the speaker grill guy had been here I would have kissed him. mmmm-mwah!

So I got around to installing it tonight (I needed to get a few screws and things from my local hardware store). First I hooked up the motor and ran the mini-playfield test, and the motor ran. Then I attached the cam and worried it into position... it's a little tricky, but I did it by unscrewing the mini-playfield opto sensor and swinging it around, positioning the motor & cam, then swinging the opto back and screwing everything in. I put the playfield down, started up the test, and held down the flipper buttons (which you have to do to avoid crushing your hands)... and the crazy gizmo really worked! Then it gave me an error! That's great news, because the error is probably because the opto doesn't work. So I ran the test again, the playfield went up, went askew ever so slightly, then stopped and gave another error. This time, it wouldn't go down. I left it the way it was and didn't go in to see what was wrong, but still, I was reasonably flush with semi-triumph! Mini-triumph, even!

Which leaves me with this chilling challenge: To install the flippers over my Christmas vacation! Then assuming I can get the mini-playfield reliably running, I should have a fully working game.

The bad news is that the guy selling the Dalek topper did indeed relist it for less money... $5 less. Then some clown bid on it, which just enabled the guy's bad behavior. Sheesh.

Anyway, late now, so gotta go to bed. There's more purchasing of stuff to write about, just not now.

Why do I get the feeling that we've picked up another pathetic life form?

Because we have. Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man finally arrived yesterday, so I took a look. The first thing I noticed was that it reeked like a smoke filled room... the seller is obviously a good friend of the Tobacco Industry. The pictures from the auction really didn't adequately show the full extent of the playfield wear. But I've seen worse. And it's astoundingly complete -- I couldn't spot a single piece of hardware missing, not even flipper coils -- and the mechanicals look pretty clean. The only thing I couldn't find in the box was the right return lane clear plastic... I'm hoping the seller still has it and will mail it along. Of course, I sent this request after I left feedback mentioning the glacial shipping and distinctive odor. ^_^; We'll discuss in detail at a later date.

But the big news in Who-ville is the successful acquisition of a real speaker grill! Two of them went up on eBay within a few days. I bid on the cheaper one that included speakers, and ended up getting it with shipping for less than the opening bid of the other one (sans speakers). It arrived a few days ago and I installed it tonight while watching Bleach on Cartoon Network (which I've seen some of in Japanese, so I don't need to pay 100% attention to in English). After replacing most of the lights and one of the sockets, I found that almost everything works except for the Doctor 7 lamp. While I was there, I put #555 lights in all of the empty backbox sockets (which was most of them), then closed it all up. You have no idea how satisfying it is to get rid of the flimsy-ass thing I made. When I put the translite in, it sat squarely in the groove rather than sitting at an angle and looks like it will fall off if I look at it funny.

The expensive grill guy was also selling a Dalek for too much money (starting bid $100, and - surprise! - it didn't sell). I'm hoping he'll relist for a more reasonable opening bid.

What would a blog entry be without pictures! Here's the DMD shootout... mine versus the real thing. Can YOU tell the difference?!?


And here is the installed grill in the newly lit game. I took the pic without a flash, so it's blurry but shows the lights working. Hee!


This final note: I sold my spare Black Knight plastics last week... I got $110 for about half of them, which is great because I payed $100 for them 3 years ago.

Surprise!

Tonight I went to pick up my daughter at college, and I thought we were going to eat dinner together, but when I got there and called her she was already eating. That annoyed me, so I went and got my own food at the local pizza place (called Pizza House probably because it's in a house, but it's next to a bunch of frats so I like to think it's a Greek joke). While I was eating, I heard the tell-tale sound of flippers, so I scouted the hidden alcoves of the restaurant and was surprised to find a Medieval Madness! Needless to say my mood improved. The game wasn't in bad condition, either... a couple of things didn't work and it was in a completely dark room, but I payed for two games and got two replays and a match.

And I did a bad thing. After all that high and mightiness about not getting more games, I bought a Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man playfield on eBay. Nobody bid on it until yesterday, and I was really hoping to get a $1 playfield, but no such luck. It went for $32, the plastics for $12, and in theory shipping is about $10 because it's just down in Richmond... my ideal playfield cost is $50 or less, so that's at least in the ballpark. I'm hoping it will arrive while my wife is out of town so I have a chance to secret it in some dark corner of the basement. M&MPM is actually a second-tier game... in the group after Xenon, Centaur, and Fish Tales. I always have great fun playing it, even though it's a relatively simple game.

I probably forgot to mention, but with one of my orders from Marco or Bay Area, I got one of the Life After Death videos on a whim. I can't say that I was impressed. From what I can tell, their raison d'etre appears to be to give people who hate the guys in This Old Pinball videos to buy. The two guys try to do the same basic shtick as Shaggy and Norm, but they are lacking in charisma. The production isn't as well done, though there is some useful info... but nothing that I hadn't already gotten from TOP. And despite the title they didn't bring a dead game back to life, they just tuned up a working game. I'll stick with TOP videos unless LAD comes out with a video on a game I actually own, which TOP has NOT (KISS and Black Knight/Firepower are on their upcoming productions list, but... and when I pulled up the page to get the link, I saw that they released another video which is NOT the two I need). Plus TOP videos are way cheaper.

My wife -- usually the villain of these pieces, I know -- has been trying for a while to get me to attempt to "trick out" a pinball machine... kind of like case mods for computers, with after market parts, etc. Well, I finally came up with an idea that's worth doing. I told her and she's pretty interested. I have to flesh out the idea, find a beater playfield that I don't feel bad about sanding, cutting the hell out of, & repainting, and develop metal working, woodworking, and electrical skills that I don't currently have. Probably it would help to get some nunchuck and bo skills, too.

I'm always amazed at guys who retire and can't figure out what to do with themselves. Clearly they don't have pinball machines.

Quick! To the Monster Slide!

Some easy stuff to catch up on. I got EBD cleared off except for the trays of playfield parts, so it's ready for me to work on it (sort of... I have to move some stuff next to it before I can get to the backbox).

My daughter mentioned a few weeks ago that she'd never seen Doctor Who working... I guess I always worked on it while she was asleep or out of the house. So when she was home from college last Saturday -- we went to see Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D -- and after she had (appropriately enough) caught up with the last two eps of Doctor Who on TV, I fired it up for her. Thankfully it worked, so I loaded it up with balls and she had fun shooting the balls around the playfield. I locked the balls in the mini-playfield so she could see the Cybermen on the DMD, since they were featured in the episodes she had just watched. Her "game" went along until I had the bright idea to hand-lift the mini-playfield so she could hit the targets... when she got the ball into one of the Dalek holes, it fell into the cabinet because the under playfield ramp isn't attached properly. She had more fun with that than she had ever had playing any of my other games for real, which was parentally gratifying.

One thing I did find out while she played is that the half-assed repair job on the Tardis opto switch that I did worked -- all I did was twist the wires together. Yay for our side.

My CPU sold on eBay for $168, which means it almost paid for itself and the other board that I got at the same time, not counting fees. Still, I can use the money. The guy who bought it was super Type-A about packing... I finally had to tell him to lay off, I know to use non-static bags, GEEZ.

And lastly, I had a successful post to rgp tonight... I asked if there was a special doodad that closed the playfield glass switch, because my glass doesn't. The answer was no, the glass should contact the switch, so at some point I'll have to try to either adjust or disconnect it. I really would like it to stop telling me I'm going to maim myself.

Number 1 in the Hood, G

Well, I did clear off and play Quicksilver for my birthday. Life intervened with the fixing of the EBD, though. We'll see how that plays out this weekend.

Another Doctor Who purchase, courtesy of eBay: The plastic backdrop of the Master from the mini-playfield, courtesy of my good friend pinballchuck. It includes a Tardis, which I don't need, but I'm hoping that the other guy who bid on it needs one. I'm kind of sad that the other guy bid on it, since I would have been very happy getting this for $4. As it was, I paid $23. But after living through what is now know as The Lexan Cutting Incidents, the fewer plastics I have to make the better (at least until I get tools that can effectively cut plastic). I think that leaves only the pictures of the spaceships on the ramps as the only things standing between me and a completed playfield.

I hope at this point I'm caught up on all the purchases.

Now on to the selling. I'm selling one of the WPC CPU boards on eBay. Money is a little tight these days, and I owe the family a bunch of money for mostly pinball-related purchases, so I decided to sell the two CPUs that I got back in April -- the ones that didn't work until I goofed with them. I plugged them into the game -- back in those days I didn't have a working game -- and found that one didn't boot if the multi-stop ribbon cable (J202) was plugged in, and the other booted up and tested fine. I actually did a really dumbass thing, but it's a long and boring story, the moral of which is: Always read the Switch Matrix chart carefully.

So, I've posted that board on eBay for $10, it ran up to about $100 in the first day, and it's been holding there since. It's still got 2.5 days left. My sincere wish is that this board pays for both boards from the original auction and then some (I paid $160 for both, I think). My timing is actually really good, because when I bought it there was a board or two showing up every week... now the pickings are a little slimmer, so I think I'm getting a better price.

With the other CPU, I could have it fixed professionally, but that's usually about $60. My "I don't know much about electronics" spot diagnosis is that the J202 connector is bad. I can either sell the board as is and get a somewhat diminished price for it, or level-up my soldering skills and try to fix it myself. We'll just give that one some thought and see what comes up.

Well, how did we get here?

Today I'm going to take a step back and look over the collection and its status. Stand back, I might be dangerous! Looking at these pictures, I feel like the eBay Pack Rat, a woman who was obviously mentally ill who bought stuff compulsively on eBay and never even unpacked it. Honestly, we're not that bad... we just have too much stuff, and we're slowly divesting ourselves of it.

I got my first pin, Quicksilver on New Year's Eve of 1985 for $295, right before moving into my first apartment. It is the only one of my games that has been serviced professionally while in my possession, and is currently the only one that is working. It has a few minor things wrong with it, but nothing that keeps you from enjoying the game (other than the stuff on top of it).

Game #2 was Paragon, which I think I got in early 2000 for $800. I had fond memories of it from my salad days in college, we had just bought our first house, and I had just discovered that the Internet was a great way to acquire pin stuff. It works after a fashion, but my wife and daughter both claim to have been shocked by it when they touch the metal side rails when trying to pet the cat that sleeps in the bed on the upper right of the playfield. I've always been skeptical of this shocking business, but it's currently unplugged for the purposes of filial harmony. I do know that it's not 100% working electrically. You can still play it, though.

Black Knight was game 3, and the guy I bought it from sold me a project Eight Ball Deluxe at the same time. I believe they were $750 and $650 respectively, plus I spent $100 on a van to drive them down from PA. BK worked great for a while, then conked out and is waiting patiently for my baleful gaze to land on it. When you power it up the bell rings and one of the fuses blows. I fixed up EBD to the point where it is working tolerably well, with only a few switches not working. I took it apart for cleaning before my brother in law came in May and haven't put it back together yet.

My first playfield was EBD, originally bought for $50 so I could practice playfield restoration techniques. My EBD machine's playfield was touched up with what looks like White-out, then clear-coated, so I wanted to try secret techniques on a beater. With the coming of the Playfield Project (PFP), though, I am evaluating it in a new light.

Next up was Doctor Who, which as we know is the impetus for this blog. I've written about its functional status until my fingers are numb, so I won't bore you with more.

The second playfield is Black Knight, which is the first one bought specifically for the PFP. It looks like it's in really good condition, though I have yet to take it out of its shipping wrap. Since it's probably in the best condition of the three, I'll probably use it for my initial experiments.

My final purchase is, of course, the Firepower playfield and cabinet, shown here in its currently resting place wedged between stuff in my basement. As I mentioned, my wife threatened me with offsite storage when I told her I'd bought it, which is like threatening a house-elf with clothes. I had to put it someplace where she is unlikely to run into it on a regular basis. Putting anything big anywhere in our basement is a game of real-life Sokoban... I spent several hours moving and re-moving boxes to not only free up that little niche, but to have enough space to drive the game and cart to said niche.

So, that's where things stand right now. I have to say, my wife has a good point... I am collecting faster than I can do anything to the collection. So, I've got to actually start making some progress... it's silly to have almost $5000 worth of pinball hardware and only be able to play one game, I want to get playfields working so I can sell the real games to free up space, and I need to have some working hardware so I can buy more and continue growing the collection.

That said, here's my first goal. Tomorrow is my birthday, so I'm going to clear off Quicksilver and play a few games. Next weekend, I will do the switch work on EBD, clean it, and put it back together. Then we'll see where we are.

I had more fun that I expected in York, PA!

The York show ended up being a lot of fun. I've had some medium to poor experiences there in the past, so this was a pleasant surprise. Even the crappy machines -- and there were several -- were enjoyable.
I finally got to play the Zaccaria game Farfalla, which I've been looking for for some time. I've played some European games before and haven't been so impressed, but Farfalla was good. Also got to try out Pirates, which I enjoyed but didn't really have a chance to study. I sank the ship a couple of times but then lost the ball before I could defeat the Kraken or whatever the heck you're supposed to do. It was good, but I didn't have the visceral wow that I got when I played NASCAR for the first time (that was the first of the modern Stern games that I really liked). I played a handful of games that I either had never played before or never as an adult. I got to play the pre-production Scared Stiff that a guy brought last year, too... they definitely tightened up the game play before release, because the pre-game just isn't as much fun.

I did have some amusing run-ins with crappy games... I had a Twilight Zone reset on me, then went to play a Fish Tales and had it reset too. The FT had already been sold -- the guy who bought it was ripped... $2500 for a weak game -- and the guy who sold it noticed it reset. A few minutes later I saw him helping the buyer load it into his car; I'm guessing he was getting it out of view so the buyer wouldn't know just how ripped he'd been. I saw the same guy try to convince some people that one of this overpriced games was a good buy even thought one of the flippers wasn't working! Lame.

I bought a bunch o' stuff: A somewhat messed up lockdown bar, so Doctor Who can give the one it's using back to Black Knight. I got some new balls for when the Doctor is in shapes, a bottom and side rail for the backglass (now it's covered on all sides), a connector so I can attach the new coin door to the game (did I mention I bought a coin door on eBay for $25 shipping incl? I should have). And best of all (heh) I bought a Firepower playfield and cabinet for $75 for the playfield project. When my wife heard about that she threatened me with offsite storage. For the next week, my brain would randomly say "FIRE POWER" and then make the game start sound. I can't remember what I had for breakfast but I can remember how pinball games sound that I haven't played in years. Sheesh.

I didn't get the mini playfield from eBay. I stopped for dinner at a diner outside of York and called my wife and walked her through the eBayage. It sold for more than I was willing to pay, and in retrospect I probably should have bid more, but oh well. My wife was more disappointed than I was... since I didn't do the actual bidding, I was removed from the process and didn't feel the post-auction let down.

I can't really think of anything else at York that I need to say. Next up, we're going to talk about my collector's frenzy and what I'm going to do with all these busted games I've acquired.

It's late and I've got two months of updates to write

Thank goodness I've hardly done anything!

I've been busy with my daughter off to college, a business trip, stuff like that. The one thing I did to is make a fake backbox stuff for Doctor Who!

Hey, that doesn't look so bad, does it? Except for the translite, it's all fake. The glass is a piece of lexan that I bought for $9 at Home Depot and cut down... what you can't see are all the cracks and scratches in it because I don't have the tools to properly cut plastic. O_O; The translite is held on by two plastic clips on the top and bottom that I got from Bay Area Amusements.

The grill was a little more work. I probably mentioned that I took pictures of DW at the Allentown show in May. I photoshopped the best images together into a passable life-sized pic and printed it out on three pages. Then I cut a piece of wood leftover from our remodeling and cut out the DMD and speaker holes. Then I taped the image to the board.

You'll have to go for an extreme close-up, but in the pic on the left you can see the lines from the different pieces of tape (it really isn't that noticable). If you notice around the DMD the tape isn't behaving. You can also see the speaker grill, which is just part of the picture. The real speaker is behind that attached over a hole.

On the back, I just cut up the leftovers from the holes into strips and positioned them where I needed to screw things in. The piece on the corner was intended to hold the board into the backbox (it rotates into place) but when I put the translite in I can't get to the corners to lock them in, so I just trust that gravity will do the work for me. This is a slightly older picture... I added a few pieces of wood at the top to stabilize where the fake grill meets the plastic I-beam thing under the translite. Before it would bow out because the I-beam thing wouldn't sit straight, but now it sits properly. I was worried about vibrations harming the DMD, so I splurged and bought some rubber washers to cushion it. Overall, I think the grill and backglass look pretty good for the $12 I spent.

Tomorrow is the York PA pinball show. I used to go on Saturday, but now I go on Friday because you get an extra hour to play and there's a better selection of stuff to buy. I've been training all week with a squeeze ball so my wrists aren't completely destroyed by flipping all day. Tonight, though I noticed a DW mini playfield on eBay with the motor and cam assembly...! The trouble is it goes off at 9PM EST, which will be about an hour into my drive home. Choices: Leave early (urk!), drive from York to Gettysburg where my daughter is at school (slightly more than a one hour drive and she'll be in her dorm on Friday night? Don't think so), or try to talk my wife through it on the phone from the road while she's at her sister's house in California. Although I'm a little leery -- she did panic and bid too much on that terrible DMD driver -- it should be OK since I'll be on the phone with her and it won't be too late at night. Ganbatte!!!! \/ ^_^ \/

Holy cheese, I almost forgot... the playfield project continues with the purchase of an almost entirely intact Black Knight playfield off eBay from... the guy I bought Doctor Who from. I'll detail that folly in a future posting.

This and that and then some

So the new display board showed up on my wife's birthday (as predicted), but I took the high road and didn't do any game work that day. But Saturday morning I plugged it in and it worked great (I tried to come up with some funny analogy for how great it worked, but couldn't... it defies analogies, that's how great it was). My power board delivers voltage a little too warm, but the adjustable voltage feature allows me to calm the raging beast without trouble. There are 4 vertical lines out on the display, which may be the cable or happened while I've been manhandling the DMD over the last few weeks. I'll worry about that later, but for now I have a more or less working display.

With display issues out of the way, I put in some batteries so it wouldn't forget the volume setting and did some more testing. The switch problems on the ramp were caused by an unplugged wire, and I tested as many underplayfield things as I could -- turns out one of the round targets under the mini playfield doesn't work, and I couldn't get any of the optos to work (one had a wire cut, but even after I spliced it, it didn't work). I did plug in the flipper boards and they work. Most of the lights and flashers are just burned out, though I couldn't get one or two to work, and I didn't try to get any that were in or under the mini playfield.

Hey, just for fun, here's a picture of my impromptu diagnostic buttons that should have been on the coin door. Note the beautiful piece of cardboard the buttons are mounted in. From there the wires are connected by alligator clips to the coin door interface board. Note the pieces of cardboard between the alligator clips to keep them from shorting against each other. It's a class act all around.

What I did notice when I plugged in the flipper boards is yet another MIA part... the things that actually allow the flippers to work. For reasons known only to him- or herself, the loon who used to own this game put regular switches where the flipper buttons are, rather than the "Flipper opto plastic interruptors" as Marco's calls them.

Armed with this information, it was time to spend some more money, because next up are the flippers. I first took stock of the flippers I bought on eBay (they're pretty much complete, aside from having the wrong coils) and what's in the game (random parts, but the main mounting plate and the flipper bats at minimum) and came up with a shopping list. Today, I did that thing I feared most: Called Steve Young at The Pinball Resource, a man who, every time I've talked to him, makes me feel stupid at least once. Now, though, I think this is just a sophisticated way he has of training his customers to do what he wants... sort of like the Soup Nazi for pinball... the Pinball Nazi, I shall henceforth call him. I had my shopping list ready, knew all the correct names of everything, had my customer number, and quickly stepped to the left as soon as I ordered. I got half a flipper rebuild kit (this should give me the parts I need to complete the upper left flipper), a coil, and 10 #906 bulbs for the flashers. I asked if he had the interruptors, but he said no and briefly discussed how some repros from Australia were in his opinion of inferior quality. But overall it was pretty painless. To get the interruptors I put in my first purchase at Marco, where they are $3.75 each. Shipping was $9, and since I felt pretty dumb paying more for shipping than for the items, I browsed for a while and found an opto set which I should be able to use under the playfield... I think it's the one with the wire cut, but I'm hoping to use it for the Tardis upkicker switch, which is also not working.

No pinball this weekend, since the family is going to Otakon. I have Monday off, so if something arrives over the weekend maybe I'll do something then.

More money than sense wins again

I posted to rgp about the board but didn't get a really coherent picture of what was wrong. Most of the suggestions didn't pan out. I did scrutinize the board carefully in preparation for the post and found that the high voltage section of the board looked like it was repaired by a 5 year old. Crappy soldering, there are scorch marks all over the board, and some of the diodes are actually 2 diodes soldered together.

The answer I wanted out of rgp was is this board worth saving? I think the answer is yes, if I could repair it myself (which I can't, currently). I considered getting a high voltage add-on board for $40-50, but then I'll have a crappy board with a good high voltage section, plus I can't see spending that much more money on this board -- it would put me into the $130 range, which is way more than a new board cost.

So yesterday I gave up on my current display driver board and ordered a new PinLED version from Bay Area Amusements for $95 including s/h. I figure I'll save what little hair I have by spending the extra $$$, plus the adjustable voltage feature of the PinLED board should help if it can't deal with the transformer delivering 5 volts too much for both high voltage inputs. I think I'll be a lot happier with the new board... I'm hoping it will arrive Thursday, because I'm off work that day for my wife's birthday (the perfect gift! It will go well with that baseball glove I got her).

I was thinking about testing the under playfield switches and maybe seeing if the W ramp is unplugged, but decided to wait for the new board to show up.

I also posted my first WTB (Want To Buy) to rgp for the mini-playfield motor/cam assembly, and at first I was disappointed with the results. Most of the offers came to my email address, and they were either too expensive ($179!!!), too little (a guy wanted to sell me just the motor for $70 when Pinball Resource sells them for $73), or too much (pinballchuck, who seems to acquire more Doctor Whos in a year than I've seen in my life, had a complete mini-playfield which he wanted to sell me for $250 -- I think that's a little steep). But then a guy showed up who wants to sell me the cam for $35... I'm waiting on pictures, and he says that something's missing, probably one of the things that attaches things to other things. We'll see how that goes. One of the posters suggested I make one, which appealed to the DIY nut in me until somebody mentioned bushings... I don't even know what a bushing is, much less how to make one. Probably buying one will be less painful.

I made a rare foray into The Home Depot Sunday and picked up rust remover for those crappy legs I got at the last Allentown show and alligator clips so I can forge a more permanent temporary connection between my buttons and the coin interface board.

I'm also getting a serious itch to try the Pinmame-HW thing. I found the box of parts I ordered from GPE. I've thought about buying one of those cool playfield mounts (sorry, I can't find a link!), but was daunted by the $275 price tag -- especially if this doesn't work out, I don't want to invest hugely in it. But then I found this site where the guy basically puts the playfield up on blocks... it's definitely a low cost alternative.

A better day than usual

With a semi-working DMD, today I decided to get down to some serious testing. Mainly I wanted to run through the diagnostics and see what's working and what isn't.

I started by making a set of test buttons for the coin door. For the first time in the last 10 years, @$#! Radio Shack had some buttons like I needed at a reasonable price. So I did a half-assed non-soldering job of wiring them up, and I even punched some holes in a piece of cardboard to mount them. Then, again half-assedly, I attached them to the coin interface board and fired up the game. It almost worked, but at least two of the buttons were in contact, which meant that every time I tried to turn down the volume, it just got louder. So I gave up and used my alligator clip again.

I love testing pinball machines. I don't usually like what I find, but the process is enjoyable. This is the first DMD game I've owned, and browsing through the little menus is too fun. I tested the solenoids, switches, and lamps, and found that more stuff is working than not... 4 solenoids/flashers aren't working and 1 works sometimes out of 25 or so, 4 switches out of 64-ish don't register (I didn't test the mini-playfield, though I probably could have by going at it from underneath) including the entire W ramp, and 7 lamps of 56 are out/missing (I didn't look), with 8 lights abstaining because the speaker panel is gone. As a percentage of total assets, it's probably working better than Eight Ball Deluxe.

Then for kicks I dug out some pinballs and fired up a game. The mini-playfield warning ruined the purity of it somewhat, but I rolled the balls around and had a good old time. I should have plugged in the flipper opto boards -- which I got from Bay Area Amusements last week, sorry I forgot to mention it -- so I could play the video mode. Maybe I'll do that later this weekend. I also have to figure out a way to keep that playfield glass switch closed.

And that was my exciting day of pinball testing! Hopefully this weekend I'll keep up the pace I've set and do some more.

I want to celebrate by killing myself!

Yes, it's another one of those pyrrhic victories that I'm experiencing so many of lately.

The replacement display driver arrived last week, so I plugged it in this weekend. After satisfying myself that it has all its parts and a few plugging misadventures, I booted the machine and...

That's certainly an improvement over the wavy line! For those who can't see, that's the Bookkeeping Totals Cleared/Factory Settings Restored display when the game doesn't have its batteries. Clearly a step in the right direction... that's the celebration part. The killing myself part has to do with the fact that almost all the pixels are lit up... it looks like a police car light flashing on the display.

A trip to the repair guide and some voltage testing indicates that the board is running hot... pins 1 and 2 on the display are -138V & -126V, not -125 & -113 they are supposed to be. Based on my guide, my guess is that this is a board where the voltage has been upped because the display it was used with was dim -- probably on its last legs. Increasing the voltage makes it brighter. Of course, for a brand new display this isn't good. I'm going to verify this on rpg, look for the telltale signs that the board has been rebuilt, then complain to the eBay guy again. Hopefully, he'll offer a refund again, and I can cut my losses and just buy a new display board.

That was last weekend. Today at work I had a bright idea... I can probably get out of this screen by pressing one of the buttons that my game doesn't have, and then I could get to the inevitable error messages. So when I got home, I experimented with Visual Pinball again... I renamed the .nv for Doctor Who (the saved settings for the pinmame emulator) so I got the above message, then pressed the virtual buttons until I got into attract mode. I found that Escape button == good, Enter button == bad (because you just have to press escape again), Up & Down buttons == who cares.

Using my manual and the spare coin door interface board as a guide -- boy that thing's coming in handy! -- I connected an alligator clip to ground (J3 pin 3, if you're keeping score), turned the game on, and touched the other end to pin 7. Look what happened:

Hey, this crazy gizmo really works!

For those who can't tell the players without a scorecard, it's in attract mode! Most of the lights on the playfield are strobing, some of the coils fire off, and a loud annoying voice is telling me that my hands will be crushed to a pulp by the mini-playfield! That's the sweetest loud annoying voice I've heard in a long time!

Let's get a closeup of that DMD...







That reminds me of this classic picture from Engrish.com...

So anyway, the game is more working than I expected. I think my next step is to get some buttons and connect them up so I can navigate the menus (my first goal is to put in some batteries and turn down the volume). Then I gotta get rid of that warning... the game thinks the playfield glass isn't on, so there's probably an issue with that switch. Then I can run some of the diagnostics and see what's REALLY wrong with the game. All in all, things could have been worse... maybe I'll just mutilate myself.

I need to change the name of this blog...

... to What's My Pinball Machine Missing Today?

I did my testing on the DMD based on the suggestions from rgp. It turns out when I looked at the Tested and Working display driver board, the Q2 transistor and the D3 diode were MIA. Q2 might have broken off, but D3 was cleanly removed, solder-sucked and everything. It also has scorch marks on the back, never a good sign in a high voltage area. I wanted to see if this is actually a different board than the one pictured in the auction, but of course it was one of those where the pictures are hosted, so they're no longer visible (I need to save pictures of auctions I win... pinballchuck, a paragon of virtue, always includes a printout with all of his items). I contacted the seller from eBay, and to my shock and amazement he replied back saying that he can replace the board or refund my money. So I put that board in the mail today, and we'll see if he sends me a replacement. I was kind of considering getting a new board -- they're only $90+s/h, and I'm already into this used one for almost $80 -- but we'll see if this guy comes through with a working replacement.

Today's revelation -- and wanting desperately to change the blog name -- came when I decided to see if I could navigate through the errors without the DMD using the diagnostic buttons... basically see if I get any reaction when I press the button, which I think should be some bloop bloop bloop noises. After checking the menu controls in the Visual Pinball VPM version of the game, I soon discovered that there are no diagnostic buttons! There's nothing at all on the coin doors except the coin slots. Oh, the zumanity! Actually, it was really annoying because I'm really tired of finding stuff missing, so to speak. Anyway, I spent some time studying the schematics and the great repair guides at Marvin3m.com (which I think are written by This Old Pinball host Shaggy/Clay). I found the wires involved (plug J3 on the Coin Door Interface -- hey, it turns out I really did need one! probably not two, though), and since they're just buttons I can probably "press" them by connecting the appropriate pins (7, 8, 9, and 11) to ground (3). Crisis averted, maybe. I'll wait to get the display working before I try that trick.

While I was looking at that, I plugged in the speakers I bought to the audio board, and they seem to work. I also found some stray plugs that were unplugged.

On the (rare) plus side, this week I sold a bunch of the playfield spare parts from two of my recent eBay purchases to a couple of guys. Two guys bought a post each, one guy is on the fence about 2 posts, and one guy got what was left of the Judge Dredd parts. All together it's about $17, and the stuff itself cost me just under $20, so that's not too bad. I'll take my blessings where I can find them.

Struggles and Triumphs

Well, that was an adventure.

I spent a great deal of time last weekend testing and agonizing. First I installed as many new parts on the playfield as I could, and put back the parts I had taken off for the purpose of comparing with new parts. I was able to replace the slingshot posts with stuff from the Judge Dredd parts, and two of the spanners from the Hurricane lot fit under the ramp on the left slingshot, so that was reasonably successful (I also contacted the other bidders on those auctions so I can share the wealth). I fastened down the long ramp and dove in.

The new power supply freaked me out. I installed it while my daughter was watching the commentary on Clerks. Everything seemed to work fine, but when I tested the voltages I got crazy numbers. I didn't want to plug it in to the power driver board and have it melt before my eyes, so I got some advice from the communal overmind at rec.games.pinball. A prompt answer from a guy with a transformer page indicated that I shouldn't test the voltages against ground, but rather against each other... so pin 1's 20.6VAC and pin 2's 8.5VAC suddenly became about 10VAC when measured against each other. I'd actually seen his page before when I was searching for a way for the transformer I had to work, but since that wasn't what I was looking for I didn't grasp its full significance. When the transformer tested out against all the values in the Measured Voltages table, I plugged it in to the power board. Nothing bad happened, all the LEDs that were supposed to light lit, and the one that isn't didn't. So we're in good shape so far.

Next I installed the CPU. Power on, the CPU booted, no problems. So I chugged though. It helped that my wife was catching up on new Doctor Who episodes (just released on DVD today! buy it now!), so I had appropriate background noise. I put in the rest of the boards and plugged each one in in turn... really the only noticeable effect of this was when I hooked up the sound board and got a beep at power on. Finally I came to the Dot Matrix Controller board, which caused the CPU to not boot. Bad. I checked some plugs and I think the ribbon cable wasn't plugged in properly or something. So finally I plugged in the DMD, started it up, and got this:
And just so you know, that's NOT the Bride of Pinbot saying she can speak ("Oh, no!"). A little poking around showed that one of the fuses was the wrong value (probably not the issue I found out later) and, after testing the voltages coming out of the controller at J604, pin 8 (+62V) was 0. Even I know that that's probably not a good sign. So much for "it is tested and Working", right. I like to believe that the fact that the guys shipped it in plain bubble wrap ruined the board. Or his test was that it didn't cause the game to explode when he plugged it in. Who knows. Anyway, after another post to rgp, the consensus is that the high voltage section is messed up, and they gave me some things to test. I probably won't make this my first foray into board repair, though the board does cost $50 to repair, ouch.

So that's where things stand right now. I've got a few things to test which I figure are my patriotic duty to perform (it being July 4th and all), then we'll see where that leads. I have to admit, I'm reasonably happy with progress so far, since things appear to be mostly functioning. I was kind of counting on the DMD to give me actionable error messages, but I guess the jagged line was a pretty clear message itself.

And while I was linking to The Machine: Bride of Pinbot page in ipdb (using my Mozilla search engine, of course!), I found a link to the homepage of the woman who did her voice! Kewl!

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...

The rest of the world must be travelling at a significant fraction of the Speed of Light...

... because I'm moving so damn slow.

Today I plugged the game in for the first time. I tested the voltage at the internal outlet, and got a satisfying 120V... not totally unexpected, since it comes directly from the power cord, but I am being extremely careful. Then I plugged the transformer in and turned the game on. Despite its rust, it emitted the typical pinball hum, so it appears to be working.

Next up, I have to do the job I've been dreading: The identification of the cables. That will be followed by a few more voltage tests, and finally (providing none of the cables is missing) plugging in my boards and seeing what happens.

On the bad news front, yesterday while trying to determine which parts in the parts list correspond to the parts I'm missing from the playfield, I found a divot in the playfield's Diamond Coat that goes down to the wood. Ouch! Today I found another one! Gak! Luckily they're both small and in areas of relatively uniform color, but still...

Yay!

Here's some rare good news... a guy at work had a bunch of power supplies that he was hoarding for a project that never happened, so he gave me one. Unlike the one in the old computer case, this one was brand new... and it was only 250W, so no decent computer would have anything to do with it, but perfect as a pinboard tester.

So, I cleared a spot on the dining room table, plugged it in, and started playing. It worked great, so I started trying to troubleshoot my one bad CPU. There were only three chips I could reseat without soldering: the ROM, the CPU, and the ASIC which has 80 pins and is nasty to take out. First I swapped the bad board CPU onto my good board and it worked fine. Then I thought I would try to re-reseat the CPU before making an attempt at the ASIC. When I was verifying that the notch was facing the right direction, I noticed that the notch was facing the wrong direction on the card. I put it in correctly and the card booted right up! Poor English guys... they had two working CPUs and didn't realize it!

Here's my first picture! It's a shot of the board from the auction... I've editorialized slightly.

A favorable verdict from the bench

The power supply that I lovingly extracted from the PC didn't work. :P So my fallback solution was using another old PC I have sitting around... I unplug the power cable from the CD drive, plug some aligator clips into the socket, and let it rip. This turned out better than expected. I plugged in a ROM chip (the Who ROM and cables arrived a few days after the boards), applied power & ground to the J210 plugs, and see what happens. What I found was the working board that I got last week appeared to boot (that is, the LEDs on the board showed the program was running), and in a surprising development one of the two boards from England booted as well.

On the board that doesn't work, the power and the blanking LEDs stay on, and the LED that indicates that the game is running doesn't. At a later date, I'm going to probe the board with my multimeter and see if the voltages are good, and possibly try re-seating the some of the chips.

Tomorrow, if I don't get sick again or some other calamity fails to befall me, I'm going to test the transformer in the game. If that delivers satisfactory voltages, I will try plugging boards into it and see what happens.

Anti-lameness rant

I finally got the boards, and they seem to be in OK shape. I just gotta spew my vitriol, though... the guy charged me $16 for shipping, so I figured it would go out Priority Mail. When it finally did ship, the email said it was going Parcel Post... I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, as I figured he wrapped the boards in the more expensive anti-static bubble wrap or something. Turns out, no. He wrapped them in plain bubble wrap and sent it Parcel Post which was about 1/2 the cost of his shipping (Priority was only $2.50 more). I spend almost $450 with this guy and he nickel and dimes me on the shipping. And he's a power-listing SOB. Lame.

Now I have to test the boards as best as I can without the cables. About all I can do is connect power to the CPU and see if it boots... I'm going to pull the power supply out of an old PC I got from work and use it as a bench test thing. I did that with one of my Bally MPUs that was not booting and it worked pretty well. Then I have to test out the transformer in the game and make sure it's providing the proper voltages, wait for my ribbon cables to show up, then start seeing if stuff actually works in the game.

I really have to start posting some pictures...

Joe's Pinblog -- now with Conjunctivitis!

Over the weekend I came down with Pink Eye... I'm not sure where I got it, though I did shake hands with someone on Friday. I've been ordered to stay home from work for three days, so I can catch up on my current purchases. Things are a little blurry, so I'll do my best.

My next purchase for Doctor Who ended up being a bit of a mistake. There was a pair of non-working CPU boards from England that I thought I would bid on, with the idea that I could pay $60 to have them fixed by either The Dallas Arcade (who I've had good luck with in the past) or The Coin-op Cauldron (recommended by the guy who sold me the game). I was actually thinking of sending a board to each to compare and contrast, keeping the one I liked best and selling the spare to offset the cost. Anyway, the key to that scheme panning out was winning the auction at a decent price. I decided that my max bid would be $115 for both boards. So when the time came (I was at work, which added to the tension), I lurked until the last minute, entered my max bid of 115, and won! Then when I went to check the cost, I saw that it was actually $160! After a few panicky wtf moments, I realized what had happened... since it was an English auction, the bid I entered was in pounds, not dollars... so I'd actually bid £115, which is almost $200. Thank goodness no one was dumb enough to bid it up that high... another American nimrod like myself and I would have been in bad shape. The final price was £97 with shipping, which ended up being about $170, but that day I'd gotten a 10% off coupon from eBay so I used that to cushion the blow. The seller, btw, was named Edwin Mole, who I supposed used to run an arcade in Toad Hall with Ratty.

A few days later a guy listed about a zillion things I needed, but he obviously used a program to list them because they were all within a few seconds of each other (I've ranted about this earlier). The trouble here is that I foolishly bid on the first item in the group, when I should have been on the second. The second one almost always went for less... I got a power driver board for $235, which I thought was great until I saw that a newer version of the same board sold 15 seconds later for $60 less. O_o But I've already gone over that, so oh well. The third (working) CPU looks like it has a Black Rose ROM chip, so I bought a Who CPU ROM from a guy on eBay. Finally, I found that the highly regarded Great Plains Electronics had a complete set of the cables I'd need to string the backbox boards together, so I bought those for $25 including shipping.

That's where my purchases stand right now... I've received the boards from the English guy, but I'm still waiting on the three other boards, and it's been over a week. *sigh*

Power and CPU were at the top of my list of things I need to get the game going, and next up is the display and driver board. Since I'm more or less out of money for now, I'm going to probably wait and see what prices are like at the Allentown show.

OK, my left eye is really bugging me, so I'm going to leave off for now.

More money than sense, part 1

I just finished listening to a podcast of Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow's novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I enjoyed the book immensely because a) I'm a huge Disney fan (I worked at Disneyland for almost a year after high school), and b) I'm a Science Fiction fan, and c) the book is about how fans take over Disney World and start running, maintaining and improving the rides. Somehow, a story about keeping archaic machinery running appeals to me...

OK. Right after I figured out what (I think) I would need to get the Doctor up and running, I went to what to me is the #1 source of obsolete computer parts, eBay. I was happy to find lots of WPC boards and parts up for auction, including a guy -- pinballchuck -- who was parting out a Doctor Who playfield. One of the first things I got from pbc was one of the things I was most worried about, the lower playfield ramp. Before I saw that ramp on eBay, I was toying with the possibility of parting out the pieces I had... the ramp made me think that I would be able to assemble the parts to get this game running again.

But really, the first thing I bought was some lamps and sockets from chuck, which got me the 15 twisty sockets I needed. That cost me almost $12 (including shipping), but I may recoup some of that by selling the parts I don't need to the second place bidder. Next up was the ramp, which was a steal at just under $20. My final chuck purchase was the Bi-directional motor board, one of the few parts I knew was missing from the pictures when I bought the game; this set me back about $31.

Next came a lull in eBay, during which I scrounged for parts on the various online pinball places: Pinball Resource, Marco Specialties, and Bay Area Amusements. I was surprised to find almost nothing I needed at PBR, which I'm of two minds about. My left brain likes the fact that PBR has a good selection of high quality stuff at low prices. The right brain thinks Steve Young is a prick and I've been annoyed, irritated, or humiliated by my every interaction with him. At this point I save up all my purchases and buy stuff from his dealer's table at the Pinball Wizard's Convention in Allentown. Marco has always struck me as too expensive, but they have more stuff I need. Bay Area I had never looked into, but they have reasonable prices on a couple of boards I need.

That's all for now... next time: Adventures with Boards!

Victory is mine!

Despite massive eBay auction stress, I was able to pick up 3 boards that I needed, including a sound board that has the Doctor Who roms already. Sadly, I got the first driver board that came up... for no reason that I could see, the second board that went off 13 seconds later sold for $60 less.

I hate power-listers on eBay

Tonight I have to stay up until midnight because a guy is selling boards I need on eBay. That by itself wouldn't be so bad, but I need almost everything he's selling and he listed nine boards within 4 minutes. This means, for example, if I lose the auction for one of the driver boards, I'll have 15 seconds to enter a meaningful bid on the next one. Similarly, there are 4 sound boards ending within a minute of each other. Then after this huge adrenaline rush of auctions, I have to try to go to sleep soon afterwards. Ugh.

Ganesha to Joe: Time to buy a new pinball machine

Being the story of how Doctor Who landed in my basement...

February/March is usually a time when we are flush with capital... I usually get my state and Federal tax refunds, and for the past few years my company has declared a bonus. After all of our prior indiscretions are taken care of, there is usually a fat wad of cash that has no contingencies on it. Every few years, I take some of that money and plow it into a new pinball machine. This year, I didn't have as much as I usually do, so I thought I would attempt --- a fixer upper.

Trolling eBay and Mr. Pinball for a few weeks, I finally came up with two likely candidates. One was a Centaur that had been in a barn for five years, and the other was a Doctor Who that had been cannibalized for parts. Centaur's positives were:

1. It was on my short list of necessary games (Xenon and Fish Tales being the rest of it);
   
2. It appeared to have most of its parts;
3. C'mon! It was in a frickin' barn for five years, how cool is that!

Centaur's negatives were:

1. My wife has stated in the past that the Centaur backglass makes her physically ill, mainly because of the titular character's pubic hair.
2. It was in Ohio, a stiff 9 hour drive each way.
3. It had reportedly had mice living in it, and smelled as much.

Doctor Who answered all three of the negatives: My wife could stand within 10 feet of it without feeling unclean, it was closer (four hours), and had not been the home of any rodents that I know of. The biggest problem with it was its lack of parts.

In the end the Centaur auction went beyond my stated maximum bid, so the decision was made for me. I did a Buy It Now on Doctor Who.

The next week dissolved in the haze of anticipation that surrounds any major purchase for me. I downloaded manuals, pictures, and tried to figure out if I'd made a huge mistake.

The next weekend I went down and picked it up. The seller turned out to be a pretty nice guy, though our tastes in machines were not identical (he traded the good Who for a Guns 'n' Roses... pretty much all Data East/Sega games make me barf). We put it in the back of my SUV (which I had bought assuming that a pin would fit in the back, but I'd never actually measured it... the game fit exactly, as though Honda designed the CRV as a single pin transport device) and I headed home.

Once home, we managed to get it on to a dolly and into the basement -- no easy task, as my wife is not a heavy lifter per se and we have no friends to speak of. In so doing I ruined one of the wheels on the dolly because it was flat to begin with and was made flatter by a few hundred pounds o' pin. We parked it just inside the walkout basement door and I marveled at both my stupidity and cupidity.

The latter is exemplified by the fact that I didn't really have a place for this game. The four games that I already owned take up significant basement real estate, my wife has carved out an area for crafts and art projects, and the rest is dominated by the TV. Utility rooms, a potential flood plain, and a faux bedroom with a door too thin for pin round out the basement. I had some ideas, but hoped a solution would present itself.

The night after I picked up the game was the Academy Awards, which was perfect because I wanted to watch it but didn't need to watch it. I took my parts list from the manual are started inventorying like crazy. I had stuff I needed (pretty much everything in the head), stuff I had but needed fixing (the launch button is cracked), and stuff I wasn't sure about (the transformer is there but rusty). While inventorying, in addition to a soda cup lid and straw that were in the game, I also found a playfield plastic that was missing, so that was a plus.

After two weeks by the door (and after becoming a favorite cat hangout), I cleared out some space near the oil tank in the boiler room, just outside the basement's normal flood plain. I put the game on its back (on blocks, just in case). When I get around to working on it, I will lay it flat onto more blocks, then tilt it back up when I'm done.

Finally, we'll end with the horror... the horror... the list parts I need, roughly in order of priority to get the machine in its most workingest state as possible.

1. Power Driver Assembly
2. WPC CPU Board
3. Ribbon Cable 14”
4. WPC Transformer 115/230v
5. Dot Matrix Display/Driver Board
6. Ribbon Cable 22”
7. Ribbon Cable 30”
8. Dot Matrix Controller Board
9. Ribbon Cable 3”
10. Flipper Opto Board
11. Flipper Stop Assembly
12. Coil Tubing
13. Pinballs
14. Tempered Playfield Glass
15. WPC Sound Board
16. Flipper Coil (Orange)
17. Fliptronic II Board
18. #555 sockets
19. Motor & Cam Assembly
20. Lower Ramp Assembly
21. Bi-Directional Motor Drive Assembly
22. Metal Leg Assembly
23. Front Molding Assy.
24. 7-Lamp Board Assembly
25. Speaker/Display Assy
26. 2-10W Resistor Board
27. Star Post Double rubber
28. Star Post #8
29. Ball Launch
30. Mini-playfield surrounding plastics
31. Jet Bumper Cap, Red
32. Dalek Light Assembly
33. Dalek Assembly
34. Lock & Cam Kit
35. 4-Lamp Board
36. Tempered Backbox Glass 27”x18-7/8”
37. Lock & Plate Assembly
38. Cover Assembly
39. Toggle Latch
40. Level Assembly
41. Cashbox
42. Plum Bob
    
    

A quick side trip to laugh at some guy on eBay

We'll return to our regularly scheduled broadcast in a sec, but I had to relay this gemlet of information that makes me collapse in hails of derisive laughter.

Since Doctor Who is pretty much boardless in the head, I'm trolling eBay for replacements with saved searches and whatnot. So, this morning I see that some guy posted some boards that I need, and they're pretty funny. His description is basically just the title of the auction and his outrageous shipping charge ($15 for one pcb?). He apparently put the boards on his couch to take his picture -- which I'm sure is excellent if you want to give the board an extra zap with static electricity. The starting bid on one is $30 less than you can buy a brand new replacement, and both of them have parts missing.

I looked at some of his older auctions and it looks like he picked through the junk box at a gaming convention and is now trying to sell the stuff on eBay. I swear one of his earlier auctions looks like one I bought for $5 so I could practice soldering.

I'm watching the auctions just to see if anyone is silly enough to bid on them.

De profundis, man

Hey howdy hey. Welcome to Joe Entropy's Pinblog. "Pinblog" has already been taken somewhere else, and some guy in Turkey nabbed Pinblog on blogspot. I glanced at it, and even with no understanding of Turkish I didn't see anything about pinball or flippers or whatever so I'm pretty sure I was robbed on this name thing.

So. Ostensibly this is a blog about Pinball, but I'm sure I'll probably stray from my core competency frequently. The reason I started this is because I just got a new pinball machine and thought it would be fun and/or entertaining for people to read about my comic mishaps and wacky adventures attempting to bring it up to even minimal functionality. If anything, you can guffaw heartily as I stumble through a repair job which I'm probably not capable of doing!

Since I've been thinking about doing this for a few weeks, I've already got a few posts mentally queued up; I'll probably spew those out over the next few days then update when something happens or I feel like typing.

We'll get into details later, but here are the basics. I currently own 5 pinball machines, which all told are about 50% functional. They are, in the order I acquired them, Stern's Quicksilver, Bally's Paragon, Williams' Black Knight, Bally's Eight Ball Deluxe, and our bloggy inspiration, Bally's Doctor Who. I bought Doctor Who off a guy on eBay for $260... it is pretty much a cabinet and most of a playfield, with no boards or anything.

That reminds me, you can most likely howl with derisive laughter at how much money I'll end up sinking into this... I estimate that I will be able to buy a fully functional game plus shipping for what I'm going to shell out to get the Doctor up and running. I'll try to keep an accurate account of what I'm spending for better or worse. Those are going to be some self-deprecating good times, let me tell you.

So, let the cartoon... begin.