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. ^.^;