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.