Over the river and through the woods...

... assuming the river is the Delaware River, the woods are the vast scrub plains of New Jersey, and Grandmother's House is a dingy warehouse with arcade games in it.

Yesterday's acquisition was that Totem playfield I mentioned last time, from an ad on the Mr. Pinball classifieds. Yes, it was $50, but had I remembered that there was a toll booth every 150 feet north of Baltimore I probably would have had it shipped. And because we have an EZPass, I wasn't really conscious of the full amount I was paying... I'm fully expecting it to be at least another $30. ^_^; That would make this a $100+ playfield except that I plan to amortize the cost across the other two stops I made.

I left the house around 7:30 and the drive up was largely uneventful... in the festive holiday spirit, I listened to the Librivox version L. Frank Baum's Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, which my parents have in their library but I never got around to reading. I find Baum in general to be very dated, and this was no exception. With stops it took me about 4 hours. The warehouse was in the business park adjacent to Monmouth Executive Airport, which is such a busy and active part of our nation's transportation infrastructure that a wrong turn almost took me onto the tarmac. The previously mentioned dinginess was accompanied by the not unpleasant smell of old games. I paid the guy my $50, looked around at his other wares, then took off. The playfield has some wear but is mostly just dirty and looks intact. Considering it's a medium production machine that I was looking for, for $50 + some transportation costs, I think I got an OK deal.

Here ends the parts of this post that are actually about pinball. Sorry.

My next two stops were pure happenstance, since they were both within a half hour of the pinball place. I went over to the New Jersey shore and visited Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash, the comic book store owned by Kevin Smith. Based on the many craptacular comic book stores I've been in, it's pretty nice. Of course, there are a bunch of props and stuff from Kevin Smith movies, and I took pictures of it all -- my daughter is a fan and my wife and I have been sucked into listening to SModcast, the funny and generally pretty filthy podcast he does with his partner. I picked up a few Christmas presents for them at the store to fully justify my trip. Red Bank, or at least Broad Street, seemed nice... it reminded me of Melrose back in the old country, where I spent a great deal of time and money in the 80's.

Then it was up the Garden State Parkway to Metuchen, where my friend Alex and his family live. Alex is a former school- and D&D-mate whom I hadn't seen in at least 15 years. Pinblog regulars will be fascinated to know that Alex maintains that he coined the name Joe Entropy back in the day. This is disputed by me, because I thought I came up with the name. We even disagreed on Joe's address: Alex said he lived at 666 Marine St in Santa Monica, and I said he lived a few blocks over at 666 Ozone. Anyway, we goofed around for a few hours, had some good Indian food, and exchanged current information about friends and relations. They were heading out for their family Christmas in CA the next day, so I left early to give them time to pack.

The drive home kinda sucked... it was raining pretty steadily, I managed to make the same wrong turn in the opposite direction that I had made going to Alex's house (thank goodness for the GPS, or I would be in Maine by now), and couldn't find reliable sources for Vault Zero soda along the NJ Turnpike. But I made it back... 14 hours and 450 miles later, and fell asleep reading the Totem manual.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Entropy!

Yes, Christmas is coming. My daughter is home watching reruns of Who Will Be Americas Next Top Model, a show guaranteed to drive me screaming from the room. My wife is on the big computer trying to convince me that my brother, a salt-of-the-earth Catalina Island dweller, needs monogrammed towels rather than an Apple Store gift card. And I am here, a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, cluthing, covetous, old pinner.

Here is my karma, illustrated: So we picked up my daughter from college today. On the way back, my wife wants to stop at the Emmitsburg Antique Mall, a dumpy old warehouse filled with kitsch and freakish oddities the likes of which you can't imagine (ok, try this: A carved wooden statue of a naked man with a machete, holding the severed head of a man). I ask her jokingly if it's worth my time to come in and find the pinball machines. She says no pinball machines here, hon. In fact, there's probably nothing that would be of the slightest interest to you (though to be fair, she probably didn't know about the naked man/severed head statue). So I ended up walking the dog around dumpy old Emmitsburg in below 40 degree weather until I saw my daughter walking desperately in the cold, so I passed the dog on to her and went inside. I wander around for 10 minutes, and -- you may breathe easy, we have finally gotten to the point of this paragraph -- damn if I don't find the one pinball-related item in the entire place, a translite for Fire! in a light box in a booth filled with fireman fetishiana selling for $165.

Hey, here's something for the obsessive-compulsives: While getting the link to Fire!, I noticed there was a playfield detail picture that didn't look right, and after a quick search I found that it actually belongs to the older Stern game Wild Fyre. I'll send them an email about it when I get back to the big computer. Of course, if they correct the pic the link above won't work, but this one which doesn't work now should.

I bought some more stuff. A guy on Mr. Pinball was selling a bunch of interesting stuff: he was parting out a Centaur, and had a bunch of neat playfields (and a Spy Hunter... oh snap!). I immediately saw that I could snag a bunch of parts that I needed for the big ugly guy, so I put in an offer on the ball launcher and everything related to it. I also bid on the plastics, magnet, and for fun made some low- and medium-ball offers on the other playfields. We agreed on a price for the magnet ($15), couldn't come to terms on the plastics -- at $80, I thought he was charging too much for an incomplete set, as he valued OEM status much more than I did. He wanted $75 for the launcher, and I initially was going to pass on it, but decided that it is a lot of parts & fabricating one was going to be a nightmare and accepted his price. They arrived last weekend, so now I pretty much have everything I need sans plastics to put together the playfield. I probably won't get to it for a while, but at least it's all there for when I need it.

I think I mentioned how I put up a picture of Silverball Mania in my cube to inspire me to keep working on the playfield project. Well, it turns out that after a few weeks of staring at it, I really like the SBM artwork! Maybe not so much the wizard at the top who has just ripped my balls out and it showing them to me, but I like the metallic man and woman erupting from the central ball shooting blasts of lightning through the spinners, and the tiny wizards coiled through the ball return lanes, and the women on the outlanes swathed in ribbons of mercury symbolically lifting your ball up and into the return kicker. Well, maybe I think too much about these things, but I do really like the art.

I also have a line on a Totem playfield, which I think was also via Mr. Pinball. It's not in super-great shape, and it's a 4 hour drive to New Jersey away, but it's only $50 so I'll probably go for it. It would also be my first Gottlieb game, which I'm sure will offer its own set of challenges.

And another thing? The Speed Racer movie trailer is frickin' awesome.

The Comedy of Errors, Pinball Style

This was one of those weekends where I ignored my duties as husband and householder in favor of trying to make progress on my playfields. It was especially important that I do this, because 1) I've been obsessing about it for weeks, and 2) It is entirely possible that more playfields may show up soon, so I've got to do something to justify my love.

Our first task was relatively easy: Get the designated playfield (Silverball Mania, which I feel is thematically most appropriate) out where I could work on it. Luckily I've been cleaning up downstairs so this was sort of easy. I moved the partially deconstructed Black Jack from the TV area to the storage room and brought out SBM. Then I plopped down with my power supply and tested the lamps while I watched Beyond the Mat, a documentary about pro wrestling. I'm really not a wrestling fan -- except for a brief, heavily ironic period in the late 80's -- but I do devote a low priority background process to it when it intersects with my pop culture interests. But it's an interesting and occasionally disturbing documentary.

Anyway, so I test the GI and all the feature lamps and I don't even get a simple majority, much less a quorum. I'd say less than 15 of the lamps worked. I'm not sure if the lamps are burned out or the connection/socket/whatever is bad, but it was a poor showing. But for some reason, the bonus multipliers all lit, so I seized on that as my beachhead: My goal was to control those four lights. Originally I was going to control the SILVERBALL lights, but I think two or less of them lit on the first try, so I scaled back.

Next I had to build my interface. Pinmame-HW, which I'm basing this whole thing on (and which has gone offline for some reason), drives everything using the parallel port, so last weekend I took an old printer cable and hacked the end off of it, figuring I would just connect up the wires to stuff and be happy. In the ensuing week, however, I realized it would have been much smarter to connect the stuff to a 36 pin Centronics female plug, then plug an intact printer cable into that. heh.

But for now I'm stuck with my butchered printer cable. So on Saturday night I watched the Spider-man 3 commentary with my wife, and spent pretty much the whole time determining which pin each wire is connected to. This yielded two realizations: that I never want to beep out continuity on a 36 wire cable ever again, and the guy who played the Sandman in the movie has a very dry sense of humor that I appreciate. But I got through it with my sanity mostly intact.

Finally, it's time to get down to business. I attached some alligator clips with pins on them to the emasculated printer cable. Then I had to set up the computer which I've designated as my pin-PC, a P3/coupla-hundred junker that used to be a server at work back when 20 Gb of total drive space could be considered server material. I originally got it for free and was going to install Linux on it, but this project came along and seemed a much better use for it. So I disconnected the keyboard mouse monitor network power from my old Mac, plugged them into this one, and found out that the USB keyboard and mouse aren't supported by the OS (Win 98 if you can believe it) and it won't attach to the network, though it did the last time I started it up. feh. Found USB->PS/2 adapters were located, but I never did get the network to see things my way. But while I was a-dicking, my gaze fell on the bag containing the craptops, two laptops I got from work that I haven't used in, like, 5 years. A laptop, I reasoned, is far superior because I can bring it to the playfield rather than doing any more lugging.

For the record, I shall point out at this juncture that all of these work computers were had legitimately, given to me by IT guys who said they were too crappy even to be donated to charity.

So I pulled out my original craptop and fired it up. This is the computer on which I wrote most of my Visual Pinball tables, taking it with me on the Metro and business trips and to jury duty when VP ruled my life. I had a wash of nostalgia and played my version of Totem for old time's sake. Then I fire up Visual Basic and start looking into writing to the parallel port. Turns out you can't get there from here, and I need a DLL that I can download, but only if I can connect this computer to the Internet. Unplugging the nearest network cable (to the TVPC) I tried and failed to network a legacy computer yet again. Bright idea: Diskettes. So I download the DLL on the TVPC, put it on a diskette, attach the diskette drive to the craptop, and finally I am ready to apply for the permit to petition for a business license.

Dumping the DLL unceremoniously into the Windows System directory, I write a quick program -- here it is: vbOut 888, 15 -- that should light all the lights, plug the cable into the computer, plug the pins into the appropriate sockets for the bonus lights, run the program, and... and... and... bupkis.

So, it's troubleshooting time. Tested the parallel port: 5 V. Tested a lamp with the power supply: It works. Try again: nothing. Measure the voltage in my makeshift cable: 5 V. Measure the voltage in my makeshift cable while it's connected to the playfield: .7 V. Oho!

Now, I am by no means knowledgeable about electronics, but here's what I guess is happening: The parallel port puts out 5 V but low amps, so it can't overcome the resistance of the bulb. The much more robust current of the power supply is what's necessary.

So here we are at the conclusion of The Pinball Comedy of Errors, where it is revealed that in the Italian town of Zaccaria, the five sets of identical quintuplets, each disguised as the opposite sex, are in fact all related, except thank goodness for the ones that had actual intercourse. And now we know that I will have to build the circuit board that interfaces between the computer and the playfield, much as I wanted to postpone it as long as possible.

And now at last our play complete, we've reached our final mark;
Our tale is finally at an end, we've run and run and lost our race.
Perhaps, on your way home, someone will pass you in the dark,
And you will never know it... for they will be from outer space. Exeunt.



Man, that Shakespeare is fucking brilliant!

One step forward and *gasp* no steps back

Tonight the computer is doggin' pretty bad, as I'm doing a much needed full backup of the hard drive. Having read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, I know the importance of having a current backup. And plenty of whuffie.

Sadly, I did not get much pin done over the long Thanksgiving weekend. My brother Dave Entropy came up for a few days, so I had to attend to my fraternal duties... these mainly consisted of following him around and assisting while he fixed stuff around the house. He patched the bathroom wall that he started two and a half years ago (that I was supposed to finish), installed most of the knobs on our bathroom and dining room cupboards and drawers, and shored up a cabinet that had been hanging precariously but my wife was scared of fixing because she was afraid of missing the stud in the wall. Anyway, no pin work for the first two days.

Boy, this backup is pissing me off.

The big breakthrough came Saturday night, when I was casting about for a quick project that I could do while watching Pins and Vids Volume 1, which I got a few days ago. I decided to actually do something with my playfields: I did a proof of concept to make sure I could light a lamp. This probably doesn't seem like a big deal, but I've been obsessing about it for months, since this is one of the cornerstones of my whole project. So I broke out the PC power supply -- that was easy, since I hadn't put it away from with my other brother Paul Entropy was here soldering for me (I'm kind of a passive consumer of my brothers' expertise) -- then identified and labeled the plugs, read the Paragon manual to figure out which pins were most likely to provide the desired results, and got connecting with Black Jack, which has been sitting around in the TV area for a while. First I plugged into the GI (I connected A2J3-10 to 5 volts and A2J3-1 to ground) and was disappointed when nothing like up... this was short-lived when I realized that I had taken all the GI bulbs out. So I plugged a bulb in and it lit up! This was much needed progress. Next I connected A2J3-6 to 5 volts and A5J1-1 to ground and that lit a feature lamp. I tried pin 2 and that lit up the 2000 bonus lamp (that's the picture), and did a few more until the flush of stuff actually working wore off. Then I dragged my wife downstairs so she could see it, though the vast import was lost on her.

This morning I gave a lot of thought to getting the switch matrix to work. My problem with the switch matrix as I mentally plan things out is one of differentiation. For example, say you have a 2 x 2 switch matrix. If switch 1 is active, then row 1 column 1 forms a circuit and you get a result. Then suppose switch 4 activates, and row 2 column 2 forms a circuit. If both are active, how can you tell that it's switches 1 and 4, and not switches 2 and 3? I figured that in 30 years of solid state pinball design somebody had figured out the answer to this problem. Well, some research into the switch matrix -- namely, reading the same article in two places (here's one at Coin-op Cauldron, fine fixer of pin boards) -- seems to indicate that the CPU doesn't look at the entire matrix all at once, but rather sends a pulse to each row and looks for results from the columns. So in my simplified matrix above, it would send a pulse through row 1 and get a result from column 1, then send a pulse through row 2 and get a result from column 2; this would yield the correct switches with no ambiguity. That set my mind at ease. Then I played a bunch of Eight Ball Deluxe games to celebrate.

And here is your moment of Zen: On the Pins and Vids video, they have some footage of the Pinball Wizards show... hey, what the heck! Who's that bald freak playing Game Show? And why couldn't they have filmed me playing a better game? *exasperated sigh*

What was I thinking? and other stories

This turned out to be a good weekend for eBayin', but kind of a bad weekend for buying things I don't need that I don't have space for. I got two games this weekend. (*rolleyes*)

Machine #1 is at least on-message, though I think I paid too much for it -- not in a heat-of-the-moment last minute panic way, but a cool, rational, I- am- making- a-conscious -decision - to- pay- this- much way. This is a High Speed, a game which showed up in the UCLA arcade just after I dropped out, but which spanks me mercilessly because I have a hard time making vertical flipper shots. I realized while driving to pick it up that it's my fifth Steve Ritchie game. It's not a working machine... it was intended for the playfield project, which lately I've been anticipating starting while not actually doing so. Here's the thinking: I get a High Speed playfield, albeit one that is worn; it has a transformer and power driver board, which if working will provide valuable voltages; and I can sell the backglass and spare boards, which hopefully I can somehow demonstrate are working or not too battery acid damaged to the eBay community. Now, whether that warrants paying $330+gas, I dunno. That turned out to be a convenient use for the $300 that my Dad gave me for Christmas. Pickup went really smoothly... I drove up to the guy's house in Hagerstown, MD, which was about 100 miles round trip. The guy looked like he did a lot of pinball fixing up and had a couple of interesting games. I surmise that he was a bachelor, because his house was kind of a mess and the whole downstairs was pretty much devoted to game repair. The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful.

Machine #2 was a total lark, a Bingo game that sold for $5.50 because something had been dropped on it, breaking the backglass and head. I bid on it thinking it was 2 hours away, but it was in fact three. So it was $5.50 plus $60 in gas and food. :P I set off this morning and the drive up was pleasant... it was up near Reading PA, and I passed through Lancaster and saw Amish buggies on the side roads. I was listening to my daughter's old audio book of Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace, which is better than the movie but much in the same way a firm, solid turd is better than bloody explosive diarrhea. And it was diarrhea that I was expecting to be good, too, so it's bloody explosive disappointing diarrhea. I remember sitting in the theater opening day in 1999 -- I'd taken the day off work and watched all three of the first Star Wars movies, though I had to fast-forward through a lot of Jedi because I ran out of time -- and at some point while they were being chased by the giant fish I realized that this was not the Star Wars movie I'd waited 16 years for... actually 19 years, since Jedi wasn't the movie I'd waited 3 years for back in 1983. And it just never got much better, either. My daughter loved it, but she was only 11 at the time.

Sorry, that was so totally off topic.

It was a very drab, rainy autumn day, and it started snowing about the time I arrived. It turns out the guy's house was also Mindgate Hypnosis, though I don't know if the guy or his wife was the hypnotist. He was helping another guy who apparently had gotten a refrigerator from him, which was lucky because the other guy had a hand truck which made getting the game up the steep basement steps across the dogshit strewn lawn and into my car in the light snow a lot easier. I had been teetering on the edge of thinking it was a huge mistake until I saw it, and I knew that the Patron Saint of Lost Causes, which according to the Wikipedia is Saint Rita of Cascia (also Saint Jude, but he's for lost and desperate causes, whereas Rita is for lost and impossible causes. I didn't feel this was a desperate situation, so Rita wins. She's also the saint of sickness, wounds, marital problems, abuse, mothers, and [unofficially] baseball). I still don't know if I can do anything with it, but I guess we'll see.

The first -- and really only for now -- order of business was to identify it. A few minutes with imdb and the heretofore unknown Bingo Pinballs site showed that we have a Bally Lotta Fun from 1959... which my wife pointed out was the year she was born, and imdb says Bally released Lotta Fun two weeks after her mother released her, so that's kind of cool. Looking at the game, the playfield looks OK, most of the wood could probably use refinishing, and the cabinet has been painted over. It's just one of those crazy impulse buys that I have no idea when I will be able to work on it.

I wonder if there's some kind of 12-step program for people like me...

Suck post

Not much to say and I'm tired & sick, so this will be short.

One of the interesting eBay auctions just went off a few minutes ago... it was an NOS Centaur playfield with some of the parts attached to it, and the parts just happened to be all the parts that I needed. My max bid was in the low $400s, and it went for almost twice that. Still, there are more of those Winter crazy auctions coming up, so there will be plenty of things for me to spend my money on.

I've started this thing where I have to do a certain amount of cleaning, long-term projects, and pinball work each weekend. I had to drive my daughter back to college on Sunday, so that kind of messed things up, but I did do my pinball work. I replaced the chattering upper right flipper on Paragon, which went well. If you recall, I had two Bally flipper coils that I bought a few years ago... when I was in Los Angeles, a friend drove me past what was then the storefront for PJ's Pinball shop, which eventually became PJ's Pinball Museum. At the time it was more of a repair shop, though. Anyway, I came back either a few days or the next time I was out with my dad and PJ was actually there. We talked for a while, I looked around and drooled a lot, he let me play a game or two, and he made me feel better by telling me that sometimes Steve Young made him feel like an idiot, too. Then I was casting about for something I could buy, and I thought about the chattering flipper on Paragon, so I got two coils from him -- in classic Joe Entropy fashion, I bought two in case I messed one up -- this may have pre-dated my involvement with Eight Ball Deluxe, or maybe it was before EBD was sufficiently working. Anyway, I used one of the coils on EBD a few months ago, and now I finally replaced the one on Paragon. Man, it's a lot easier to play when you have a decent chance of catching the ball on the flipper.

Oh, while I was in Gettysburg I stopped in and played a few NASCAR games. Every time I play, more stuff is not working. I've still got the grand champion and 3rd place score, though. heh

I'm really getting antsy to start doing some preliminary tests on the playfield project... so much so that I just sent a picture of Silverball Mania, which will probably be the first playfield I try to get working, to work to hang in my cube. I post it on the wall so I see it almost every time I turn away from my computer... this is supposed to inspire me to work on the game in my off hours. Previously I've posted Doctor Who & Black Knight, and I got both of those into playable shape, so I have high hopes that this will work with SBM as well.

Worst. Post. Ever.

Well, that's probably an exaggeration. But I'm sure it will be right up there with the conjunctivitis and tick-pulling entries.

More bad Doctor Who news... I tried to troubleshoot a little with it and the display was messed up and 3 columns were out. Yeesh. I'm hoping I just misaligned some plugs.

I used some of my birthday money to buy a full set of new drop targets for all the games I haven't already gotten them for. The tough part of that is actually replacing them, which seems like it will be a lot of work unless I can figure out a way to do so without taking the target assembly out of the game.

At some point I got tired of looking at the same instruction cards for Quicksilver for 21 years and made new ones. I got versions from Pinball Rebel and goofed around with them until I was happy with the fonts and stuff. My wife's been doing a lot of papercraft projects recently, so she had a bunch of nice card stock for printing (previously, I'd done EBD cards on plain paper with less than stellar results). The results looked pretty good... I included the old versions for comparison. The title font isn't quite as chunky on my card, but it will fool the uninitiated. And my old score card was just hideous... how could I have put up with that for so long? Stern's card slots are a little smaller than Bally's, so I reduced them to 95% for the best fit.

After that, I replaced the Eight Ball Deluxe cards, and got a little fancier -- I took the logo from the pdf of the manual and added that to the card. I retroactively thought of doing that with Quicksilver, but the cover of the manual is a copy of the backglass, so the logo has Ms. Quicksilver's head at the bottom, so it would require a little cleaning... more than I was willing to do with the 30% battery life that was left on the spousal laptop at the time.


On the subject of instruction cards, I have that I usually don't care much for most of the custom cards that I find on the Pinball Rebel site. I guess they're usually too busy for my taste. Basic text and some subdued graphics are all I want to see, not a reworking of the backglass or stats about the production run or game history. I think I've seen a card for Paragon that uses the game's color scheme and the borders around the score displays from the backglass that I liked.

On a completely unrelated side note, I was hoping to get the next edition of Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Years because the release date was about three weeks before my birthday. I even noticed that my wife had a pre-order in for it (and for $14.99! A bargain!). But when my birthday passed with no hall of fame in evidence, I looked it up and saw that it had been pushed back to March 31st. *sigh* I liked the Gottlieb version, though I wish you could turn off the ambient arcade noises while you're playing the game, and the Williams version has a bunch of good games. So I will wait patiently and maybe get it as an early anniversary present. ^_^;

A lot of cool stuff is showing up on eBay. Neat playfields, project games, and insanely overpriced crap (a Totem for $1000?!? puh-lease)... and I don't think they're getting top prices because people are saving for Christmas or worried that the economy will fall over and start frothing at the mouth. Or both! I'm watching a bunch of cool stuff, some of it local. There was an NOS Viking playfield that I would have won for $100 if the reserve hadn't been $400. Using an NOS playfield would violate my principles for my playfield project, though. And there have been a couple of Xenons and stuff. So we'll see if I get anything interesting. I do have a little cash to play with... I borrowed my daughter's spring tuition from my Dad, and in the check he included my Christmas money. And I have been getting the itch to start working on the playfield project again...

My Goodness/Your Badness

No DIA this time because there hasn't been any official movement, but the Loser 500 should be due for a spanking soon... while my Dad and brother were here, we celebrated my birthday a week early and I got some fabulous cash and prizes, which I intend to apply towards my debt to the family.

My brother actually played a few games of pinball while he was here, mostly Quicksilver since it's upstairs. But as he is an electronics whiz and we resisted my Dad's urge to put him to work around the house (on previous trips he has installed the lighting in our basement and office) so that on his last day here he actually volunteered to show me some soldering. In his youth he scored 100 on the NASA soldering test, so how could I go wrong?

In the limited time available, we decided that of the 7 boards that could use some work, the best ones to try would be a WPC CPU and the EBD lamp driver with the bad traces. My brother surprised me with an actual de-soldering iron, which is so much easier to use than the solder sucker that I have. He also confirmed that my soldering iron, which I think is about 2/3 as old as I am, is junk. I plan to buy a new one soon with one of the gift cards that were my gift from him.

Let's do My Goodness first. The lamp driver worked out great. Rather than soldering on a new wire to replace the trace, he cut out the middleman with a pretty cool trick: He noticed that the middle leg of the transistor didn't connect to anything on the underside of the board, so he bent it up and soldered it to the trace. Check out the picture: The elegance of this solution is amazing. He also critiqued my soldering technique of the other transistors... he said I used too much solder. When he finished, I plugged the board into the game and put it into the lamp test, and for the first time since I bought the game the left arrow and the Target 1 Ball lit in all their glory! That left only two lights out, so tonight I replaced the burnt out bulb in the left bumper and fixed the Rack 2 Ball by jiggling the wire on the connector. So for this brief, shining moment, everything on Eight Ball Deluxe is working! Let's pause and savor this moment... ahhhh!

The CPU didn't work out so well. My brother desoldered and removed the old U20 chip (and I helped a bit) with relative ease. Then he soldered on a socket, which didn't go so well... his precision soldering technique is apparently a little rusty. He started getting angry and frustrated, which happens pretty much any time he does work for me but is never a good sign. He was worried that he might have broken some traces or something. When he finished, I did a bench test and the board booted. With high hopes I attached it to the game and fired it up. Unfortunately the results were a little less than spectacular. It said there were pinballs missing even though they were all in place. Then I did the switch test and found that although the one column that was broken has now been joined by two more. Ouch! Well, to paraphrase Meatloaf, 1 out of 2 ain't bad. When I have some time, I'll try to compare continuity tests on the two boards and see if there's anything really obvious, like bridged connections.

But I'm still relatively happy... EBD is working, and that's good news. Plus I got to do some desoldering and watch him solder, which according to D&D should be worth a few Experience Points. Time will tell whether it's enough to level me up.

They crawl out of their holes for me and I blog; you blog

Yes, there's nothing quite like a Gary Numan reference to really date you as a child of the early 80's. I'm thinking of the 80's a lot lately, probably because I acquired a lot of the stuff I'm selling on eBay in that era. The Fathom playfield went for $58, which I won't pretend wasn't a slight disappointment. The clown who offered me $100 didn't even bid on it, though for all I know he was an eBay agent trying to trick people into selling stuff in violation of eBay's rules (We are clean, don't ask, I'm an agent... it's an all Gary Numan post!!!). Anyway, so that accounts for 7DPF going up perilously near the 50% mark... I've only got about $24 more to go to pass the halfway point, and the DIA in the low 60's... who'd a thunk? The Loser didn't fall drastically, because I spent more than I thought I would at the White Rose show, so that ate up most of the proceeds from the playfield.

White Rose was fun, the usual collection of good stuff, crap, and some old friends (it wouldn't be the same without the whitewood Scared Stiff or Future Spa with the hand touched up playfield and gate that doesn't work. The drive up was nice... I've been listening to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and that added a twisted counterpoint to the idyllic MD/PA farmland. Nothing really leaps to mind as an outstanding game... I played Jungle Lord, which I used to play back in the day. The worst of show had to be a Gorgar with a half-gone backglass, weak flippers, worn playfield, and toward the end of the day added messed up sound and wonky displays that the guy wanted $650 obo. I was tempted to offer the guy to let me take the game and he could give me $650, and I'm guessing that would have been his best offer. I played a couple of the games I played at the Mid-Atlantic show... Mike & Co. fixed the rubber that trapped the ball on Cirqus Voltaire (I didn't write about that, but it happened during my Voltaire-spanking game) but not the thing that spotted the Q.

Purchase-wise, I bought two white spot targets for Centaur (only to find when I got home that it needs 4 ^_^; ), some #47 lights and a couple of #555 compatible LED lights (just to try... I couldn't afford to convert my games over to them at $2 a pop, though it would probably help Paragon's power issues). I also dropped a load on a guy in the flea market who was cleaning out his parts inventory... I found all but one of the pieces I need to fix the remaining Fathom inline target assembly, and I was lured into buying a playfield from him... well, lured kind of indicates that I wasn't fully responsible. Let's say that I convinced myself like a blamed fool to buy another playfield. As we can see on the left, it's a Flash that's not in too bad condition. A few wear spots, a missing bumper & flipper (& more?), and a hole drilled in the top with a coat hanger stuck in it most likely as a storage device. The guy also had a somewhat beaten Lost World and an OK CE3K and he offered to let me have them all for $125, but that was pretty much all the money I had at the time, so I passed. There was also a nice clear-coated but largely depopulated Lost World... if I was blessed with infinite finances, I would have bought both and populated the clear-coated one with the parts from the beater. I will admit sheepishly that while recounting the day's purchases to my wife I was not wholly forthcoming about it... I really need to work on that controller so I can stop this playfield skullduggery.

Anyway, so that's all I got. My dad and brother are coming in for a week tomorrow, so I'll take an eBay vacation until then.

Oo ee oo aa aa ting tang walla walla bing bang

It's always good news when the DIA indices are moving in the right direction. Thanks to healthy Doctor Who target sales, DW is teetering on the bleeding edge of profitability! It's only got $12.50 or so to go. Unfortunately I don't think I have any more ets parts (Easy to Sell in the Neopets dialect) so that might be stuck there for a while. I've also paid for a quarter of the 7 playfields. Overall I've paid for 50% of these guys with parts sales, and that's brought my loser index within striking distance of $500. Phew!

Better yet, the Fathom playfield has lots of pages views and watchers, no so many bids. It languished at the opening $10 bid until yesterday, when it finally got bid up to $37. A guy emailed me and said he'd give me $100 for the pf, but I decided to risk it and let market forces decide on the outcome. Plus eBay frowns on that practice.

Since last Sunday was the end of the no listing fees promotion, I piled 25 items on in one sitting. About a third of them have bids, but I'm hoping it will get up to about 50%. I relisted some Byte magazines from my youth which didn't sell for $2 three weeks ago but this time a guy paid $17.50 for them. Where the heck was he when I was selling the other magazines? My wife says I should be happy with what I have -- after all, this was the last of my computer mags from the 70's & 80's, which all told got me around $100-200. I guess I can look at it as ending a good run on a high note. My computer magazines are going out like the Mary Tyler Moore Show.

When I was listing the Fathom pf, I realized the White Rose show coming was an excellent selling point -- I could deliver it for free to a potential buyer at the show -- so I tried to push out the Black Jack pf to take advantage of that. Maybe if I didn't have a full time job that might have worked out, but stripping, cleaning, and listing for sale a playfield over the course of two two hour nights wasn't going to happen. I got the plastics off and most of the coils and switches, but the lights are still on. I can try to sell the plastics for some scratch, then finish the playfield at my leisure and get it, Skateball, and the spare Doctor Who ready to sell in April, right before Pinball Wizards.

Not much else going on... I've got to curtail my eBaying activities and start cleaning, since my Dad and brother are coming out from the Fatherland for a visit. Since I missed my daughter's birthday on account of post show explosive diarrhea, I'm going up to visit her at school today and taking the dog with me... that will give my wife a chance to get some pre-Dad cleaning in, and I can see my daughter and check on the NASCAR at Pizza House.

Today is a nice day to be off work because your boss' boss' boss got fired

And the title pretty much says it all. It's a really nice day, and the boss of the boss of my boss (the head of our department) was laid off yesterday as part of our parent company's elimination of levels management. It kind of sucks because he's really smart -- he actually knows what he's talking about, rare in a Peter Principle corporate culture -- but he was promoted out of the position where he could do the most good. It wasn't much of a shock to me, but we all liked & respected him, so it was rough on the department. Our new boss^3 (our former boss^4) told us to go home early and don't come back until Monday. And it is a really nice day... not too hot, not humid, there's a breeze blowing... I was even able to convince my wife to come out with me and walk the dog.

Since we sold the Inline Fathom targets, the 7DPF has moved up slightly. I also sold some Doctor Who plastics, but the guy wants to bid on one of the last two sets I'm selling, so payment is pending. That should make the Doctor Who parts game profitable, though I still have to pay for the gas.

This afternoon I've been taking pictures of the Fathom playfield for eBaying Sunday. It's really kind of beaten up, so I'm really not expecting it to sell for much if it sells at all. I've been cleaning it most of this week, and in some cases I think I've taken some paint off. O.o I'll put some pictures up in a later post.

I had two interesting and seemingly unrelated things happen last week. After hearing Python Anghelo on TOPcast, I found a recording of Ayn Rand's Anthem on Librivox and listened to it just to remind myself why I can't stand her work. It's a conventional dystopian society story -- very popular back in the late 40's/early 50's -- but at the end it rears up and spews Objectivism out its anus without warning. The other thing was I got an email from a guy asking for help with one of the first Visual Pinball vpinmame tables I wrote, Lost World. His problem was that my script for the table loads/saves some fairly trivial options to the hard drive, but changes in Microsoft's attitude towards security (from "huh?" to "holy crap we'd better do something about this before we get hit with another European lawsuit!") made it so newer computers don't allow scripts access to the computer's vitals without permission. The script was designed in such a way that it could only set the options by writing the save file then reading it... so bypassing the load function left the options at their script default values, and that kept the table from working. As I told the guy in my reply, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but five years and two versions of Windows later it's a pretty crappy design. And for some reason these two events conjoined in my mind. I realized that if I were a true adherent of Ayn Rand, I would believe that my design was brilliant, and it was the copycats and moneymen at Microsoft who messed it up. And nowhere does Python show that than in his attitude toward Zingy Bingy, which pretty much everyone else who's interviewed says was a tasteless and unreleasable game except, of course, for Python, who still believes it was a great idea that would have saved the industry. That to me is Ayn Rand in a nutshell: You're so self-involved that you are unwilling and unable to admit that everything you do isn't a work of genius.

Hey, here's an awesome quote from the Pinball Wikipedia about Zingy Bingy: "It has been rumored that the president of Capcom Japan was visiting and was given a demonstration of the game, after which he left without a word and, two days later, closed the pinball division."

OK, I promise that's my last rant about Ayn Rand or Python Anghelo unless Stern comes out with a Python-designed Atlas Shrugged pin to coincide with the alleged movie coming out next year.

But let's get back to real pinball stuff. I went to the Mid-Atlantic Gameroom show at the state fairgrounds last week, and I actually had a blast. It was dead... I doubt that there were ever more than about 30-40 people in the room... but that was awesome for me because there were a good selection of mostly newer pins and vids so there wasn't a lot of waiting for anything. The vendors pretty much sucked... I bought two spot targets that I may not have needed for Centaur from noted Eastern Seaboard character Dr. Pinball (I suspect it's an honorary doctorate, but I'm not sure), but the rest were selling neon signs and replacement circuit boards for games. But what the lack of people really meant was I got to spend as much time as I wanted with some great games. Probably 3/4 of them were from MD Pinball Palace, since Mike from that company was one of the show's organizers. The last hour of the show it was pretty much me and the show staff playing, and I was totally spanking machines left and right. First I made it up to Underboss on Sopranos, which pretty much taxed my patience on that game so I'm sort of glad I didn't make it to Boss. On Cirqus Voltaire I worked through all of the marvels and I would have joined the Cirqus if the thing that spotted the "Q" had worked. Right after that I completed the Stiff-o-meter in Scared Stiff, which I've done before but was still pretty cool. I got the #1 score on both games. At that point it was 7:55 and the show closed at 8, so after a quick and lousy shuffleboard bowling game I left while I was ahead. I also spent a lot of time with Champion Pub and Revenge from Mars, had an awesome Fart Multiball in Family Guy, ended up playing a third of all games new Stern has put out, did a bunch of video games that I would rarely play, like shootin' defenseless woodland creatures games, and played an almost entirely working Doctor Who (for a change). There were also a couple of fun EMs. Sadly, my generation was represented by a "fully shopped" KISS that had no playfield lights or sound and played for crap, a Star Trek that was OK, and a Swords of Fury (which I should never ever play because for days afterwards the phrase "Lionman! Lionman!" is ringing through my head). I also had an awesome totally lucky save on Addams Family where The Power kicked in right when my ball drained and dragged it back above the flippers! Kewl! So I ended up having a pretty good time.

The next day I got what I think was food poisoning of the blow it out your ass variety, possibly from the hot dog I ate at the show (but it could have been some old lunchmeat I had, too).

Wheesh

There's a lot of little stuff to write about, and I probably won't remember it all, but we'll see what we can do.

eBay season has begun and that means the return of the DIA. I sold a bank of Skateball targets for $11 which brought up the 7DPF and DIA slightly. The Loser 500 is way up, mainly because I've been spending over the summer with no visible means of support. The Centaur playfield was at least half of that, plus the new tumbler, plus concert tickets, etc. I sold the old rock tumbler for $17.50, so that and the targets are about the only reduction so far other than my spending money. My birthday is coming up next month, and my dad usually gives me a few hundred dollars, plus there are more eBays in the offing. So we'll see how things go.

We've got a few things in the eBay queue right now. I rebuilt and listed a bank of inline Fathom targets and relisted some of the Doctor Who plastics, this time in lots. They've all got bids so far. We've also got the rest of the plastics, the 6 target bank from Fathom, and if I can ever get it cleaned up, the Fathom playfield (which I thought I wrote about, but I guess not... I took advantage of some dog-free time and stripped the remaining parts from it while watching Miyazaki movies -- Kiki's Delivery Service and Laputa... I started watching Laputa in English, but it was so terrible that I switched to Japanese w/subtitles even though I wasn't paying full attention to it... but then, I've seen Laputa enough times that I pretty much know what's going on. Kiki at least has Phil Hartman as the voice of the cat, so that's listenable in English). Success story with one of the DW plastics: When I cleaned out of the cabinet of the parts game, I found a couple at the bottom, including one that was kind of warped. I shot it with the heat gun and plopped it under some old computer magazines I was selling and it turned out flat as a pancake. Very nice. The second set of inline targets from Fathom isn't complete, so I can't do much with those without some spare parts.

Tomorrow I'm going to the Mid-Atlantic Coin-Op Show, which is just up at the state fairgrounds. It's the first year for this show so it will be interesting to see what's there. Usually coin-op shows don't have as much pinball as I would like, but it's so close that I have to check it out. I doubt I'll find the parts I need for the incomplete Fathom targets, put I'm taking them along just in case.

Here's my latest guilty pleasure: When I'm tired of work, I sneak out and play Roller Coaster Tycoon at Continental Bar & Grill, which is just a few blocks from work.

I finally caught up with the TOPcasts -- including the awesome 3 hour Lyman Sheats interview -- and now I've started listening to Talk Pinball, which isn't as interesting but it's still pretty good. There's also only 7 of them, and they don't interview any big names, just guys who run pin shows and stuff.

Not much else I can think of... I'm getting antsy again, since I feel like I'm not making good use of my investment in pinball games. Part of the problem is that when I'm not working I'm getting stuff ready for or selling stuff on eBay, and my remaining spare time is taken up with walking the dog, cleaning the house and paying bills. My wife was supposed to take over the eBay duties from me, but so far that hasn't happened... I've pushed out 25 auctions to her 2 in the last month. She says after her sister leaves (the sister has been visiting this week), she's going to tear into the eBays. We'll see how that goes.

Her sister bought a video on craft soldering, so I watched it to see if I could pick up any pointers (I didn't). But the whole time I was thinking that the video would be so much better if the women doing it were more like Norm and Shaggy.

If this is Labor Day, why aren't I working?

Well, things are moving along briskly and stopping abruptly in equal measure. I am almost caught up on TOPcast shows... I haven't watched the videos yet, but I'm two back from the most current one. Walking the dog for 45+ minutes a day sure helps me get caught up on my podcast backlog. The one that stands out in my mind, of course, is Python Anghelo, who I kind of figured would be a character based on what everyone else was saying about him, but I really wasn't prepared for someone who was so full of shit as he was. He's obviously very talented and I like a lot of his games, but he is so egotistical and completely convinced of his own genius that he was extremely difficult to listen to. First warning: All the disclaimers they put before, during, and after the show. Second warning: When Python told Clay that he should read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead if he (Clay) wanted to understand what he (Python) was talking about. For me, Ayn Rand is in the same category as Thoreau... if I had read them when I was in college, they would have totally blown my mind. But because I read them as adults, I have the experience to know that what they're saying is idealistic (Thoreau) or a justification of selfish bullshit (Rand). So the fact that Python likes Rand so much told me a great deal about him immediately. The way he just dismissed people that he didn't consider to be geniuses really got on my nerves. Everyone else is "copycats and moneymen" (please to read quote in Romanian accent). And some of his ideas -- for example, this "Zingy Bingy" thing he kept talking about -- sounded like garbage, and everyone was probably right to think it would have been a colossal failure. After the Python Tapes I listened to the Jeff Powell interview, which was the first one I listened to live, and he mentioned that Python either made up or significantly altered the truth... at least now I know what he's talking about.

My last boss was Romanian, and while certainly not as bad as Python, I see a lot of similarities between them... especially how stubborn she can be and often convinced that her way is pretty much the only sensible approach. I should ask her if she's read The Fountainhead, or at least Atlas Shrugged.

But enough complaining!

I tried fixing the last couple of SCRs on Eight Ball Deluxe with no luck. When I carefully examined the board, I saw that a previous owner had tried to repair the tracing without much success. I'm not up to repairing tracing, and not surprisingly neither of the new SCRs did much. But the good news is that the flippers work again... it might have been fixed when I reseated the playfield fuse, or it might have been fixed by the Pinball Fairy blessing my game in the night. Who knows. I think the bad flippers on Doctor Who were caused by one of the plugs not being plugged in properly or the flipper fuse was blown.

I'm not providing a lot of definitive factual information today, am I?

The New Fall eBay Season has started... I'm pushing my wife to start posting stuff (mainly because it's a lot of work for me, and I already have a job), and she's starting to do so slowly. I'm kind of anxious for her to come up to speed quickly, since we need the money. September is "no listing fees" month -- finally, an eBay promotion that I can actually take advantage of, as opposed to their usual "free gallery pic on auctions posted between midnight and 1 AM on Tuesday the 14th!" -- so between us we spewed out 13 auctions. I'm selling the rock tumbler I bought to test parts polishing, and the first result of the new parts polisher, a spiffed up drop target bank from Skateball. That's right, the Dumbass Industrial Average is poised to move again! After that I've got another drop target bank ready to go, but after that I have to find more stuff to sell.

While I was assembling polished drop target assemblies, I reassembled the 5 targets assembly from SB with Centaur ORBS targets and replace the Harlem Globetrotters inline targets with the Centaur wheel targets. They look great. I did it while watching DVR'd Daily Shows and Colbert Reports with my wife... if you tire him out, the dog will now settle down and let us watch TV, as long as the cat doesn't show up. This should allow me to get a lot more work done on some of the labor-intensive projects I have, like stripping playfields.

Trapped balls a poppin'

We dropped off our daughter at school, and I took the opportunity to school NASCAR for a few free games. My high score is still on (heh). I managed to get a couple of free games, and things were going fine until I managed to get all three balls stuck. Basically one ball got caught to the left of the race track diverter, keeping it half open, then a second ball that was racing around the track got stuck on the right. After numerous ball searches, it served up the third ball, which I used to try to knock the second ball free. After a few hits the third ball got stuck too, so I gave up, turned the machine off, and slunk away quietly.

The home front is relatively uninteresting. I did find that my complete lack of confidence in myself paid off for a change: When I ordered the chip to replace U20 on the DW CPU, I actually ordered two chips as I was worried that I would break one of them. (In retrospect, what am I likely to do to a chip that will render it unusable?!? Kind of silly, really.) Well, since it appears that my second CPU also has a bad U20, the second chip may come in handy! I should doubt myself more often.

Tonight I took a trip to John's Place, a bar in Fairfax, VA -- about a half hour from my work, or about an hour if like me you take wrong turns and choose the wrong street during rush hour. It's the home of the VA branch of the Free State Pinball Association, and they had a bunch of games available. I had to turn most of them on myself, but that was no problem, and most of them were in reasonable condition since they're maintained by FSPA members. They had: Attack From Mars, Fish Tales, Getaway, Mars: God of War, Mousin' Around, Night Rider, Strikes 'n' Spares, The Addams Family, The Shadow, White Water, World Poker Tour, and a Baby Pac-Man unplugged in the corner. I played 'em all except Getaway, which I couldn't get to accept any quarters. Shadow and Fish Tales were either sluggish or just off their game. I had one good game of ATF. It was nice to play a WPT that wasn't filthy, like the one I played in California... considering Steve Ritchie designed it under protest, I didn't think it was that bad. Mars spanked me. I guess that's the reason he has that smug look on his face. I couldn't get multiball because after every ball any captured balls are returned to the trough, which made it impossible to build on previous balls. I think I've played Mousin' Around before... 1985-1990 Bally games really don't do much for me. And on TAF I got the ball stuck -- and hence the title of today's entry. Near the end of an undistinguished game, I shot the ball with the Thing flipper toward the swamp, and the ball got wedged between the upper-most spot target and the wall. I was hoping it would go into a ball search, give up, and serve another ball, but it never got past step 1. After a while I gave up, turned the machine off, and slunk away quietly.

Slow week

Not much to tell... the week has been focused on getting my daughter back to college tomorrow. That means me watching the dog a lot, which means me not working on the pinball machines a lot. But going up to Gettysburg means a stop at Pizza House, which means I'll get to see how much lower the NASCAR game has sunk.

I forgot to mention that after the Great Doctor Who Board Swap and subsequent left flipper malfunction last weekend, Eight Ball Deluxe decided to show its solidarity by having both flippers go out. I'm hoping it's just a bad connection -- EBD occasionally loses touch with the coin door, so I have to wiggle a connection on the CPU board to remember it's there -- but I haven't had the heart to look at it yet.

The parts from Great Plains showed up yesterday, but of course I haven't installed them yet.

I have to say I'm really loving the TOPcast shows. I've been powering through them, mostly while walking the dog and walking to and from my car at work. I've made it up to #35 with Barry Oursler. A lot of them are really interesting... guys who designed games that I own or really like, and guys who worked in the industry for decades. And I love it when it's inadvertently topical... like listening to Steve Ritchie talk about Spider-man the day I actually played it for the first time. Plus so far there's been interviews with either the artist or designer of all my games except Quicksilver. At the very least, it's great dog walk listening. I'll be kind of sad when I catch up to the current shows... Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and The Writer's Almanac will seem drab in comparison (yes, I am a Public Radio nerd).

Boy, there's something else pinball-related nagging at my subconscious, but I can't quite remember what it is. Well, it will come to me at a point at which I can't do anything about it...

I remember what I was going to write. Last weekend when I was tracking down the bad SCR on Quicksilver, I looked at the manual from IPDb for the schematic only to find that the manual was missing some of the diagrams. It wasn't too annoying -- I just had to dig out my copy of the manual from the basement -- but it annoyed me enough to actually do something about it. So I scanned the three pages that were missing and posted them to IPDb. We'll see if they post them.

I Fix and I Break: A Joe Entropy Adventure

This was a busy little pinball weekend. Buoyed by my success with EBD, I launched myself into checking the lights on Paragon. This involved clearing off Paragon and plugging it in, because it is a dumping ground for my family's stuff and shocks them without mercy. So I put it into the lamp test, and noticed that it can barely light all the lamps... I had to turn out the lights in the basement just so I could see which lamps were out. It turns out Paragon was in good shape, lamp-wise... there were a few burned out bulbs, but that was it. I don't know whether to be overjoyed or disappointed that I didn't get to use my new-found SCR replacin' skillz. I'll opt for the former. A little research indicated that dim lamps probably mean a bad bridge rectifier on the power board.

Next I pulled the lamp driver board out of Quicksilver... I was reasonably certain there would be at least one bad SCR on there, since there were several lights that have resisted bulb changes. While my wife watched the Doctor Who one last time (she wanted to watch the Pop-up Video-style comments), I tested the SCRs and found one bad one. I wasn't sure what it was -- not only is the lamp driver schematic mislabeled as belonging to Cheetah in the manual, it says that the left and right spinner lamps use the same pin. I replaced the bad SCR and tested the game, and the broken lamp was the left spinner, which I kind of suspected it was. QS also had a bunch of stuff on it which I didn't feel like clearing off, so bulb replacement will have to wait.

Finally last night was Doctor Who and the CPU of Death. I posted again on rgp about the remaining English-guy CPU -- the one which won't boot if J202 is plugged in -- and got a response to try reseating the ASIC chip, because that can solve a lot of seemingly random problems. I tried it and by gosh did it work much better than I ever could have dreamed! The game booted and almost entirely worked. Unfortunately -- there's almost always one of those, isn't there? -- while plugging and unplugging cables I broke off one of the pins from J202. >:( I think/hope that it's the pin that takes care of the left flippers, because that's what didn't work. It was nice, though, to hit all of the switches that were out on the other CPU and have them do something.

After these exciting pinball adventures, I put in a Great Plains Electronics order. I realized at work today that I ordered something for four of my five games (which I really don't feel is an accomplishment): A chip to fix the blanking problem on Black Knight, SCRs for EBD, a bridge rectifier for Paragon, and a new plug for J202 on DW. Sheesh.

While I was waiting for someone to call me back, I glanced at the list of local pingames and noticed that a place near my house had a brand-new Spider-man! Ignoring my family's needs, I toddled right over to the Sole d'Italia restaurant to give it a go. I had fun, but I didn't love it. The playfield is kind of like the bastard love-child of Medieval Madness and Attack from Mars. The thing I had the biggest problem with was fighting the villains like Venom or Doctor Octopus... I knew that by hitting the shots I could start battling them, but I never figured out how to defeat them. I think I did -- I guess it was just hitting their shots repeatedly -- but I never felt like I finished fighting them, as opposed to Spider-man's bastard love-parents, where you can easily tell when you've complete an objective. I got a bunch of replays, and ended up leaving a matched credit on the game because it was getting late and I had to walk the dog. I also found a quarter on the ground, so instead of 40 cents per game, it really cost me only 35 cents per game. Yoink!

But really, the best thing about playing Spider-man is that it was the first time in a while or possibly ever where I've played a completely working, virtually brand new machine. It was pretty sweet. And for fun, I played a game in Spanish, since you get the chance to choose your language when you press start. El yoinko mas bueno!

And on a slightly anti-climactic note, I realized while I was walking the dog and listening to TOPcast on the iPod tonight that I really need to switch to external batteries on all of my games. I don't think I've ever changed the batteries on Quicksilver, and I've had that game for over 20 years (to be fair, the service guy might have done it, but that was in 1995). The potential for leaking battery mayhem is great, so I need to make that a priority.

But I digress...

First I have to start off with the eBay Loser of the Week. This guy posted a set of Centaur plastics that were "New NOS (Used)". The title of the auction included New and NOS but strangely enough not used. And these things are warped, a few are cracked, and the upper left one is in three pieces. So I send him an email saying that (imo) New, NOS, and Used are three different things. He replies and says his bad and he's updated the auction. Now it just says NOS (Used). So I send him another email, and then he relists it without the NOS. Ultimately, I think he was just careless because he has other items that he's selling that are actually NOS. My wife the conspiracy theorist believes that he was hoping to get away with it. Anyway, I wouldn't buy from him anyway because he's charging $15 for $8 worth of shipping, so the minimum price is $40, and I can get a brand new set from IL Pinball for $100+shipping.

Speaking of Wall of Voodoo (which we were, really) right after I wrote the WOV stuff, a guy at work pointed out that Stan Ridgway, the WOV lead singer, was doing a 25th anniversary of Call of the West tour and was in town on the 2nd. My wife and I were totally there. It was mostly empty... for the whole show, I doubt there were more than 10 people in the balcony and maybe 40 on the floor (compared with when we saw The Residents at the same place, which was a lot more crowded). But it was a great show. He played about half WOV songs and half solo songs. It was pretty cool... a nice nostalgic rush. They also had copies of WOV's first album on CD for $15, which go for $50 on eBay.

But I digress, so back to pinball: I have finally leveled up my soldering skills to introductory board level! I replaced the little things that drive the lamps in Eight Ball Deluxe on the Lamp Driver Board. About a week ago while my wife and I watched an old Tom Baker Doctor Who on DVD I pulled out the components -- I think they're SCRs -- that failed the continuity test and correspond to lights on the playfield that don't work. I sucked the solder out of the holes (I had inexplicably lost my solder sucker, so I had to buy a new one from Radio Shack, which I think is better than my old one anyway). Then last night while we watched the commentary on said Doctor Who -- it was the last episode with Sarah Jane Smith in it, which I'd gotten a hankerin' to watch after the Sarah Jane episode of the new Doctor Who... and the Doctor totally didn't leave K-9 with her, he didn't even get K-9 until he was with Leela, even my pathetic neurons remembered that!... but I digress -- I soldered new SCRs in. I only had one size... I got some of what I thought were the bigger ones at Pinball Wizards, but I don't think they're the right kind (and like a dumbass, I paid like $2 a piece for them, and Great Plains sells them for .55!). Anyway, I plugged the board back in, and now all the lamps driven by SCRs that I replaced work great! Mostly they were all but two of the 9-15 target lights. My next job is to test the SCRs on the other two games of that ilk, Paragon and Quicksilver, order enough parts from Great Plains, and solder some more.

My new favorite comic strip these days is Lio. It's reminds me of the Addams Family in that it's weird, creepy, and morbid, but incredibly funny. And it's so much better and more authentic than the generally lame Addams Family tribute by the Non Sequitur guy, The Gravesytes (which is almost exactly like the Addams Family except that it's usually not funny and, like just about every other Non Sequitur strip, it's just a vehicle for the writer's cynicism and bitterness).

But I digress... new arrivals from eBay -- and I thought I'd written about these, but I guess not -- are a set of Xenon drop targets with memory that I can use for Centaur, which were about $30 with shipping. I need to get new 1-4 targets from PBR, but that can wait. I also got an incomplete set of Eight Ball plastics for the playfield for $20
w/shipping. Without realizing it, the set had all the ones on my playfield that were broken or missing, plus I have a few extras to sell.

Through random Internet searching, I found that the guys who put out the Gottlieb Pinball Hall of Fame are putting out a version for Williams in October, just in time for my birthday! The game list is pretty good -- Gorgar, Pinbot, Funhouse, Black Knight, Space Shuttle, Whirlwind, Firepower & Taxi -- and it's only $15. I think there might also be two hidden tables, because the descriptions for the other platforms include two more games, Jive Time & Sorcerer.

But I digress...

July: Very uneventful month

So let's write about it!

Since giving up on the cash 'n' carry thing, I've actually been spending my family's money quite liberally. I bought new targets from PBR for the Centaur target banks I have (the inlines and ORBS). I bought a plastic and two bumper caps for Mr. & Mrs Pac-man from a guy on Mr. Pinball. I got a desoldering tool so I can make my board repairs, because I can't find my old one. A couple more purchases are in the pipeline, but I'll wait until they actually arrive before I blog 'em.

But the big purchase at $112 was a parts tumbler. It's a Dillion CV-500, actually made for cleaning bullet casings or something... who cares, I hate guns anyway. My old tumbler was a rock tumbler that worked pretty well, but was tiny. This is a lot bigger -- not big enough to hold my largest parts, but still plenty big. It was waiting for me when I came back from the Anime con -- it was delivered on the same day as Deathly Hallows. So I loaded it up with some corn cob media and dumped some parts in and have been polishing those shiny bastards ever since. It's been running almost continuously for a week, so today I shut it off for a break. I'll need to shine up some parts I want to sell, like some of the Fathom target assemblies.

Other than that, things have been all quiet on the pinball front. I've been listening to TOPCasts... a lot of them are interesting, a lot of the guests are nice, a few come off as jerks. I guess he abandoned the tech shows and focused on the interviews... they kind of function as an oral history of pinball, especially when he has legends like Alvin Gottlieb showing up. I tried listening to tonight's interview with Margaret Hudson -- after all, I've been staring at her artwork a lot with all the EBD I've been playing, and she did M&MPM as well, so I was interested in what she had to say -- but she was a tough interview. Shaggy would ask her a three or four sentence question, and she would respond with a short sentence. She just didn't seem to have a lot to say... like C3PO, she was not very good at telling stories... well, not at making them interesting, anyway. My computer lost the connection at about the 20 minute mark, and I didn't make much of an effort to retrieve it. I'll listen to the podcast.

Off topic, but last night my wife went to see Transformers (her choice!). We used free tickets we had gotten when "developmentally challenged" child freaked out during a showing of Meet the Robinsons... I wasn't really bothered by it -- I had a kid, I can ignore stuff like that -- but I didn't turn down the free tix. It was just as well, because Transformers was one of the stupidest movies I've seen in a long time. I was in college when Transformers first came out, and it wasn't Japanese, so I didn't pay that much attention to it originally, but I'm a sucker for a cool robot movie (Gigantor, Iron Giant, etc.). It was my first Michael Bay movie, and now I believe what everyone says about him... and it certainly makes that song from Team America that much funnier. It was a 2 hour and 23 minute movie, but he could have trimmed an hour of dumbass expository crap from the beginning without losing anything worthwhile. I wanted to stand up and scream, "Shut the FUCK up and show us the damned fighting robots!" The robots themselves rocked pretty hard. Mid-air transformations, crazy-ass CGI stunts -- the fights were great. But any time John Turturro was on screen, I just stared at the ceiling and thought about O Brother Where Art Thou. His character was stupid, worthless, and a complete waste of screen time. Worst. John Turturro role. EVER. And if Angelina Jolie wasn't already estranged from Jon Voight, this movie would have caused it. Of the humans, I didn't have a big problem with Shia LaBeouf or the soldiers, but as for the rest, I would just as soon see them on the cutting room floor in Transformers: The Fan Edit.

I win the right to fight the Black Knight again!

Quite a lot to blather about, so let's go...

Black Knight is once again working (after a fashion)! July 4th was mostly rained out here and we were stuck at home with the dog. It ended up more festive than usual... we ordered pizza, my daughter and some of her friends hung around and played Life (the new version, which is NOT heartily endorsed by Art Linkletter, so is therefore lesser in my eyes). I ended up spending most of the evening with Black Knight and troubleshooting. Still stuck on the idea that it was a bad coil or permanently closed switch, I ended up disconnecting several suspect coils to no avail. After blowing through five 2.5 amp fuses, I gave up and threw myself on the mercy of rec.games.pinball. This time, it came through! A guy answered who had had the exact same problem two years ago with a darned helpful suggestion: Pull the fuse out, start the game, then put the fuse back in. I tried this and lo! the game worked just fine, solenoids and all. The trouble appears to be a bad blanking circuit, probably the timing chip that allows the CPU to power up the playfield once it's decided that its slave chips are all suitably obedient. Basically the signal is sent early, the playfield powers up, but (this is my reading of it) there's garbage in the solenoid line, so a bunch of them fire at once and the fuse throws itself on the grenade to prevent widespread carnage. Remove the fuse allows the CPU time to get control of itself first. This problem is either caused by the timing chip (that's what the guy's problem was) or a bad egg in the 40-pin connector between the driver board and the CPU. When I get around to doing it, I'll prolly try replacing the chip first. For now, I'm doing the lame-ass method of removing and replacing the fuse to play the game.

And how does it play? I've had better. :( The upper right flipper is very weak, and the others are a little anemic. There are a couple of burnt out lights, and my favorite settings (slightly longer hang time on the targets, 5 balls, etc.) were forgotten when the batteries died. But I did have a couple of decent balls, and since I had played EBD earlier, it was a rare night when I actually played two of my games. Cue the Hallelujah Chorus!

I have been playing a lot of Deluxe Eight Balls lately, because it's the workingest game that's not covered in pet materiel. I sucked tonight, but last weekend I had an awesome ball... I completed two balls + deluxes and was working on a third, 4X bonus or so, I would have gotten the extra ball if my settings hadn't still been hosed from the MPU board's last service (I corrected them soon after), and I discovered that if you go long enough it starts making a whirring background noise instead of the usual chew chew chew chew chew. I got the high score, which was only about 2 mil. If I had a video of it, I would have posted it on YouTube, that's how good it was.

We got out of work early on Tuesday, so I took a detour to Beltway Chevron for a few games of Funhouse. I did OK... Rudy's eyes are open now, but the right one wanders like a lazy eye. At one point it rolled into the back of his head, which was kinda weird. But it was fun.

Also on the Fourth, I powered up Doctor Who to play a game despite the missing column, and found the playfield dead. Now that I think about it, it's probably that F105 fuse or whatever, but at the time -- I had just given up on BK in disgust -- I wasn't thinking that clearly.

I was poking around the Marvin3m repair site and found my latest obsession: TOPCast, the This Old Pinball Internet radio show and podcast by Clay/Shaggy. Clearly modeled on Car Talk, it features call in trouble-shooting, news, and interviews. I powered through 5 episodes on July 3-4 alone. The most interesting interview so far was with Tim Arnold. My impression of him in previous interviews I've read was that he was kind of a dick, and now I still think he's a dick, but at least he's an interesting one. His stories about building his business and collection and the Pinball Hall of Fame are fascinating, and he mentioned some interesting tech tips like replacing incandescent feature lamps with LEDs. The show is often hard to understand and amateurish, but I enjoy it immensely. I was kind of sad that my BK problem was solved by rgp, or I would be tempted to call in.

Man, I would love to go to the Pinball Hall of Fame. We're just not Las Vegas people... I think about going some time when I go visit my dad, but Las Vegas is a long, hard six hour drive across the desert on Interstate 15... and the Wall of Voodoo song is only 3 minutes, which leaves 5 hours and 57 minutes to fill (both ways!). It's hard, because I'm usually out there to visit him for a week, and a trip to Sin City would be 3 days minimum. But Tim Arnold's not getting any younger either...

I tried calling PBR on Monday to buy drop targets for Centaur, but they were closed for the week. I thought I would explode with frustration, but it had pretty much wandered into the back of my mind by Tuesday night. I pulled parts I knew I would need for Centaur from Skateball, Fathom, and one or two from Black Jack. I've been disassembling the target banks and throwing them in the dishwasher, and at some point I'll give them a final cleaning and reassemble them. I also washed Skateball's apron and ball launch guide, and found out that paint doesn't stick to metal parts so well. ^_^; Well, if I use them I'll have to repaint them anyway.

Here's something that made me simmer with impotent rage: About a week before I bought the Centaur playfield, there were a bunch of target assemblies on eBay, including a four target bank with memory, exactly what I need for the 1-4 targets. It went for like 11 bucks, too.

That looks like about all I've got to write about for now. I don't know how much pin work I'll be able to do, as we're starting to ramp up for the trip to Otakon in two weeks. My daughter invited four friends to stay in our hotel room... she insists she told me but I have recollection of it, Senator. Seven in a room reminds me of when my friends and I went to the 1983 Baltimore Worldcon, and I'm pretty sure we stayed in that very same hotel. We probably had 6 or 8 in the room for that, but I could sleep on the floor a lot easier when I was 21-ish. Well, the good thing about being the only 40-somethings in a room of 18-20 y.o.'s is my wife and I always get the bed!

Holy crap, Art Linkletter is still alive. That guy's a rock. Old people are funny... they say the damnedest things, after all.

OK, adding the On Interstate 15 link made me search for Wall of Voodoo links, and I found a MySpace page that played Call of the West. And damn if I don't still remember ALL the words to that song, even the spoken word portion at the end. Even after 25 years WOV is still my favorite band...