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...