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*
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