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...
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