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!