Here's what I should have given up for Lent...

Playfields, of course!

I could not resist the urge and ended up getting an unpopulated Funhouse on eBay. Of course, "unpopulated" here means "virtually impossible to complete without throwing more money than a new game would cost", but as usual I couldn't resist. It's in surprisingly good condition... a few minor wear spots, but mostly just grimy. And unpopulated.

So while I'm wondering how I'm ever going to get the parts for this, a guy from Romania who posts regularly on Mr. Pinball classifieds mentioned he had a bunch of parts from a Funhouse that he parted out. So I asked for a few parts, we haggled a bit, and we completed a sale. I got the wiring harness, the two plastics with lights, the clock and gangway light boards, and Rudy hideout and trapdoor mechanisms. Obviously the real money pits will be Rudy and the ramps, but this is a good start. And I can probably repurpose a bunch of the Doctor Who parts (like slingshots, bumpers, ball trough) for this. Let's put it this way: Things could be worse.

Hey, here's an interesting fact about Funhouse that I could only find out by looking at an unpopulated playfield: There's an Interstate 70 shield and the phrase "Feel the Power" in the pretty much hidden upper right corner, obviously a reference to Whirlwind!

And then another fine eBayer posted a populated (*shudder*) Centaur. It was not in as good a shape as mine, but it was fully populated (*shudder*). Resistance was pretty much futile and it ended around 10 AM on a weekday, so I bid strategically and won. As you can see, somebody tried and failed to touch it up, it's missing its plastics, I don't think it has correct targets, and if you look carefully at the wiring harness, all of the plugs have been cut off (the auction said it was missing one, but I think that was an honest mistake... it is completely emasculated). Certainly less of a challenge than the unpopulated playfield, so I took the path of least resistance. The current plan is to scan the nice playfield so I can attempt to touch up this one, then sell the nice one on eBay. I've already started selling the Centaur parts I got, and it looks like they're selling for a pathetic fraction of what I paid for them... desperation always up the price of anything. We'll have a full report on that later.

After a few unsatisfactory eBay auctions for the plastics, I bought a new set from Illinois Pinball for $100 bucks. They are super nice, and since I don't care about NOS or original parts, they will no doubt make this game look a lot nicer.

What does this mean for the bottom line? Well, I owe the family almost $1000. That's a little extreme for a guy who's supposed to manage on $20 per paycheck and has already spent his bonus and tax refund.

Well, help is on the way, because the start of Spring means the start of eBay season. In addition to the Centaur parts, I'm also selling the boards and stuff from High Speed, which so far have attracted lots of watchers and a few bids.

The coolest thing was as I was testing everything the High Speed parts, the one thing that worked great was one (and only one) of the displays. Since I don't have another System 11 game, I plugged the displays into my Black Knight to see if they would work. The one that did was one of the two alphanumeric displays, which I found were plug compatible with the plain old numeric displays less the extra segments. Also, the player 4 plug is situated so you can attach the 26 pin cable to it with the 6 extra sockets hanging off the end. The picture on the right is what I got.

Well, knowing it was working meant I had to come up with a hair-brained scheme to test the other segments. My first attempts at using wires to jumper between the connector and the 6 sockets didn't go anywhere... I had a pretty good idea of where things had to go by reading the schematic, but I had to get everything there.

My bright idea was to run wires from the segment plugs from player 3 to the new segments in the 26 pin plug. The six new pins were easy to find, but it turns out that the unused pin 5 in numeric world is used for a segment on Planet Alpha. As you can see on the right, it looks half-assed but derned if it didn't work like a charm. Whatever did in the other displays -- probably normal outgassing, but who knows -- sure didn't affect this display. It looks nicer than most of mine. And the proof is in the eBay pudding, because this item has the most watchers I've had in a while -- 32 after 4 days, and it's got the highest bids so far. Obviously I have high hopes for all my items, but some items have higher hopiness than others.

I've got a bunch more to write about, but it's late and I don't want to be wrecked at work tomorrow.