Romantic Pinball Road Trip

For my birthday in October, the lovely and talented Frauline Entropy gave me the gift of pinball: A weekend driving around with her playing pinball. After some strategizing and research, I opted for the following itinerary for the weekend of December 4th:

Friday: Drive to New Jersey, stay in a Bed & Breakfast
Saturday: Spend the day at the Silver Ball Museum in Asbury Park, NJ
Sunday: Drive to Castle Video in Branchville, NJ

We also had some other alternate locations for Sunday in case something didn't pan out.

Our B&B was the Lillagaard, a late Victorian affair in nearby Ocean Grove. It was a couple of houses from the beach -- not that the beach in December was such a draw -- and about a mile from the SBM. It being the off season, we were one of only two couples there, the other being a grumpy gus and his wife who seemed to spend most of their time watching Fox News in the common room. The B&B was a lot of fun... kind of creaky, a lot of exposed pipes, kind of shoddy remodeling workmanship coupled with some nice flourishes, a coffin-like shower, and I was able to steal unsecured wifi sporadically from a nearby house. Friday we arrive after dark and ate dinner in an old drug store turned sandwich place a few blocks away. It was rainy and windy on Saturday, but that was no problem since we planned to spend the day inside playing games. The SBM was pretty cool... it was in the basement of a hipster clothing and record shop, and had about a hundred games set up, mostly EMs, a few early solid state games, and an Attack & Revenge from Mars for the kids with short attention spans. There were also a few random arcade games, like puck bowlers and putting games. Admission was $20, the games were mostly in good condition, and a lot of them had toppers with a blurb about the game. We pretty much spent most of the day there, though my wife goofed around in the town for a while. I did get a couple of high scores, which was cool. And the most amazing thing of all was that Mrs. Entropy had a good time... and no one was more surprised than she was. She really enjoyed the puck bowler, but ended up spending a lot of time with the from Mars brothers. At some point she even admitted that she wouldn't mind having them in the house! So now all I need to do is find an unused $6000 and 20 sq feet of floorspace and we'll be in good shape. We ate lunch at a surprisingly tasteless organic food coffee shop, and after I finally conked out we browsed a paranormal bookstore that was doing holiday photos with an abominable snowman, then ate dinner at a much better place than the organic place.

Sunday was a sunny but cold day, so we goofed around along the boardwalk for a bit. Then we drove about 2 hours to get to Castle Video, which is part of a mini-fiefdom consisting of storage, movie rental, and what looks like a couple of other small businesses. But the guy likes pinball, so he had about 15 games set up, mostly Williams and a few DE/Sega games. Again, my wife had a lot of fun, though she got spanked hard by a couple of games so she gravitated to the more accommodating games, like Whodunnit. I again put up a few high scores, most notably on Fish Tales where I scored a massive (for me) 300 million. I like to imagine the chagrin on the faces of the pinball league that meets at Castle Video when they wonder who that Joe guy is on a bunch of the machines. After that it was too late to go to any of the other stops, so we just headed home. All in all we had a pretty good time, and who knows? Maybe Mrs. Entropy will even accompany me to a show some time. This year the Saturday of Allentown falls on our anniversary... perfect for another Romantic Pinball Road Trip!

And speaking of gifts, for Christmas my wife got me an extremely cool baseball jersey from the Pacific Pinball Museum. I love PPM's art... I bought a copy of their Art Nouveau-style poster for the PP Expo a few years ago, and this year they posted the poster as a pdf for free. I printed it at 11x17 on one of the nice color printers at work, framed it, and hung it downstairs in the pinball area. Sweet!!!

I like the cut of that doctor's trim

A bunch has been going on, but it's mostly newsy stuff that's not terribly interesting. For example, yesterday I found out that the Funhouse machine in a local gas station was gone... not sure if it's gone permanently or not. Came in third in VA league after an awesome semi-finals and terrible finals. Just to shake things up, in MD I managed to choke in the semi-finals for an anemic 5th place finish.

Last night I finally got around to replacing the translite glass in Doctor Who. For pretty much as long as DW has been set up, I've been using a piece of poorly cut lexan for the translite glass, with various sizes of Williams translite trim to hold it on and (what I now know to be) a Stern lift trim at the bottom. While lighter than a real glass and perfectly adequate when I didn't have one, this wouldn't do... especially since the Stern trim had a habit of falling off without a lot of provocation. Well, I got some real glass at Allentown this year, and I bought some real Williams lift trim from Marco a few weeks ago, so all the ducks were in a row.

I was able to reuse the side trim that was on the lexan because that was about the right length. The top trim on the lexan was actually two small pieces that I'd cut off the sides to make them fit, so I discarded those and cut a new piece using our Dremel. I also Dremelled the lift trim and those both fit pretty nicely. Then to make everything super-nice, I cut notches in the back of the top piece so the side trim would nestle snugly. As you can see from the picture, it's a pretty good fit... the other side, not so much, but it's good enough for something nobody ever sees. I'll do the same thing with the T2 translite glass, which only has two trims holding it on (and no lift trim, which made it a bitch to remove the first time). Unfortunately, I only ordered one lift trim from Marco, because I wasn't sure it was the right one. So I ordered another one from them this morning, and felt stupid because I had to pay for shipping again (I did manage to find one other part I needed, but that was of little consolation).

Marco actually did well by me with the previous order. I also got one of the plastics that gets shot up by the cannon on T2 and replacement decals for the drop target. I was going to make my own decals for the target, but Marco had them for $2 a piece, so after the Who-mobile incident I figured that was cheaper than doing it myself. When I got them, the decals sucked... it was blurry and the part number lettering was a sucky computer font, not the basic sans-serif of the original. I was literally able to print a better one using the image that accompanied the description on Marco's website. So I called up Marco and a very nice pinball parts lady helped me. After I described the problem, she went to the folder where they kept the decals and saw that there were two batches, one normal and one that sucked ass. She said she could see why I was unhappy with them. So she told me to keep the crappy ones and she sent me two of the good ones for free. Yay for Marco!

Quick! Tell a Lie!

Here's an actual blog-sized post, not the bloated Proustian epics that I usually write.

I've been using the fully working WPC CPU in DW for about a month now, and the game pushed me up into the expert bracket right about the time that Boing Boing published this link a few days ago about auto-percentaging in pinball. Coincidence? I think so!

Of course, we've known for a while that DW was a smart cookie since the old CPU changed the W-H-O ramp rules to account for the Hang-on switch not working. The game has permanently upped the replay score and lowered scores on ramp shots... not quite as lowered as the DW that I play in the Baltimore league, but it's getting there. Interestingly, even with the adjusted scoring my top scores -- top, mind you, not typical -- are still in the 1/2 billion range... probably because I'm learning to exploit certain money shots more effectively, like the Sonic Boom.

2 T2: Misjudgement Day

I am in a crappy mood today. Aside from Thanksgiving, which seemed to go pretty well, I haven't gotten much done this weekend and what I have gotten done has been pretty sucky. So I thought I'd just make everyone feel sucky by posting an entry.

Like Doctor Who, the two Terminators kind of appeared out of nowhere. There was a liquidation guy up in PA who was eBaying over 100 pins in various stages of working-ness and Europenosity (that is to say, some worked, some didn't, and a lot of them were 220V). It looked like the guy had bought out an operator or collector that had gotten a bunch of container games and was in the process of fixing them up. I had been keeping an eye on these games as they appeared, because a lot of them were pretty interesting... most went outside of my price range, though. It finally came down to a choice between a pretty complete Dr. Dude and two Terminators being sold together. I think The Dude abided for a little less than I would have paid for it, but by then I had already set my sights on the 2T2s. I won the auction for $535, and buyer's remorse set in immediately. ^_^;

They guy lives near York but since he wasn't a pinguy he wasn't going to the show. And since my SUV only holds one pin on a good day, I decided to pick the first up the week before the show and the second the day of. Logistically this was a stretch because my daughter had our SUV and we had her newly purchased used car because her school won't let her park with temporary tags. But luckily the license plates arrived the week after I won the auction. My lovely wife and the dog decided to join me if we added some sightseeing to the agenda, so on Saturday we went up to Gettysburg and dropped off my daughter's car, picked up our SUV, and headed east towards York. I picked one of the games at random and the guy helped me load it up. We stopped at a really nice dog park in York and had a picnic lunch, then went on to look at a Victorian mansion in Oakbourne which I think my wife found on the Internet while looking for God knows what. Really, this place has to be seen to be believed... it's like a miniature East Coast version of the Winchester House. The most striking feature is a water tower that is designed in the style of the house... that's me in the picture. It was a really weird and cool place. After that we headed home. Considering it was primarily a pin-centric trip, we all had a pretty good time.

When I went up for the York show, I left at an ungoshly hour so I could pick up the second game -- I had to load it myself because the guy was out of town -- and then toodle over to arrive at the fairgrounds as close to opening as possible. The only real problem was that he said he would shrink-wrap the game so I could load it easily and he didn't... I ended up using an extension cord to keep the head from falling off while I lifted the game onto a dolly. But after some struggling I got it loaded up. There was also an ethical conundrum... in addition to my game, he had left out about 10 others, with random circuit boards and translites strewn around an overhang next to his garage. It would have been the work of but a moment to get a few extra parts while I was there, but I chose civilization over anarchy and left with only what I had paid for.

So now we get to the games themselves. They have no boards in either of their heads. One has all of its ramps, the other doesn't. The one on the left looks like it was operated by a Charles Dickens character... it is worn, filthy, has electrical tape splices, and the faded cabinet looks like it was stored in water. Every time I touch the front or back of the playfield my hands come back grimy. The one on the right is relatively clean, is in an unfaded but not perfect cabinet, but is missing paint over the auto-fire insert. Neither has the Hunter-Killer ship, but one has the wire that holds it (yay?). Everything on both games within the line of fire of the cannon is beaten to shit, though the nicer game is in marginally better shape. Both are 220V.

The plan -- and I did have a plan, believe me -- is to combine them into one game, sell the spare parts, play the game for a while then sell it, hopefully netting a tidy profit. I'm pretty sure it's possible, but it will take a lot of work. The biggest hurdle I have is to NOT keep the second playfield for the playfield project... I keep thinking that maybe if I sell enough of the cabinet parts I could keep the playfield, and then I flagellate myself to purge myself of the unclean thoughts. I really can't afford to keep the playfield.

I've started looking around for replacement boards. Part of the plan -- I did mention the plan, didn't I? -- was to fix and use the spare CPU and display boards that I bought for DW, which would mean I'd only need to get the driver and sound boards. The driver board was no problem, and within a week I had bought a hacked but theoretically working rev 3 driver board from eBay. It won't work in T2, but I have a rev 1 board in DW, so I've use the 3 board in DW and the 1 board in T2. As I mentioned elsewhere, I also picked up a third and blessedly working CPU board. Both boards were a little over $100 each... the CPU was a bargain, and hopefully the driver board will turn out to be as well. And I just review an earlier post and found that I pretty much said all of this already. Well, I guess it just bears repetition.

My initial decision was to use the filthy playfield with the parts from the clean game; so I stripped it down and threw all of the appropriate parts into the dishwasher. Once again, the Shag came through for me... the disgusting wiring harness came out of the washer looking like new. The wires actually had colors instead of being uniformly London Blitz gray. I gave the denuded playfield a few weeks ago and gave it a thorough cleaning this weekend. As the grime comes off, it's pretty clear that it's not the better playfield. So far the only problem I can see on the clean game is that wear spot, but on the dirty playfield the area around the bumpers is worn through the mylar, the "Timer" insert has lost paint, and it looks like the area above the auto-fire insert has been touched up. There's also a scorch mark on the underside where it looks like a flipper coil 'sploded. Yeesh.

And that's pretty much where I am right now. I'm kind of bummed about the playfield being in as bad a shape as it is, but on the other hand if I go with the clean playfield I won't have to transfer the parts, which was something I was dreading.

I think my next steps are to get a cabinet ready to go, buy some legs (there are some on sale til the end of the year from an arcade supplier with an office in Baltimore... good timing), switch it over to 120V (luckily I bought a US line filter when I was acquiring DW parts), and see how far I can get until I start a new round of What Am I Missing Today?

But now I'm exhausted AND in a crappy mood. So all of this will have to wait for another time.

We give thanks... for Pinball

You may recall that last month was my birthday, and for reasons explained in previous posts we celebrated late. Well, my wife gave me a pinball-related gift this year: A weekend driving around playing pinball. It was kind of an interesting idea. I scoped around a locations within a few hours and came up with two options: The Silverball Museum in Asbury Park, which just opened fairly recently... I think I heard about it on rgp. They look pretty EM heavy, but whatever. A guy in league and he had been there and it's pretty neat. There were a couple of other options which I got out of the Pinball Locator, but I decided on Castle Video in Branchville, NJ. They are weighted towards new Stern and WPC, so that will balance the museum nicely. I was thinking of a third or fourth stop -- Eight on the Break in Dunellen, NJ and the Pinball Parlour in Earlington, PA were what I was thinking of -- but decided that the former doesn't have as many games as Castle Video (though they have a few nice ones CV doesn't have) and I've been in the latter a few times now and their hours make it hard to swing. We're going up the weekend after Thanksgiving and we'll stay in a bed & breakfast near the museum. Should be fun!

League is going well-ish. I'm in first place in VA and have squeaked into the top five in MD. I'll definitely be in the playoffs in VA no matter how badly I do next week, but it could go either way in MD. I seem to play for crap when the pressure's on, but we'll see how it goes. If I could just play as well on Doctor Who there as I do at home, I'd be in pretty good shape.

I'm going to try to discuss T2 in my next post, but first here's a useful thing I made. I got the T2 ROMs from reliable ROM source John Wart Jr. and wanted to test them just to make sure. So I got out a WPC CPU board, plugged in the ROM, and used my power supply and some alligator clips to connect it up. This is always very stressful for me, because I'm worried that the clips will short against the wrong pins or something. So last week I decided to get the ROMs for Fish Tales and came up with a bright idea. I made a connector for the CPU's power plug so that I can easily attach the power supply's clips to the proper wires (color-coded, smart me!). It works great, and it's one less thing I have to worry about when I test CPUs.

The White Rose pinball show was fun. I got to play a bunch of games, I ignored the crap and enjoyed the non-crap. I was kind of disappointed at the shopping, as I didn't find much that I would need for T2. But I did invest in a full set of LEDs for Quicksilver. I did see one of the guys there from league, but he was just there to pick up a game so we didn't interact much. I picked up the second T2 and the Fish Tales playfield, and I sold a guy a pair of gold legs (painted, not real ones) that were on the first T2 for (what turns out to be) the bargain price of $10. I had my after-show Roburrito which was tasty. Some guys there had a solid state repro of the EM game King of Diamonds, which looked and played beautifully. It was a few thousand dollars, though, kinda out of my price range at this time. I think they plan to make other games. That's about all I can think of, other than the flyer in Roburrito for someone selling a hearse for $1200 ("Want a sick ride?" it said). It would probably be good for hauling pins...

Halloween at Castle Entropy

Halloween sucks for us. We live on a busy street with no sidewalks, so we've gotten about 3 trick or treaters in the 10 years we've lived here. And with the Entropy Scion at college, we don't even get a little run off from her holiday. Mrs. Entropy and I carved our pumpkins, watched a little Anime, and ate most of the good candy ourselves. Boo hoo.

On Monday I bought a new WPC CPU board that was advertised as 100% working on eBay for just over $100 + way more shipping than it should have been. Although I've been burned by the "100% working" ploy, in this case it was truth in advertising. I plugged it into Doctor Who and it seems to work pretty well. I can hit those ESCAPE targets now, and it certainly makes the Hang On shot actually scorable. There's one opto that I know is out (the right-most gray button target) and the right bumper doesn't seem to be working, but these are minor things. I played a few satisfying games with the new board. I also bought a new power driver board, a somewhat hacked rev 3 board which can't be used in Terminator, so the idea is that DW is going to donate its rev 1 board to T2 and use the rev 3 board. That's assuming the new board works, but testing it is a lot more effort than a CPU. Plus that wasn't sold as 100% working, it was "functional when it was pulled out of a BSD."

I really need to narrate the T2 story, but that will have to be another time. However, Shaggy has come through again with another wonderful dishwasher tip: Throwing the wiring harness in. I ran both of the T2 cabinet harnesses through (each as their own load, in deference to my wife who doesn't want Pinball Grime on her dishes) and they came out really nice... one was already pretty clean, but t'other was filthy and that looks really good now.

Wednesday's league was good, I think it was 3 wins and 1 loss. Pasted them on Mousin' Around with a season high score... MA is proving to be my goto game for decent scoring. There's one in both locations now, and it tends to be pretty good to me. My loss was on Fish Tales, which I just can't get started on in league... every other FT likes me, but the one at the Volleyball House has it in for me. I typically hit the boat ramps repeatedly to activate the Monster Fish award, but I have a hard time getting 3 ramp shots. The bad news about Monday league is that my complete destruction of my group last week has pushed me into A Division. Kinda cool when looked at from a distance, but up close it could spell my doom... the A Team seems to be a lot better than I am, so I'm really not sure how well I'll do.

Birthday Pinball Extravaganza!

Yesterday was my birthday, and my wife gave me possibly the best gift of all... she kept my sister-in-law and the boyfriend-in-law busy while I goofed off alone in the house with the dog. We actually kept my birthday a secret from them... my sister-in-law has an uncanny sense for coming to visit at the worst times. Once my wife told her specifically not to come around a certain day and the sis-in-law came during that week. This time we didn't tell them not to come, we just lamented their timing. It's not because I don't like my wife's sister, it was just that I had no desire to celebrate one of my rare prime numbered birthdays (47) with my wife's sister's boyfriend, who at the time was a complete stranger. So I informed my wife that we would celebrate my birthday after they left, and she was OK with that. And now that I've met the bf-in-law, I feel it was the correct course of action. I mean, he's OK, kind of monopolizes the conversation with stories of working for the Oakland city car barn, but he's not a guy I really want to party with. It's sort of like listening to my Dad's WWII stories, only boring and with no familial connection.

Anyway, so I thought I'd check the FSPA pinball location database to see if there was anything around other than Sole d'Italia's Family Guy. Well, there was! A Fish Tales in the Potomac Community Center, only one of my favorite games on a street that I take home from work when the Beltway is backed up (more or less every day)!!! E. Yoink. Exclamation. Point.

So I drive down there and the game's in great shape! It's there with a bunch of video games in the game room. They keep them turned off so parents can regulate their kids' gameage. FT kinda was a little tilted in the wrong direction so the ball goes SDTM a little more than I'd like, but cheeze! I got a couple of free games, and at one point I had six three foot kids clustered around watching me because the Halloween party had just let out. That was kind of funny. Anyway... frickin' awesome. A game I like on my way home from work. A great surprise on a largely covert birthday.

But the hits just kept on coming today! In league, I was 2 points away from a perfect night! I came in demonstrably first on three games and second on the fourth... recall that when the 2nd and 3rd scores don't add up to the first place, first place steals third's point. I was making my shots... jumps in No Fear, 3 or 4 Borg shots in a row in Star Trek, an awesome Penthouse Party in WhoDunnit... and if I had kicked ass on Twilight Zone (possibly by getting the extra ball that was lit but I couldn't seem to hit), I could have done it. I feel bad for the guy in my group that came in 3rd on all three games, because I think he got 0 points (*cringe*). But I can't feel too bad for him, because he was 3 points behind me in our division. Honestly, I think I could have handled him getting a few points instead of me completely destroying him, but I guess that's the way the pinball bounces. Now if I can just do that well in the Wednesday night league, maybe I'll be getting somewhere.

Barfin' up a blog entry

I'm really tired after a long day running around Gettysburg with my wife, daughter, dog, sister-in-law, and boyfriend-in-law. Much time was spent in strained silence while the bf-in-law, dog and I rode around by ourselves while the ladies kept their own car. I see it as penance for buying a crapload of new pinball stuff.

Yeah, I said a crapload. A pair of Terminator 2 parts games from eBay, a nearly complete Fish Tales playfield from rpg, and a mostly incomplete Bally Playboy playfield from Craigslist. Yoink!

More fascinating blow-by-blow accounts will follow, but I thought I'd open the blogging floodgates to try to get the flow of information moving again. Sadly, even though I haven't been writing, things have continued to happen.

Let's start with easy stuff. I did decide to do both the Virginia and Baltimore leagues after all. I failed pretty decisively for the first few weeks, but I've been surging in VA so now I'm #1 in the hood, G. Last week in MD I had my first really good week and moved up into the top 5. (Both of these are in B Division, of course.) MD is an interesting league... it's in an old warehouse that's been converted into a mecca for Volleyball, and in the corner are the league's pinball machines. It's an odd place to play pin... last week, a guy was playing Shrek and a volleyball bounced off the playfield glass, barely missed his head, and landed in the kid's play area. He didn't even miss a beat and kept right on playing... I think he ended up with a pretty good score, too. They're doing construction so parking is a bitch. Overall, they're nice guys... I think they're a little more competitive than the VA gang, which would explain why I'm on top in VA and in the middle there. I don't know if I'm going to continue two nights a week after this... I'll probably alternate between the two depending on how I feel. VA is more convenient to go to after work, while MD is more convenient from home and I work at home most Wednesdays. It's also rough on the finances, because each league is $60 minimum per season. But we'll see.

And I see by the clock on the desktop that it's just past midnight, so I am now more or less 47 years old.

Pinball Elbow?

So, my right arm has been hurting for a few weeks... mostly one of the muscles in my forearm hurts when I pick up something heavy, or when I was doing my squeeze ball exercises in the car. I finally went around to going to the doctor and after a few probing questions she said it looks like Tennis Elbow. When I told her my major arm activities were mousing and pinball, she said she thought the twisting in pinball was causing the problem. At this point I told her she was thinking about foosball, not pinball, and described the flipper motion. She agreed that that probably didn't cause the problem, but suggested I lay off while under treatment (consisting of an anti-inflammatory drug, a cream, and wearing a brace).

So I was pretty good and didn't do any pinball until last night, when I went to the end of the season party for the pinball league. It was at a members house, a crazy big affair in the semi-rural suburbs of Virginia. They had tasty Mexican food and a basement filled with pins, almost all 90's and 00's games with a decided bias toward Pat Lawlor. One of the few exceptions was a 1934 World's Series, which was actually kind of a blast to play. There were two contests. The first was a Safe Cracker Assault the Vault challenge, where they inserted a magic token into Safe Cracker, which puts it into Assault the Vault mode, a 90 second ball free-for-all, and the highest score wins. I didn't win that. The other was way more fun than it sounds: Cashball, which was basically a half playfield that Williams put on top of a slot machine (probably to use up pin parts after they got out of the business). It basically autoplays a simple game of pinball, shooting the ball around a track with flippers and autoplungers. Various things get you extra balls, and each time the ball goes through the playfield everything is worth more points. The only interaction you have with it is shooting the ball, which you can get a skill shot. So I didn't win that either, but at the end of the evening I played a few more games... and on the last one I spanked it within an inch of its life. I got about 3-4 extra balls. The highest score had been about 2,700 and I scored over 11,000. The guy who owned it said he'd never even seen a score with 5 digits before. Sadly, there was a bug in the high score function so although it showed I had the high score, it didn't display it properly. Anyway, it was a lot of fun.

So on the way home from the party, I noticed that my arm was hurting more than it had been since I started treatment. At that point, I was willing to give my doctor the benefit of the doubt. In the long run, I don't know what I'm going to do about that... league starts tomorrow, and I'm even thinking about doing the Wednesday night league in Baltimore too (subject to my wife's approval, and she wasn't too keen last time I mentioned it). Also, I'm wondering how messed up my arm will be after the pinball show in three weeks. Anyway, we'll see how that goes.

I did have an anemic start to my eBay season... sold 4 out of 9 things for some decent change, including a part I bought for $5 which sold for $17. To add insult to the buyers' injury, I sold a second one I had to the second highest bidder for $16. And I've still got one left. Sweet! But then I spudded last week and almost got there this week, but no go. I would like to sell enough so that I've paid off my debt to the family by the time the show rolls around (about $100 to go). eBay has not had much I want to buy at prices I can afford lately... I don't know if it's the new fees or the changes in seller agreements or what. It doesn't really bother me since I'm still making money, but the guys on rgp are always bitching about it. Well, I suppose waiting for next week to sell means I can get more stuff ready.

Andannuderdendum

This just occurred to me... swapping out the #44 bulbs with #47s in Paragon shouldn't have taken it from anemic to super-bright just on the merits of lower amperage. Now I think that one or more of the old bulbs had probably aged to the point where their resistance was higher than it should have been... one or two of them had the chromed surface of a bad bulb. In deference to the late Michael Jackson, one bad apple DID spoil the whole bunch, girl.

Andthendum

And then I remembered what I was going to type last night, but forgot.

My wife wanted me to play some Katamari on the Playstation over the weekend, but before she made it down to the basement I popped in the Williams Pinball Hall of Fame (follow the link... Amazon has it new for $5.50! Score!). I'd been thinking about PHoF since I read that the PS/3 version is supposed to have Medieval Madness, Tales of the Arabian Nights and either No Good Gofers or Monster Bash depending on who you listen to. I'm leaning toward NGG, though I don't consider that a big selling point... I'd think that MB would require a license from Universal Studios, which would be tough to swing in a low margin game like PHoF. Anyway, I ended up having a pretty good time playing... I finished a few goals and unlocked a wizard mode or two. I still haven't unlocked the two hidden tables yet, so I'll keep plugging along. Williams PHoF seems easier than the Gottlieb one, mainly because the goals in those damn EM tables spank me silly. Get a special in Ace High and Central Park? Please. Give me full-sized flippers and then we'll talk.

Either way, I'm eager to get more PHoFs, even if I have to sacrifice and buy a PS/3 in order to do it. I'd really like a Bally edition, but unfortunately Bally has some really good games that are unfortunately licensed properties (like Wizard! and Captain Fantastic). Fireball should be doable, though. I saw a thing online that said PHoF was actually a surprisingly good selling game, especially given the apparent lack of interest in pinball as a whole. I'd like to believe that's a simple classic games = awesome : new games = suck equation, but I just don't see that. Anyway, hopefully the prospects for new versions with more manufacturers or more games are good.

The other thing I forgot was I attempted to fix a physics problem with Eight Ball Deluxe over the weekend. The trouble is that the easiest shot to hit the Eight Ball target -- from the lower left flipper -- almost always causes a SDTM drain on my game. When I played an EBD at PAPA, I noticed that machine didn't have that problem. My puny brain reasoned that the problem was either that there is some physical object which causes this (either the clear plastic the ball rolls off of or the post at the bottom of the 8 ball target enclosure) or my machine was not in balance. The latter seemed likeliest, as I think I've only formally balanced one of my games (Quicksilver, when it was kicked upstairs to the living room). So Saturday night I decided to see what I could do. A level told me that the player-side legs were definitely off center by a bit. I tried turning the feet of the legs, but they appear to be a little rusty and wouldn't turn. I didn't want to turn this into a big production, so I cut up some cardboard squares and shoved them under the errant leg. The result? Maybe it's a little better, but not much. I think I'll need to watch it over the course of many games, and possibly take the glass off and study it in depth... probably I should keep records of how many times I lose the ball from that shot and why.

OK, this time I've said everything I wanted to say.

#2!

The pinball league finals were last week and I came in a solid second place. I did great in the first half when I was playing against the other top five finishers in my division, but I pretty much choked for most of the second half with the top three. But I'm more than happy... this is my first time, so second place is good enough. I will say that there was some pretty good pinball going on... one guy who'd been knocked out of the A-Division finals was playing Twilight Zone and got Lost in the Zone in two subsequent games. Then there was the guy who almost rolled over Strikes and Spares in one ball (~900K points).

Points were given out depending on your place, and there were prizes with point values, so the end of the night was basically the shopping segment from Wheel of Fortune (the game show, not the pin). I got a framed Whirlwind translite, a Williams window sticker, and the rest on a gift certificate for the Spiegel Catalog.

I got some repairs done over the weekend. Black Knight has blown the playfield light fuse, so I replaced that. I also finally replaced the upper ball lock plastic which I've had for years but never gotten around to. The sound on Eight Ball Deluxe has been goofy, and it got to the point where it was saying the wrong things... it would say "Get the 15 ball" instead of the 8 ball. I reseated the J2 plug that goes from the CPU to the sound board, and that fixed it... so that's basically two connectors on the CPU with problems I'll need to address at some point.

Then yesterday I started thinking about Paragon's weak feature lights, and rather than fixing the power board I decided to take the easy approach and replace all of the #44 bulbs with lower power #47 bulbs to see if that helped. I ended up swapping almost 50 bulbs, and that did the trick. It's still not great when doing the lamp test, but during normal play the bulbs are nice and bright, even when the Paragon letters are flashing. It was an easy fix that I should have tried sooner.

The next couple of weeks are going to be busy... eBay season is starting soon, the White Rose show, the next league season, the league party, plus my usual crapload of non-pinball related activities. sheesh!

Results!

Well, I came to PAPA last weekend and ended up having a lot of fun. I went up on Friday. It was a pretty long drive -- over 4 hours with limited stops -- but when I got there it was pretty impressive. It's basically a huge carpeted warehouse filled with lots of fairly well-maintained pinball machines. The center area was roped off for competitions, but all the other games were available for play, usually for 50 cents each. Then off to the side there was the big board showing scores and standings. There are a handful of video and novelty games for the kids, too.

The collection is pretty awesome. A lot of them are organized by theme, so you have a Space area (with Space Shuttle, Space Station, Star Trek, Attack+Revenge from Mars, Space Invaders, etc.), a Zaccaria section, an early EM section, etc. I got to catch up on my recent Stern games (24, CSI, and Batman) and play some super-rare games (Varkon, Blackwater 100, and Joust to name a few). And to contrast the lame-ass crap that you see at shows, all of these games were in perfectly reasonable working order -- maybe not all perfect, but highly playable. I can't think of one game I played that was mechanically not up to snuff.

The competition went OK for someone who didn't care whether he won. I entered two tournaments, "Classics" and the lowest division... if I had managed to make it to the playoffs in C division, I would have had to have come back on Sunday, but I didn't think I would and I solidly met that expectation. Classics was mostly EMs and a few early SS games, and I was in the top 8 for an hour or so. I ended the day in the top 25% out of 100 players, which I thought was fine. I even had a top 10 score on one of the games, but that was balanced by my bottom 10 score on another. In C Division I can in just out of the upper third, and playing a couple of sucky games didn't help... I only got points for two of my five games, Batman (which I did spanked in practice) and Doctor Who (with which I was able to use secret techniques gleaned from playing at home, namely racking up a huge playfield multiplier then starting multiball). Both games I finished in the top 40. Overall, I had a good time and I thought I did fine for my skill level.

I did meet up with a couple of people from the league, which allowed me to have the novel experience of actually hanging around with people at a pinball-related event. I even got to play a few games with a guy in my division, which was pretty fun. We played a few games of Joust, which is a blast with two players... you play 3 normal balls, then the game spews all the balls out onto the playfield for 30 seconds of nuttiness. I was invited to join the group for dinner, which was nice. It did keep me out later than I would have liked, because they were all staying in hotels and I had a 4 hour drive ahead of me. So as soon as we got back, I jumped in my car and drove.

The trip back was hard but not the helldrive it could have been. Towards the end I was stopping every 30 minutes or so just to keep myself in drivable condition -- not helped by all the budget-related rest area closures. I finally made it home at 2:30 AM.

Next week are the league finals, so we'll see how that goes.

And one final note, on Saturday I beat my current high score on Paragon with a score of 962,000. I basically got the 40K super bonus on the first ball and the 5x multiplier for most of the balls. Assuming uniform scoring and adjusting that to a 3 ball game, that would have put me in 4th place for that game in the B Division at PAPA. Sadly, I checked the Classic Joe scoresheet from my youthhood and found that my top score for the Big P was 1.02 million, so I have a little farther to go before I can do le Danse Superieur on my 18 year-old self.

Consolation Prize

Possibly as a way of making up for my lousy performance at the pinball league, I finally beat Davros on Doctor Who last night... just once, and there weren't any crazy multipliers at work, but I managed to do it.

ugh

Week 9 was a bad week, and I just got home from Week 10 and it sucked pretty bad, too. My warmup games were crap, and my league games were crap. Luckily the other guys in my group were mostly playing from crap as well, because it was like a toilet backed up or something. It was made worse by one of the guys in my group listening to his iPod the whole time, which I found kind of rude. I should still be able to get into the playoffs, though.

Next Friday I'm heading up to PAPA for some pin in the 'burgh. Hopefully I'll play better than I did tonight.

I did have a lucky Doctor Who repair incident. I started playing a few nights ago and I'm surprised I hadn't noticed it before, but there was only a screw where there should have been a post and bumper at the bottom of the Repair Targets and the Hang On corridor... looking at an old picture confirms it. Anyway, I must have whacked the screw askew with a well placed ball. Luckily, my basement was arranged such that the spare playfield was right behind me, so I took the post & rubber off and put it on in the working game. Problem solved!

Longtime readers will be tired of this refrain, but I'm starting to get a hankering to work on my playfield project again. I even rearranged things slightly so that Silverball Mania, my designated experimental playfield, is set up next to the desk. Something's bound to happen now!

Whoa.

Week 8 of the pinball league went better than expected. I am still in first place and got a pretty good score, considering I wasn't even there. Jack*Bot was one of my group's games, so my triumphant 4 B point score was counted, and I stole a point for that as well. My group also had Mousin' Around which was a good score, I just barely eked out a win on Skateball, and even my old nemesis Star Trek gave me a second place finish. That plus 4 bonus points (apparently, the match points are considered a virtual fifth machine and a scored accordingly... yoink!) gave me 16 total points out of a maximum (?) of 20. I'm now at #9 out of 19. I guess I'll find out next week if I'm going to move up to Division A or stay in B for the whole season.

The big question is whether my performance of the last few weeks is because of the practicing I've been doing. Honestly, I don't know. I feel like I'm playing better now that I've learned some of the advanced techniques and put a name to some that I already used. And I tried keeping track of my scores when I played at home, but I didn't stick with it so it would be hard to judge from that.

Now I'm getting super antsy to find out how I do in the last two weeks... will I continue doing well? Choke? Become so smug that collapse in on myself and start to burn? Probably it will be some combination of those, but I'm really interested to find out.

On a side note, we also went to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I was pleasantly surprised by it, because it certainly wasn't what I expected. I guess the filmmakers took advantage of the fact that this was basically an all-talking exposition book to make Harry Potter and the Extended Surreal Tone Poem. The entire movie was like a dream... kind of a nonsensical dream if you haven't read the book, because they had to leave so much out to fit it in 2.5 hours. A pretty bold choice and extremely cool for a big movie franchise... especially since it looks like they intended to do that, as opposed to the second Transformers movie, which apparently is an attempt by Michael Bay to remake Dali & Buñuel's Andalusian Dog with giant robots.

How'd THAT happen?

I'm not really sure how this came about, but I am #1 in points at the pinball league. I think it's just a matter of luck and a handful of good scores on key machines. The league scoring has this rule for "point stealing", where if your score is greater than the sum of the two players beneath you, then you steal a point from the lowest scorer. For example, normally you get 3 points for 1st place, 2 for 2nd, and 1 for third. But if player one's score is 5000, P2 is 3000, and P3 is 1500, since 5000 > 3000 + 1500, P1 will steal P3's point, so the points will be P1 = 4, P2 = 2, and P3 = 0. I think P2 & P3 can steal from P4, but I'm not totally sure how that works since I thought P4 gets 0.

Anyway, I'm not sure how long I'll be on top or what that will get me if I manage to stay. I'm definitely at the top of the B Division, so another good week or two will move me up into the bottom of A Division, where the players are WAY better than I am.

This week I'm not going because tomorrow is my wife's birthday and league night probably wouldn't go over so well. So a few weeks ago I pre-played all 9 games and those scores will be used for this week. I did pretty well on a few of the games, so I'm hoping my group will get Jack*Bot (4 billion points!) this week instead of, say, Star Trek TNG (FAIL).

Not much going on in the repair world lately. I'm kind of focusing on striking a subtle balance between getting the house clean and sitting on my fat lazy ass, so there hasn't been much time for anything other than furtive practice games here and there. I have sold a couple of spare parts by answering Mr. Pinball want ads to the tune of about $50. I also traded a work table in my workspace in exchange for milk crates full of my records that were in my wife's workspace, which definitely worked out better for her. But the lost work area did give me a little extra storage space so I could move three rogue playfields from in front of a file cabinet into my area. It also got the playfields out of our basement's flood plain, so that's good news for sure.

By the way, the Nintendo DS games that I found a few weeks ago? Instant Karma did get me after all... knocked me right on my head. Last week I carried the Super Mario 64 DS cartridge in a backpack pouch separately from my game case, and something happened to it so now it doesn't boot. I guess in a way Karma had already gotten me when I tried to play Sonic Chronicles, because that game was so bad that just playing it was like being punished.

Training? Luck? Or some third alternative...?

I forgot to mention that since I started training, I've become the Loop Champion on Doctor Who twice in as many days. I honestly can't attribute this to anything I've been doing, except possibly that I'm getting better at the shot. I even hit it enough times in a row to get the ramp door to close, which is the game's way of saying "Cut it out already."

Still no sign of a Davros Multiball, though.

We're gonna need a montage

League continues. I went up in the standings after the first week, down after the second, up after the third, and I lucked into going up slightly last time because I got extra points due to my score on WHO dunnit being greater than the 2nd and 3rd place players. I also decided to go way out on a limb and register for PAPA in August... I'm going to go for one day, mostly to play, but also to see how I do in a real tournament setting.

However, I'm starting to run up against my inconsistency as a player. I haven't really competed against similarly skilled players in at least 25 years... not since my days in the UCLA game room between classes and playing Blackout with me mates in the old King George V Pub between dart games. Since then, I've mostly played alone and I've been focusing on touring each game's features rather than scoring boffo points. Being an irregular player wasn't really a problem, because if I goofed up I'd just play another game until I was satisfied.

But with all this competitive playing I'm doing lately, I'm suddenly motivated to improve ma skillz. So like Little Mac before me I have to go into training.

I started by watching some videos by this guy Leo Something-or-other. Unfortunately, there was very little useful information... they're geared mostly towards the novice player, with just a few advanced tricks.

A more helpful resource has been ipdb's playing skills pages. Novice and intermediate were pretty obvious, so I started trying out the advanced skills. I did the Chill Manuever last week during a league game on Jack*Bot so I can at least do that, even if I can't necessarily do it reliably (and it's hard to practice because none of my home games have a post). I've done the Bounce Pass and Hold Pass, so those are a matter of learning to use them consistently in play. The one thing I did learn is something I don't think they list (but Leo shows): Passing the ball between flippers by holding the ball then quickly flipping so the ball goes up the inlane then back down with enough velocity to bounce to the next flipper. I practiced for a while with the glass off so I could try it multiple times, and I've gotten reasonably good at it.

The thing I really need to work on is shaking the machine to influence the ball, something I've never done much. I'm trying to work on the Up Push when the ball is in the slingshots and nudging when the ball is near the in/outlanes. Yesterday I nudged when the ball was past the switch in the outlane, but today I was doing it before it hit the switch... still too late to do anything, but I'm doing it earlier. I'm also not positive that I'm doing it in the right direction. It helps that I haven't hooked up the tilt on Doctor Who, though shaking the machine in any way causes the Dalek Dome to move around since it's not screwed down.

Finally, I've started keeping track of my scores so I can try to see trends, hopefully improvements. I used to keep a list of my high scores when I was a kid... I still have them, in fact... I think the high score on Quicksilver is from that list.

Now I'm going to fade out in my montage... If you fade out, it seems like more time has passed in a montage. Montage!

Theft, And Wandering Around Lost

First, a quick pinball repair tip. I was talking to Scott, the guy who cares for the games at John's Place where my league night is, about my sticking Who flipper. He suggested using a little teflon lubricant where the big metal thing is hanging up on the End of Stroke switch. When I mentioned that I had thought lubes verboten in pins, he said this stuff was OK. The Internet confirmed his recommendation, so I picked some up from Radio Shack in a handy pen dispenser. I just tried it tonight and it works great. I applied a few drops sparingly to the big metal thing, worked the flipper action a few times, then played a sticky-flipper-free game. Thanks, Pinball Repair Man!

My work closes early on Fridays during summer, so I took a pinball road trip to Loudoun County, VA, where there were a purported five locations with games. It took about 5 hours and I ended up driving about 100 miles, but I managed to investigate them all. Four of the five were still there, and I spanked three of them, getting high scores on a Family Guy, Revenge from Mars, and almost a billion on old-school Indiana Jones.



Now, to be fair, RfM and IJ were 5 ball games, and instead of specials they gave out extra balls. But still... where is this kind of playing on league nights? The locations were two bowling alleys and two pizza places. One pizza place had a Road Show and Hurricane, which was awesome until I started playing them: They were in terrible shape. The bulldozer didn't register hits in Road Show, and Hurricane had bad switches and weak flippers. Barf. I won't even Google Map the location because the games were so bad. On t'other hand the second pizza place, Lovettsville Pizza & Subs, was frickin' awesome. This place is in the middle of Bugfuck, VA, but the games were in awesome shape. Three of the four games were working, they were clean (!!!), and they were all 5 balls. Granted, it was cramped because apparently the Little League season had just ended and the party was there. But I was really surprised at how well the games were maintained, especially coming from the previous pizza place. I also found a bunch of Gameboy games in one of the bowling alleys, and instead of turning them in I kept 'em. Probably bad in the long run karmically, but what the hell... until Karma strikes me down, I'll be playing Mario DS.

I did a little more work on the Google Earth KML file of pinball locations... mostly in the form of correcting issues with the Pinball Locator database. Here is the file if you want to download it (right click and save as... no browser I've seen knows what to do with it). Note that it won't work in Google Maps, because GM has a 60-200 point limit and this file has 850 or so active sites.

At first I offered the file to the Pinball Rebel himself, suggesting that he could post it on his site. But he did what he usually does: Send me two emails, then just when I think we're making progress he stops replying. This same thing happened a few months ago when I mentioned that I might be capable of fixing some bugs (a few of which I consider serious) and adding a spatial search to the Locator. I don't know if the Rebel has a short attention span or if he and I email in different dialects of the English language... if I were to go to Texas speak to him directly, we could probably hash it out pretty quickly. For now, if I can't get my point across to him in two emails, I'm pretty much doomed. Whatever.

Finally, I made a Mr. Pinball Classified sale today. A guy in Florida needed a transformer and everything downstream from it to the wall socket for a WPC game. I didn't think I had a spare transformer, but I had the rest, purchased years ago from my old pal Pinball Chuck (who is selling again on eBay, I was happy to see) for something or other. Anyway, even though this FL guy is working on a "Black Knight" (I'm assuming it's really a BK2K) he went for it, even after I raised the price from $10 to $20 (the receipt was in the box when I found it, and it looked virtually brand new, so I couldn't let it go for the lower price). But then as I was looking for the post where I mentioned this purchase, I found a reference to the High Speed transformer...! So I went downstairs, and what I thought was the Data East transformer I pulled out of Doctor Who was the one from HS. So I just emailed back the guy to see if he's interested. Looking at some of my other posts, transformers sell for some serious shekels, so if FL Guy is interested I might get some serious bank. w00t!

Happy Bloomsday!

Today is Bloomsday, when fans of James Joyce celebrate the day that Ulysses takes place. My wife had her own version of Bloomsday today because she had an appointment with Dr. Bloom. That has nothing to do with pinball, I just thought I'd throw that in.

I saw a great eBay auction description for a prototype Doctor Who game. I personally don't think it's an actual prototype, because the pictures of the Dalek motor assembly look exactly like the Wobble Head kit that I bought last year. But here's the description:

Up for bids is a fantastic operating coin operated arcade pinball machine called "Dr. Who" by Bally in 1992. Plays and functions extremely well including the davit robot topper which is a mechanical moving topper as it turns it's head left to right vice versa while lights up duration it's vocial animation! Sheldon found on Dr. Who machines as it was a prototype that never made it to the regular production due to production costs and Bally was looking for ways to trim production costs hence the mechanical topper. In the production version machines has the non-mechanical davik robot that just lights up during vocial animation. Believe me, it makes the game so much more animated and exciting to play with the mechanical robot instead of the regular version which is a dud (boring). Any questions let me know as the photos should answer your questions as photos of the motor inside the davik robot body are present as well as those showing the different positions of the davik head in mechanical motion while speaking w/ lights.

I have sheldon seen a description that I enjoyed so much. I think if the guy was trying to sound like a foreign scammer, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

I was kind of bored at work today, so while I was waiting for compilations to succeed I took the data from the Pinball Locator, geocoded it using one of my company's products, and turned it into a Google Earth KML file. The initial results were pretty satisfactory for the amount of time I spent on it... certainly easier than writing a web page to do it, which was my original plan. There are a few data errors... for example, you can see on the pic two spellings of Crofton Bowling Center that register as two separate locations. The most discouraging thing about the project is that there don't appear to be many pin locations nearby that I haven't visited. :( Anyway, I'll probably refine the process a little and maybe post a cleaned up version somewhere when I'm done.

There is Madness in Town Square

So I did go to the Virginia pinball league night sponsored by the Free State Pinball Association, and I did not turn around and go home or die or embarrass myself or say too much that I'm likely to regret. Good. For a person as notoriously lacking in social skills as I am, that's a huge win.

I showed up a few minutes before 8 and got signed up. I pretended that I actually was capable of normal social interaction and met a few people, most of whose names I forgot within seconds. I paid some dues then gravitated to the other noob for a little strained conversation, though a few guys took the initiative and talked to me, which was nice.

They started a few minutes late with a crowd of 20 or so. They explained the rules, which are more complicated than "play games, write down scores" but not overly so... certainly easier than bowling. We were cordoned off into groups of four and the games were allowed to begin. My group's first game was Strikes and Spares, and despite being distracted as always by Ms. SNS's stunningly erect areolae (curse you, Kevin O'Connor!) I was pleased to win just barely. That was followed by Skateball, then the Prominent Nipple theme was broken with Bram Stoker's Dracula, and finally Mousin' Around! I did adequately, usually a second or third place. With that we were done for the week, so I hung around for a few more minutes and then left.

I had fun. I plan to return. 'nuff said.

After quite some wait the LEDs finally arrived. I think I'll fully illuminate this subject in its own post, because it's kind of a big topic and I haven't fully investigated it yet.

And yesterday, after the Most Triumphant resolution to a client problem that's been weighing heavily on my soul for a week (who would have thought that a corrupt positive sign would prevent "0" from being converted from a string to an integer? Thanks, diligent Windows XP programmers!), I rewarded myself with a pinball game. I went to Beltway Chevron to play Funhouse -- I wanted to play a 4 player game so I could hear all of Chuckie's player nicknames -- but it was turned off. So I consoled myself with a couple of Family Guy games at the Italian restaurant. Who wants Chowdah?

Miscellaneous Love

I'm going to take a moment and mention some progress I've made on my work area. Longtime or diligent (or both!) readers will recall this post from about a year ago detailing the disaster area that was our basement. On the right is the current state of my work area... there are a bunch of boxes out because my daughter is making cleaning up her summer project. But you can see that I have a desk and some space to work. I can walk around without juking or turning sideways too much. I've even put up some posters (one is even framed) and placed the pachinko in what I think is a reasonable place. As soon as I get closer to being done, I'll have to take a picture from the same angle for some before/after action.

Forensic analysis of this picture will indicate that I'm using a different camera. That's because my beloved first digital camera, the Canon PowerShot S30 that I bought 7 years ago for almost $600, has done broke. It was actually pretty handy because its interminable shutter time and 5-10 second lag to write pictures to the memory card made it so no one cared if I just kept it downstairs with my stuff. Now I have to use my wife's camera, which is a lot better but in slightly higher demand. *sigh*

OK, so repairs on DW continue: I forgot to mention that I installed the new playfield glass switch. I cut the old switch off and soldered on the new one, then spent about ten minutes adjusting it so the switch actually closed when the glass was in its normal position. Now it works great! One small step for me, one giant leap toward total pinball legitimacy!

I also had some excellent troubleshooting action. At some point -- I think it was right after I added all the stuff to the coin door -- I looked at the playfield and said, dagnabbit I'm tired of the right side extra ball lanes being lit all the time! That and some of the Time Expander lights just never seemed to go out. So I did a little lamp testing and found out that no matter what light was lit, the lights on the same row in columns 2 (where the right lights are) and 5 (where the lower row of Time Expander lights are) would also light. Clearly we had a short. I even used the Pinball Repair Guide's troubleshooting technique of pulling the light plugs from the power board and checking them for continuity and got connections where there shouldn'ta oughta been none. So, bad diodes is a possible culprit and easiest to check, so I checked diodes in column 2 until I came to the Doctor 7 lamp, which for lo these three years has been hanging impotently under the playfield without a bulb in it. And the odd thing is I've been looking at that light the whole time and just mentally bleeping over it because I'm usually under the playfield trying to fix something else. It turns out that socket was hanging against another wire and was causing the short! Hey! Cause and effect! So I mounted it to the playfield and put a bulb in, and two magical things happened: The column 2 lamps no longer lit with the other bulbs and the previously non-working Doctor 7 backbox lamp lit like the real McCoy... the real Sylvester McCoy, that is! hyuk hyuk. So all this time I was thinking it was bad traces or a problem with the transistor, and it was really just two stupid lamps in series.

Fresh from that triumph, I did the same thing for column 5 but ran into a problem: Just like the Doctor 7 lamp, there is a bulb that's out in column 5, the right lock on the Mini-playfield. The problem is that I can't get to that light without disassembling the MPF, and disassembling the MPF is a big chore that requires me to have easy access to both sides of the playfield -- I need to unscrew screws and while doing so keep the things the screws are screwed into from turning... not easy to do by yourself while the playfield is in the game. I think I'll just wait until the great cabinet swap and deal with it then.

And speaking of which, I had some goof off time last week, so I decided to clean the underside of the new cabinet, which had some scuffs and 17 years of dirty finger grabs in its Convenient Lifting Areas. First I used various household cleaners like Simple Green and 409 without much luck. Then I mixed some Pine-sol and water and that did a lot better. I finished off by scrubbing the really filthy parts with one of those Mr. Clean micro-pore sponges, which really got the job done. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures since the camera was broken, but I figure I can take some detailed shots when I clean out the inside.

Finally, I'm going to attempt a rare social thing: On Monday I am going to go to League Night at the Virginia branch of the Free State Pinball Association. Hopefully I can actually talk to people who actually share my interests; worst case: I'll end up standing quietly off to the side like I imagine high school dances would have been if I ever went to one, which I didn't. Boy, 46 years old and still an awkward teen. Nice.

Awkward Teen Hunger Force. Number 1 in the 'hood, G.

Coin Door Love

The next major zone of repairs was the coin door. The first step was to un-crimp the crappy job I did on the test button wires and use the crimping tool to make a set of nice, honest crimps. Also, I put them in the correct plug slots, so now the buttons won't be reversed. Testing had revealed that one of the coin slots had all of its parts, so I wired that up to the coin switch pins. Finally I had created a makeshift lamp circuit using old light sockets, wired it to the GI pins on the coin door board, and stuck them to the coin mechs using sticky foam that I picked up at Target. I tested and everything worked so well, I turned free play off and set it to 1 credit per quarter and 3 credits for two.

My coin door lamp circuit went through several iterations... I had to recall what little I remembered of my Electrical Engineering class in college. First I tried out the lamps in series, and that gave me one anemic light and one barely lit one. I went through three revisions.

    /-- + Lamp - --\
V --                -- Gnd
    \-- + Lamp - --/

This is the classic parallel circuit, but had too many wires that would clutter up the already cluttered coin door.

Then there was an interim design which I've forgotten. I took that, removed some useless connections, and wound up with this:

V -- + --- +
    Lamp  Lamp
      - --- - --- Gnd

I liked this one because it was nice and spare... no Y intersections and a minimum of work for my meager soldering skillz. You can play follow the wires on the picture above to see how it played out in the real world.

When I switched off free play, I also made what (to me) is a change I never thought I would make: I reset the game to 3 balls per game.

Gasp.

Now, you have to understand that 5 balls per game has been Holy Writ since I first started playing 30 years ago. But the more I've played DW over the past few weeks, the more I've realized that it's designed to be a three ball game. With five balls, I end up getting too many features on a regular basis. And I have to say that since I made the switch my games are just a smidge more satisfying in a somewhat hard to quantify way.

Also, I have added a new item onto my list of things to do by summer's end: I'm going to swap the game into the other cabinet. I've been planning to restore the red areas of the cabinet sides using some kind of decal something-or-other that I was going to make myself using the other cabinet. I felt a kinship to the old cab because I still believe that it was originally a prototype with the moving Dalek head. But a few weeks ago wife said something that infected my mind with the idea of using the new cabinet, and the infection spread, reproduced, and eventually overpowered my loyalty to the old one. I mean, the new cab has all of its red in unfaded glory, fer cheese sakes. It has more flaws in it than the old one, but I now think those will be easier to repair than the Rube Goldberg decal thing I had planned.

And finally, here's what happened when Rosie discovered that I had connected the Dalek head:

Backbox Love

Like I said, I've been actually getting a lot done on Doctor Who. First up, I decided to work on problems with the backbox, all lighting related: There was a bunch of GI out on the backbox light board, the Dalek GI was out, and only two of the Doctor lights worked.

First I decided to do something totally unrelated to lighting and reconnected the Wobble-head. That was pretty easy, but then I decided to ready the dome to be screwed back on. I noticed that if the dome was lined up with the screw holes, the eye stalk would bump into the inside of the dome when it moved. That didn't seem so cool, so I tried adjusting the mounting nuts to make the Dalek lean back, hoping this would reposition the eye as well. It didn't really. So I repositioned the dome so it's hanging over the top of the game slightly and left it at that. I emailed the guy who made it and he said he had never heard of this problem. In a world of mass conformity, I suppose it's comforting to be unique.

Next I moved on to the various GIs that were out. I checked voltages at the points where they exited the power board and didn't get much. Then I jumped a working strand of lights with a non-working one and that lit them... but then the stress of all those lights running on one circuit blew out the working strand. I think I lamented for a while, then looked up GI problems in the pinball repair guides. Mostly they focus on complicated stuff like replacing burned connectors and stressed circuits. That didn't sound so cool, but buried in the tough solutions was a relatively easy one: Replace the fuses. I did that, and now all my GI works fine. This imparted a valuable lesson to me which I knew but had forgotten: Check the simple stuff first. *sheesh*

Finally I pulled the light board for the 7 doctor lamps on the display mount. Six of them work when the display is face down, but when it's mounted in the game, only two work. I connected the board up to my power supply and found a legitimately bad twist-out light socket, which I replaced. But the Doctor 7 lamp worked when I tested it, so I surmised that it was a bad transistor on the power board or something. I put the board back in and was rewarded with six working Doctors, which I chalked up to yet another bad connection. Sylvester McCoy would have to wait for a future repair session.

And those were the backbox repairs. Mostly successful, can't complain.

From Allentown to Our Town

Fortunately/unfortunately a lot is going on and I'm not writing any of it down.

Went to Pinball Wizards in Allentown two weeks ago. The night before I checked rgp to see if there were any up-to-the-minute reports, but all I found what this noob report. I was surprised that he did not point out that when he was walking around the Flea Market in the rain, he got wet.

Drive up was uneventful, except for seeing a truck shedding a retread and an Amish guy driving a buggy.

Spent yet another all-time low amount of money, $50 including admission and a pita sandwich at the Middle Eastern place in the farmer's market. There just wasn't much on my list... my games are working too well these days, or I already have the parts I need to fix them. There wasn't anything in the flea market that really jumped out at me, even though I brought a fat wad of cash with me after last year's Doctor Who incident.

There were some pretty good machines there, and several that were comically malfunctioning... such as the Funhouse that didn't have use of its left flippers, or the Mystic with no feature lights. But after so many years -- I think this might be my 10th year going to the show -- since I assume there will be a whole bunch of crappy games, I'm not as annoyed as I used to be. As with bad movies, the key is low expectations.

I did finally get to play the new Indiana Jones game, which I found reasonably fun. Unfortunately the sound was turned down too low for me to hear what is reportedly the worst Sean Connery impersonation that anyone has ever been paid to do. They had a CSI there, but it had a crowd and I didn't have a chance to play. And I did get to play the aforementioned Mystic, which I was looking forward to because I hadn't played it since my college days and I had co-done an adaptation of it in my VP salad days. I was kind of cheesed that it didn't work, because its tic-tac-toe conceit relies pretty heavily on feature lights. But I amused myself by sending a text message to my wife with a picture of the game and the text "Why are they hurting the Mystic?" which is hysterically if you've see The Fall.

I toyed with the idea of buying LEDs for Paragon to reduce its power needs, and even went to the point of trying to estimate the number of bulbs on one that was there, but when I showed up with cash in hand to the people hawking them said they were out of the #44/47 bulbs. Later I was sort of glad, because fixing Paragon's power problem by reducing the power consumption of the machine isn't really fixing it, it's just putting the problem off by a few years. Maybe that's cool for the National Debt, but this is pinball, which is serious. But that got me thinking about LEDs, and I think I'm going to buy some and install them on Quicksilver. Partly for fun, partly on the off chance that in a few years incandescents will be impossible to find, but mostly because QS is the most visually striking of all my machines and LED bulbs will probably make it more so. Their other-worldly glow is well-suited to the game and its theme of big-headed naked women in a dimension of liquid mercury.

On the way home, I finally stopped at Pakha's Thai House Restaurant, which is located outside of Harrisburg. I've been passing this place every year since it opened and have always been curious about it -- I wouldn't expect Dillsburg PA to be the center of a huge Thai community -- but the food was pretty good and pretty cheap. It appears to be where all the cool kids in the Harrisburg area hang out, and based on the photos behind the cash register, the Fox 43 news team from York is quite enamored with it.

Secrets of the Mystery Box... Revealed!

J.J. Abrams: I have two things to say to you: 1) It's awesome that you cast Simon Pegg as Scotty and the guy from the Harold and Kumar movies as Mr. Sulu; and 2) Stop reading now, I'm going to reveal the contents of the Mystery Box!!!

This is it, sorted into various boxes by type. Starting at the bottom plastics and circuit boards, which isn't so much a type as it is a box of the stuff I put on eBay. In the second tier, we have a CD box of all the magic nuts and screws, targets/switches/locks, followed by flipper parts (Darwin contributed the ball to this box, it was not part of the Mystery Box), and 53 pinballs in various conditions. In the top row are miscellaneous junk, plastic posts of many colors, larger plastics including a whole lot of bumper caps, and leg bolts and larger nuts. Not shown are the light bulbs, which were a motley collection of #44s, #555s, #904s, and two #89s.

So was it worth it? Well, most of the plastics sold on eBay, with the best performer being the guy in the middle right, an Elvira plastic in really nice condition that went for $13. Overall the highest priced item was a Williams relay board (not shown because it was probably under the BS Dracula graveyard) which went for $27... pretty good for an untested item. Overall, after expenses I made $80. I figure that there were about $5 worth of working bulbs, and I've already used a 904 in DW... not bad, since I was planning on picking up lights at the pinball show next week, and now I don't have to.

A lot of the stuff is unusable, but over time I'll probably be able to dip into it for various parts. I may also see if I can mix up some of it into some little mystery boxes of my own and sell them as lots on eBay... my conscience would demand that I sweeten them with some better stuff, though.

So, along with the roughly $5 worth of fun that I estimated I got out of pawing through the box, so far I'm up to about $90 worth of goods and services from the $96 I paid for it. And I now have a huge supply of odds & ends, which has already served me well more than once. Overall, I am reasonably satisfied, as I have been the author of much larger fiascos.

I also got around to listing the High Speed backglass. A guy wanted it on Mr. Pinball, so I sent him an email but I made the mistake of making a scammer joke ("I am from London in UK and I only accept Western Union payments... just kidding, I'm actually in Maryland."). It turns out he was one of those guys who only reads the first part of an email, because he replied back and said he'd found one in the US. Oh well. But since I had the pictures ready to go, I turned around and started a 5 day auction on eBay, which I usually don't do but I wanted it to finish with plenty of time so I could offer free delivery to the pinball show. I'm hoping that a local snaps it up, since I don't relish packing it for shipping. A guy from Canada asked if he could pick it up, which is a 9 hour drive one way. His max bid was only $5, though, so it doesn't look like he'll get it. I'm hoping to get about $75 for it so I can have a little extra boodle to take with me to the show.

Also on Mr. Pinball, I posted an ad for a Lotta Fun backglass again, hoping someone going to the show would respond in the affirmative. No such luck though. I also successfully avoided another round of boneheaded scammer emails by putting the following in my ad: "Note to scammers: You must be at least as smart as I am to successfully rip me off. If not, I will waste much more of your time that you will of mine."

In repair news, my crimping supplies arrived but I haven't done anything about it yet.

Also, I was going through my old saved links and found this one about DW mini-playfield problems. Rereading it, I realized that this guy was describing my problem exactly. So I decided to do a quick round of testing, with an eye towards asking Pinball Resource to bring a motor with them to the show. And what did I find? A completely working and well-behaved mini-playfield. W? T? F? I really don't think fixing the power to the CPU board would have fixed this, so I'm kind of at a loss. I plan to turn it back on and try it out in gameplay tonight to see if the failures come back.

We went up to visit my daughter at school yesterday, and basically checked out for 20 minutes to play a few games of The Champion Pub. I've been prevented from doing so for the last couple of visits, so I had to play the Bastard Card or face the prospect of the school year ending without me playing any games of it. I had fun, beat a few boxers, lost to a lot more, got two replays, and had a hard time in the dark bar with no GI.

There is more to write about, but it's getting late and I have to walk the dog before it gets dark.