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: