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!