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...