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...