He Powers Up... And It's Good!

As usual, I'm kind of constipated with news. But the good news is that I've assembled T2 to the point where the power driver board is getting power, and nothing blew up. So yay.

Tonight was the optional Week 0 of league, but Mrs. Entropy made it clear that I would not be honoring our nation's fallen soldiers by going to a stinky old bar and banking pinball scores.

I did sneak out yesterday and play a few games of NASCAR at Sole d'Italia. I'm kinda bummed that they got rid of Family Guy... I'm finding that although I liked NASCAR when it first came out, it's not holding my interest. And why does the garage not work on any of the games I play? And why doesn't the software see that the garage is disabled and give you the awards for, say, hitting the test car a bunch of times? Or maybe it's awarding them and I didn't notice. Anyway, I played for a while and by the end I was kind of hoping I wouldn't win any free games.

Anyway, I honest to gosh mean it when I say that the next post will feature some for real pinball fixin' stuff.

The End of an Era

My daughter graduated from college last weekend, which means one thing: I won't be going to Pizza House to play pinball any time soon.

Graduation Weekend was hectic, as we should have expected. A bunch of plans (cleaning the house, making gift bags for the family, etc.) came off a little half-baked. Family members cancelled (my brother, somewhat predictably), did stupid-ass shit (my father-in-law, who had my bro-in-law drive him 10 hours across the Midwest despite being sick, which made him more sick, so he spent the weekend in a hospital with pneumonia), and did stupid-ass shit that cost us money (my goofy sister-in-law, who ignored all the emails, Facebook posts and phone messages about the plane ticket my wife bought for her and purchased her own, which we only found out about the day before she left, by which time it was too late so we ended up donating $300 to the Richard Branson Naked Supermodel Water Skiing Fund). But Zoe Entropy did graduate (.02 grade points away from honors :( ) and moved out of her campus housing for the last time.

I didn't get to play any pinball during the weekend, but I had to drive the SUV up to pick up the last of her stuff on Monday, so I took the opportunity to make my last visit to Pizza House (at least for the foreseeable future). Happily, the high score that I set on NASCAR three years ago is still there. I put a dollar into Austin Powers and played four or five games until I was replay percentaged out. Then I put a dollar into NASCAR and played eight or nine games... every time it upped the replay beyond my score, I would match or get a special. I finally played my last two games and walked away, and as I opened the door I heard it match, but I kept walking. I kind of would have liked to go into town and play a game of The Champion Pub, but I had to get home.

I remember when I left school -- I remember it very well, since I did it three times in the 17 years it took me to get my Bachelor's degree -- and I felt the same wistfulness when I left Pizza House for the last time. Now granted, only a little of it was because of the pinball... Gettysburg College was this place I'd been coming to for four years, and now I was going to stop coming to it.

And THAT got me thinking about the time my Mom was at UCLA Medical Center about 8 years ago getting surgery for the cancer that eventually killed her. While she was under the knife, I got tired of waiting and took off, exploring the buildings that I'd attended class and goofed around in 20 years before. Of course I ended up at the arcade, a shadow of its former self but still with a couple of ratty old pins in the corner. There was a Getaway, maybe a South Park, and a few others that I don't remember. It was comforting to play pinball in a familiar surrounding.

I really don't know where this is going. Usually I can tie this all up with some kind of clever narrative thread, but I can't, so I'm just going to stop.

Well, enough of this. Next time I'm going to write about an actual useful electrical technique that I learned from my brother while he was here for the graduation (the reliable brother who actually showed up, of course).

Disparate but not Serious

I've been pretty busy lately, but the pinball is taking the backseat to life. Mostly it's cleaning and getting the house ready for my daughter's graduation -- yesterday I spent about 2 hours cleaning bathroom floor grout -- but I'm also serving as Mrs. Entropy's surrogate daughter, since her own is spending Mother's Day on a Senior Trip to the beach. So I had to make breakfast, make dinner, do some gardening (which, to be fair, I was going to do anyway), and watch Fringe episodes with the wife. These are all fine things, but not really pinball things.

However, these are the pinball things that have happened. In league I got into the VA playoffs by having a pretty good final week. Since I was in A division, the playoffs were kind of a foregone conclusion, but I did my best. I even did some practicing in Visual Pinball to learn the rules of the games I was weakest in a little better. My weakest game was High Speed II, and I was happy after a few VP games to have gotten 300 M on it, almost 10x my highest league score. Then in Allentown, I played one that was there and busted out another 300 M, and on a real machine to boot! I felt I was ready. So what happened? Nobody picked that game against me. So much for pathos. Anyway, I had one 4 point game of WHO Dunnit and three third place finishes for a third place overall. That ended up being OK because I got the prize I wanted, a copy of Pinball 101 (and a new toolbox). The guy who finished third in B got the same DVD, so obviously we intend to study up and improve our games. But, ya know, it was fun. The end of the season party was last night, and this time it was only about a half hour drive away. The guy hosting had a great selection of games, including Voltan Escapes Cosmic Doom, which I played a few times as a youngster and co-did a VP adaptation for, but have never played as an adult. There was a pinball scavenger hunt and a get the closest score contest, but I didn't do well in either. I did have the most frickin' awesome game of High Speed, scoring 3.5 M and getting multiball twice, which is really good for me since I have trouble getting the ramp shot. There was one of the nuttiest games I've ever seen called The Wiggler. The steaks for dinner were good, too. And one of the guys in the MD league who got a full set of 6 digit Bally displays for free brought one for my Paragon, which has a display with a segment out. Good times.

Allentown was OK. I went on Sunday, because Saturday was our anniversary. Sunday kinda sucked. There were half the games and half the flea marketers, and none of the vendors had much that I was looking for. I had my aforementioned awesome Getaway game, played some Iron Man (which was good... people say it's just the Austin Powers playfield, but the game feels different enough to me). I chatted with a guy that I'd met at the Fairfax Open. I was happy to see that the guy with the Future Spa with the messed up playfield finally fixed the gate (I had left a note suggesting he fix it a few shows ago... maybe he took my advice). There were a few more games that were pretty interesting... I'll probably mention something about them later.

I did talk to the guy who sold me the LEDs for Quicksilver, and the LED manufacturers as a whole apparently worked with the Alltek Systems guy to solve the flickering light problem by either a) soldering a diode on every feature light, or b) buying a new lamp driver board. I wasn't aiming to buy a new lamp board, but the guy offered to sell it to me for 20% the $100 list, and since I hadn't found much else at the show to buy I went for it. This, of course, is waiting until after graduation...

Not much progress on T2, aside from selecting a line filter and teasing out the wires to install a new plug. I used my new tiny camera to see why the speaker panel wasn't fitting correctly, and it turns out that just bending the brackets was all it needed. I ordered some parts for it, including 3 of the 4 ribbon cables from Great Plains, still the best price on cables by a dollar each.

I've having very good luck with my Fish Tales playfield. It was missing its reel, and I was kind of disparing finding a new one. But a guy posted the reel and motor on a Mr. Pinball classified and only wanted $60 for it, so I yoinked it up. Then I posted a WTB on RGP and Mr. Pinball for the brackets that held the optos, and I got a response from a guy who had parted out an FT who still had the brackets. We're currently negotiating, but he sends me only one email a day... why is no one as eager to finish these transactions as I am?!?

More as I have time and remember all the stuff I was planning to write...