My goodness

I really haven't written very much about the Terminator, or anything else. Here's where we right that wrong.


After fixing the plugs, I plugged everything in. Unlike Doctor Who, T2 had all the wires and plugs it should have had. Williams clearly learned a lot about manual writing in the year between T2 and DW, because the extremely clear diagrams of the boards showing the plug positions with a listing of the plugs and their wire colors is not there. Instead it's a text listing of the plugs in what must have seemed like an orderly tabular fashion, but in reality makes it really hard to find stuff. So I used the DW manual to connect just about everything, then puzzled out T2's manual for plugs DW didn't have (like the non-Fliptronic flipper connectors). 

I was reluctant to plug in the playfield, so I tested voltages and stuff as I plugged, and nothing seemed completely bizarre. To summarize a long evening of booting and plugging, at the end I had a lit machine with a more or less working DMD (it did to the whoop whoop whoop because the board is the one that delivers too much power to the DMD). To the right is what it looked like after I put everything back together. As a bonus, all the solenoids worked and pretty much all the switches, too, except for the ones in the dead column (known problem with the MPU) and a switch that just wasn't there. The drop target wouldn't stay up, but just about everything else worked. I even played an impromptu game, only slightly hampered by missing flipper lanes and ramps that weren't connected to their wireforms.


So we have a more or less working game installed in its new cabinet. The next step was to move it from the boiler room to its permanent home, next to Eight Ball Deluxe. That doesn't leave a lot of room to squeeze between the game and the basement sofa, but I'm thin enough to pull it off. It also helps that we had to move another sofa our of the rear of the basement, so I had to clear a path, and I used that excuse to organize the pinball area and label boxes of parts that are sitting around. This has been a huge step forward for me... I can actually find stuff relatively quickly when I need it.

Now it was time to strip down the playfield for cleaning. This was also kind of a preview of the sort of cleaning I'll need to do when DW moves into its new cabinet. I took lots of reference pictures as I disassembled, and labeled parts and put them in bags as I went. If I had had the space, I would have laid the parts out on a table in a forensic reconstruction, but sadly the best I could do is array them on various pinball machines.


In the end, what we were left with was a mostly stripped filthy playfield (I removed the wood sides and backsplash after this picture was taken). Now kids, if you're cleaning your game, you'll probably want to strip all the parts off the game including the undersides. But I am lazy and hate to solder, plus the underparts are relatively clean, so I wiped them down in situ and only removed problem parts, like the drop target assembly that wouldn't stay up.


Now, if you zoom into this picture you can see a couple of flaws in the playfield. The worst is missing paint on the top of the auto-fire hot dog, but if you look closely you can also see some kind of goober build-up behind and on either side of the white targets, and on the left side of the Chase Loop you can see where some clown put two wood screws and a rubber in the place of a lost metal wire. I'm kind of expecting the last two to be covered up by ramps and plastics.


So in our next episode we'll talk about the actual cleaning process.


In other pinball news, I ended up finishing 3rd in league, so I did not completely humiliate myself. It was basically a contest between two guys, and me and the other guy were fighting for the bottom. He normally can beat me on any game made after he was born (I have beaten him on Strikes and Spares, for example), but I had an excellent game and crushed him on Attack from Mars, 6 billion to 1 or so... and that one game has been my nemesis all season, with me not scoring more than 400 mil.


My daughter is chugging away at the pinball museum. Her boss is kind of a dick, very difficult to work with, and worst of all doesn't realize that he's difficult to work with. He takes every perceived slight personally, which means he's alienated the local league and the other museums, which he should be bending over backwards for. I basically sent out an email to the league guys suggesting that we extend an olive branch to the museum via my daughter, but when she brought it up to him he got mad that he hadn't heard from the league in months (mainly because he didn't listen to the voicemail on his phone) and he said that we were just out for freebies (which she didn't say, I think he was projecting his own fears on us). She called me in tears because she didn't know what to do... it's so obvious that he needs the support of the local community, but he's mad at us for basically imagined reasons. I tried to calm her down and said we could discuss next steps when she got home, but luckily he came back later and she was able to talk some sense into him -- that we weren't out for free memberships, we wanted to HELP and VOLUNTEER and LEND HIM GAMES THAT HE DESPERATELY NEEDS. So she got permission to open negotiations and send out a special newsletter targeted to the local community. She's also going to meet with a league bigwig for lunch and talk about stuff, and I offered to pay for the lunch to make it look like the museum is buying him lunch (because if you've got a big deal donor/helper, you want to treat him with kid gloves, including dropping 20 bucks on lunch. Cheez!). Anyway, the whole incident gave me new insight into the Arab-Israeli peace process.