Silver Lining

Even a craptacular suckfest like my PAPA experience was has to have something positive come out of it, right? Well, it doesn't really have to, but in this case it did. It got me off my duff to do some much needed repairs.

While I was driving back and my wife was kind of dozing, I made a mental list of the things I need to fix on T2. I picked T2 because the other games either have something really big wrong with them or need a lot of work, whereas T2 made for a very concise list:

• Fix the lamp column problem
• The kickback aim seems to be off, sometimes allowing balls to drain while its impotently kicking at them
• Bottom jet bumper doesn't work
• Ameliorate the ridge on the playfield in the left orbit, which seems to be interfering with balls
• Adjust flippers
• Fix Hunter/Killer Jackpot lamps
• Start button light is out (I wasn't sure about this during my drive, but it turns out to have been true)
• Fix flaw around edge of autofire hot dog insert
• Fix flaw on front of cabinet
• Try to do something about lines that are out on DMD

And I added this after I fixed the start button lamp:

• Clean start button

So on Monday night after PAPA I got started. Most obvious was fixing the jackpot lamp board, which really impacts gameplay. I've managed to get it working in the past by reseating the plug, but that didn't work this time so I pulled the whole board. Testing with my handy PC power supply -- that thing is so danged useful! -- showed that there was a bad connection between the last lamp in the circuit and the ground pin. Yes, it's fixable, but is it worth fixing when you've got a spare set of lamp boards in a box? Not really. I pulled the necessary board out, transferred the sockets, tested it, and plugged it in. Done!

Next up was the start button. Did the obvious stuff like checking the bulb and where the wires were going to the coin door interface board. Everything looked fine, but it was getting late so I left it disconnected (and played a few games, so I had to open the coin door to press the start button :P ).

Tuesday night I skipped volunteering at the museum because I was sort of fed up with pinball, but I continued to work on the T2 start button. Since the cabinet area seemed OK, I took a look in the backbox to see if anything was up there, and there was something in the Up position: Following the interboard wiring table (not as nice as the diagrams in the Doctor Who and later manuals, but in this case serviceable), there is supposed to be a 3 pin socket in J136 with one cabinet lamp wire going into it and another in J135. On my game there was no socket at J135 and two wires attached to J136, one of them somewhat haphazardly as though it had been stuck there because there was no place else to put it. That, of course, turned out to be the wire that was supposed to be in J135. Not having any .1" sockets (pins? yes. hole plugs? yes. sockets? no. sheesh) I just alligator clipped the wire to the proper pin, yielding a working start button! It was at this point that I added the last item to my list, because the button plastic was a sickly yellow.

Next I decided to look at the dead bumper. My first guess proved incorrect since the switch test showed that the switch was working fine. But the solenoid test showed that it didn't work, and in fact just clicked demurely instead of a full-bodied whack. I'm not really a pop bumper expert, but comparing it to the working bumpers showed that the metal and bakelite pieces that connect the plunger to the bumper ring was not doing any connecting. The two pieces are supposed to come together around the neck of the plunger like a pillory; however, both pieces were facing the same direction, allowing the plunger to get out of the stocks and wander around rather than being pelted with rotten vegetables like it should. So I disassembled it, reassembled it correctly, and it worked perfectly. Now the action in El Bumperino borders on insane... my bonus multiplication has at least doubled since I fixed the bumper.

Finally on Wednesday night I tackled the jaundiced start button. When I disassembled the button to try to clean it, the plastic with the text on it crumbled. I tried to use a spare button from one of the Doctor Who cabs, but there was some reason I didn't, like maybe it didn't fit or something. So I printed out the word START 3/4" wide on paper, cut a circular piece and put that in where the plastic was. It looked fine and I like the white better than yellow because it suits the game better... though I do notice the grain of the paper, so I may need to replace it with something a little more uniform than 20 lb printer paper. The only problem I ran into was when I put it back together the button would go in but not pop out. After some trouble shooting I found that in prying up the outer plastic I had deformed it, and that was rubbing against the sides of the button housing. I filed off the rough edges and now it works.

And that's what I've done so far with T2. During idle time watching TV, I've been slowly clearing stuff away from and off of the Doctor Whos in preparation for preparing to do the cabinet swap, and last night I put the new cabinet up on legs and repositioned the old one where I can hopefully get to the parts easily.

I was planning to do a lot more pin-related stuff this weekend, but I found out a few weeks ago that stalwart personal finance manager Quicken, which I've been using for 15 years but has pretty much abandoned the Mac, will not run under the new version of the Mac OS. After years of neglect -- and lagging about 3 years behind the PC feature set, which I guess makes the current version on par with Quicken 2004 for PC -- this was the last straw, so I downloaded iBank, a Mac-only product. Basically I got sucked in for two days and actually enjoyed paying my bills in software that functions... the joy of being able to cut, copy, and paste text reliably made me lose track of time. Sorry, Quicken, I'm just not Intuit any more.

And how could I have forgotten this? Before I left for PAPA, somebody pointed out that a picture of my daughter and I graced a pinball article in The USA Today! At first they said I was on the cover, but it turns out I was on page three. I am pointing at a nondescript part of the playfield in Creature (maybe the Snackbar?). The guy took the picture on a day when I'd gone to pick up my daughter from work, but I'd pretty much forgotten about it until the article appeared. The article was sitting out on the desk at PAPA, though I don't think anybody recognized me. :( The most unfortunate outcome? An inmate serving 18 years for dealing crack sent my daughter a letter saying he'd really like to get to know her... and he should be eligible for parole by 2014! What a catch. Does this happen every time you appear in the newspaper? If so, ew!

Epic and Most Egregious PAPA Fail. Ever.

There are some weekends when tournaments go well for you, and there are some weekends when they don't; this last weekend at PAPA was of the latter sort.

You know, even though I said that all I was hoping for was to break into the top tercile of C, I was kind of expecting to do a lot better. And maybe that was my problem... I looked at how much better I've been playing in the last year and projected that forward, showing a much better showing.

Anyway, the trip up was OK. We left a little late, but it wasn't like I was on much of a deadline. When we got there, though, I was a little drained. Played a few games to warm up -- which is usually sort of pointless, as my play is usually randomly good or bad based on factors I am unable to fathom.

So, our C Bank consisted of Addams Family, CSI, Iron Man, Terminator 2, The Simpsons Pinball Party, The Rolling Stones, Twilight Zone, Wheel of Fortune, and World Cup Soccer. Kind of a mixed bag for me... Addams and TZ are games I have done well on, but generally others do better. T2 I own, which as I've pointed out in the past is a mixed bag. Stones has been very good to me in league, and I've played World Cup in league and sorta know what to do, but our is so crappy that I rarely deal with it. IM is always pretty brutal, WoF I've played and gotten the GC on the game at Volleyball House, but I couldn't tell you how or why... I just looked up at the end of the game and had 105 Mill. And CSI I'm just not that familiar with.

So for my first round I went with IM, T2, Stones, WoF, and World Cup; I did poorly, encouraging (my score was basically the total of three skill shots and one 3x Jackpot), poorly, poorly, and pretty good for me, respectively. So I put in a second entry, swapping out Soccer with CSI on the theory that if I didn't know it, most other people probably don't either. I managed a respectable IM score, but just about everything else was junk.

I also put in a Classics II entry which was not great, which landed me at 114 out of 128. Considering classics is all skill levels, I usually don't expect much. I play largely for fun and because it helps my World Pinball Player ranking, because C Division isn't counted.

Part of the problem was I felt out of sorts all day. I had a dehydration headache despite drinking water and Gatorade. Even my for-fun games weren't that impressive, though I managed a pretty good White Water game.

After a while I pretty much gave up. The wife and I went to the hotel, then wandered around until we found someplace that wasn't decorated in decaying steel-town chic for a nice dinner. That night I studied the CSI rules.

On the plus side, I did find a roll of tokens that someone had lost, and greedily kept it for myself.

The next day I was up early and ended up wandering around Carnegie trying to find milk for my cereal. While I was walking I found a little rubber snake on the ground, which I was hoping would augur great things for that day and ended up keeping it in my pocket for the rest of the trip... let's see how well that worked out.

So I showed up at PAPA World HQ and dawdled a while before I threw in another entry. The highlight of that one was an IM score that was 150K less than my previous respectable one, and a bunch of crap. I did put in two Classics IIIs... one was kind of a junky one on Mystic, Embryon, Gorgar, and my personal fave Tri-Zone... this was a little sad, because I had some great practice scores on the latter three that morning. After I saw how all the cool kids were ganging up on Embryon and especially Mystic, in my second entry I swapped them out for Evel Knievel and the EM Safari and did pretty well... had a good Tri-Zone which was 8th place overall, Safari was #24 and Gorgar was OK, and I ended up in 36th place out of 117.

Then it was dinner time and I had decided to go to the league dinner -- this turned out to be on par with the rest of the weekend. I talked my usually non-sociable wife into going, and aside from some brief conversation about anime with another guy, generally just watched the TVs in the restaurant (we later found out she was getting sick, so I can't completely blame her). I was seated next to someone who wasn't particularly talkative that night, someone who is like nails on chalkboard to me, and a guy who hadn't even played in league for 9 years who I could not communicate with -- didn't understand my jokes and couldn't fathom anything I said. My wife and I split a meal and our two halves together were what I expected our portions to be. And I still had my dehydration headache. As soon as our bill was paid I was out of the door like a shot. Then we ended up taking some wrong turns thanks to detours, so after dropping my wife off at the hotel I didn't make it back until 10 or 11.

It was time for a change in strategy. First I took some aspirin and started chugging water and Gatorade to deal with my headache. Clearly the games I was playing weren't going my way, so I tried out a Simpsons they had on the floor and I couldn't stop -- granted it was set to Novice settings, but I ended up with the GC and actually made it to Alien Invasion, way better than I've ever done before. So my final entry was an all-Stern lineup: CSI, IM, WoF, Simpsons, and Rolling Stones. Even with the upper playfield left flipper being too weak for me to get more than one ball locked despite numerous shots, I still managed a #29 score. I finally had the Stones score I deserved, which was good for #34. The other scores were junk. But when the dust cleared, I ended up in 50th place: Not just in the top tercile, but in the top quartile! That's a full 8% better! Well, OK, it sucks, but it sucks less than my next lowest entry, which would have put me around 66th place and have been a major disappointment. And on my gigantic 27" monitor, my entry shows one line up from the bottom of the first page. That's good for something.

I was thinking about parlaying my newly energized self into another entry, but I got wrapped up in a good game of Tales of the Arabian Nights (high score #1!) and half missed/half ignored the closing of entries around 2 AM. So my finish was a little disappointing, but at least I moved forward and out of the 60s.

The next day we packed up and got ready to go. My wife was really not feeling well and Ol' Scruffy at the hotel desk would only give us an extra half hour to get out of the room. But get out we did, we made it over to PAPA and I watched the A Div finals, which featured some pretty awesome play and an actual nail-biter final game where any of the top three guys could have one it and it wasn't decided until the last ball. We left pretty soon after that -- my wife didn't even feel like playing a closing game of Pang Pang Paradise.

I ended up driving the whole way home, which I didn't really want to do but kind of had to. About halfway home I realized that I must have left my PAPA swag bag with my t-shirt back at the hotel. Eh. It was pretty typical of the entire weekend, and 1) It wasn't that great a bag, unlike the awesome overnight back we got last year, and 2) I'm a little sad about losing the shirt, but on the other hand I don't need any more reminders of how sucky PAPA 14 was for me. On the plus side, the last hour of our drive home it was thundering and lightninging constantly, which was kind of cool.

And just to top off the suckiness with a suck cherry: I had scheduled Monday as a vacation day but ended up having to work half a day because we had a deadline to meet the next day. And while I was unpacking the car I discovered that I'd left half our supply of Gatorade at the hotel too. It just keeps on sucking.

Off to PAPA for the Weekend!

Well, Mrs. Entropy and I are heading off to Pittsburgh today for PAPA 14. I'm hoping to actually break into the top tercile of the bottom tier, but we'll see. I did have a bit of existential doubt about whether my nice finish at Pinburgh morally obligates me to compete in the B Division instead of my usual C. I put the question to the FSPA league mailing list, and the response that put be over the edge came from the guy who pasted my ass to the wall with Gorilla Glue on Monday (which caused me to go from 1st to 3rd place in our last night before the finals... nice). To paraphrase him, basically PAPA divisions are bosses, and to level up you need to beat the first boss, in this case C Division. So I've decided that to move on to B Div I should put up a decent showing in C, not this 61st/62st place bullshit I've done the last two years. I've got high hopes: C Division's games this year include Rolling Stones, which has served me well in league this season (with the possible exception of last Monday night); Terminator 2, which of course I own (and got a whopping THREE Super Jackpots on the same ball a few days ago, despite the lamps that indicate where to shoot being out and having to use the lamp column display problem to figure out which of the jackpot lights is lit); and Wheel of Fortune, which I have the high score on at Volleyball House (though to be fair, to this day I have no idea how I scored so high). So as I say every year: We shall see.

And since I've got a theme going here, these are this week's museum repairs: My two undisputed successes are I replaced a broken drop target on Big Bang Bar and I fixed the lamp board on Indiana Jones. Sadly, the drop target was just a blank one I found in the bottom of the cabinet, not one with a decal on it. The IJ lamp board I pulled and took home, fixed and tested in Wednesday night (there were some burned out bulbs, bad connections, and one or two sockets that had broken and needed resoldering), then Zoe Entropy installed it (!!! The issue is following in the footsteps of her sire) Thursday when she went in to work. I glanced at it when I went in for some pre-PAPA practice after work... there are still a few bulbs out, and I'm suspecting they're bad connections at the plug. But the resoldered lamps were working, so you can tell if you've spelled the ENT of ADVENTURE.

I also looked into a "weak kicker" on Safe Cracker. That turned out to be a perfectly good but poorly aimed kicker, which was kicking the ball into a wireform, which caused the ball to rattle back and forth in the lane, slowing it down to the point where it couldn't make it out of its lane, giving the impression of weakness. 50K rgp poster Lloyd T. Olson suggested I bend it slightly to the left to re-aim it, so I'll try that next time I go in (probably NOT next Tuesday, since we have a big project to finish at work and I'll probably be in a post-PAPA pinball funk). While I was in SC I checked a switch it said was bad, which turned out to be a drop target whose spring had come off. I reattached it, and in the process found out how difficult SC is to work on... it's tiny size makes it so everything is packed in so tightly that it's virtually impossible to do anything without taking a bunch of adjacent stuff apart.

And in the Good/Bad Omen Department: When I went in the the museum last night I did some pre-PAPA flipping. Largely sucked, but did get my first Super Jackpot on Creature, and it would have been doubled except that the museum's game only registers 1 letter for each ramp shot instead of the usual two (or three if you're Bowen) so it takes twice as many ramps to spell Creature. Anyway, hopefully that is the foretaste of victory and the crappy other games I played were not the anticipation of suck. Again, we'll see in about 8 hours.

All I Do These Days is Museum Repairs

Well, not all. I have gotten my basement closer to being a usable arcade... Eight Ball Deluxe and Terminator are set up, though EBD leans like a mofo and the leg with the greatest influence is hard to get to. Really, so is Paragon, but on a lark I turned it on last night and it was acting kookier than usual. It acts like it's in attract mode, but when you press the button it makes the start-of-game sound & deducts a credit, but then doesn't do anything else and continues in attract mode. In league news, I've been in the unprecedented (for me) position of #1 in A Division for four straight weeks, and with one week to go I am mathematically assured of getting into the playoffs. I've got a 6 point lead over the #2 & 3 players so it's feasible that I could be #1 in playoffs even with a mediocre score for week 10. I think that gives me valued game picks in the playoffs, which is always fun... as well as something I haven't gotten for some time, since when I've actually made the playoffs I've usually been in last place going in.

So, at the museum on Tuesday I got a few more things done. I spent most of the time bending the diverter linkage on Indiana Jones into a workable facsimile of what it should be, and that fixed it. When I tested it I made a few shots to the Path of Adventure, which cleared the switch errors; now Indiana Jones is credit-dot free. ^_^ I also changed tactics with the sticking left flipper and changed the coil stop -- albeit from what turned out to be a somewhat rusty mechanism that had mushroomed, so I had to clean and file it down somewhat -- which did the trick. My new theory is that the coil stop had become lightly magnetized over time, and that was causing the plunger to stick to it. Spent some time giving it a bit of a makeover... I replaced the shredded plastic posts around the INDY lanes with better ones that I cannibalized from T2 leftovers. And I replaced a couple of GI bulbs and tried to get as many of the lamps replaced as possible. Unfortunately, there are a couple of sockets on two of the boards that aren't making good connections, so I'll probably bring those boards home on Tuesday and re-solder them (this worked pretty well with the STTNG big lamp board, and I'm hoping for similar results).

Speaking of Star Trek, I've gotten kind of tired of the slingshots popping out of the rubber. One of the things I've noticed about the museum's games is that a lot of them have slingshot rubbers that are about 1/2" too large, so I'm constantly tucking the kicker back into the rubber until I get tired of it and replace the rubber. Unfortunately, the meager parts store in the back had only one 4" rubber, and that was clearly intended to be a reference piece. However, they sell rubber in the gift shop -- at prices that are a little steep imo -- so my daughter found the 4" bag and gave me two.

And finally, the Avatar Link gate wasn't staying up because a little donut attachment that holds the gate up had fallen off, which I figured out from comparing the assembly diagram from the downloaded manual to reality. I found the sheered off screw that probably was supposed to be holding it on, but not the part itself. I'd been in contact with the Stern Tech Support guy and he said that he would send me out the piece because it was still under warranty. However, I played the game on Thursday while waiting for my daughter and the gate was staying up again... I'm guessing that the real repair guy had been in and fixed it somehow. Anyway, I'll look at it for sure next Tuesday.

So next week is going to be too too fun: Week 10 of league on Monday, pull and fix the IJ lamp boards on Tuesday, relax on Wednesday (phew), return the (hopefully) fixed boards on Thursday, then toodle up to Pittsburgh on Friday for the weekend at PAPA. And that's a Full Week of Pinball for you.