If this is Labor Day, why aren't I working?

Well, things are moving along briskly and stopping abruptly in equal measure. I am almost caught up on TOPcast shows... I haven't watched the videos yet, but I'm two back from the most current one. Walking the dog for 45+ minutes a day sure helps me get caught up on my podcast backlog. The one that stands out in my mind, of course, is Python Anghelo, who I kind of figured would be a character based on what everyone else was saying about him, but I really wasn't prepared for someone who was so full of shit as he was. He's obviously very talented and I like a lot of his games, but he is so egotistical and completely convinced of his own genius that he was extremely difficult to listen to. First warning: All the disclaimers they put before, during, and after the show. Second warning: When Python told Clay that he should read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead if he (Clay) wanted to understand what he (Python) was talking about. For me, Ayn Rand is in the same category as Thoreau... if I had read them when I was in college, they would have totally blown my mind. But because I read them as adults, I have the experience to know that what they're saying is idealistic (Thoreau) or a justification of selfish bullshit (Rand). So the fact that Python likes Rand so much told me a great deal about him immediately. The way he just dismissed people that he didn't consider to be geniuses really got on my nerves. Everyone else is "copycats and moneymen" (please to read quote in Romanian accent). And some of his ideas -- for example, this "Zingy Bingy" thing he kept talking about -- sounded like garbage, and everyone was probably right to think it would have been a colossal failure. After the Python Tapes I listened to the Jeff Powell interview, which was the first one I listened to live, and he mentioned that Python either made up or significantly altered the truth... at least now I know what he's talking about.

My last boss was Romanian, and while certainly not as bad as Python, I see a lot of similarities between them... especially how stubborn she can be and often convinced that her way is pretty much the only sensible approach. I should ask her if she's read The Fountainhead, or at least Atlas Shrugged.

But enough complaining!

I tried fixing the last couple of SCRs on Eight Ball Deluxe with no luck. When I carefully examined the board, I saw that a previous owner had tried to repair the tracing without much success. I'm not up to repairing tracing, and not surprisingly neither of the new SCRs did much. But the good news is that the flippers work again... it might have been fixed when I reseated the playfield fuse, or it might have been fixed by the Pinball Fairy blessing my game in the night. Who knows. I think the bad flippers on Doctor Who were caused by one of the plugs not being plugged in properly or the flipper fuse was blown.

I'm not providing a lot of definitive factual information today, am I?

The New Fall eBay Season has started... I'm pushing my wife to start posting stuff (mainly because it's a lot of work for me, and I already have a job), and she's starting to do so slowly. I'm kind of anxious for her to come up to speed quickly, since we need the money. September is "no listing fees" month -- finally, an eBay promotion that I can actually take advantage of, as opposed to their usual "free gallery pic on auctions posted between midnight and 1 AM on Tuesday the 14th!" -- so between us we spewed out 13 auctions. I'm selling the rock tumbler I bought to test parts polishing, and the first result of the new parts polisher, a spiffed up drop target bank from Skateball. That's right, the Dumbass Industrial Average is poised to move again! After that I've got another drop target bank ready to go, but after that I have to find more stuff to sell.

While I was assembling polished drop target assemblies, I reassembled the 5 targets assembly from SB with Centaur ORBS targets and replace the Harlem Globetrotters inline targets with the Centaur wheel targets. They look great. I did it while watching DVR'd Daily Shows and Colbert Reports with my wife... if you tire him out, the dog will now settle down and let us watch TV, as long as the cat doesn't show up. This should allow me to get a lot more work done on some of the labor-intensive projects I have, like stripping playfields.

Trapped balls a poppin'

We dropped off our daughter at school, and I took the opportunity to school NASCAR for a few free games. My high score is still on (heh). I managed to get a couple of free games, and things were going fine until I managed to get all three balls stuck. Basically one ball got caught to the left of the race track diverter, keeping it half open, then a second ball that was racing around the track got stuck on the right. After numerous ball searches, it served up the third ball, which I used to try to knock the second ball free. After a few hits the third ball got stuck too, so I gave up, turned the machine off, and slunk away quietly.

The home front is relatively uninteresting. I did find that my complete lack of confidence in myself paid off for a change: When I ordered the chip to replace U20 on the DW CPU, I actually ordered two chips as I was worried that I would break one of them. (In retrospect, what am I likely to do to a chip that will render it unusable?!? Kind of silly, really.) Well, since it appears that my second CPU also has a bad U20, the second chip may come in handy! I should doubt myself more often.

Tonight I took a trip to John's Place, a bar in Fairfax, VA -- about a half hour from my work, or about an hour if like me you take wrong turns and choose the wrong street during rush hour. It's the home of the VA branch of the Free State Pinball Association, and they had a bunch of games available. I had to turn most of them on myself, but that was no problem, and most of them were in reasonable condition since they're maintained by FSPA members. They had: Attack From Mars, Fish Tales, Getaway, Mars: God of War, Mousin' Around, Night Rider, Strikes 'n' Spares, The Addams Family, The Shadow, White Water, World Poker Tour, and a Baby Pac-Man unplugged in the corner. I played 'em all except Getaway, which I couldn't get to accept any quarters. Shadow and Fish Tales were either sluggish or just off their game. I had one good game of ATF. It was nice to play a WPT that wasn't filthy, like the one I played in California... considering Steve Ritchie designed it under protest, I didn't think it was that bad. Mars spanked me. I guess that's the reason he has that smug look on his face. I couldn't get multiball because after every ball any captured balls are returned to the trough, which made it impossible to build on previous balls. I think I've played Mousin' Around before... 1985-1990 Bally games really don't do much for me. And on TAF I got the ball stuck -- and hence the title of today's entry. Near the end of an undistinguished game, I shot the ball with the Thing flipper toward the swamp, and the ball got wedged between the upper-most spot target and the wall. I was hoping it would go into a ball search, give up, and serve another ball, but it never got past step 1. After a while I gave up, turned the machine off, and slunk away quietly.

Slow week

Not much to tell... the week has been focused on getting my daughter back to college tomorrow. That means me watching the dog a lot, which means me not working on the pinball machines a lot. But going up to Gettysburg means a stop at Pizza House, which means I'll get to see how much lower the NASCAR game has sunk.

I forgot to mention that after the Great Doctor Who Board Swap and subsequent left flipper malfunction last weekend, Eight Ball Deluxe decided to show its solidarity by having both flippers go out. I'm hoping it's just a bad connection -- EBD occasionally loses touch with the coin door, so I have to wiggle a connection on the CPU board to remember it's there -- but I haven't had the heart to look at it yet.

The parts from Great Plains showed up yesterday, but of course I haven't installed them yet.

I have to say I'm really loving the TOPcast shows. I've been powering through them, mostly while walking the dog and walking to and from my car at work. I've made it up to #35 with Barry Oursler. A lot of them are really interesting... guys who designed games that I own or really like, and guys who worked in the industry for decades. And I love it when it's inadvertently topical... like listening to Steve Ritchie talk about Spider-man the day I actually played it for the first time. Plus so far there's been interviews with either the artist or designer of all my games except Quicksilver. At the very least, it's great dog walk listening. I'll be kind of sad when I catch up to the current shows... Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and The Writer's Almanac will seem drab in comparison (yes, I am a Public Radio nerd).

Boy, there's something else pinball-related nagging at my subconscious, but I can't quite remember what it is. Well, it will come to me at a point at which I can't do anything about it...

I remember what I was going to write. Last weekend when I was tracking down the bad SCR on Quicksilver, I looked at the manual from IPDb for the schematic only to find that the manual was missing some of the diagrams. It wasn't too annoying -- I just had to dig out my copy of the manual from the basement -- but it annoyed me enough to actually do something about it. So I scanned the three pages that were missing and posted them to IPDb. We'll see if they post them.

I Fix and I Break: A Joe Entropy Adventure

This was a busy little pinball weekend. Buoyed by my success with EBD, I launched myself into checking the lights on Paragon. This involved clearing off Paragon and plugging it in, because it is a dumping ground for my family's stuff and shocks them without mercy. So I put it into the lamp test, and noticed that it can barely light all the lamps... I had to turn out the lights in the basement just so I could see which lamps were out. It turns out Paragon was in good shape, lamp-wise... there were a few burned out bulbs, but that was it. I don't know whether to be overjoyed or disappointed that I didn't get to use my new-found SCR replacin' skillz. I'll opt for the former. A little research indicated that dim lamps probably mean a bad bridge rectifier on the power board.

Next I pulled the lamp driver board out of Quicksilver... I was reasonably certain there would be at least one bad SCR on there, since there were several lights that have resisted bulb changes. While my wife watched the Doctor Who one last time (she wanted to watch the Pop-up Video-style comments), I tested the SCRs and found one bad one. I wasn't sure what it was -- not only is the lamp driver schematic mislabeled as belonging to Cheetah in the manual, it says that the left and right spinner lamps use the same pin. I replaced the bad SCR and tested the game, and the broken lamp was the left spinner, which I kind of suspected it was. QS also had a bunch of stuff on it which I didn't feel like clearing off, so bulb replacement will have to wait.

Finally last night was Doctor Who and the CPU of Death. I posted again on rgp about the remaining English-guy CPU -- the one which won't boot if J202 is plugged in -- and got a response to try reseating the ASIC chip, because that can solve a lot of seemingly random problems. I tried it and by gosh did it work much better than I ever could have dreamed! The game booted and almost entirely worked. Unfortunately -- there's almost always one of those, isn't there? -- while plugging and unplugging cables I broke off one of the pins from J202. >:( I think/hope that it's the pin that takes care of the left flippers, because that's what didn't work. It was nice, though, to hit all of the switches that were out on the other CPU and have them do something.

After these exciting pinball adventures, I put in a Great Plains Electronics order. I realized at work today that I ordered something for four of my five games (which I really don't feel is an accomplishment): A chip to fix the blanking problem on Black Knight, SCRs for EBD, a bridge rectifier for Paragon, and a new plug for J202 on DW. Sheesh.

While I was waiting for someone to call me back, I glanced at the list of local pingames and noticed that a place near my house had a brand-new Spider-man! Ignoring my family's needs, I toddled right over to the Sole d'Italia restaurant to give it a go. I had fun, but I didn't love it. The playfield is kind of like the bastard love-child of Medieval Madness and Attack from Mars. The thing I had the biggest problem with was fighting the villains like Venom or Doctor Octopus... I knew that by hitting the shots I could start battling them, but I never figured out how to defeat them. I think I did -- I guess it was just hitting their shots repeatedly -- but I never felt like I finished fighting them, as opposed to Spider-man's bastard love-parents, where you can easily tell when you've complete an objective. I got a bunch of replays, and ended up leaving a matched credit on the game because it was getting late and I had to walk the dog. I also found a quarter on the ground, so instead of 40 cents per game, it really cost me only 35 cents per game. Yoink!

But really, the best thing about playing Spider-man is that it was the first time in a while or possibly ever where I've played a completely working, virtually brand new machine. It was pretty sweet. And for fun, I played a game in Spanish, since you get the chance to choose your language when you press start. El yoinko mas bueno!

And on a slightly anti-climactic note, I realized while I was walking the dog and listening to TOPcast on the iPod tonight that I really need to switch to external batteries on all of my games. I don't think I've ever changed the batteries on Quicksilver, and I've had that game for over 20 years (to be fair, the service guy might have done it, but that was in 1995). The potential for leaking battery mayhem is great, so I need to make that a priority.

But I digress...

First I have to start off with the eBay Loser of the Week. This guy posted a set of Centaur plastics that were "New NOS (Used)". The title of the auction included New and NOS but strangely enough not used. And these things are warped, a few are cracked, and the upper left one is in three pieces. So I send him an email saying that (imo) New, NOS, and Used are three different things. He replies and says his bad and he's updated the auction. Now it just says NOS (Used). So I send him another email, and then he relists it without the NOS. Ultimately, I think he was just careless because he has other items that he's selling that are actually NOS. My wife the conspiracy theorist believes that he was hoping to get away with it. Anyway, I wouldn't buy from him anyway because he's charging $15 for $8 worth of shipping, so the minimum price is $40, and I can get a brand new set from IL Pinball for $100+shipping.

Speaking of Wall of Voodoo (which we were, really) right after I wrote the WOV stuff, a guy at work pointed out that Stan Ridgway, the WOV lead singer, was doing a 25th anniversary of Call of the West tour and was in town on the 2nd. My wife and I were totally there. It was mostly empty... for the whole show, I doubt there were more than 10 people in the balcony and maybe 40 on the floor (compared with when we saw The Residents at the same place, which was a lot more crowded). But it was a great show. He played about half WOV songs and half solo songs. It was pretty cool... a nice nostalgic rush. They also had copies of WOV's first album on CD for $15, which go for $50 on eBay.

But I digress, so back to pinball: I have finally leveled up my soldering skills to introductory board level! I replaced the little things that drive the lamps in Eight Ball Deluxe on the Lamp Driver Board. About a week ago while my wife and I watched an old Tom Baker Doctor Who on DVD I pulled out the components -- I think they're SCRs -- that failed the continuity test and correspond to lights on the playfield that don't work. I sucked the solder out of the holes (I had inexplicably lost my solder sucker, so I had to buy a new one from Radio Shack, which I think is better than my old one anyway). Then last night while we watched the commentary on said Doctor Who -- it was the last episode with Sarah Jane Smith in it, which I'd gotten a hankerin' to watch after the Sarah Jane episode of the new Doctor Who... and the Doctor totally didn't leave K-9 with her, he didn't even get K-9 until he was with Leela, even my pathetic neurons remembered that!... but I digress -- I soldered new SCRs in. I only had one size... I got some of what I thought were the bigger ones at Pinball Wizards, but I don't think they're the right kind (and like a dumbass, I paid like $2 a piece for them, and Great Plains sells them for .55!). Anyway, I plugged the board back in, and now all the lamps driven by SCRs that I replaced work great! Mostly they were all but two of the 9-15 target lights. My next job is to test the SCRs on the other two games of that ilk, Paragon and Quicksilver, order enough parts from Great Plains, and solder some more.

My new favorite comic strip these days is Lio. It's reminds me of the Addams Family in that it's weird, creepy, and morbid, but incredibly funny. And it's so much better and more authentic than the generally lame Addams Family tribute by the Non Sequitur guy, The Gravesytes (which is almost exactly like the Addams Family except that it's usually not funny and, like just about every other Non Sequitur strip, it's just a vehicle for the writer's cynicism and bitterness).

But I digress... new arrivals from eBay -- and I thought I'd written about these, but I guess not -- are a set of Xenon drop targets with memory that I can use for Centaur, which were about $30 with shipping. I need to get new 1-4 targets from PBR, but that can wait. I also got an incomplete set of Eight Ball plastics for the playfield for $20
w/shipping. Without realizing it, the set had all the ones on my playfield that were broken or missing, plus I have a few extras to sell.

Through random Internet searching, I found that the guys who put out the Gottlieb Pinball Hall of Fame are putting out a version for Williams in October, just in time for my birthday! The game list is pretty good -- Gorgar, Pinbot, Funhouse, Black Knight, Space Shuttle, Whirlwind, Firepower & Taxi -- and it's only $15. I think there might also be two hidden tables, because the descriptions for the other platforms include two more games, Jive Time & Sorcerer.

But I digress...

July: Very uneventful month

So let's write about it!

Since giving up on the cash 'n' carry thing, I've actually been spending my family's money quite liberally. I bought new targets from PBR for the Centaur target banks I have (the inlines and ORBS). I bought a plastic and two bumper caps for Mr. & Mrs Pac-man from a guy on Mr. Pinball. I got a desoldering tool so I can make my board repairs, because I can't find my old one. A couple more purchases are in the pipeline, but I'll wait until they actually arrive before I blog 'em.

But the big purchase at $112 was a parts tumbler. It's a Dillion CV-500, actually made for cleaning bullet casings or something... who cares, I hate guns anyway. My old tumbler was a rock tumbler that worked pretty well, but was tiny. This is a lot bigger -- not big enough to hold my largest parts, but still plenty big. It was waiting for me when I came back from the Anime con -- it was delivered on the same day as Deathly Hallows. So I loaded it up with some corn cob media and dumped some parts in and have been polishing those shiny bastards ever since. It's been running almost continuously for a week, so today I shut it off for a break. I'll need to shine up some parts I want to sell, like some of the Fathom target assemblies.

Other than that, things have been all quiet on the pinball front. I've been listening to TOPCasts... a lot of them are interesting, a lot of the guests are nice, a few come off as jerks. I guess he abandoned the tech shows and focused on the interviews... they kind of function as an oral history of pinball, especially when he has legends like Alvin Gottlieb showing up. I tried listening to tonight's interview with Margaret Hudson -- after all, I've been staring at her artwork a lot with all the EBD I've been playing, and she did M&MPM as well, so I was interested in what she had to say -- but she was a tough interview. Shaggy would ask her a three or four sentence question, and she would respond with a short sentence. She just didn't seem to have a lot to say... like C3PO, she was not very good at telling stories... well, not at making them interesting, anyway. My computer lost the connection at about the 20 minute mark, and I didn't make much of an effort to retrieve it. I'll listen to the podcast.

Off topic, but last night my wife went to see Transformers (her choice!). We used free tickets we had gotten when "developmentally challenged" child freaked out during a showing of Meet the Robinsons... I wasn't really bothered by it -- I had a kid, I can ignore stuff like that -- but I didn't turn down the free tix. It was just as well, because Transformers was one of the stupidest movies I've seen in a long time. I was in college when Transformers first came out, and it wasn't Japanese, so I didn't pay that much attention to it originally, but I'm a sucker for a cool robot movie (Gigantor, Iron Giant, etc.). It was my first Michael Bay movie, and now I believe what everyone says about him... and it certainly makes that song from Team America that much funnier. It was a 2 hour and 23 minute movie, but he could have trimmed an hour of dumbass expository crap from the beginning without losing anything worthwhile. I wanted to stand up and scream, "Shut the FUCK up and show us the damned fighting robots!" The robots themselves rocked pretty hard. Mid-air transformations, crazy-ass CGI stunts -- the fights were great. But any time John Turturro was on screen, I just stared at the ceiling and thought about O Brother Where Art Thou. His character was stupid, worthless, and a complete waste of screen time. Worst. John Turturro role. EVER. And if Angelina Jolie wasn't already estranged from Jon Voight, this movie would have caused it. Of the humans, I didn't have a big problem with Shia LaBeouf or the soldiers, but as for the rest, I would just as soon see them on the cutting room floor in Transformers: The Fan Edit.

I win the right to fight the Black Knight again!

Quite a lot to blather about, so let's go...

Black Knight is once again working (after a fashion)! July 4th was mostly rained out here and we were stuck at home with the dog. It ended up more festive than usual... we ordered pizza, my daughter and some of her friends hung around and played Life (the new version, which is NOT heartily endorsed by Art Linkletter, so is therefore lesser in my eyes). I ended up spending most of the evening with Black Knight and troubleshooting. Still stuck on the idea that it was a bad coil or permanently closed switch, I ended up disconnecting several suspect coils to no avail. After blowing through five 2.5 amp fuses, I gave up and threw myself on the mercy of rec.games.pinball. This time, it came through! A guy answered who had had the exact same problem two years ago with a darned helpful suggestion: Pull the fuse out, start the game, then put the fuse back in. I tried this and lo! the game worked just fine, solenoids and all. The trouble appears to be a bad blanking circuit, probably the timing chip that allows the CPU to power up the playfield once it's decided that its slave chips are all suitably obedient. Basically the signal is sent early, the playfield powers up, but (this is my reading of it) there's garbage in the solenoid line, so a bunch of them fire at once and the fuse throws itself on the grenade to prevent widespread carnage. Remove the fuse allows the CPU time to get control of itself first. This problem is either caused by the timing chip (that's what the guy's problem was) or a bad egg in the 40-pin connector between the driver board and the CPU. When I get around to doing it, I'll prolly try replacing the chip first. For now, I'm doing the lame-ass method of removing and replacing the fuse to play the game.

And how does it play? I've had better. :( The upper right flipper is very weak, and the others are a little anemic. There are a couple of burnt out lights, and my favorite settings (slightly longer hang time on the targets, 5 balls, etc.) were forgotten when the batteries died. But I did have a couple of decent balls, and since I had played EBD earlier, it was a rare night when I actually played two of my games. Cue the Hallelujah Chorus!

I have been playing a lot of Deluxe Eight Balls lately, because it's the workingest game that's not covered in pet materiel. I sucked tonight, but last weekend I had an awesome ball... I completed two balls + deluxes and was working on a third, 4X bonus or so, I would have gotten the extra ball if my settings hadn't still been hosed from the MPU board's last service (I corrected them soon after), and I discovered that if you go long enough it starts making a whirring background noise instead of the usual chew chew chew chew chew. I got the high score, which was only about 2 mil. If I had a video of it, I would have posted it on YouTube, that's how good it was.

We got out of work early on Tuesday, so I took a detour to Beltway Chevron for a few games of Funhouse. I did OK... Rudy's eyes are open now, but the right one wanders like a lazy eye. At one point it rolled into the back of his head, which was kinda weird. But it was fun.

Also on the Fourth, I powered up Doctor Who to play a game despite the missing column, and found the playfield dead. Now that I think about it, it's probably that F105 fuse or whatever, but at the time -- I had just given up on BK in disgust -- I wasn't thinking that clearly.

I was poking around the Marvin3m repair site and found my latest obsession: TOPCast, the This Old Pinball Internet radio show and podcast by Clay/Shaggy. Clearly modeled on Car Talk, it features call in trouble-shooting, news, and interviews. I powered through 5 episodes on July 3-4 alone. The most interesting interview so far was with Tim Arnold. My impression of him in previous interviews I've read was that he was kind of a dick, and now I still think he's a dick, but at least he's an interesting one. His stories about building his business and collection and the Pinball Hall of Fame are fascinating, and he mentioned some interesting tech tips like replacing incandescent feature lamps with LEDs. The show is often hard to understand and amateurish, but I enjoy it immensely. I was kind of sad that my BK problem was solved by rgp, or I would be tempted to call in.

Man, I would love to go to the Pinball Hall of Fame. We're just not Las Vegas people... I think about going some time when I go visit my dad, but Las Vegas is a long, hard six hour drive across the desert on Interstate 15... and the Wall of Voodoo song is only 3 minutes, which leaves 5 hours and 57 minutes to fill (both ways!). It's hard, because I'm usually out there to visit him for a week, and a trip to Sin City would be 3 days minimum. But Tim Arnold's not getting any younger either...

I tried calling PBR on Monday to buy drop targets for Centaur, but they were closed for the week. I thought I would explode with frustration, but it had pretty much wandered into the back of my mind by Tuesday night. I pulled parts I knew I would need for Centaur from Skateball, Fathom, and one or two from Black Jack. I've been disassembling the target banks and throwing them in the dishwasher, and at some point I'll give them a final cleaning and reassemble them. I also washed Skateball's apron and ball launch guide, and found out that paint doesn't stick to metal parts so well. ^_^; Well, if I use them I'll have to repaint them anyway.

Here's something that made me simmer with impotent rage: About a week before I bought the Centaur playfield, there were a bunch of target assemblies on eBay, including a four target bank with memory, exactly what I need for the 1-4 targets. It went for like 11 bucks, too.

That looks like about all I've got to write about for now. I don't know how much pin work I'll be able to do, as we're starting to ramp up for the trip to Otakon in two weeks. My daughter invited four friends to stay in our hotel room... she insists she told me but I have recollection of it, Senator. Seven in a room reminds me of when my friends and I went to the 1983 Baltimore Worldcon, and I'm pretty sure we stayed in that very same hotel. We probably had 6 or 8 in the room for that, but I could sleep on the floor a lot easier when I was 21-ish. Well, the good thing about being the only 40-somethings in a room of 18-20 y.o.'s is my wife and I always get the bed!

Holy crap, Art Linkletter is still alive. That guy's a rock. Old people are funny... they say the damnedest things, after all.

OK, adding the On Interstate 15 link made me search for Wall of Voodoo links, and I found a MySpace page that played Call of the West. And damn if I don't still remember ALL the words to that song, even the spoken word portion at the end. Even after 25 years WOV is still my favorite band...