What Narcissism Means To Me

I can't take credit for the title, that's from a collection of poems by Tony Hoagland... but it is appropriate, because this blog is pretty inwardly focused.

But enough of that... let's talk about ME!

The DIA on the wall indicates a milestone... the Doctor Who parts game is now officially profitable! I saw a post on rgp from a guy who wanted a bi-directional motor board for a Cirqus Voltaire, and I had a spare one from the parts game. I asked $25+s/h, netted $24 after fees, and that pushed me $11 over the price I paid for the second DW. And I still have parts left, too... I doubt there's enough to push the DIA over 100, but one can always hope. The $11 can now go towards paying for the psychic anguish both DWs have put me through.

Other than that, it's been a pretty quiet month in the neighborhood. While I was testing the board for the CV guy, I spent a little debug time with DW. My goals were to fix the non-working upper flipper, test the U20 chip on either board, attach the Dalek, turn off the mini-playfield, which has a pretty checkered past functionally, and fix the sticking right flipper (which after a year or working fine has now returned). I turned off the mpf first, because that was easy. I was hoping the dead flipper was a loose wire or something, but no such luck... I need to do some serious diagnostics on it. Didn't test the chip. Did attach the Dalek, which careful readers will know involves plugging into different plugs than the standard set. I confirmed that the Dalek's GI board is not getting any power, and it's not getting it from the power board. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that, but it's pretty low on my overall list. I did plug in the flasher and stood the Dalek up on top so it at least looks like it's mounted. And I worked the sticking flipper a little, which usually helps it. It hangs up on the end of stroke switch, and I really don't know why... it's the same size switch as all the others, and I've tried another switch. I guess I should swap the round thing with the arm that closes the eos switch. That's definitely above the Dalek GI on my list but not a huge priority.

But that's it for the month. I think the most significant thing I did was clean up the floor around DW so I could walk there. I also rearranged the boiler room so that High Speed wasn't blocking access to the boiler... before, Lotta Fun and DW parts were next to each other and HS was in front of DW, blocking easy access to the boiler. Now they're all in a much more orderly line. Granted, LF blocks access to the fuse box, but as long as no electrical calamities befall my house, I should be OK.

TOPCast is finally back. I listened to the interview with Tim Arnold, and it made me desperately want to get out to Las Vegas. There was also a good article on the Pinball Hall of Fame in Southwest Airlines' magazine, which I saw a link to in Boing Boing. I also got eps 2 & 3 of Pins and Vids, but they just arrived yesterday and I haven't watched them yet.

I had a $50 gift certificate from Amazon so I spent it on the third volume of Aussie writer Michael Shalhoub's Pinball Compendium based on his interview on TOPCast last year. Apparently my expectations were low, because this book wow'ed me right out of the box. 300 pages, beautiful full color pages, a crapload of text, incredible detail and interviews... it's awesome. I am hard to impress -- just ask my wife -- and this book floored me. Luckily a $25 Amazon gift certificate arrived Friday so I bought the first volume, which should arrive Tuesday... that way, I can read through the history of pinball chronologically. I should get the money for volume two long before I finish the first book.

No playfield progress to speak of... on the last day of my Christmas holiday, I plopped myself down and wired up a small version of the light controller on a breadboard while watching the first season and a half of the animated Tick (of which each season has one episode missing for no discernible reason... luckily I have my pirated copy I bought off eBay a few years ago, but still...!). That was a miserable failure... no results. What I need to do now is actually debug it... test voltages and stuff. I think it was unrealistic to expect to assemble it and have it just work, especially considering my last experience with assembling electronics was in my intro to EE class 15 years ago. I also got some parts that I can use for a switch matrix -> parallel port reader, which I hope will free me from pinmame-hw's silly hacked keyboard approach to reading switches. The parts are all sitting in a box, ready for me to have a couple dog-free hours of frustrating labor.

And this final note: I've gotten a lot of pin playing in lately out in the world. I had to go in to work on New Year's Eve and they let us out early, so I blew off the family time and got in some Funhouse at the Chevron station a few miles from my house. Also played some Roller Coaster Tycoon at the place near my work, but I found on Friday that they'd replaced it with World Poker Tour. It's a super clean machine, but the right flipper is a little weak, so the left ramp is a little hard to hit. And I took my daughter's last couple of books up to her yesterday and snuck over to Pizza House for a few games of NASCAR. Coming soon: I'm thinking about a trip to John's Place, my self-imposed exile from Crabtown can end now that a statewide ban on smoking went into effect at the beginning of the year (but with my luck, it won't apply to the arcade side), and I'm thinking about doing a 3 hour tour to Pinball Parlour, where they have a whole bunch of games... but the trouble is, they're only open from 7-10 PM, so I have to drive for six hours to get in three hours of game time, and I get home at 1 AM. My wife is going out of town to visit her Dad in a few weeks, so I might do one or more of those then.

I'm always amazed at how much I have to write even when nothing happens...

Over the river and through the woods...

... assuming the river is the Delaware River, the woods are the vast scrub plains of New Jersey, and Grandmother's House is a dingy warehouse with arcade games in it.

Yesterday's acquisition was that Totem playfield I mentioned last time, from an ad on the Mr. Pinball classifieds. Yes, it was $50, but had I remembered that there was a toll booth every 150 feet north of Baltimore I probably would have had it shipped. And because we have an EZPass, I wasn't really conscious of the full amount I was paying... I'm fully expecting it to be at least another $30. ^_^; That would make this a $100+ playfield except that I plan to amortize the cost across the other two stops I made.

I left the house around 7:30 and the drive up was largely uneventful... in the festive holiday spirit, I listened to the Librivox version L. Frank Baum's Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, which my parents have in their library but I never got around to reading. I find Baum in general to be very dated, and this was no exception. With stops it took me about 4 hours. The warehouse was in the business park adjacent to Monmouth Executive Airport, which is such a busy and active part of our nation's transportation infrastructure that a wrong turn almost took me onto the tarmac. The previously mentioned dinginess was accompanied by the not unpleasant smell of old games. I paid the guy my $50, looked around at his other wares, then took off. The playfield has some wear but is mostly just dirty and looks intact. Considering it's a medium production machine that I was looking for, for $50 + some transportation costs, I think I got an OK deal.

Here ends the parts of this post that are actually about pinball. Sorry.

My next two stops were pure happenstance, since they were both within a half hour of the pinball place. I went over to the New Jersey shore and visited Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash, the comic book store owned by Kevin Smith. Based on the many craptacular comic book stores I've been in, it's pretty nice. Of course, there are a bunch of props and stuff from Kevin Smith movies, and I took pictures of it all -- my daughter is a fan and my wife and I have been sucked into listening to SModcast, the funny and generally pretty filthy podcast he does with his partner. I picked up a few Christmas presents for them at the store to fully justify my trip. Red Bank, or at least Broad Street, seemed nice... it reminded me of Melrose back in the old country, where I spent a great deal of time and money in the 80's.

Then it was up the Garden State Parkway to Metuchen, where my friend Alex and his family live. Alex is a former school- and D&D-mate whom I hadn't seen in at least 15 years. Pinblog regulars will be fascinated to know that Alex maintains that he coined the name Joe Entropy back in the day. This is disputed by me, because I thought I came up with the name. We even disagreed on Joe's address: Alex said he lived at 666 Marine St in Santa Monica, and I said he lived a few blocks over at 666 Ozone. Anyway, we goofed around for a few hours, had some good Indian food, and exchanged current information about friends and relations. They were heading out for their family Christmas in CA the next day, so I left early to give them time to pack.

The drive home kinda sucked... it was raining pretty steadily, I managed to make the same wrong turn in the opposite direction that I had made going to Alex's house (thank goodness for the GPS, or I would be in Maine by now), and couldn't find reliable sources for Vault Zero soda along the NJ Turnpike. But I made it back... 14 hours and 450 miles later, and fell asleep reading the Totem manual.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Entropy!

Yes, Christmas is coming. My daughter is home watching reruns of Who Will Be Americas Next Top Model, a show guaranteed to drive me screaming from the room. My wife is on the big computer trying to convince me that my brother, a salt-of-the-earth Catalina Island dweller, needs monogrammed towels rather than an Apple Store gift card. And I am here, a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, cluthing, covetous, old pinner.

Here is my karma, illustrated: So we picked up my daughter from college today. On the way back, my wife wants to stop at the Emmitsburg Antique Mall, a dumpy old warehouse filled with kitsch and freakish oddities the likes of which you can't imagine (ok, try this: A carved wooden statue of a naked man with a machete, holding the severed head of a man). I ask her jokingly if it's worth my time to come in and find the pinball machines. She says no pinball machines here, hon. In fact, there's probably nothing that would be of the slightest interest to you (though to be fair, she probably didn't know about the naked man/severed head statue). So I ended up walking the dog around dumpy old Emmitsburg in below 40 degree weather until I saw my daughter walking desperately in the cold, so I passed the dog on to her and went inside. I wander around for 10 minutes, and -- you may breathe easy, we have finally gotten to the point of this paragraph -- damn if I don't find the one pinball-related item in the entire place, a translite for Fire! in a light box in a booth filled with fireman fetishiana selling for $165.

Hey, here's something for the obsessive-compulsives: While getting the link to Fire!, I noticed there was a playfield detail picture that didn't look right, and after a quick search I found that it actually belongs to the older Stern game Wild Fyre. I'll send them an email about it when I get back to the big computer. Of course, if they correct the pic the link above won't work, but this one which doesn't work now should.

I bought some more stuff. A guy on Mr. Pinball was selling a bunch of interesting stuff: he was parting out a Centaur, and had a bunch of neat playfields (and a Spy Hunter... oh snap!). I immediately saw that I could snag a bunch of parts that I needed for the big ugly guy, so I put in an offer on the ball launcher and everything related to it. I also bid on the plastics, magnet, and for fun made some low- and medium-ball offers on the other playfields. We agreed on a price for the magnet ($15), couldn't come to terms on the plastics -- at $80, I thought he was charging too much for an incomplete set, as he valued OEM status much more than I did. He wanted $75 for the launcher, and I initially was going to pass on it, but decided that it is a lot of parts & fabricating one was going to be a nightmare and accepted his price. They arrived last weekend, so now I pretty much have everything I need sans plastics to put together the playfield. I probably won't get to it for a while, but at least it's all there for when I need it.

I think I mentioned how I put up a picture of Silverball Mania in my cube to inspire me to keep working on the playfield project. Well, it turns out that after a few weeks of staring at it, I really like the SBM artwork! Maybe not so much the wizard at the top who has just ripped my balls out and it showing them to me, but I like the metallic man and woman erupting from the central ball shooting blasts of lightning through the spinners, and the tiny wizards coiled through the ball return lanes, and the women on the outlanes swathed in ribbons of mercury symbolically lifting your ball up and into the return kicker. Well, maybe I think too much about these things, but I do really like the art.

I also have a line on a Totem playfield, which I think was also via Mr. Pinball. It's not in super-great shape, and it's a 4 hour drive to New Jersey away, but it's only $50 so I'll probably go for it. It would also be my first Gottlieb game, which I'm sure will offer its own set of challenges.

And another thing? The Speed Racer movie trailer is frickin' awesome.

The Comedy of Errors, Pinball Style

This was one of those weekends where I ignored my duties as husband and householder in favor of trying to make progress on my playfields. It was especially important that I do this, because 1) I've been obsessing about it for weeks, and 2) It is entirely possible that more playfields may show up soon, so I've got to do something to justify my love.

Our first task was relatively easy: Get the designated playfield (Silverball Mania, which I feel is thematically most appropriate) out where I could work on it. Luckily I've been cleaning up downstairs so this was sort of easy. I moved the partially deconstructed Black Jack from the TV area to the storage room and brought out SBM. Then I plopped down with my power supply and tested the lamps while I watched Beyond the Mat, a documentary about pro wrestling. I'm really not a wrestling fan -- except for a brief, heavily ironic period in the late 80's -- but I do devote a low priority background process to it when it intersects with my pop culture interests. But it's an interesting and occasionally disturbing documentary.

Anyway, so I test the GI and all the feature lamps and I don't even get a simple majority, much less a quorum. I'd say less than 15 of the lamps worked. I'm not sure if the lamps are burned out or the connection/socket/whatever is bad, but it was a poor showing. But for some reason, the bonus multipliers all lit, so I seized on that as my beachhead: My goal was to control those four lights. Originally I was going to control the SILVERBALL lights, but I think two or less of them lit on the first try, so I scaled back.

Next I had to build my interface. Pinmame-HW, which I'm basing this whole thing on (and which has gone offline for some reason), drives everything using the parallel port, so last weekend I took an old printer cable and hacked the end off of it, figuring I would just connect up the wires to stuff and be happy. In the ensuing week, however, I realized it would have been much smarter to connect the stuff to a 36 pin Centronics female plug, then plug an intact printer cable into that. heh.

But for now I'm stuck with my butchered printer cable. So on Saturday night I watched the Spider-man 3 commentary with my wife, and spent pretty much the whole time determining which pin each wire is connected to. This yielded two realizations: that I never want to beep out continuity on a 36 wire cable ever again, and the guy who played the Sandman in the movie has a very dry sense of humor that I appreciate. But I got through it with my sanity mostly intact.

Finally, it's time to get down to business. I attached some alligator clips with pins on them to the emasculated printer cable. Then I had to set up the computer which I've designated as my pin-PC, a P3/coupla-hundred junker that used to be a server at work back when 20 Gb of total drive space could be considered server material. I originally got it for free and was going to install Linux on it, but this project came along and seemed a much better use for it. So I disconnected the keyboard mouse monitor network power from my old Mac, plugged them into this one, and found out that the USB keyboard and mouse aren't supported by the OS (Win 98 if you can believe it) and it won't attach to the network, though it did the last time I started it up. feh. Found USB->PS/2 adapters were located, but I never did get the network to see things my way. But while I was a-dicking, my gaze fell on the bag containing the craptops, two laptops I got from work that I haven't used in, like, 5 years. A laptop, I reasoned, is far superior because I can bring it to the playfield rather than doing any more lugging.

For the record, I shall point out at this juncture that all of these work computers were had legitimately, given to me by IT guys who said they were too crappy even to be donated to charity.

So I pulled out my original craptop and fired it up. This is the computer on which I wrote most of my Visual Pinball tables, taking it with me on the Metro and business trips and to jury duty when VP ruled my life. I had a wash of nostalgia and played my version of Totem for old time's sake. Then I fire up Visual Basic and start looking into writing to the parallel port. Turns out you can't get there from here, and I need a DLL that I can download, but only if I can connect this computer to the Internet. Unplugging the nearest network cable (to the TVPC) I tried and failed to network a legacy computer yet again. Bright idea: Diskettes. So I download the DLL on the TVPC, put it on a diskette, attach the diskette drive to the craptop, and finally I am ready to apply for the permit to petition for a business license.

Dumping the DLL unceremoniously into the Windows System directory, I write a quick program -- here it is: vbOut 888, 15 -- that should light all the lights, plug the cable into the computer, plug the pins into the appropriate sockets for the bonus lights, run the program, and... and... and... bupkis.

So, it's troubleshooting time. Tested the parallel port: 5 V. Tested a lamp with the power supply: It works. Try again: nothing. Measure the voltage in my makeshift cable: 5 V. Measure the voltage in my makeshift cable while it's connected to the playfield: .7 V. Oho!

Now, I am by no means knowledgeable about electronics, but here's what I guess is happening: The parallel port puts out 5 V but low amps, so it can't overcome the resistance of the bulb. The much more robust current of the power supply is what's necessary.

So here we are at the conclusion of The Pinball Comedy of Errors, where it is revealed that in the Italian town of Zaccaria, the five sets of identical quintuplets, each disguised as the opposite sex, are in fact all related, except thank goodness for the ones that had actual intercourse. And now we know that I will have to build the circuit board that interfaces between the computer and the playfield, much as I wanted to postpone it as long as possible.

And now at last our play complete, we've reached our final mark;
Our tale is finally at an end, we've run and run and lost our race.
Perhaps, on your way home, someone will pass you in the dark,
And you will never know it... for they will be from outer space. Exeunt.



Man, that Shakespeare is fucking brilliant!

One step forward and *gasp* no steps back

Tonight the computer is doggin' pretty bad, as I'm doing a much needed full backup of the hard drive. Having read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, I know the importance of having a current backup. And plenty of whuffie.

Sadly, I did not get much pin done over the long Thanksgiving weekend. My brother Dave Entropy came up for a few days, so I had to attend to my fraternal duties... these mainly consisted of following him around and assisting while he fixed stuff around the house. He patched the bathroom wall that he started two and a half years ago (that I was supposed to finish), installed most of the knobs on our bathroom and dining room cupboards and drawers, and shored up a cabinet that had been hanging precariously but my wife was scared of fixing because she was afraid of missing the stud in the wall. Anyway, no pin work for the first two days.

Boy, this backup is pissing me off.

The big breakthrough came Saturday night, when I was casting about for a quick project that I could do while watching Pins and Vids Volume 1, which I got a few days ago. I decided to actually do something with my playfields: I did a proof of concept to make sure I could light a lamp. This probably doesn't seem like a big deal, but I've been obsessing about it for months, since this is one of the cornerstones of my whole project. So I broke out the PC power supply -- that was easy, since I hadn't put it away from with my other brother Paul Entropy was here soldering for me (I'm kind of a passive consumer of my brothers' expertise) -- then identified and labeled the plugs, read the Paragon manual to figure out which pins were most likely to provide the desired results, and got connecting with Black Jack, which has been sitting around in the TV area for a while. First I plugged into the GI (I connected A2J3-10 to 5 volts and A2J3-1 to ground) and was disappointed when nothing like up... this was short-lived when I realized that I had taken all the GI bulbs out. So I plugged a bulb in and it lit up! This was much needed progress. Next I connected A2J3-6 to 5 volts and A5J1-1 to ground and that lit a feature lamp. I tried pin 2 and that lit up the 2000 bonus lamp (that's the picture), and did a few more until the flush of stuff actually working wore off. Then I dragged my wife downstairs so she could see it, though the vast import was lost on her.

This morning I gave a lot of thought to getting the switch matrix to work. My problem with the switch matrix as I mentally plan things out is one of differentiation. For example, say you have a 2 x 2 switch matrix. If switch 1 is active, then row 1 column 1 forms a circuit and you get a result. Then suppose switch 4 activates, and row 2 column 2 forms a circuit. If both are active, how can you tell that it's switches 1 and 4, and not switches 2 and 3? I figured that in 30 years of solid state pinball design somebody had figured out the answer to this problem. Well, some research into the switch matrix -- namely, reading the same article in two places (here's one at Coin-op Cauldron, fine fixer of pin boards) -- seems to indicate that the CPU doesn't look at the entire matrix all at once, but rather sends a pulse to each row and looks for results from the columns. So in my simplified matrix above, it would send a pulse through row 1 and get a result from column 1, then send a pulse through row 2 and get a result from column 2; this would yield the correct switches with no ambiguity. That set my mind at ease. Then I played a bunch of Eight Ball Deluxe games to celebrate.

And here is your moment of Zen: On the Pins and Vids video, they have some footage of the Pinball Wizards show... hey, what the heck! Who's that bald freak playing Game Show? And why couldn't they have filmed me playing a better game? *exasperated sigh*

What was I thinking? and other stories

This turned out to be a good weekend for eBayin', but kind of a bad weekend for buying things I don't need that I don't have space for. I got two games this weekend. (*rolleyes*)

Machine #1 is at least on-message, though I think I paid too much for it -- not in a heat-of-the-moment last minute panic way, but a cool, rational, I- am- making- a-conscious -decision - to- pay- this- much way. This is a High Speed, a game which showed up in the UCLA arcade just after I dropped out, but which spanks me mercilessly because I have a hard time making vertical flipper shots. I realized while driving to pick it up that it's my fifth Steve Ritchie game. It's not a working machine... it was intended for the playfield project, which lately I've been anticipating starting while not actually doing so. Here's the thinking: I get a High Speed playfield, albeit one that is worn; it has a transformer and power driver board, which if working will provide valuable voltages; and I can sell the backglass and spare boards, which hopefully I can somehow demonstrate are working or not too battery acid damaged to the eBay community. Now, whether that warrants paying $330+gas, I dunno. That turned out to be a convenient use for the $300 that my Dad gave me for Christmas. Pickup went really smoothly... I drove up to the guy's house in Hagerstown, MD, which was about 100 miles round trip. The guy looked like he did a lot of pinball fixing up and had a couple of interesting games. I surmise that he was a bachelor, because his house was kind of a mess and the whole downstairs was pretty much devoted to game repair. The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful.

Machine #2 was a total lark, a Bingo game that sold for $5.50 because something had been dropped on it, breaking the backglass and head. I bid on it thinking it was 2 hours away, but it was in fact three. So it was $5.50 plus $60 in gas and food. :P I set off this morning and the drive up was pleasant... it was up near Reading PA, and I passed through Lancaster and saw Amish buggies on the side roads. I was listening to my daughter's old audio book of Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace, which is better than the movie but much in the same way a firm, solid turd is better than bloody explosive diarrhea. And it was diarrhea that I was expecting to be good, too, so it's bloody explosive disappointing diarrhea. I remember sitting in the theater opening day in 1999 -- I'd taken the day off work and watched all three of the first Star Wars movies, though I had to fast-forward through a lot of Jedi because I ran out of time -- and at some point while they were being chased by the giant fish I realized that this was not the Star Wars movie I'd waited 16 years for... actually 19 years, since Jedi wasn't the movie I'd waited 3 years for back in 1983. And it just never got much better, either. My daughter loved it, but she was only 11 at the time.

Sorry, that was so totally off topic.

It was a very drab, rainy autumn day, and it started snowing about the time I arrived. It turns out the guy's house was also Mindgate Hypnosis, though I don't know if the guy or his wife was the hypnotist. He was helping another guy who apparently had gotten a refrigerator from him, which was lucky because the other guy had a hand truck which made getting the game up the steep basement steps across the dogshit strewn lawn and into my car in the light snow a lot easier. I had been teetering on the edge of thinking it was a huge mistake until I saw it, and I knew that the Patron Saint of Lost Causes, which according to the Wikipedia is Saint Rita of Cascia (also Saint Jude, but he's for lost and desperate causes, whereas Rita is for lost and impossible causes. I didn't feel this was a desperate situation, so Rita wins. She's also the saint of sickness, wounds, marital problems, abuse, mothers, and [unofficially] baseball). I still don't know if I can do anything with it, but I guess we'll see.

The first -- and really only for now -- order of business was to identify it. A few minutes with imdb and the heretofore unknown Bingo Pinballs site showed that we have a Bally Lotta Fun from 1959... which my wife pointed out was the year she was born, and imdb says Bally released Lotta Fun two weeks after her mother released her, so that's kind of cool. Looking at the game, the playfield looks OK, most of the wood could probably use refinishing, and the cabinet has been painted over. It's just one of those crazy impulse buys that I have no idea when I will be able to work on it.

I wonder if there's some kind of 12-step program for people like me...

Suck post

Not much to say and I'm tired & sick, so this will be short.

One of the interesting eBay auctions just went off a few minutes ago... it was an NOS Centaur playfield with some of the parts attached to it, and the parts just happened to be all the parts that I needed. My max bid was in the low $400s, and it went for almost twice that. Still, there are more of those Winter crazy auctions coming up, so there will be plenty of things for me to spend my money on.

I've started this thing where I have to do a certain amount of cleaning, long-term projects, and pinball work each weekend. I had to drive my daughter back to college on Sunday, so that kind of messed things up, but I did do my pinball work. I replaced the chattering upper right flipper on Paragon, which went well. If you recall, I had two Bally flipper coils that I bought a few years ago... when I was in Los Angeles, a friend drove me past what was then the storefront for PJ's Pinball shop, which eventually became PJ's Pinball Museum. At the time it was more of a repair shop, though. Anyway, I came back either a few days or the next time I was out with my dad and PJ was actually there. We talked for a while, I looked around and drooled a lot, he let me play a game or two, and he made me feel better by telling me that sometimes Steve Young made him feel like an idiot, too. Then I was casting about for something I could buy, and I thought about the chattering flipper on Paragon, so I got two coils from him -- in classic Joe Entropy fashion, I bought two in case I messed one up -- this may have pre-dated my involvement with Eight Ball Deluxe, or maybe it was before EBD was sufficiently working. Anyway, I used one of the coils on EBD a few months ago, and now I finally replaced the one on Paragon. Man, it's a lot easier to play when you have a decent chance of catching the ball on the flipper.

Oh, while I was in Gettysburg I stopped in and played a few NASCAR games. Every time I play, more stuff is not working. I've still got the grand champion and 3rd place score, though. heh

I'm really getting antsy to start doing some preliminary tests on the playfield project... so much so that I just sent a picture of Silverball Mania, which will probably be the first playfield I try to get working, to work to hang in my cube. I post it on the wall so I see it almost every time I turn away from my computer... this is supposed to inspire me to work on the game in my off hours. Previously I've posted Doctor Who & Black Knight, and I got both of those into playable shape, so I have high hopes that this will work with SBM as well.