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First, another fan-gush for Wizard of OZ... just read about+saw the playfield pic on Pinball News, and it looks pretty darn cool. Definitely a welcome departure from the current generation of Stern "make this shot three times to start a mode" design philosophy... not that I dislike the last couple of years of Stern games, but seeing WOZ as it develops makes me think I've been missing the variety that comes with a second pinball company.
Last Tuesday I took another day off to work on games at the museum. It turns out my timing was poor, because that happened to be the day before Mrs. Entropy's birthday -- which I also took as vacation, by the way -- but she saw me wanting to spend most of the day at the museum as an indication that I didn't want to spend time with her. How she leaped that chasm of faulty logic to arrive at her conclusion I'll never know, but I managed to smooth things over mainly by pointing out all of the times she's wandered away from me physically and mentally which I did not take as an indication that our marriage was over (such as her fanatical devotion to a zombie podcast or the recent binge of Facebook games, which she basically spent the entire month of June playing).
So, maintainin' the games: Based on my data set of two, my day-long binges seem to always involve one game that is a huge thorn in my side. This time it was Indiana Jones, on which I had my own personal pinball adventure. The problem that kicked things off was a sticky flipper, which I worked on for a while and managed to not fix. But I also looked at the test report and found that the game reported a whole bunch of switch errors on the mini-playfield. When I tested them they worked fine, but then I noticed that the diverter that sends the ball to the Path of Adventure vs the ramp was not opening all the way, which kept the ball from making it to the mpf. Taking a look, it appeared that the diverter had become disconnected from the linkage to the coil and some goofy jury-rigged solution on it. I looked up one part of the linkage on Marco and it looked fine, then spent a bunch of time trying to make the jury-rigging work until I finally gave up. Later, at home, I had the presence of mind to look up the other end of the linkage and found that what I thought was jury-rigging was the actual part, which may have broken but was reparable. So if it's still messed up on Tuesday, I have a picture of the part as it's supposed to look, so I should be able to fix it accordingly.
After that miserable failure, I moved on to another personally irritating project: Black Knight. Instead of a spinner, the museum's BK has always had a roll-under gate; this makes it somewhat re: tarded because when it lights for 2,500, a roll-under will give you two or maybe three scores, whereas a spinner will give you whole bunches. Luckily, I had a spare spinner assembly! You see, when I got my BK 10-ish years ago, it had the wrong spinner on it. So I got a correct one on eBay, but that auction was for the entire spinner assembly and I just needed the thing that did the spinning. Synchronicity! So I bought a BK spinner sticker set at the former Pinball Wizards show in May and I found the spinner stuff I had bought while organizing the basement a few weeks ago. I installed everything, spent a little more time than I expected adjusting it, and at the figurative end of the day I had a Black Knight with the proper parts.
While I had BK open I decided to run it through some diagnostics because it's a little wonky. Surprisingly, the switch and solenoid tests passed, but the lamp test had some issues... but they turned out (as we can see on the right) to be strictly regimented issues, which I suppose are the best kind of issues to have. So the lamps that are out either fall in one of two columns or one row, which should make trouble shooting a little easier. But that's a job for another day.
Then there was some this and that things I did: Avatar's flipper was supposedly sticking, but I couldn't reproduce it, though I did find that the Link gate wasn't staying up... need to look into that. I tried to fix the dollar bill slot on Breakshot but to no avail. I retrieved a stuck ball in the traditional position on Guns 'n' Roses, on the plastic next to the lower pop bumper (clearly Slash was remiss in his play testing). I think that was all I did. If I ever get another full fixin' day at the museum -- and I'm unlikely to, at least in its current location -- I'll have to try not to get stuck on one particular game to the exclusion of all others. o_O;
But first, the coolest news of all: The guy who operates most of the games at our league just sent an email that he's putting a down-payment on a Wizard of Oz and is going to put it on location at one of the league joints when it comes out in December (ish). Another guy in our league is buying one, but he lives about 2 hours away from me, so it will be nice to have one a little closer.
So I went to the museum on Tuesday for my volunteer stint and got a ker-app load of stuff done, including a bunch of interesting fixes.
First, I reattached the subway ramp to Star Trek: The Next Generation, which has been quite the thorn in my side (and probably warrants its own post). Spoiler alert: One of the divertors broke off and a fixer in my league welded it back together for me. Anyway, it worked great. The only things really remaining were the right flipper wouldn't hold and the spinner didn't work -- very annoying for me, because Warp 9 is my new favorite mode in ST -- and probably caused by the same thing since the spinner is part of the flipper switch circuit. A quick look showed that a wire was dangling off the right flipper coil, so I quickly re-soldered it and that fixed both problems. Star Trek is now working for the first time in at least a month!
Next the Black Knight challenged me. It made annoying sounds during attract mode and would not eject balls when the game was over, which if there were no balls in the plunger trough kept you from starting a new game. The Internet told me that the sound problem was most likely an issue with the connection from the sound board to the CPU, so a quick un/re-plug job fixed it for now. I wasn't able to reproduce the ball restart problem, so hopefully that was a temporary problem (the Internet has an answer for that too, resetting the game to factory settings, so we'll keep that tucked away until we need it). It's working well enough for now, but it has a lot of switches and lamps out which will be annoying to fix.
Since WHO dunnit was right next to BK I decided to fix a problem that's annoyed ME, the center targets not working. I opened it up and found that the screws holding the target bank were loose in the playfield, so the cam that raises and lowers the targets had come out of the slot, and pulled a wire from one of the targets for good measure. Soldered that and filled the screw holes with wood putty. After it dried I reattached the target bank, and now it works great! It has some switch and lamp problems too, but those are for another day.
Game Four was a special request: A guy from my league who hangs out at the museum a lot mentioned that the extra ball/buy in button didn't work on Twilight Zone. Opened up the game and found that the button was loose in its housing, so I just snapped it snugly in and it worked. While I was there I re-glued one of the goofy after-market toys that the museum curator loves to put on his games -- this isn't the Smithsonian, after all. It's a TV that's supposed to show video clips from the show, and it doesn't even work (but that's not my problem). I just re-glued it to keep it from interfering with the game.
The final game fix of the night was Guns N' Roses, which I've grown to like lately... like a lot of DE/Sega games, I've found it grows on me. But I've noticed that the Guns ramp has stopped scoring. It turns out the plug on the upper switch had come out (are you sensing a pattern here?) and just had to be re-plugged in, though because of the location of the switch I had to get my daughter to hold up the playfield while I reached around and reconnected it. During testing I scored a Jackpot on said ramp. Yay for me!
And that was my exciting day. I took next Tuesday off so I could go in and work on games for the whole day, which I did once before and had a huge amount of fun doing. And seeing a variety of issues is really helping me stretch my repair muscles more than they've been stretched before. I heartily recommend volunteering to fix pins at your local establishment.
A few months ago I put in an application to volunteer to fix games at the National Pinball Museum. I interviewed with my daughter, then museum director David Silverman asked me a few questions, then I got the job. So for the past couple of months I come in after work on Tuesdays and fix games.
There's a guy that fixes the games, but from what I've seen he fixes games like an operator fixes games -- so if the ball doesn't register when you shoot it into Rudy's mouth, so what? You can still play it. That's what the ball search is for. I try to get the games into the kind of condition I want them in when I play them.
At first I came in figuring I'd use the museum's tools, but with the exception of a very nice soldering iron the museum's tools are either terrible or missing (for example: There are I think three sets of socket wrenches on the shelf, but not one driver that works with any of them). So next week I brought in my tool box. Then I discovered that the museum also didn't have a partiuclarly good collection of spare parts. So next week I brought in my parts box. Now I just have a luggage cart with 4 tool/parts boxes on it, plus my laptop which I've loaded up with manuals and reference. If I had infinite time and patience, I would probably organize the tool area into something that people could actually use.
Typically of any collection of games, every game that needs fixing is a rabbit hole that you just keep falling into. So for example, Funhouse. It had two problems listed: Rudy's mouth and the P target didn't work. I also wanted to fix something I thought was kind of stupid: David loves to put add-ons in his game, and in Funhouse he'd attached a promotional plastic to the left slingshot. But he'd attached it in such a way that the ball would sometimes hit it.
The P target was easy: One of the wires had broken off, so I resoldered it. Rudy's mouth was also pretty simple: Of the 6 screws holding the kicker and Rudy's head to the playfield, there were only two installed, which caused the kicker to droop so the switch wouldn't close when the ball was in it. A quick look in the cabinet turned up the other 4 screws, so I screwed them in. Problem solved. Although I wanted desperately to remove the promo plastic, instead I just raised it up so the ball wouldn't interfere with it.
While I was digging around in the cabinet for the screws, I found an envelope. Inside were a set of Cliffy Protectors that David had ordered almost 10 years ago and never installed. So I installed the hole protector (the ramp protectors were a lot more involved).
Finally, I noticed that the mylar on the playfield was bubbling up, especially around the clock inserts. Not much I could do about that, so I had to leave it.
When all was said and done, the game was pretty much working correctly. It didn't even have a credit dot! I pointed this out to my daughter, and she didn't realize what the credit dot was. So a few days later she asked their tech about it, and he said that the credit dot doesn't necessarily mean the game is broken, because it can come on if someone hasn't hit a particular switch for a while (!!!). So when my daughter told me that, my first thought was: Yeah, dumbass, so why don't you hit that switch and see if it still works? Like I said, he fixes games like an operator.
Tonight was an extra big night: I spent 4 hours in the trenches. The autoplunger wasn't working on Guns 'n' Roses, which turned out to be a blown fuse (and of course, that particular fuse wasn't in the fuse box, but luckily I found one sitting on a work table), and while I was in there I replaced a bunch of burned out bulbs. Next I worked on Indiana Jones, which was ejecting two balls into the plunger lane. I was worried that it was a bad opto board, but the switch test showed that the trough switches were working fine. A little more poking around showed that there was a ball in the idol lock, for a total of 7 balls in a six ball game. Removing one ball fixed that problem.
The left flipper on Jurassic Park wasn't working, and a quick inspection showed that a ball was trapped in the raptor kicker (this has happened before). The flipper had basically fallen apart, so I just fixed the nut and screw out of the cabinet and reassembled it. I freed the ball and repositioned the kicker, hopefully for good. I also installed a set of Cliffy Protectors which I had ordered. Nice!
The lockdown bar on Stargate didn't close, and they had taped the door closed. Turns out the bar just needs to be whacked down smartly before it would close. I also retrieved the lock pieces from the cabinet and put it back together.
Lights Camera Action also had a non-working left flipper, and the problem was pretty much the same as Jurassic Park, but in this case the linkage had fallen apart and I couldn't fix it without a new one. Since it was getting late, I noted it on the fixit list and moved on to the last game, Barb Wire. Balls keep getting stuck in the Retinal Scanner, and the problem turned out to be a flaky connection to the kicker. I noted that it should probably be resoldered.
And other than being particular long, that was my day fixing games at the NPM. There were a few more that I wish I was able to get to (I also bought a protector for Star Trek TNG and newer Funhouse protectors which I wish I could have installed, and I'd really like to tear into Star Trek and fix a bunch of crap on it). Ideally the museum won't close for good next Monday so I'll have another opportunity to finally get more of those games tuned up. Of course, what would be best would be if I could just take a game home every few weeks, give it some TLC and care for it like a game should be cared for, then return it to the museum.
I am a nut for to-do lists, so much so that I save them. Here are a couple of items from the last months:
Christmas 2010 - Blog
Feb 2011 - Update blog
3/4/11 - blog!
5/6/11 - start bloggin
Etc. Unfortunately, blogging is always harder than not blogging, and the longer you don't blog the larger the backlog of things to write about becomes... I'm reminded of a diary that I kept religiously in the early 80's that eventually became a many pages long to-do list of things to write about, until finally I got to the point where I couldn't remember what my cryptic comments meant.
But there comes a time in a boy's life when he has to shit or get off the pot... so be prepared for me to take a massive dump on you, my loyal readers.
Here's what I've done lo, these many months, in no particular order:
- Got Terminator 2 up and running, even to the point of it making its public debut
- Loaned two games out for a league party
- Did not make the league playoffs for the first time since I started
- Participated in the Pinburgh tournament against some of the best players in the world, and came in ninth (yeah, you heard me... Ninth, bitches!)
- Added mapping to the Pinball Locator
- Got my league back to reporting our stats to the World Pinball Ranking website
- Was solicited to help bring the PARS rating system back to life
- Organized my basement to the point where I could actually get to most of my games, but then a bunch of stuff happened that made it all fall apart
- Attended the opening of the National Pinball Museum in December, which my daughter was instrumental in getting to happen
- Started volunteering to help fix games at the National Pinball Museum, which is fun and educational
- Mourned the possible closing of the National Pinball Museum in July, which my daughter didn't really have much to do with
- Got a crapload of new playfields for my playfield project, which I have non-bindingly vowed will move forward this year
And there's probably a bunch of other junk which I can't remember. In the next few days/weeks/months I'll probably write about one or more of these things and a few more besides.
So, to subtly reference the massive dump metaphor one last time: Let's get a move on.
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).
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.
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.
Just checked the PAPA scores, and it turns out there was a miscoded entry which was re-entered and dumped me down to one below last year's rank. It's sad; oh, so sad.
Or blogged about it, for that matter. It's because I've been a busy little barracora lately, and for a change it's mostly pinball related.
My goal was to finish my first major update to the Pinball Locator before I went to PAPA, and gosh darn it I did, by about 2 days. I reformatted the database to make it easier to wrangle, point-coded about 80% of the locations and added a distance search, revamped the add and edit functions to make them faster and easier to use, added a search by count of games by location, and I carry the search parameters around so you can refine your search easier & you can return from an add or edit to your previous search and see your updates immediately. And since the heavy lifting is out of the way, I can now easily add much smaller features and not go another 2 months without an update... or at least not for a while, anyway. Reaction so far has been positive... some people pointed out data errors, which I fixed last night. And there are a few bugs... the game count doesn't recalculate properly and if you edit the last item in a search you won't return to that item when you're done. I should be able to fix those today or tomorrow.
And then I went to PAPA on Friday. This time, Mrs. Entropy went with me, which helped a lot on the hell-ride coming back. My stated goal was to defend and exceed my mid-60's title from last year. I put in a pretty good entry that got me up to #6 in C Division, then did two crappy entries that didn't do much. I had only dropped to #9 when we left, but by the time we got home I was down to #17. Yesterday I watched as I sunk lower and lower on the list, and when I went to bed I was one below last year's place. Somebody did me a favor in the wee hours, though, and when I woke up I found that I had tied last year's ranking. I didn't exceed it, which was sad, but there's always next year.
One thing I did do better this year was know my games and what to do. I looked at the C Div games before I left and familiarized myself with the rules to a game that I didn't know (Creature from the Black Lagoon). When I got there, the first thing I did was do a practice game and scored a healthy 144 mil on a game that I used to just flail randomly at. If I had done that well in the tournament, I might have managed a healthy top 30 finish, but I couldn't get my multiball going.
What I learned this year is that next year I need to stay the whole weekend. Getting one fairly good round on Friday is fine, but you need to prune and maintain your entry with subsequent entries like you would an ornamental shrubbery. Plus you get to goof off & play pinball all weekend, not just for one day, and leaving early Sunday evening will probably make the return trip merely a purgatory ride.
Mrs. Entropy had a good time. Revenge from Mars -- her go to game -- wasn't working so well, which forced her to get out and play some others. I need to break her of the habit of double-flipping, though. She ended up having a pretty good time, and we had some chats with other league members we met there.
Sadly, the cool poster design I blogged about last month was not the default t-shirt.
My daughter, in her capacity as Assistant to the Curator of the National Pinball Museum, revealed to me that the inventory of games she's been undertaking shows that they are a little short of newer games for their pay-to-play area. I suggested she might talk to some of the big deal collectors and ask them to loan some machines to the museum. I suggested that I might be able to temporarily part with Eight Ball Deluxe and one of my DMD games (if I could get either of them working reliably). So we'll see how that plays out. By the way, I am full of good ideas for the NPM: I told Zoe last weekend that she should get some flyers to the PAPA people so they could include them with the tote bags they give out to entrants. She did and they did, so hopefully that will get the word out a little more to the heavy-duty players and the rest of us.
And finally, league: I finished in the top 4 of A Division, just barely squeaking into the playoffs. I basically need to do OK, have the person below me not have an awesome night, and have the person above me have a crappy night. I did, she did not, and he did, so I'm in. Of course, I'm competing agains two PAPA B Division finalists and an A Division competitor (#65 out of 80, but that's in frickin' A), so I'm pretty much just hoping I won't soil myself. I think I get some game picks, so I ran some preliminary numbers and I have some ideas of what to do.
Now I have to go finish cleaning the Terminator.
While I had BK open I decided to run it through some diagnostics because it's a little wonky. Surprisingly, the switch and solenoid tests passed, but the lamp test had some issues... but they turned out (as we can see on the right) to be strictly regimented issues, which I suppose are the best kind of issues to have. So the lamps that are out either fall in one of two columns or one row, which should make trouble shooting a little easier. But that's a job for another day.
