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Playfields, of course!
I could not resist the urge and ended up getting an unpopulated Funhouse on eBay. Of course, "unpopulated" here means "virtually impossible to complete without throwing more money than a new game would cost", but as usual I couldn't resist. It's in surprisingly good condition... a few minor wear spots, but mostly just grimy. And unpopulated.
So while I'm wondering how I'm ever going to get the parts for this, a guy from Romania who posts regularly on Mr. Pinball classifieds mentioned he had a bunch of parts from a Funhouse that he parted out. So I asked for a few parts, we haggled a bit, and we completed a sale. I got the wiring harness, the two plastics with lights, the clock and gangway light boards, and Rudy hideout and trapdoor mechanisms. Obviously the real money pits will be Rudy and the ramps, but this is a good start. And I can probably repurpose a bunch of the Doctor Who parts (like slingshots, bumpers, ball trough) for this. Let's put it this way: Things could be worse.
Hey, here's an interesting fact about Funhouse that I could only find out by looking at an unpopulated playfield: There's an Interstate 70 shield and the phrase "Feel the Power" in the pretty much hidden upper right corner, obviously a reference to Whirlwind!
And then another fine eBayer posted a populated (*shudder*) Centaur. It was not in as good a shape as mine, but it was fully populated (*shudder*). Resistance was pretty much futile and it ended around 10 AM on a weekday, so I bid strategically and won. 
As you can see, somebody tried and failed to touch it up, it's missing its plastics, I don't think it has correct targets, and if you look carefully at the wiring harness, all of the plugs have been cut off (the auction said it was missing one, but I think that was an honest mistake... it is completely emasculated). Certainly less of a challenge than the unpopulated playfield, so I took the path of least resistance. The current plan is to scan the nice playfield so I can attempt to touch up this one, then sell the nice one on eBay. I've already started selling the Centaur parts I got, and it looks like they're selling for a pathetic fraction of what I paid for them... desperation always up the price of anything. We'll have a full report on that later.
After a few unsatisfactory eBay auctions for the plastics, I bought a new set from Illinois Pinball for $100 bucks. They are super nice, and since I don't care about NOS or original parts, they will no doubt make this game look a lot nicer.
What does this mean for the bottom line? Well, I owe the family almost $1000. That's a little extreme for a guy who's supposed to manage on $20 per paycheck and has already spent his bonus and tax refund.
Well, help is on the way, because the start of Spring means the start of eBay season. In addition to the Centaur parts, I'm also selling the boards and stuff from High Speed, which so far have attracted lots of watchers and a few bids.
The coolest thing was as I was testing everything the High Speed parts, the one thing that worked great was one (and only one) of the displays. Since I don't have another System 11 game, I plugged the displays into my Black Knight to see if they would work. The one that did was one of the two alphanumeric displays, which I found were plug compatible with the plain old numeric displays less the extra segments. Also, the player 4 plug is situated so you can attach the 26 pin cable to it with the 6 extra sockets hanging off the end. The picture on the right is what I got.
Well, knowing it was working meant I had to come up with a hair-brained scheme to test the other segments. My first attempts at using wires to jumper between the connector and the 6 sockets didn't go anywhere... I had a pretty good idea of where things had to go by reading the schematic, but I had to get everything there.
My bright idea was to run wires from the segment plugs from player 3 to the new segments in the 26 pin plug. The six new pins were easy to find, but it turns out that the unused pin 5 in numeric world is used for a segment on Planet Alpha. 
As you can see on the right, it looks half-assed but derned if it didn't work like a charm. Whatever did in the other displays -- probably normal outgassing, but who knows -- sure didn't affect this display. It looks nicer than most of mine. And the proof is in the eBay pudding, because this item has the most watchers I've had in a while -- 32 after 4 days, and it's got the highest bids so far. Obviously I have high hopes for all my items, but some items have higher hopiness than others.
I've got a bunch more to write about, but it's late and I don't want to be wrecked at work tomorrow.
Now here's some awesomeness: I actually fixed something on Doctor Who. The upper left flipper wasn't working, so I finally found some diagnosis time while my wife flipped (no pun intended) between Extreme Makeover and America's Funniest Home Videos before finally landing on Pinky and the Brain. Before I got too far into it, I realized that each flipper has its own fuse, so I thought I would try changing the fuse first. Looking at the manual, I swapped the upper flipper's fuse with the one for the non-existent upper right. This yielded a working upper flipper (yay!) but now the lower left flipper wasn't working (boo!). Then I said screw it, I'll just replace the LRF fuse with a new one. That didn't work. So I lifted up the playfield and checked the coil voltages with the game turned on. This showed me that the LRF wasn't getting any power, and pulling the plug from the Fliptronics board I found that there was no power there, either; it sure sounded like a fuse. Before I got into some serious diagnostic work, I took another crack at the fuses. I decided it was time to question authority, so I pulled all the fuses and popped them in one at a time to see which flippers started working. I found that the manual was playing me for a fool: Fuses F901 and 902 are the lower flippers, and F903 and 904 are the upper flippers, which is the opposite of what the manual and sticker in the backbox says. I replaced F902 with a brand new fuse and the flipper started working. I played a celebratory game and got an OK score.
So all I've got left to do is fix the switch matrix and figure out why the mini-playfield has problems. One interesting thing I noticed was while I was in the switch test: The MPF opto switch was flashing on and off... that would certainly explain why it was having problems.
In other news, I decided to take the day off work Friday and take that trip to Pinball Parlour than I mentioned last post. I figured it would be marginally easier to leave the dog with my wife than go while she's out of town and let the poor dog stay overnight at the vet. Pinball Parlour is only open from 7-10, so I left at about 2:30 thinking I would be there with plenty of time to get some food... but that didn't work out. There was some stuff spilled on the road north of Baltimore, the stupid EZPass malfunctioned, causing me to think I was going to get a ticket for skipping through tolls (I shouldn't since they have my license plate on file), and rush hour traffic in Philadelphia got me there about 5 minutes before 7. Thank goodness for the Nerds Rope and Beef Jerky I had on the way up.
Pinball Parlour has newer Williams games (mostly late 80's on) and a bunch of EMs from barely post-flipper to the mid-70's. They mostly work, with some bad flippers and such here and there. I'm unhappy with their unreasoned prejudice against 70's-80's Bally solid state, but what can you do. There was a kid's party in there, so when they came in and ran roughshod over the games, I retreated to the EM room. Then I would shoot the balls and finish the games that they started to cut down on the noise. The few EMs that were working were in suck shape, and I was sad that their 1948 game wasn't working either... I'm up to the late 40's games in Pinball Compendium, and it would have been cool to play one. I was also sad that their Joust pinball wasn't working -- nor was it working when I went a couple of years ago. I did play the one early 80's game they had, Hyperball. I also snuck in a few vids, like Crystal Castles (which I could finish back in the day, but not any more:( ) and Paperboy. The owner popped in at 10 and said he was staying open an extra hour. That meant I got home at 2 AM, but the drive home was not bad. Anyway, I had fun, and it was relatively cheap if you don't count the tolls.
Speaking of Pinball Compendium, the one thing I don't like about it -- aside from Shaloub's kinda artless style, which I can overlook -- is the way he fauns over everyone who talks to him. I honestly don't need to know that he worships Steve Kordek and Harry Mabs as gods every few paragraphs, and that he is so grateful that they spoke to him.
And I got The King of Kong on DVD from Netflix the day it came out. I enjoyed it, though I watched it knowing that played Michael Moore-style games with the truth (my wife wouldn't watch it because it was too biased). Even so, Billy Mitchell struck me as the sort of person that I dislike -- people who are so full of themselves, whether deserved or not, turn my stomach. Plenty of awesome extras too, though I found the commentary by the I am 8-bit guy and IGN editor extremely witless and boring, so I turned it off after 10 minutes. Regardless, the one thing it did is make me want to go to Funspot in NH -- they have a frickin' awesome collection of pins & vids, and it's just two hours away from my friend Marlin's house in Boston...! And I may have to drop my daughter off in New York if she goes to England for a semester abroad, which is just four hours away from Boston...! Maybe it's time to plan an early Fall New England romp.
And finally... watching King of Kong extras made me want to play some Donkey Kong, especially since I didn't even remember the Pie Factory level since I haven't gotten to in in about 20 years. So I fired up MAME and totally sucked at it... I didn't even make it through the second barrel level. I fell short of the kill screen by about 114 levels. ^_^;
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...
... 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.
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.
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!
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*
I could not resist the urge and ended up getting an unpopulated Funhouse on eBay. Of course, "unpopulated" here means "virtually impossible to complete without throwing more money than a new game would cost", but as usual I couldn't resist. It's in surprisingly good condition... a few minor wear spots, but mostly just grimy. And unpopulated.
And then another fine eBayer posted a populated (*shudder*) Centaur. It was not in as good a shape as mine, but it was fully populated (*shudder*). Resistance was pretty much futile and it ended around 10 AM on a weekday, so I bid strategically and won. 
As you can see, somebody tried and failed to touch it up, it's missing its plastics, I don't think it has correct targets, and if you look carefully at the wiring harness, all of the plugs have been cut off (the auction said it was missing one, but I think that was an honest mistake... it is completely emasculated). Certainly less of a challenge than the unpopulated playfield, so I took the path of least resistance. The current plan is to scan the nice playfield so I can attempt to touch up this one, then sell the nice one on eBay. I've already started selling the Centaur parts I got, and it looks like they're selling for a pathetic fraction of what I paid for them... desperation always up the price of anything. We'll have a full report on that later.
The coolest thing was as I was testing everything the High Speed parts, the one thing that worked great was one (and only one) of the displays. Since I don't have another System 11 game, I plugged the displays into my Black Knight to see if they would work. The one that did was one of the two alphanumeric displays, which I found were plug compatible with the plain old numeric displays less the extra segments. Also, the player 4 plug is situated so you can attach the 26 pin cable to it with the 6 extra sockets hanging off the end. The picture on the right is what I got.
Well, knowing it was working meant I had to come up with a hair-brained scheme to test the other segments. My first attempts at using wires to jumper between the connector and the 6 sockets didn't go anywhere... I had a pretty good idea of where things had to go by reading the schematic, but I had to get everything there.
As you can see on the right, it looks half-assed but derned if it didn't work like a charm. Whatever did in the other displays -- probably normal outgassing, but who knows -- sure didn't affect this display. It looks nicer than most of mine. And the proof is in the eBay pudding, because this item has the most watchers I've had in a while -- 32 after 4 days, and it's got the highest bids so far. Obviously I have high hopes for all my items, but some items have higher hopiness than others.
