A Busy Spring in Pinball

Spring was an active season for Pinball.   If you haven't heard, Pinball is in a resurgence!

An interesting short on CNN about pinball (aired this week):

Also, meet the Pinball World Champ for this year: - Robert Gagno in the video below.   He's awesome.

Texas Pinball Festival in March was a great success.  

Right now, Stern, Jersey Jack, Heighway Pinball, Dutch Pinball, Chicago Gaming/ PPS and Spooky Pinball are all building / shipping pinball machines!   A year or two ago, to think 6 active Pinball companies would be rolling in 2016 would have been the short bet.  Exciting stuff!

In the spring JJP started shipping the long-awaited Hobbit Pinball machine. With JJP's penchant for quality and innovation, this game is sure to be a hit.

At TPF Stern announced and revealed their Ghostbusters Pinball game.  Hand-drawn artwork on the playfield and cabinet by Zombie Yeti, epic theme and great early code - will make this Stern's highest selling game.    Limited Edition's sold out in 1/2 a day.

Heighway moves on from Full Throttle and is in development of Alien pinball.  Another awesome theme for pinball, it'll be great to see how this game comes together.

In the Spring, Dutch Pinball hosted a factory tour and just recently started shipping The Big Lebowski.    The callouts / audio potential alone will make this a fun pin to check out!

After a rocky start, PPS / Chicago gaming is shipping the highly anticipated Medieval Madness remake pin.    It is exciting that this fun pinball machine has been remade in NIB-awesomeness.

Looking for Contributors

Are you really passionate about Arcade and Pinball machines?   We are looking to open up this site to outside contributors, to give you a platform for blogging about your Arcade and Pinball Shenanigans!   (We are also looking for people that are interested in taking part on some video streaming episodes, be it to check out your collection, talk about collecting or industry news.)

Interested?  ping me to discuss: bill.dodd@graffitilogic.com

Saying Goodbye to Tron!

This weekend, I packed up Tron for its legs-on move to a new owner.   It was fun!

December was Awesome - Happy New Year!

December was a fun month for my arcade and pinball collecting shenanigans..   I took advantage of some time away from being a programmer @ work to being a nerd @ heart. :)

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Star Wars AND Pinball in the Same Month?  Yes, Please!

We hosted our local pinball and arcade group in December.   It was nice to get to hang out with friends and just play.

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We also added a game to the mix, kind of a complicated story but suffice-to-say a Wizard of Oz pin from Jersey Jack Pinball now occupies our space.  We are stoked!
 

WoZ has been out for awhile, I'm a bit of a latecomer to this game but I like that every time some tech blogger heralds that "Pinball is Dead or Dying" some awesome local American company pops up and shows otherwise.   Between Stern Pinball's release cycle of popular culture licensed titles and Jersey Jack's innovation and focus on a polished end-project: It looks like Pinball is very much alive.

During the break from work we tried our hand at Broadcasting pinball games on Twitch, which has been educational and interesting.   Should come in handy for recording tournament matches in 2016.

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Coming into the New Year, I've decided to let my Tron Pinball game find a new home.   

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We'd gotten it in a series of trades and I modded the crap out of it. In the end, though I think I had more fun working on it than playing it.   Best to get something in to play to put in it's spot.  I have some good ideas on that.. :)

Anyway, I hope your New Year is excellent.  Looking forward to 2016!

Bills Arcade, Walkthrough 2015 (in 4k!)

Periodically on weekends where we have all of the games going, like over Thanksgiving, I like to do a quick walk through and show the games in our collection.  It's interesting because over time, the room changes as new games come in and old games cycle out.  (Though, these days it is more IN than OUT ;)  )

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this brief walkthrough of the games in our game-room.

Pirates!

Recently, I found a Pirates of the Caribbean for sale a couple hours away.  A friend and fellow pinball-collector, Marshall and I made a trip to Mississippi to get it.

I wasn't really looking for a Pirates but the prospect of a well-priced Home-Use-Only machine within driving distance was too good not to check out.    My whole family is all about Disney and love the ride, so it seemed like it would be a good fit for our game room.

I usually expect pinball machines to be in a condition that is less-than-advertised.  I was surprised to find this machine was more-or-less as described.   It had 1700 plays and was running original game code.

There were a few issues but I don't think the owner even realized them.

The first thing that I noticed was that the DMD was "off'.   Some screens looked fine, while others seemed jumbled.  It seemed like the screens that used the most dots where the ones that showed the problems most prominently.   

I hoped it was just a connection but the data connection to the DMD was quite solid (and hot-glued).   

PinballLife.com carried a perfect, drop in replacement for this older-model stern game.   It was about $100 and worked perfectly.

While we were playing the game, I could hear a coil energizing but didn't immediately work out which one it was.    As it turns out it was the right pop bumper.  Once we got it home, after a few games played the machine started to pop Fuse F8 immediately on powerup.

Using the coil matrix I unhooked everything on that fuse until we found the right pop bumper coil to be fully seized.

The replacement coil (a $12 part), I already had but after replacing it I noticed it stayed engaged whenever the game was powered up.

The coil matrix charts in pinball manuals are super handy in showing you how your coils are switched and where they get their power.  In this case, Q10 was the driving transistor.  

Since the coil was stuck energized, I replaced the Q10 transistor.

Stern electronics are incredibly reliable.  I was reminded of why this in trying to remove the transistor.  The board solder took quite a bit of coercion to get heated enough to pull the old transistor.   

Putting it all back together

I added warm-white Cointaker Retro LEDs to the inserts and some green spotlight LED's to accentuate the ship and Kraken.

New playfield glass, replaced DMD, a coil and a transistor, Cointaker LED's and red super-bands. The end result turned out pretty good!  In this photo we are still using Incandescents in the GI, I'm experimenting with various LED's to try to retain that 'candle-lit' quality that is pervasive to the ride and the movies.

Halo 5

The time Halo fans (I'm one of them... I think) have been looking forward to is finally here.   I sat down and played through Halo 5's campaign yesterday from about 6pm to 12:30am.  The last game that I played through in one sitting was Halo 4.  Because, I'm old and.. you know.. work and stuff. :)

I guess I'm totally going to go into grumpy-old-dad mode here, Spoilers ahead.

The disappointment began when my son and daughter sat there with me, hopeful to play co-op campaign in split screen.     Evidently in the next-gen gaming market fun should be sacrificed for fps count.    The developers intentionally left out split-screen play altogether so as to keep the 60fps frame rate.   

What the hell, guys.   What a horrible idea that is.  I guess folks developing games didn't realize the most fun playing games is having your friends over to work through the campaign or to destroy them in multiplayer.  Many fights amongst siblings will now occur and many parents, fed-up are just going to say "screw it" and remove the game so as to remove the family conflict.

Fortunately, my kids handled it well.  "Oh, it doesn't support co-op?  *shrug* - and they went upstairs and played Halo 4 on the xBox 360.

Cortana's back..  I mean, when MSFT doubled down on Cortana as their Siri alternative this shouldn't have really surprised anyone.    How is she back?  Well it's basically a matter of: *sprinkle* nonsensical sub-space star trek pseudoscience here.

How is it that she didn't die?  I honestly couldn't tell you, aside that she's back and on a power trip.  You see, she merged with this Forerunner thing and it's given her other powers and she's doing her iRobot Vicki, bring-peace through the imprisonment of humanity-move.   I think that's what happened, anyway.

If you are a fan of Master Chief and looking forward to playing as him, I have good news: there will be other Halo games where you get to do that.   In Halo 5 you play as the big guy for about 1/3 of the game.  I don't have the exact count handy but yeah, that's the deal.  You play as Locke through 2/3 of the game, you play as Master Chief through only a small handful of missions.

There are 15 total missions and three are pointless non-combat RPG-ish nods to ODST-styled "talk to the locals" objectives that are supposed to advance the story in some way.   The whole non-combat mission thing is very sloppy at best. You can direct your squad to shoot things and they kinda-of-do.   Don't let them drive a warthog, though - they are asian woman drivers at best.

The story was good-ish, I guess - it kept me playing but ended on a weak note.

So, basically Spartan Locke in his buddies go kick a bunch of ass and end up back at the Infinity where the one-armed doctor chick is talking about Cortana doing bad stuff.

Master Chief and his fire team are in the midst of kicking a bunch of ass when he has a Vision from Cortana and takes his team to go find her.   She's somehow merged with this thing called the Forerunner Domain and it magically gives her powers.  She's collecting these awesome gigantic Forerunner robots that were built to police entire Solar systems.

Locke does a bunch of stuff, Master Chief and his crew do a bunch of stuff and Master Chief and his crew end up getting put in some sort of stasis-thingy-ma-bob, basically as Cortana's pets while she enforces galactic martial law with bad-assed space robots.

Locke and his crew break and kill and fight a bunch of stuff and save The Master Chief and his crew.   Later, they all chill at the Arbiter's pad for what I'm guessing was Shawarma, based on the decor of the place.

So, in conclusion..  Cortana is back and she's VICKI from iRobot.   Locke is Mario and Master Chief is the Princess.   Oh and a Forereunner bad guy named Warden Eternal is Bowser. 

Well, at least there's multiplayer.

Halloween Block Party 2015

We've always really enjoyed Halloween, such a great holiday for kids (of all ages). :)

Halloween, 80's movies and music and arcades naturally gel with one another. A good trip down nostalgia lane! For our Halloween party this year, we turned it into more of a block party. We had 45+ guests over for an outdoor showing of Ghostbusters. It was a pot luck with a ton of great food and friends.

This feed is from one of the Nest cams in our walk-out basement.