Showing posts with label resources. Show all posts
Showing posts with label resources. Show all posts

Thursday, March 24, 2022

revisiting the classics: new code megathread

Over on Pinside and Maaca I am maintaining threads where I compile fresh code modifications for old pinball games.  Some are minor ROM mods, some are full rewrites, some require hardware mods.  I will not be updating the list here, but just for the sake of browsing here is where it currently stands.

Available:

EXTRA:
Freeplay ROMs for all the classic Stern games by @slochar https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/free-play-roms-for-classic-stern-games-link

Divide-by-10 ROMs for all Williams System 6 games by Ted Estes https://www.ipdb.org/search.pl?searchtype=advanced&mpu=3

Gottlieb System 80B  Freeplay ROMS by Davroux Brothers https://www.flipprojets.fr/Proms80B_EN.php

 IN PROGRESS - maybe go cheer on the dev?
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Wednesday, March 2, 2022

learning pinball tech fundamentals

There are many great places to learn about pinball online, but instead of taking a pinball machine and then braeking it down in to its basic parts, how about we start with the fundamentals and build towards a pinball machine?  That's certainly an approach that jives even better with my own learning style.

I want to point out Mark's Fun With Pinball Simple Devices page, where he has an EM pinball machine broken down in to fundamental components, so you can see how every part operates in isolation.  From pop bumpers, to drop targets, to score motors and even the playfield magnets that give Twilight Zone The Power, there are many diagrams and videos to explore.

one example would be this stepper demonstration:

you can go to the site to view the video

 

There are also the education pages which "include short lessons that use pinball machine parts to explain scientific principles".

Click the above link to go to his Learning page, but also here is a paste of those main lessons:

Switches and electric currentSwitches and electric currentSwitches and electric current
Solenoids, relays and electromagnetismSolenoids, relays and electromagnetismSolenoids, relays and electromagnetism
Flippers, coils and powerFlippers, coils and powerFlippers, coils and power
Electromagnets and accelerationElectromagnets and accelerationElectromagnets and acceleration
Chimes, vibrations and pitchesChimes, vibrations and pitchesChimes, vibrations and pitches
Testing Solenoid StrengthTesting Solenoid StrengthSolenoid strength test



An incredibly useful visualization he has put together is the  Animated Schematics Diagrams for EM machines.  Perhaps you've seen the long-scroll that is an EM pinball schematic?  A lot of that can be readily explained with methodical patience, but it is definitely intimidating at first glance.  And even if you can trace some of the basic functionality like how your drop targets are scoring (or failing to score,) the introduction of the "Score Motor" can be a challenge to wrap one's head around.

This site has animations reviewing the score motor operation for numerous functions, from the context of schematics and I highly recommend checking it out: emSim: Animated Schematic Diagrams for EM Pinball Machines.  You can pause the videos and see what pulses are active from a score motor at any time.  Remember, a Score Motor is just a set of stacks of switches that are either on or off, depending on what part of the motor rotation we are at.

still from animated schematic diagrams


There is a lot more to explore on his site, including online EM classes, 


Once you have the fundamentals of operations and want to fix specific problems?  The best place to go is still Clay's pinrepair site: Pinball & Coin Operated Games to 1978.

Working on a more modern game than 1978?  Get started diving in to your system via pinwiki.
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Tuesday, January 11, 2022

some good follows

Here are people and places I follow, all come recommended!

My friend pindude152 is one of the best EM techs in all of Canada, and puts immense care in to bringing machines back to life.  His work is awe-inspiring and his collection spans an incredible assortment of EM marvels you'll probably never find elsewhere.

Fogh Andersen - the site is in Dutch but fire up your translator because you're about to witness step-by-step restorations of some incredibly cool mechanical machines!

Nazox2016 gets mentioned a lot on this blog, almost as much as pindude152!  Nazox2016 has provided an incredible service to the world, documenting and sharing information about Japanese medal machines and other EM games.

Cat Despira's Retrobitch blog should be quite familiar to anyone that has dipped into arcade game history any time over the last decade.

On しいたけと猫が好き (I like shiitake mushrooms and cats) accs2014 has been putting up scans of hotel brochures that show arcade game rooms from hotels and has been an immense resource for those of us trying to look to at the esoteric world of pre-1978 Japanese arcades.

The History of How We Play by Ethan Johnson dives deep in to the facts-based history videogames, and is everyone's first stop when compiling "lists of things popular videogame books got very wrong."

This Week In Pinball is a once-a-week antidote to spending endless hours on sites like Pinside.  Nuff said.

The Arcade Blogger posts great restoration series of arcade machines, plus they also published a recent book on Missile Command!

I spend a bunch of time on Discord doing research stuff, and there are 3 I want to highlight:

  1. Gaming Alexandria - video + arcade game history nerds united
  2. For Amusement Only - the server for that EM Bingo + Pinball podcast we all know and love!
  3. PWN - Pinball Women & Nonbinary - a fresh-faced discord that is currently low traffic, for cis, trans, non-binary, two-spirited, and self-identified women and non-binary pinball fans


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Monday, March 22, 2021

Italian Pinball Database

 oh hey check it out there is a list of Italian pinball manufacturers!

Italian Pinball DataBase


Casino


Lido

Stellar Airship


Read more »
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Thursday, August 6, 2020

3 issues of Canadian Coin Box magazine from 1974

I scanned in 3 issues of Canadian Coin Box magazine, loaned from JF.   They'll be of interest to anyone interested in pinball, EM arcade games, video games, and jukeboxes.

Canadian Coin Box Magazine - 1974-04 (PDF)



Canadian Coin Box Magazine - 1974-08 PDF





Canadian Coin Box Magazine - 1974-12




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Bally Skill Roll manual

I scanned the manual for the 1956 Bally Skill Roll.  Enjoy the PDF!

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Thursday, July 9, 2020

pachinko museum supplemental material

There was lots of information on the walls at Sugiyama's Pachinko Museum but I don't know any Japanese, so I wanted to include all of the extra historical details here for all of the Japanese-reading fans.
Again, thanks to nazox2016 for all of these photos!

 If you can translate any of these please email me (at thetastates@gmail.com) or respond below, and reference the picture #
Read more »
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Monday, July 6, 2020

Rock-Ola's World's Series (1934) resources

Once upon a time I ended up buying 3 World's Series over the course of a year.  I made a deal with a friend in the Montreal area and he took all 3 with the promise that one would be returned nicely restored.
In anticipation of my World's Series returning I wanted to compile some resources for this amazing machine. 
It was wildly popular, they apparently made like 50,000 of them.  And while so much coin-op from the 1930s never survived the last 90 years, the sheer volume of World's Series means they aren't too hard to come by.


Tonnes of reproduction parts are available at the wonderful Buckwerx Rock-Ola site
Chris Hale has a Shapeways (3d printing) store where he has recreated many of the key complex parts

and if you want to learn all about the machine, and even see videos of it operating from the INSIDE, check out Mark Gibson's World's Series restoration page at Fun With Pinball.

Between those three sites you should have every bit of info to take an 86 year old World's Series project from start to finish.

PLAY BALL!

photo by Mark Gibson

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Monday, March 2, 2020

Niche digital-games!

There are so many cool games that were made around the world!  Even if you attend pinball and coin-op shows, chances are you haven't played most of them.

Thankfully a few devoted fans have made digital versions of some of these machines so you can at least get a general idea of what they are about.  Like digital pinball, digital OTHERGAMES are never a substitution for the real thing, but are an amazing learning opportunity.

If I am missing anything relevant please leave it for me in the links and I'll update this page.


Pinball:
So you may know that digital pinball is pretty much everywhere and on every platform, but you might not know that there is Zaccaria Pinball on Steam where you can play 27 original Zaccaria pinball tables.  Worth the money.  Chances are you'll never be able to play most of these anywhere in your lifetime.



Bingo:
Joop's Bingo Gameroom is a downloadable bingo simulator with great sounds, graphics, and physics.  You can try the trial version, and the lifetime subscription is something like $80.




Smart Ball:
The original server is down but you can play this cute little Smart Ball emulator on my website and get the source code on Github.



Pajatso:
The next handful of entries are all from the same great site.  Emulation really doesn't capture the aesthetic essence of most of these, and least of all would be the pajatso one, but how often are you ever going to get to try a full-sized Nordic Pajatso machine in real life?  Yeah, I thought so.  (answer: maybe at Fun Spot, and/or some cool spots in Europe)
But you can at least see what the mechanics are all about.  Play pajatso online (Flash required)



Big Strike Bowling:
You might recognize the layout from Chicago Coin's 1972 Mini-Baseball, and you'd be correct!  They stole the design directly from a series of popular German wall machines in the 60s.  Play some of the bowling classic here.



Tooty Fruity:
A novel 1970s drop-case machine from Crompton's, I love the aesthetics of this one.  Drop coins in to play, make 3 or 4 in a row to get paid out.  Very satisfying, play it here.  You're probably not going to ever encounter one outside of the UK.



Bajazzo:
The classic clown-catcher!  One of the oldest coin-op games out there.  Rotate the clown to the right to release a ball.  Catch the ball in your basket and return it to the left to win a coin!
These fetch $1k-$2k USD at auctions so don't expect to play one casually any time soon.   Play bajazzo now!


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Thursday, July 14, 2016

more public pinball at the Neighbourhood Pub!

Very excited that Ottawa has another wonderful place to play!  Check out Ottawa, Canada over at the pinball map!


We have 3 main spots:
House Of Targ, with 18 pinball machines and an equal amount of arcades
Lowertown Brewery, with 6 pinball machines and I have yet to visit yet...
and now.. Neighborhood Pub at 2257 Baseline Rd, with 9 machines plus a few arcades









OTTAWA HAS PINBALL GOING ON


Neighbourhood Pub, which I will forever refer to as Neigh-P, is also the first to dive back in to the EMs.
Yes, that is a 60s era shuffle bowler!
They are all wonderfully fine tuned, and a blast to play.


Neigh-P does 45 cent wings on Sundays, Mondays, and Thursdays, and they are delicious and probably the most affordable meal in the city.
MAACA people are going to be meting there on Wednesdays (with the wings special honoured,) I think.
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Saturday, April 30, 2016

Introducing... Meteor???

Meteor?  Really?

Where is it?  It's not here...  oh wait there it is!



So yeah Meteor is at my friend's house.  He was converting his Blue Chip to LEDs, so I asked him yo also do Meteor, and that's when things spiraled out  of control.
Did you know that 1979 Stern games weren't made to handle LEDs? did you? DID YOU?? 

First up you need to add some resistance since LEDs have very little draw, and that's solved by this clever little kit.
Then you need your LEDs.
Then you need to fix the bulbs that aren't working by replacing a logic chip.
Then you need to realize you fixed the wrong thing and replace the SCRs for the lamps.
Then you need to realize the schematics were wrong and you replaced the wrong SCRs.

Follow the saga:


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Friday, April 29, 2016

Sealing backglasses with Triple Thick

So I have this friend and...  well at first I sold him a pachinko I didn't have room for.  and then wouldn't you know it he had a basement and I needed a home for a pinball machine.  So he took my Sinbad.
Then I got a Meteor, and didn't have room, so he took that too.
Oh and hey he also bought a Blue Chip!

So oops, my bad, suddenly he has an arcade in his basement.

He is also a licensed electrician and breezes through tech issues in a tenth of the time they take me to address, so I will be posting up videos of his work as we go. 

But first up, I wanted to share his great videos about sealing backglasses with Triple Thick.  If you have any machine with a backglass, YOU NEED TO SEAL IT NOW.  Those things are falling apart more and more by the day, especially if you have incandescent bulbs back there.




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Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Tutorial: getting all the bulbs working

My friend Lee (cdnpinballer) had posted up this great tutorial last year that I wanted to share.
When you get a new game in the shop, how do you get all of the bulbs working?

His response, in regards to his Big Game:

I always start diagnosing non working lamps by trying a fresh new bulb with a few turns of the socket and in my case I had to replace probably 10 burnt out bulbs. If the new bulb doesn't work I then reach for my aligator clips. 

I clip one end to the questional lamp socket and the other end to a working lamp socket. If the lamp turns on then I know the socket and bulb are good. If it doesn't turn on then I know to replace the lamp socket. So, I had to replace a few lamp sockets as well. 

Then I turn to the connector pins on the lamp driver board. I just replace the 0.100" connector pins of the suspect bulbs because it takes a minute or two and it's easy. So, that fixed maybe 2 or 3 broken bulbs. At that point I was left with 4 non working bulbs. 

The only items left in the chain are the transistors, chips, some resistors and possibly broken solder joints on header pins or the header pins themselves. So, I removed the lamp driver board for a closer look. 

Solder looked good, no cold joints. Header pins looked OK. Tested the suspect transistors and 2 of the 4 definately tested bad so changed those along with the other 2 suspects because it doesn't take that long to do and they are cheap. 

With the board reinstalled 2 of the lamps still didn't work in attract mode. WTF? Do I need to replace a chip now? It doesn't make sense because they're driven by different chips. Hummm.. I was stumped until I put thr game into test and everything started flashing. Lesson learned! Not all lamps flash in attract mode! :FP:
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Thursday, August 28, 2014

new adventures in leg cleaning!

I took a trip to Home Depot and picked up:
- a 3 foot long piece of ABS tubing, 3" diameter.
- An end cap for it
- a cap with a screw on lid
- some ABS cement, and safety goggles.
A quick google gave me the tips for how to best use the ABS cement, and I affixed both ends without issue out on my back deck.  I let it cure for 2 hours while I made dinner.

What I was left with was a tightly sealed tunnel the perfect size for soaking pinball legs in Evapo-Rust!

Looking down the tube with a leg in it...
Remember that scene in Tank Girl where she is shoved down that ever slimming tube?  *shudder*


Rust spots on the legs...
Before!

After!

Black painted legs:  The rust had ruined the black paint areas, but when the rust is gone the damage it did is ever more striking.  Treated, on the left.  Untreated, on the right.

And even the hardware bits got a soak for a few hours:

soaked!

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Wednesday, August 13, 2014

installing LEDs in an EM: my guide

I posted up some advice about using LEDs in this thread on MAACA, so I thought I should repost it here...

Hi! I have put LEDs in a handful of EMs so far, all to great success.
You are looking for #44s/Bayonet base (they rotate, so NOT the 555s)
I order all of my lights from http://cometpinball.com/ and am very happy with their prices, products, and ability to ship things with no duty getting charged.

For above the playfield I use almost all white lights. My rule is: if the bulb can be seen while playing, I use frosted "warm white". If the bulb is not directly visible, I use frosted "Natural white" (which are brighter).
Often the only coloured LEDs I use above the playfield are to match the rollover guide plastics at the top.

Under the playfield, I will match the inserts with frosted or non-frosted coloured LEDs for purple, red, green, blue inserts.
Yellow inserts, I use natural white bulbs since the yellow LEDs are often too dim.
If the inserts are clear, but the surrounding paint is yellow, I'll sometimes use non-frosted yellow LEDs under them since the white inserts allow the colour through better.

ALWAYS get flat-top lights when possible. Dome-top lights leave a circle of light on the plastic they are beneath.  There are some uses for dome-tops, but few on EMs.

My first priority is replacing all incandescents in the backbox so they stop cooking the backglass! You can often find creative colour accents to use, but 80% of the time warm white and natural whites (frosted, almost always) are the way to go.
I colour-match with the "game over", and player # lights. And I use natural white for the score reel lighting.
I almost never bother putting LEDs in the match lights though.

Good luck!
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Monday, June 9, 2014

Arcade Review: The Pinball Wizard Arcade in New Hampshire

I had the joy of visiting The Pinball Wizard Arcade in NH this last Thursday and it was a sight to behold.

At first I was going to go check out Fun Spot, but I heard somewhere that PWA maintained their machines better, and hey it was closer to where I was staying.
Well this visit was a testament to that:  All of their machines were in incredible condition.  No weak flippers in the house.  No dirt to be found.  I don't even think I noticed any bulbs out.


This place is run by an awesome woman named Sarah, whom I met while she was fixing a head-2-head USA Football pinball machine.  (which she finished working on, BTW, and I managed to sneak in 2 games on it with a friend before we left.  Forgot to snap a photo though.)
Sarah was in and out during the day, making tech housecalls.  I think I saw 3 other people there working on machines that day.
They take game quality seriously!  I can't stress that enough.

Their web site lists 172 video games, 113 pins, and 33 other games.  Only about 5% were turned off.

Blackwater 100's left flippers weren't working.  Mentioned it to the staff, 20 minutes later it was fixed.
I walked up to Paragon at one point and the score displays were off.  I mentioned it to an employee, and I got a token refund, and 10 minutes later it was working.
They apparently was some issue on a Pacman machine.  It was pulled slightly out of the lineup and a tech had it back in there, 100%, less than 30 minutes later.
4+ hours of pinball, and I think the only other technical issue I could spot was the outlane gate on Big Guns not closing after being used.  (Forgot to report that one.)
I can't even keep my 4 games in this nice of condition, but they have over 100 pins in ace condition, ready to play.


You get a cup of 100 tokens for $20, and most games are 2 tokens (40 cents) or 3 tokens (60 cents) per credit.  Only the super pricey games (ST:LE, Mustang:LE, Medieval Madness, WOZ,) were 4 tokens.

We went on a Thursday and it was storming outside and despite a number of other gamers there, it felt like we had this castle of games to ourselves.  We spent 4 hours there and I barely got to put a single game on each of the pins I was interested in.  If you plan a trip, I'd recommend 2 days there.  The first day, you're just overwhelmed by easy access to all of these excellent games in excellent shape.


Games that I had not known well, but really impressed me:
Banzai Run
Transporter: The Rescue
Carnival
Mustang: LE
Scorpion (widebody!)
Space Invaders (widebody!)

Not pictured?  Many of the games, many of the games in focus, and oh yes, a Star Trek: Limited Edition, and Wizard Of Oz Limited Edition are also there.
They had one of the 9 Fix-It Felix games there, which just seems perfect.  They have a Nintendo Play Choice 10 next to a Nintendo Super System.  So many great curiousities.
They had the sit-on S.T.U.N. RUNNER!
They had all of the popular Mortal Kombats and Street Fighters and Tekkens and Capcom/Marvel fighters, all of the popular multiplayer sports games, all of the "odd controller" game that you can never quite replicate the feel of on your emulator.
3 player Xenophobe!
6 player X-Men!
Atari's 1974 Tank!


If you check their photo album from 2012 on their site, I see so many games in those shots that aren't there now.  HIGH TURNOVER.  This is not a stagnant collection.  The pictorial history suggests that there will always be many new things there.  I can't wait to see what's new when I visit there next year.
































































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