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Pinball Wizards on the Internet
cecil36 writes "Pinball wizards are now turning to the Internet for their needed support. With WMS Industries (Williams/Bally) no longer in existence,
owners of Williams/Bally pinball games are turning to online communities (such as the news group rec.games.pinball) to find sources for parts to maintain their games. It could use a little more detail, as the article failed to mention Stern Pinball. Lots of useful links contained within if you are looking for those few parts to fix your games." I need to order new
Rubber for my Jack Bot sometime too.
with all the new new games with the pretty graphics, and the big guns to frag all your friends with... it seems that pinball games are still the most entertaining... if you can find them anywhere.
Over 30 years in fact. Back in the dark ages, I was addicted to the mechnaical pinball machines. A virtual "pinball" machine will never cut it as far as I am concerned. Doesn't have the feel of a real pinball machine. I do hope lots of folks keep the real thing alive.
A coin op can rake in a good profit with a pinball, but maintenance takes much more than a guy to go round and collect the money. Ms Pacman does not get stuck behind a bumper.
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I wonder if there is any value in the knowledge stored in the brains of us soon-to-be-geezers pinball wizards. Not only did I mis-spend my youth playing pinball machines, I worked my way through school repairing them. 200 violently moving parts + abusive players = job security.
I started working on them in 1978 when stuff like Pong and Space Invaders was high-tech. The control circuitry has changed radically over the years - from relays, solenoid steppers, and cams - to sophisticated multi-processor systems. However, the playfields are still filled with precision mechanisms that get bashed with little cannon balls.
Every machine used to come with a little kit of spare parts you could expect to break in the first week, along with a COMPLETE SET OF SCHEMATICS! Really! They were right there in the bottom of the machine. A complete 30+ page large format book of prints with long fold outs for the complex stuff. No "black box" block diagrams - every wire and resistor was shown. They expected you to repair to the component level - not just swap modules. I am getting misty eyed just thinking about how I had all the info I needed to do the job. In these "modern" times, you don't even get a clear diagram of how to hook up the power LED in your new computer case.
In my opinion, the only people truly qualified to repair pinball machines are the addicts themselves. We used to stay late after work the day a new model was delivered. We would put the first one together (these things used to come in lots of pieces and were not trivial to assemble) on our own time. 3 or 4 of us would then play the machine until dawn - stopping now and then to make tweaks. By morning we were completely fried, but had a supreme knowledge of how to tune the machine for playability. More importantly, we could kick ass in the pinball tournaments the bars would sponsor. The bucks we won would more than pay us back for the sleep we lost. Some of the customers would bitch about "professionals" playing in the tournaments, but the bar owners liked the idea of having somebody around who could unlock the machine and unstick a ball or unjam a coin slot.
smoke-filled VFW halls
quart bottles of playfield wax
a giant canvas bank bag full of rubbers
the smell of stale beer and burnt solenoid drivers
soldering iron burns
you: 685,370 everybody else: under 85,000
It was a simpler time...when carpal tunnel syndrome was just "pinball wrist"
"Reality is independent from perception." - RDH
I worked at Capcom Coin-Op during their brief flirtation with pinball. The real problem with pinball in arcades is that they take a hell of a lot of work to maintain. An arcade with 40 pinball machines? That's a full-time employee just to clean the damn playfields if you want them in top condition.
What's the maintenance on a vid? Wipe the screen with windex and empty the coinbox. What's the maintenance on a pin? Clean the playfield. Clean the glass. Check for stray objects. Adjust switches. Replace bulbs. Rotate and replace rubbers. Align drop targets. And heaven help you if you have a pin with really neat, but really fragile, special mechanical parts!
And what happens when the machine gets old and you want to make way for new games? Video cabinets can be re-used. Slap a new mobo in there and put a new marquee up and you're good to go. Not so with pinball machines. There's no practical way to gut one and upgrade it to a new machine. You can do it, but it costs way more in labor than just buying the new machine outright.
Don't get me wrong. I love pinball and would really like to see it make a comeback. But it takes lots of time and a dedicated technician to keep them running and fun.
Oh well. Time to go down to my basement and fire up my Black Knight and Big Bang Bar.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Not quite. Compare older pinball machines vs the newer ones. What you'll find is that as time passed pinball machines got slightly narrower (many machines) and the slope got sharper (all machines). And later machines added all sorts of useless crap (ramps/heads/thingamabobber) that just got in the way. Now while some hardcore pinball players may find the newer machines were 'harder' and thus more fun for them to play, casual or first time players only got one thing. An empty wallet. The newer machines were NOT user friendly, and at $0.75 (Average) a play, watching the ball move smoothly and quickly between the flippers without touching them while you wail on the buttons helplessly sucked hard.
You can see where an attempt to 'tilt' the odds on the favor of the arcade owners pockets alienated the actual players of the arcades and thus their demise was a given. You can see where the Fighting/Driving/Shooting games are going the exact same direction right now also. Simply put people got greedy and tried dipping into the well too often for players to stomache or afford. Hence home game consoles took up all the slack.
As for electronic pinball on the console/computer...nadda....it's gone because most of it just sucked. I DO NOT want to play the same crap pinball I left the arcades for on my new computer/console. Instead I still play two of the best pinball video games ever made for a home console. Hardcore pinball players may disagree, but I think these two are the most fun you can have electronically. They are: Devil's Crush && Alien Crush for the TurboGraphx 16. They're not perfect, (Alien Crush has an annoying screen flip, but you learn to ignore that easily) but more importantly they are FUN. Something the last round of mechanical pinball WASN'T.