What's that sound? It's 4 Amusement Only, the EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast. Welcome back to 4 Amusement Only. This is Nicholas Baldridge. Well, multi-bingo progress. Nine left. I've been working diligently on the 20 whole games that I have in the list. By far the largest chunk of games that I have left to program, and I'm down to the last nine, including, I believe, five 20-hole games. So that is very exciting. Single digits, I never thought I'd see the day. There's going to be 142 total machines available in the multi-bingo, and right now I'm at 131. Very cool. I've had the question a few times from a few different places when I'll be updating the publicly available code. Right now I am sprinting just as fast as I possibly can to finish the remaining games. And once they're all at least playable, meaning finished on the programming side, then I will do another sync with the public repository. The problem is that I work from a private repository that has all of the back glass images, and I have to do a manual sync of everything. It takes a while. So give me a minute, and then you'll have it. The last sync that I did was at 100 games, so there's quite a bit in there already. so let me tell you a little bit about some of these 20 hole games and the feature advancement that Bally had they had this rapid growth and change with features just as they did with every other generation of bingos but in the 20 hole games they started experimenting with solid state and this is in the 1960s The way that they experimented was actually pretty interesting. They had a solid-state card that was installed into these games, and that card helped track winners, and it helped track information about a special game, which I'll get into in a moment. One of the interesting things about that solid-state card is that it was very repairable. The technician could take it out of the game entirely, it was just a card that plugged in, and work on it, and then plug it back in. And the way it was designed, you could actually plug it in either way, either direction, and it would still function just fine. That was very clever, I thought, because the people that are working on these games are probably not familiar at all with solid-state technology, and the fact that they were thinking about problems that would occur in the field, I think was very wise and kind of different from how the other manufacturers handled some of their early solid-state experiments. So what did it do? Well, that varied from game to game, and the general concept was the same, and that is that there was a white button on the front of the cabinet at this time pick a play was standard so you have your red button to start the game green button to coin up features only and your blue button to coin up odds only the red button plays for both features and odds after you put in your initial coin well all the way to the left there's a white button and the white button has always been used for special purposes so games like Bounty with the skill shot feature, games like Lido or Can-Can, where it allowed you to light the super sections more easily. Well, on these 20-hole games, what it does is advance odds in the special game, and the special game started out relatively simply. in the game Orient, that was the first game, the first mainline 20-hole game, the tower game, or the special game, was simply to land in alternating even and odd holes. So you start off landing in, say, number 2, then number 3, then number 6, number 7, and number 10. Let's say that was your game. Well, then you would win the special game, and in fact you would win it all the way. The interesting thing about the special game is that you could actually collect after your third ball has landed, at least in Orient and Venice. So in those two games, they had the same feature, even odd, even odd. The problem with the special game at this time, at least in my mind, is that you can miss. So rarely do bingos take anything away from you, except for lockouts on certain features. So you might have a feature that allows you to move numbers on the bingo card, but then it stops you from moving them after you shoot your fourth ball or your fifth ball. That's all well and good. You had the feature, you knew it was coming, the lockout, and then it's gone. In this case, you're playing the special game, you have the special game, you've coined it up separately from the main game, which, by the way, the special game doesn't coin along with red button presses. You can only coin it with white button presses. And you hit even, odd, odd. Well, you had a winner, and now it's gone. That's very unusual. In fact, I can't think of any off the top of my head, games where they take away a winner like that. I'm not sure that I like that, you know, as a player. I do think, as a player, it would be very challenging, and it'd be a fun additional challenge. The problem with the even-odd-even-odd is that you're going to have to really plan out which numbers you're going to shoot for, even more than normal, because, ideally, you want to win in both games. The even will make that very difficult to do except in certain sections So getting your odds to the right spot for the main game and making sure that you don't flub the special game, these are important things. Once you've collected in the special game, the special game is over. There's no way to continue it with the next ball. That's also a striking thing. Basically, it resets that whole section. So later on, Bally experimented with different playfield designs that would impact the special games. So games like London was the start. Each of the holes on the playfield was marked with a symbol. A circle, a square, or a triangle. and your first three balls have to land one in each of those symbols and then the game will pick at random one of the symbols and you have to land in one of those marked holes and then again the game will pick at random one of the symbols and it will mark one of those. Now in truth it's not really random. There's actually a 15 position stepper that checks for the color that it's going to display, color or symbol, and then that's what does the flashing. But this looks super challenging, and again, they take away from you. So if you flub on ball four, then you're toast. Later on, Bally kept refining this. Later on, they came out with Safari, and Safari is very beloved. by many of the players that I've talked to. And I think one of the reasons for that is that the special game never robs you. It never cheats you. So this game has what's called the animal feature. That's what they call the special game. And on the right-hand side of the back glass, there's this tower of arrows and animals in circles. Each of the holes in the play field is marked with a number. it'll say up three or down three, up one or down one, up two or down two. And that's telling you if you land in that hole, the position of that tower on the right-hand side will change. And if you happen to be lined up with one of the circles that contains an animal image, you'll win a certain amount of replays. The least amount of replays is tied to a lion for some reason. The next highest is a rhino. And then the highest of all is a giraffe. So the cool thing about the animal feature is that you can actually win by going down. So if you start off, you shoot your first ball and land in down three, well, you're well on your way to the first lion. You just have to make sure that you land your other balls appropriately. I think it's two more, and then you'll have a winner in the lion. Now, Safari had a bug, and when I interviewed Hugh Count on the podcast here, he talked a little bit about that. And what he said, if I recall correctly, was that the problem was the solid-state board only required a tiny amount of voltage to change the state of the transistor and tell that stepper to move. so if you had a ball in a hole and you kind of jiggled the game around a little bit you could jostle it into moving at the highest and lowest points of that tower are the big winners so you could coin up the special game and really rack up the replays just by nudging the machine a little bit I have a feeling that that you know, tempered operator enthusiasm a bit towards these special features, but I don't know that for sure. I also don't know about reliability. You know, did the technicians or operators have concerns at the time about the reliability? Were there field failures? Was there anything like that that was happening? I have no idea. The boards, of course, are very simple by today's standard, but they are vastly more complex than the boards on some of the initial flipper experiments, as I mentioned a little while ago. So the final special game that they came up with was something called Super 7. And Super 7 was the most difficult to program by far. The way this works, each hole in the playfield is marked with a diamond, with a certain value in it, anywhere from 1 through 4, I believe. On your first two balls shot, you have to land in two holes that add up to the number 7, with those diamonds above them. So hole number 1 is equivalent to four diamonds. So after you shoot ball number 1, it steps up to number 4 on the back glass, and then ball two is lifted, and then you can shoot that and hopefully land in one that's marked as three. If I recall, the one that I tested all the time was one and five. So in the real game, of course, you're going to land in, you know, 13 or six or something, you know, and really get thrown off. But once you have seven, the game proceeds to the next phase, and this phase, you can collect those two, which has a really low set of odds. The highest amount it'll pay out is 72, and that's after putting in, you know, 100 bucks. Not really. It's after putting in, you know, about a dollar, probably, to ensure that it lights all the way to the top. so with ball three the game changes and instead of carrying about the diamonds you have to carry about the colored circles that surround the trap holes on each of the holes on the game and they alternate red and yellow so at first the game tasks you with landing in a red hole then a yellow hole and then a red hole so this is very similar and it kind of harkens back to that original special game with Orient. The gameplay on that sounds ridiculous. I mean, it sounds so heart-pounding and intense. I really excited to get to try that especially without having to pay money to do so because I feel like that is a quarter suck for sure But it's a really neat challenge, and the way that the game tasks you with shooting all over the playfield makes it less difficult to win on the regular card. But the regular bingo game has changed on Bonus 7 and Super 7, and they're sister games that use this Super 7 slash Bonus 7 special game. Instead of having the standard, or now standard, Mystic Lines layout, where you have the four sections and they're kind of blue in the bottom left, yellow, red, and then green in the upper right, they really changed everything and rearranged the layout, as well as the numbers within each of the parts of the Mystic Lines unit. So winning on the main card is going to take a lot of brain power as well, especially if you're used to playing a standard Mystic Lines game. So I'm looking forward to play that, but boy, it looks rough. It looks very difficult. Right now I'm working on Double Up, which, funny enough, is the most requested game by my kids. Since that one's left the house, they've been really interested in playing that. And Double Up is a return to pure EM. So again, I'm not certain exactly what caused them to drop the Solid State special game, but they did at this point and returned back to pure EM. It might have just been cost-cutting. You know, it's hard to say, but I suspect that it was either player or operator disdain in one way or another. So, there being so few games left to make, let me just list them and I'll at least have that out there. Big Wheel and Magic Ring. Those were early solid state experiments, but they did different things with their solid state circuits. they detected winners on the main game and allowed you to play double or nothing. The way the detection works on that, I've read through the schematic for Big Wheel, and it's kind of cool. It's very interesting, and I'll have to go over that in its entirety on another episode. But I have Big Wheel and Magic Ring. Those are sister games, both with the same type of moving numbers. Double Up Hawaii, those are sister games. and the last two of the traditional Mystic Lions games before they switched to the 40 coin limit. Mystic Gate, which is the only game with a rebound rubber that will actually lift up and allow you to shoot underneath of it to access holes which are further down. Tahiti, that's another 40 coin limit game. it's got a ball return feature that will return balls in sections B or C none of the balls in section A will return but it has traditional Mystic Lines layout otherwise Miss Universe, which is an 18 whole game, it's the only one that Valley produced in mass quantity and Continental Continental is a backlash I've never seen a complete game. I don't think there's one pictured on IPDB. And it's essentially just a rework of Miss Universe. It's interesting because that was produced in 1978, and of course the actual production Continental, which was the fully solid-state game that Bally produced, came out two years later. Galaxy, which is a 24-hole game. And then optionally, I have four card games. So I'm not counting these towards the nine. because I'm probably going to implement these much later on. Those include Joker Wild, Twin Joker, Yukon, and High Hand. But I have a feeling I'll come back to those sooner or later. So, RoboFrenzy update. I picked up some wood. I had it cut down to the rough size that it needs to be in order to make a prototype cabinet. And hopefully I'll be nailing that together this weekend. So, that brings me to service calls. I had a really interesting one over the last weekend. I worked on a game which was High Flyer. That's the six card and the first one that Bally produced with the red diagonal scoring. that game was interesting because it was a high flyer in a wall street cab or rather it was in a high flyer cab but it had a wall street stencil speculation of the owner is that it's a wall street special and that would be very interesting there's no photos of that on ipdb i assumed that that was actually not a thing you know because it's it's one of those odd stories the story is that Bally produced these Wall Street specials. They're high flyers with a Wall Street stencil, and they were shipped to Europe, specifically Spain, and they had, apparently, digital replay counters. This game had no digital replay counter, and the text on the back glass and the play field was in English. Now, there's no telling who prior might have changed out the back glass and play field for regular ones, regular high flyer ones. Or perhaps there was a production mistake. You know, maybe they grabbed a Wall Street special cab and threw the high flyer guts into it. But this game was definitely exported. In fact, it was a re-import because half of the motors were set to 60 hertz and the other half were 50. So, I set them to 60 hertz. That fixed a lot of problems. The clutches were glued on to the clutch washers. So, unglued them, lubed them. That helped. Cleaned a few switches, adjusted a few switches, and everything worked. Search index number two was the one that gave me the most trouble. Those search index switches are so hard to adjust properly. This one just would not catch fully until I adjusted it about 16 times. The problem with the search index is that the travel on that relay is very very small So you have to make sure that the switches activate and deactivate at the appropriate time so that the search disk will stop and the game will score That involves making sure that the search index relay assembly is in the appropriate spot. Otherwise, it won't catch at all. It'll just hit the teeth on the gear that surrounds the search index. So tweaked all that, and then started working on a timer unit problem. Actually, initially, that's what I was working on because the game wasn't lifting balls appropriately, so the timer unit wasn't stepping. Well, there were some trough issues, fixed those, and then took a look at this timer unit, and the timer unit had been replaced. I took a look in the manual, and the manual has a standard timer unit, 8-step, with three concentric circles of rivets. Well, this one only had a single circle of rivets, similar to a reflex unit, but completely populated with rivets. There was also a dead rivet. There was one that was completely malformed. There was just a teeny tiny little chunk of the rivet left. And I said, hmm, that's interesting. Now, the unit had been wired in such a way that that dead rivet didn't make any difference whatsoever. I did have to take it apart and clean it and reassemble it, and then the game timed appropriately. Well, I playtested the game like crazy, you know, working out scoring bugs, because if there's scoring problems, you're typically going to be spending a bit of time on them with one of these 76 cards with the double or nothing feature. so I was working on that, and then the timer unit stopped resetting, and it kept tripping after fourth, so you could search on ball one, which is not appropriate, so I went back and took a look, and it was getting mechanically bound on that dead rivet. It had rotated, and there was just a tiny little chunk of it left, and it was enough to block the wiper from resetting. initially I tried to build it up with silver solder to make it reliable so there was less of a transition from top to bottom that the wiper had to make in order to reset that worked a little bit but it wasn't very pretty and then I took a file to the rest of that dead contact and just got it down to the bake light and that made it much more reliable so that's all taken care of and I met a great new bingo guy in the process so I hope that brings him many years of enjoyment and we were talking about other games as well so I really hope he gets into them and hope he makes it up to York at some point in the future and gets to try out some of the games so that brings us to the year of Flipper Lists. Today's game is Jenko's 1937 Archer. Archer is a beautiful game and it's themed after Robin Hood. We're all probably familiar with the stories of Robin Hood, but at one point he's a famed archer and he enters a tournament, an archery tournament. And in this tournament he competes against other archers. Well, That's basically the scene that's illustrated on the back glass. You have two archers lined up shooting targets. I'm a sucker for medieval themes and literary themes, and this one is pretty cool. The playfield graphics have the two archers facing each other, holding their bows at rest. So two different scenes, and it's very cool. On the back last scene, you've got the grassy field, the stands, the crowd, and you've got these two archers which are aiming their bows at the targets. This game has scoring in the hundreds and the thousands. There are illuminated posts and spring bumpers, which score 1,000 points when lit. There's two illuminated bumpers up at the top edges, and then two at the bottom edges. There's also a center illuminated bumper, well, upper center. And the upper and lower toggle back and forth every 500 points. There's a center drain rollover, which scores 1,000 points, and everything else on the playfield scores 100 points, except the kick-out holes, which I'll get to later on. Your scores in 100-point intervals appear as backlit arrows on the back glass in flight towards the target. I think that is a super cool touch, and it looks great. So first it's the top archer's turn. He shoots the arrow, and then it's the bottom archer's turn, and she shoots the arrow. and you have about 500 points on each. And then it switches to the thousandths block, which is up at the top. Those are block rectangles that portray from 1 to 10,000. The three kick-out holes are arrayed on the playfield, and they apparently score 1,000 each. It's not clear. It's not drawn on the playfield. But it almost doesn't matter. I have seen a video of this being played, and the design is such that it's hard for a ball to land in there reliably. I don't know if it was the wrong size ball or what, but the cups that hold the ball are very shallow, so it's easy for the ball to roll out of it. If they score 100 points, I don't think it would matter very much, and it certainly wouldn't be much of a reward. So I'm going to assume that it's 1,000 points until I'm proven wrong. If you happen to know, please let me know. I would love to hear that. All right, well, with only nine games left to program, I'd better get back to it. Thanks very much for listening, though. My name again is Nicholas Baldridge. You can reach me at 4amusementonlypodcast at gmail.com, or you can call me on the bingos line. That's 724-BINGOS1, 724-246-4671. You can listen to us on iTunes, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, via RSS, on Facebook, on Twitter, at Bingo Podcast. You can also follow me on Instagram, at Bingo Podcast. Or you can listen to us on our website, which is foramusementonly.libsyn.com. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll talk to you next time.