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BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·46m 50s·analyzed·Jun 11, 2017
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.028

TL;DR

Blockade hosts discuss vintage pinball machines and a DIY wood pinball kit Kickstarter.

Summary

Chris and Jared from the Blockade Podcast discuss their experience playing vintage pinball machines at a tournament, covering older EMs and wood rails with brutally difficult designs. They explore the mechanical challenges of maintaining these machines, discuss flipper power issues on games like Terminator 2 and Firepower, and interview a Kickstarter project called 'Makeable' — a DIY wooden pinball machine kit with Arduino integration for scoring.

Key Claims

  • Pro Football (Gottlieb 1973) has a center playfield spinner that the flippers can barely power through, often resulting in half-spins or the ball dribbling back down the center drain

    high confidence · Chris describes playing the table and observing the spinner's weakness; later confirms it's a Gottlieb 1973 model

  • Kickoff (wood rail) features three 'gobble holes' (center drain holes) in the playfield that cause ball loss, similar to Whoa Nellie's center hole mechanic

    high confidence · Chris describes the table's design and gameplay, noting 20 seconds of play without scoring; later confirms the three holes with reference to IPDB images

  • Terminator 2 machines in the wild are commonly underpowered and unable to reach ramps that are clearly intended to be shot according to the game's design

    high confidence · Chris reports this is a common observation across multiple T2 machines; attributes it to potential flipper coil replacements or relay circuit issues

  • Flipper coil replacements on EMs may use incorrectly rated coils, reducing flipper power; EM machines require careful coil matching due to relay-based systems

    medium confidence · Jared theorizes flipper coil issues based on EM era maintenance practices; notes complexity of EM electrical systems with relays

  • The Makeable DIY pinball kit uses pop rivets as conductive pins for copper plates to interface with Arduino-based scoring via Bluetooth to a mobile phone

    high confidence · Jared describes the kit's construction in detail, including pegboard, copper plates, and pop rivet implementation

  • Makeable Kickstarter ships starter kits at CHF 239 and stand-up versions at CHF 329, with shipping worldwide

    high confidence · Jared provides specific pricing and currency information from the Kickstarter page

  • Makeable kits are expected to ship around Christmas time according to the Kickstarter timeline

    high confidence · Jared cites the Kickstarter page shipping estimate

Notable Quotes

  • “You can tell that at this point in pinball design, they were just after your coins. Let's make this as dangerous as possible.”

    Chris @ ~26:30 — Commentary on aggressive, player-unfriendly design philosophy in early EM/wood rail era

  • “That would drive me insane. The only way, after the ball is dribbled down through that center section where all the gobble holes are, the only way you can get it back up there is to try and shoot those really tight-looking left and right loops.”

    Jared @ ~27:30 — Reaction to Kickoff's brutal playfield design with center drain hazards

  • “So I was going, yeah, it does look a little bit sort of cloudy but it's okay. It'll be fine on the clothesline because it's sheltered. Have a guess which direction the rain came in yesterday. Right onto the clothes direction.”

    Chris @ ~1:00 — Casual banter establishing podcast tone; demonstrates hosts' personalities

  • “But on an EM, it could be up to eight places that actually need to be fixed. Yeah. Because it could be a relay right down the relay bank, or it could be an end of stroke switch on the cabinet or it could be a contact switch somewhere else in the playfield.”

    Jared @ ~38:30 — Technical explanation of EM complexity vs. modern machines

  • “It's community-driven pinball development, really. So I kind of like the idea.”

    Jared @ ~53:00 — Assessment of the Makeable DIY kit's maker community approach

Entities

Chris FrebuspersonJared MorganpersonBlockade PodcastorganizationBlack HolegameWilliams Time ZonegameF-14 TomcatgameSpanish EyesgamePro Footballgame

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Makeable Kickstarter positioning DIY pinball as community-driven platform for sharing designs and collaborative innovation; emphasizes maker culture and playfield experimentation

    high · Jared: 'people devise. And I think that's the idea with this. The idea is for you to sort of have a go at making crazy designs and then putting them up on this maker community and let other people see them as well. And it's sort of like community-driven pinball development, really.'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: EM era machines require knowledge of relay-based electrical systems to properly diagnose and repair; complexity far exceeds modern solid-state machines, making restoration difficult without specialized expertise

    high · Jared: 'on an EM, it could be up to eight places that actually need to be fixed... it could be a relay right down the relay bank, or it could be an end of stroke switch on the cabinet or it could be a contact switch somewhere else in the playfield'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Early EM and wood rail machines deliberately designed to be extremely difficult and punishing; player-hostile mechanics (center drains, weak flippers, obscure objectives) suggest design philosophy was extracting coins rather than enabling enjoyable gameplay

    high · Chris: 'You can tell that at this point in pinball design, they were just after your coins. Let's make this as dangerous as possible.'

  • ?

    product_concern: Terminator 2 machines in circulation are commonly underpowered; flipper coil issues likely due to incorrect replacement coils or relay circuit degradation, preventing intended ramp shots

    high · Chris: 'virtually every T2 I run across now, today, in the wild or at a private collector's, unless it's been completely fixed up... it just is underpowered'; Jared theorizes flipper coil replacement issues from EM era maintenance

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.141

0:00
this is the blockade podcast with your hosts chris and jared you are listening to the blockade podcast i'm your host chris rebus aka shut your trap joining me as always from over there jared morgan i'm over here it's hello I'm over here waving my hand it's rainy rainy rainy oh it's very rainy here today we've got apparently according to Google weather we've got four days of rain coming up um so it's sort of weird for winter normally winters are usually dry um but yeah we've got rain and of course it would rain because yesterday I put a load of washing out on the sideline and I thought well I was looking up at the sky going yeah it does look a little bit sort of cloudy but it's okay. It'll be fine over in the sideline because it's sheltered. Have a guess which direction the rain came in yesterday.
1:03
Right onto the clothes direction. Thanks. If you want it to rain, wash your car or don't bring your umbrella.
1:11
Or warm your garden. Right. Or if you want it to be exceedingly boiling hot like the hottest day on the planet, schedule work in your attic.
1:22
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, go and retile your roof. Right, yeah. It'll be 40 degrees Celsius, or like 100 in Fahrenheit. When I, or one neighbor that he's since moved, but he lives across the street from us, you could predict the weather based off of what he was doing.
1:42
Because inevitably, and you're right, it would be, oh, working on the roof? How long is that going to take? Two weeks? Yep, sure enough, that's the hottest two weeks, you know, of that month.
Kickoff
game
Terminator 2game
Firepowergame
Firepower 2game
Royal Flushgame
Pro Pinballgame
Road Kingsgame
Whoa Nellie Big Blastgame
Makeableproduct
Pinball Arcadeproduct
Steve Ritchieperson
CPRcompany
IPDBproduct
  • ?

    technology_signal: DIY pinball innovation using Arduino and Bluetooth for rudimentary scoring on wooden playfield; represents accessible entry point to pinball design and customization for makers

    high · Jared describes Makeable kit: 'uses basically an Arduino or something like that. And you can then make a rudimentary pinball with rudimentary scoring that they will do through a Bluetooth enabled Arduino and your mobile phone as like the DMD'

    • 1:51
    Yeah, exactly. or you're sitting tile oh look at that it's raining you know as he's doing it outside where he needs it to be dry yep yeah and you just look up you go damn you as you look up into the sky yeah so i'm going to uh to uh talk about this because i teased it last week and my wife didn't want to hear it, so to my wife, plug your ears!
    2:20
    Let's talk spiders here. Spiders. See, being an Australian, I am an expert on spiders. You go and ask anyone, and they'll say, yeah, we're not for the spiders. Because they'll kill you.
    2:34
    Right. So I read this interesting statistic that basically said that spiders eat anywhere from 400 to 800 tons of insect matter, basically, or what you will say. Flesh. Meat.
    2:55
    There is only 400 million tons of humans on the planet, which means that in a year, spiders could eat all of us and still be hungry.
    3:08
    Wow. Well, that's the stuff of horror, really, isn't it? now the interesting thing now is supersized spiders right the interesting thing I find about this less about the fact that they could consume us and still be hungry but the fact that there are that many insects that they are consuming each year it's like can you imagine if we didn't have spiders oh my god how many insects oh my god we'd be awash in them There'd be plagues of insects everywhere. You see them in your house. We're not particularly fastidious when it comes to little house spiders that we see crawling around the world. You look up into the cornice in your roof, and you see these little dots up there. You go, yeah, they're all spiders up there. You go, just look at all the bugs that they must be eating. You can tell they're eating because you see little spider droppings everywhere, little black spikes. and you must be like plowing through a fair bit of spiders. The other thing we have over here is geckos and the geckos... Do they bother you? Well, geckos, no. The geckos are fine. Let me first describe geckos just in case they're different in America. So geckos are these sort of translucent sort of lizards, basically, that have really grippy suction pads on their feet. Actually, they're little, very fine hairs, actually. They'll allow them to climb up walls and do all that sort of funky stuff. And they like to eat bugs and moths and stuff like that. And they make this really loud sort of chirping noise. Oh, I didn't know about the chirping. It scares the living bejeebers out of you, particularly when they're in the room with you and you don't know they're there. All of a sudden, it's like this beep, beep, beep, beep, beep noise. And it's like, oh, crap.
    5:08
    Yeah. So anyhow, they're great. They keep the bug count down as well. They also eat spiders. They don't really care. They're like the honey badgers of the I like to eat bugs world.
    5:20
    But getting back to spiders, that's a lot of bugs. Yeah, just a few. And that's yearly. I mean, that's what I'm saying. That's yearly.
    5:31
    This is the thing, though. The bugs, when they reproduce, they produce hundreds. So for every bug, they make lots of rates.
    5:38
    So I guess, you know, it's like a smorgasbord of food available anyhow. So it's like the spiders basically, even though that sounds like a colossal number, spiders can never keep up with the amount of bugs that are out there. That's the thing. So really they're going, oh, I'm so overworked, trying to keep the bug count down.
    6:01
    Every day eating bugs in one more pee. I don't know what to do. Yeah. So, I guess, hooray for spiders?
    6:11
    Good on you, spiders. Except for the ones that cause flesh-eating bacteria. We don't like those. I don't think I've heard of any of those in Australia, which is surprising because we have some good spiders down here. Yeah, you don't have the brown recluse?
    6:24
    No. Oh, yeah, that's a good time spider. And we don't have tarantulas, but I think we have a family member of the tarantula family down here. You don't have tarantulas because you just have a bird-killing spider the size of a tarantula.
    6:38
    Yeah. Yeah, those ones are good. I haven't actually seen one of those. But I was at a science fair recently in our state museum, and there was this spider exhibit, and somebody was just handling a spider, just letting it crawl over themselves and showing people what it looked like. It was very placid. You could tell that when people freak out about getting a spider on them, And it's unwarranted because spiders really don't care about you unless you're pissing them off, basically.
    7:09
    Because this spider was happily just crawling over hands. And, like, the person was just letting it crawl over this hand and then it would just crawl over that. And they just let it pass it around, let it crawl up the arm and then pick it up. And it was happy. It was fun. It was like a garden orb or something like that when there's really big, scary-looking spiders that really are plasters or anything. So, yeah, they were having fun with spiders.
    7:31
    All right. enough of spiders um yeah yeah you know who wants to talk about those anymore i played in our tournament last month or last week i should say uh and the guy's house we went over to he had a whole slew of old tiny ems and well i'll just give you the list of games that we played for the tournament um you can kind of tell the age of everything that we're playing so uh we had black hole, which everybody was commenting about. Hey, you know what's a great design? It has this really cool area that you want to shoot and ball into, and then if you drain, you die.
    8:12
    Classic 80s pin. Yeah. We have Williams Time Zone, which is an EM. And then F-14 Tomcat, a table called Tucson,
    8:26
    an EM, Road Kings, which I believe It was a System 11 high speed. Another very ancient EM, which is called Pro Football.
    8:45
    And then Royal Flush, which is more modern. It's basically the same, almost, I shouldn't say it's the same thing. It very much reminded me of, what's the one that we just got in last season in Pinball Arcade? Power Gone. No, the Gottlieb. That was also a card themed.
    9:05
    Jack's Open or something like that? Yeah, Jack's Open, yeah. Yeah. Virtually the same play field, just like instead of the bank of cards or drop targets being straight across the top, it was on an angle.
    9:22
    Oh, right, okay. Yeah, because there's not really too much you can do with a street level play field. Really, it's, I mean, certain configurations that will actually work when you're actually designing them. Terminator 2,
    9:35
    Spanish Eyes, which was another old EM, and then the oldest of the batch, which was a wood rail called Kickoff. Oh, wow. A wood rail?
    9:48
    Yeah. What I learned from playing these is there is a different class of EM. so you take an EM like Royal Flush which was just on the verge of almost us getting to Salt State so your flippers are the size you're used to there's flipper return lanes goals are fairly understandable in terms of you kind of know what the object of the table is relatively easily.
    10:34
    It just looks like a standard pin for the most part, just lacking all the well, it has plenty of bells, but all the whistles.
    10:42
    Yeah. Then you go into a table like Spanish Eyes. Spanish Eyes is weird because it has a pop bumper right at the drain hole. and the two flippers... Oh yeah, they will pop it back in? Well, okay, so it's got a pop bumper and then kind of a U-shaped border around the pop bumper with the bottom of the U being the hole that goes to the center drain. So what happens is if your ball goes into that area, it's going to bounce around like crazy and it's very possible that it can bounce right back out and you can continue playing. But more often than not, it bounces it into the center drain and then it's toast. And then the two flippers are your little short two-inch... I always want to call them zipper flippers even though they're not a zipper, but it's that size flipper. And they're on the outsides of – It's the flippers that actually have the word flipper written on them. Exactly. Yes, yes. Because back then you didn know what those things were Anyway so and that table is one of those that there also this big horseshoe dead center
    11:47
    and I call those the EMs where they're difficult because of the size of the flipper, and also because they have these weird playfield mechanics that you're just not quite sure what's going on. But again, you relatively understand, keep the ball alive and try and get it to the upper play field, which is always, to me, the main task of any EM.
    12:12
    Then you move on to something like pro football. Pro football is... This is when you're... What do they call it? The leather-capped football helmets? We're talking American football here.
    12:27
    They didn't have hard helmets back then. It was the leather kind of thing. And I had no clue what to do on this thing. It kept two different scores. It had both a touchdown score, essentially, and a typical pinball score. It had what they called red side and blue side.
    12:52
    And you were scoring for those teams. And if you lit, and those were lit at the top of the play field. There was two in lanes. One was red, one was blue. Whatever lane you got it in, that lit. and the object was to get both of them lit because then that multiplied the scores even higher for whatever you bounced off against.
    13:14
    But there was also this thing of advancing the football across the football field and it would light and there was these very targets that you were supposed to push back by repeatedly hitting them and then eventually they'd drop. But everything that you did pretty much resulted in the ball wanting to go straight down the middle.
    13:36
    Right. And it was one of those things where, for the life of us, none of us could figure out what the heck we were supposed to be shooting at.
    13:46
    It was just try and make it hit anything and score points somehow. But God knows how. It was really kind of a head-scratcher. and then bring it up now to see what it actually looks like if I'm looking at the right thing it's a godly pro football oh no that's way too recent that's 1973 kick me the link and I'll look at it yeah it's alright keep going oh so then what I was going to say is the wood rail which is like from a completely different planet was and kickoff it had so two on each side and they basically ran one to the next kind of that dribble over factor but each flipper was labeled like cornerback, quarterback running back as if that was going to determine what kind of shot you were going to be able to make But in the playfield, down at the bottom, or the lower half of the playfield, there was these three center or three holes that you could shoot and drop the ball into. What we didn't realize right off the bat was you shoot the ball in there, you lose your ball. So, yes, you score points, but you also lose the ball. And what somebody pointed out to me is it's kind of like on Wo Nelly.
    15:27
    There's a hole in the middle of the playfield there also. and it's the exact same thing. So you're trying to avoid the hole.
    15:35
    So not only do you have to worry about outlanes and center drains, but you also have these three holes in the middle of the play field.
    15:42
    And that table was an exercise in slow motion death. I literally, there was one part where I literally for 20 seconds didn't hit a single target. It was just setting the ball up, watch the ball come back to my flippers. and send the ball up and watch the ball come back down to my flippers.
    16:04
    And then it would hit a bumper, and you'd watch it slowly go out the out lane, and there was nothing you could do about it.
    16:13
    Right. Okay. That sounds pretty not fun. Yeah. You know, I'm mistaking my two football tables here. I realize that the pro football was the one that had the four flippers kickoff, had those little tiny zipper flippers, but then it also had the plastic... It was like playing Plinko. So the plastic lanes down at the bottom that, depending on where the ball fell, you would score X amount of points.
    16:41
    Just a really bizarre, hard layout. But I'm telling you, man, those tables just were a nightmare to try and figure out what the heck you were doing.
    16:54
    I'm just trying to... Oh, okay. It's actually Williams. Profitable? I think so. So let me have a look. The play field shot's pretty low res on IPDB. But, yeah, so it did have two red flippers down the bottom and sort of like four outlanes. Put a link in the comments and I'll take a quick look. Yeah, I think I'm looking at the same thing.
    17:24
    It does look rather interesting. I'll tell you that much. Just got to go tab back to the... So at minute 20 in the podcast, much editing is taking place. Yeah. There you go. Have a look at that one.
    17:45
    Yep, that's the bastard. Oh. Yeah, that's a kickoff. Sorry. so you can see there's a hole right next to the blue pop bumper right next to the red pop bumper and right dead center and all three of those are death holes they're gobble holes they call them the only way to get a score happening is to shoot all the way you know if you want to call it a loop all the way on the side there's a 10,000 point sides and in the centers just off the centers if you can stomach aiming for those to avoid the hole. You need to get it up there into the bob bumpers to score more points. Otherwise, you're not really scoring points.
    18:29
    That's insane. So the only way, after the ball is dribbled down through that center section where all the gobble holes are, the only way you can get it back up there is to try and shoot those really tight-looking left and right loops.
    18:44
    Wow, what an unsatisfying pinball machine to play. That would drive me insane. You can tell that at this point in pinball design, they were just after your coins.
    18:55
    Totally. Let's make this as dangerous as possible. Let's put little tiny flippers on with huge, not even return lines, they're basically four lanes that go straight into the out lane arch.
    19:10
    Little teeny tiny flippers, and then the only way you can get it back up to where you can actually score points is through these tiny little lanes that would pretty much be impossible to get most of the time anyhow.
    19:27
    And then on top of it, if you look at the back glass, this is the kind of scoring where it just puts a light behind a number and you have to do the addition to figure out what your scoring is. which we were like what the heck is that that's no stop bueno don't like it um oh look at those racy cheerleaders on the back glass my goodness right you can see their pantaloons yeah they uh they were they were showing something there yeah so I mean that's this guy's collection also it's these machines were player machines at best yeah you know they he hasn't done play field restoration on them and good luck if he wanted to because you'd basically have to be an exceedingly good artist and be able to do all the painting yourself.
    20:41
    You're not going to find a playfield overlay or a CPR playfield for any of these. Nope. Wow. And so the other one was Pro Pinball, right? Pro Football. And it was probably a Williams, I'd imagine, as well. It seems to... It's a Gottlieb. Okay.
    21:05
    And it is from... 1931 to... Hang on. Yeah, that's not the year it is. 1973. Yeah, 1973. Yeah. All right, let me have a quick quiz at this so I can know what you're talking about.
    21:24
    So the full... Yeah, so it's a full flipper, strangely aligned flipper playfield with. So in this one, it's interesting because they're both football themed tables. Yes. But in this particular one, pro football has the actual football player field actually running top to bottom, whereas on the EM it was left to right. And of course, being the way that art is actually laid out means that the whole play field changes, doesn't it? Because they then have to accommodate the playfield features around that big centerpiece of art. Yes, and now what you'll notice is on the left and right side dead center, dead middle of the playfield, you'll see what says touchdown those are the very targets that you whack them a couple of times and they keep on going back, back, back, back until they finally drop it.
    22:18
    The center of the playfield is basically a field goal, a spinner the strength of the flippers on this machine, the ball barely could get past it. And when I say barely, maybe a bit. If you were lucky, you would get one spin. If you were extraordinarily lucky, two spins would happen. Usually, it would do a half spin and wouldn't even register, and the ball would dribble back down straight down the middle.
    22:46
    So I'm looking at how you would launch the ball into play here. It launches from the center drain. Yeah, I see that. So it actually kicks it back out. Yeah, you push the right flipper, and it shoots it out, and basically it goes all the way. It would shoot out hard enough to go all the way up to the right. There's a stand-up yellow target about three-quarters of the way up the play field.
    23:13
    And you'd get some points, and maybe from there it would hit the slingshot that right underneath that and then that would bounce you up into the upper play field to score points some bigger points But I telling you these tables do not want the ball on the upper playfield No. It's quite annoying. And I'm trying to see, like, for that, the upper playfield area, it looks like that there's, the only way to get up there is really through that spinner. So you shoot the spinner, and then theoretically it would shoot into either the left arch or the right arch and go to the left three rollovers at the top or the right three rollovers. That seems to be how that game is supposed to work. Yes, if you get a hard enough launch on the flipper. Yeah, so if the flippers are strong enough, you could theoretically get to the upper area and have some fun. But otherwise, it's pretty much just shoot the very targets and try and score. And that's why on this, this was the table that I literally went 20 seconds with the ball just bouncing and not touching anything that scored me a point.
    24:16
    Yep. That sounds about right. That's a brutal game. So the two brutal games, both are very different eras, but the EMs out to kill you. Yeah, yeah.
    24:28
    But still, it's interesting to play these and realize what people were willing to put up with. It's just a whole different thought process to pinball.
    24:40
    You know, back then. The other thing that I found interesting, and I was again talking to some people and we all kind of came to the same conclusion. So Terminator 2 was one of the tables that I had to play.
    24:54
    And we all commented, why is it that every T2 we play, shooting, getting the ball all the way up the ramp is a virtual impossibility? Like the flippers are never strong enough. I remember when it first came out in playing T2 and it plays very,
    25:10
    my recollection of it is that it plays very much like what is in Pinball Arcade with strength. Yeah. But virtually every T2 I run across now, today, in the wild or at a private collector's, unless it's been completely fixed up. Shopped out. Yeah, shopped out. It just is underpowered.
    25:31
    Yeah, it will be. Probably because they need to rebuild all the flipper circuits for those flippers. And it could be also because they would have used, that they might have tried to replace coils with a different rated flipper coil over the years, and that might have actually affected its ability to shoot the rams. Because I think of the era of pinball machine, when you did replace flipper coils, you had to be pretty particular about what one you put back in because it was rated for the playfield objects in the game. So if you find that it could be that of those games that are around, that they might have been fixed up at one point when coils were a bit undefined and someone just put a different rated coil in there and that coil might have been fine for 20 years. So it's still in that game and it's probably incorrect.
    26:24
    Yeah, I don't know. It might be a symptom of Steve Ritchie games because I've also come across with... This guy had both Firepower and Firepower 2. and Firepower 2 in particular was just woefully underpowered.
    26:43
    There's a steep metal ramp on the left-hand side, not even halfway up the playfield, I don't think, and I could get the ball about three-quarters of the way up the ramp, and then it would roll right back down. That was from a completely still-caught ball, which just doesn't seem right to me. no it's yeah it's strange it is it is it's interesting and you know it's one of those things obviously with owning pinball machines of a certain era especially with those EM's good luck making them play well I again it's are you supposed to make them play the way that you expect a pinball to play today or was that the standard back in the day and good luck finding anybody that remembers.
    27:35
    Well, it does pose some problems, doesn't it? Because we don't have anyone like you and I who have recently played this era of pinball machines. Like the more recent era of pinball machines, we can't actually go, yeah, that's way underpowered. It used to be this. But all the people who used to have a misspent youth playing 50s and 60s pinball machines said, well, they're kind of dead.
    27:56
    Or their memory is so off from what it was back then. I mean, you know, many a year ago. The decades cloud your judgment about what you remember of a pinball machine. And you would think, though, that if you can't even reach the spinner and you can see that the design of the play field is such that you need to get up to that upper level, then that would suggest that some work needs to be done on those flippers. Yeah.
    28:30
    Would suggest it. But it'd be interesting to see one that's been completely like mechanically shopped out. Because the problem with the EMs is that everything, everything is connected through relays. So unlike, you know, with a pinball machine now, if there's something wrong with the flipper, it's probably only two places that really needs your attention. But on an EM, it could be up to eight places that actually need to be fixed. Yeah. Because it could be a relay right down the relay bank, or it could be an end of stroke switch on the cabinet or it could be a contact switch somewhere else in the play field. It could be any number of contact points that transfer electricity to the coils. It could be causing that thing not to work properly. So trying to work that out is tricky.
    29:18
    Very much so. All right, enough of that particular bit of fun. You had something pinball related. you were going to talk about.
    29:32
    Yeah, I did, actually. I would need to go and find the link for it. But it was a kickstarter for something rather unusual in the fact that it was like a... You know when you're a kid and you wanted to make a pinball machine, so you get out a bit of wood and you stick some nails in it and, you know, you sort of make up one that flipped and you could shoot the ball around, and maybe put some paper tube ramps on there and stuff like that. Sure. You know that.
    30:02
    Rubber band going between a couple of the nails. Oh, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, there is a Kickstarter open at the moment that basically takes that to a new level in that they've actually made a proper wood kit that you can buy with two flippers at the bottom that are all connected quite nicely from a mechanical perspective. I know that when I was making a pinball machine, I always had just basically straight bits of wood leading to the outside of the cabinet, and I just had to flip them with the flippers, which means no outlanes or any sort of thing like that. I had two pencils that I just manually flipped.
    30:42
    Yeah, right. Pretty much like me. Like in the days when we were doing it ourselves, This one also uses BB size metal balls.
    30:56
    And, gee, there's some ruckus out there. I don't know what's going on with the kids. I don't know if you can hear that coming through the mic, but if you do, sorry, my kids are playing up this morning. That's okay. It's okay for kids to play. They don't want that. Yeah. So this thing basically has all, it's all looked like CNC'd wood and everything, and it's all got metal components in it to make the flippers pretty good quality. But then what it is basically, it's what would you call it? Do you know the wood material you use in your garage to make a pin board out of for your tools? You have that little horizontal and vertical holes.
    31:37
    Yeah, pegboard. Well, it's got basically pegboard in there, which allows you to put a basic sort of guides and rails and stuff that come with the kit. But what it also has is it has conductive copper plates that you can put around the play field as well. And it's kind of genius the way they've actually thought about connecting it. They just use pop rivets stuck through the play field. So, you know, the pop rivets that you, when you get a pop rivet, it's got like a long tail on it that you stick into the gun and then you crimp the gun and it cuts. Well, what they're doing is they're actually using those as like the conductive pins for the copper. And the idea is that you can connect it up using basically an Arduino or something like that.
    32:24
    And you can then make a rudimentary pinball with rudimentary scoring that they will do through a Bluetooth enabled Arduino and your mobile phone as like the DMD. So, you know, we're not talking anything completely rich as far as rules go. But what this kit will allow you to do as a maker is employ other techniques like, you know, you could use cardboard or foam or other stuff to make very different pinball designs, which you can then put rudimentary scoring on. So it's a pretty nice looking, like, set. I can't find the link to it. I think I actually tweeted it. Yeah, you did tweet it because I took a look at it from there. It's what, about $350, I think, to back it.
    33:14
    Yeah, something like that. I'm just trying to find the... It should be in the tweet list, hopefully.
    33:21
    If I scroll back, there's a lot of other stuff. I'm looking at the Blackade tweet list. Yeah, here it is. I knew my Twitter foo would come in handy. The project is called Makeable. and yeah it's a three legged pinball machine in the way that they it's a bit odd but the other thing is you can make it a tabletop as well and the video is pretty cool they've actually got one pinball play field that actually has a planter box in it and like they use it as almost like a little mini garden it's all people friendly yeah it's all very So it's a really interesting sort of idea.
    34:08
    It's not overly expensive, I don't think. So it's CHF is Canadian, right? CHF is Canadian. Yeah. Something, I don't know. So if you pledge CHF 239, you get a starter kit, a desktop starter kit and then you also get if you spend a little bit more like $3.29 you get the stand up version of it and they will ship this anywhere in the world so yeah you can pretty much get this thing and start putting it together and whacking bits of cardboard tube on it and have some fun it is very DIY way. There's no doubt about it. It's totally do-it-way. Yeah, it's there for you to experiment I guess it sort of like a way to if you interested in maybe building a basic pinball machine you could actually use this to quickly prototype some obstacles and stuff in it and just sort of test things out. And it uses little BB balls. So I think they give you about four balls in the kit.
    35:24
    So you can just sort of, you can technically add multiple, but some of the designs on the Kickstarter page, they're pretty elaborate. There's some pretty crazy ramps and stuff that people devise. And I think that's the idea with this. The idea is for you to sort of have a go at making crazy designs and then putting them up on this maker community and let other people see them as well. And it's sort of like community-driven pinball development, really.
    35:48
    So I kind of like the idea. It's kind of interesting. And truth be told, it reminds me a lot of the old wood rail that I was playing in terms of the simplicity of what you're doing here, except for you're not going to have powered pop bumpers or slingshots on this thing.
    36:05
    No, it will be passive, basically. But, I mean, theoretically, it might be something fun to sort of muck around with.
    36:13
    So, yeah, check it out. I'll put a link to it in the show notes if you want to check it out. Apparently, according to the backup page, should be ready about Christmas time this year when they'll start shipping them out. So, happy Merry Christmas to you. Ta-da!
    36:28
    Before we close out today, I want to touch upon two quick things. Nothing in-depth here. Number one, I haven't had an issue with projection in a theater that much lately, other than the occasional it's slightly blurry. so I went and saw Wonder Woman the other night and I wanted to see it in 3D because the one website that I go to that mentions 3D and stuff said it was pretty good so I go there they hadn't flipped the lens to make it 3D so what we saw when the movie started was a complete blurred mess so I had to get up and run out of the theater and go talk to the people that work there, which is my least favorite thing to do. Because once I'm settled into my movie seat, I don't want to move.
    37:27
    And I go out there and I said, hey, your 3D is all jacked up. You need to go correct it. And if you could, start the movie over. Because I just missed it. I missed the first couple of minutes because I'm out here talking to you people. So I went back in the theater.
    37:43
    Boom, they flipped the little lens. It's at that point that I went, boy, it's kind of dim, too. It's not a bright, crisp, and for some reason, the 3D wasn't, like, usually when I watch a 3D movie, you can really sense the depth.
    37:59
    Yeah. And this, although if you flipped off your glasses, you could see that it was still a blurry mess, which means it should have plenty of depth. There was just something not deep looking about the presentation. And I don't know if it, I don't know exactly what the issue was that was going on in the movie theater. whether it was because it wasn't super bright but then it wasn't until the credits started rolling that I also noticed that the credits were slightly blurry so it was a combination of being slightly out of focus not bright enough and then me being just annoyed at the way they started the movie to begin with it was just like way to kill your enjoyment of a movie you have one job make the movie watchable you know yeah it was just really sad and it just kind of made me go you know what i you know unless it's james cameron or whatever and and maybe i'll pick a different theater to go see 3d um it was just like i'm better off at home when it comes out in the video uh you know watching them that way i would have just walked out no you guys can't can't you know organize a beer in a pub at the moment as far as this um uh projection goes so i'd like my money back now thanks i'm leaving Yeah, but I hate doing that too. Again, once I'm there...
    39:19
    You've got your supersized popcorn and your mega drink. Oh, no, I don't pay for those. Are you kidding me? No. Yeah, nuts.
    39:27
    No, that doesn't happen. Yeah, that's frustrating. So anyway, I just wanted to kind of just... I don't know, that was on my mind. It's annoying.
    39:36
    The other thing is, did you hear about this rock climber that just climbed in Yosemite. There's this cliff face, if you will, called El Capitan. And he just climbed it 3,000 feet, no rope, no safety equipment.
    39:54
    Whoa. Yeah, they call it free-solid. That's pretty ballsy. Yeah. It took him four hours to do. That's not much. No.
    40:04
    So he would have been leading it up that bloody cliff. Right. And I mean, it's sheer straight up and down. It's stupid. My family just went to Yosemite last summer, and it's staggering. And to think that somebody was like, yep, that's what I'm going to do. So he was the first person to ever do it. And a lot of people have said it's the holy grail of free solo climbing to do. So here's my thing. You're an adrenaline junkie. So of course you're doing these things. you just conquered the ultimate of adrenaline junkie things. Oh, and you're only in your mid-20s. You're like 26, 27. Now what? What do you do now? Yeah, what do you do now? You know?
    40:47
    The interesting thing is that somebody was talking to him and mentioned about adrenaline. He goes, oh, no, if you feel that kick of adrenaline, something's gone terribly wrong. Oh, really? Because he says you should be climbing these things in complete relaxed calmness. The minute you feel an adrenaline spike, That means something bad has happened, and you don't want that feeling.
    41:10
    It's just like, wow, the mindset that these people have to go through. What I found funny was they were quoting these other renowned climbers that have mentioned – there were two of them that had contemplated doing this exact same feat, and they'd mentioned a couple of other climbers. They're all dead.
    41:30
    How do you think they all died? Falling off a mountain. You know, one guy died from, he was climbing over a seawall, and I guess a rogue wave splashed up high and washed him off, and he drowned. Another guy was base jumping and died that way. Yeah, we hear that all the time.
    41:54
    Yeah, base jumping is one of my safest sports. Right. Another one had died, you know, while climbing. it's like what is up with a sport that you i don't know i i guess i don't have that death wish you know i understand doing adrenaline junkie things but i don't understand the death wish thing um that's how that's how you feel alive is by conquering death it's like well yeah different strokes for different folks i guess yeah of course i can guarantee you they'd be like you sit there and play pinball for an hour or two. What a waste of life.
    42:35
    Yeah. Or, you know, you go to work every day just to earn a living. What a waste of life when you could be trying to kill yourself. It's funny because this guy, and again, I've heard this about other climbers, he lives in a van. He owns a van. That's where he sleeps. That's where he's got his hot stove and everything. Basically, he lives on less than $1,000 a month. Right, okay. And to them, the idea is, well, if I feel like driving across the country to this climbing spot, then I drive to that spot in the country and I park and I climb for the next two months.
    43:15
    Yeah. That's what I do. Yeah, that's what I do. It's like, wow. It's such a different headspace for me.
    43:25
    It is, yeah. It's a mindfrag for sure, right? It's like, okay, sure. Obviously, the guy's single, right?
    43:34
    Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because there's no way you could do that if you had a partner or kids. So, yeah. Oh, no, yeah. The minute somebody else's life comes into your mind, then it's game over. It's game over. Yeah, so it's like, yeah, I'm an adult. I can do what I want, basically, is what he's saying.
    43:54
    I'm an adult doing adult things. Which is why I play. decisions life and death that's right that's about my level of um of adrenaline uh yeah boy my adrenaline strikes when i get multi-ball whoo look out yeah boy i'm scared oh my gosh i'm gonna center drain no i've lost one of the funny balls ah Yep. Oh, man. Yeah, that's crazy stuff, honey.
    44:25
    Yeah. Hey, we're not getting paid by these guys or anything, but I just wanted to throw out on Twitter, I just posted the 10 shirts I just got for 50 bucks.
    44:39
    They're, you know, fun shirts. Like the one I'm wearing is a, he's got a TIE fighter and an excellent. Yan Yang. Ying Yang, yes.
    44:50
    My style of t-shirt. Anyway, I picked them up from this website called $6 Shirts. Oh. Yeah. No, and they don't lie. They're $6 a shirt, but if you bought 10, then they knocked $10 off the price, and all of a sudden it was $50 for 10 shirts, which is a bargain. That's pretty cheap. That's your wardrobe done, basically.
    45:09
    That's a real bargain. Do you get to choose them, or is it like random? No, you get to choose. There are over 1,000 shirts to choose from, I think. And you can pick the color of the T-shirt. Wow, that's pretty good. Yep. So I just wanted to link to them.
    45:26
    Because I know I've mentioned Busted Tees before where I've gotten most of my previous shirts of this nature.
    45:34
    So, anyway, one of those things that people might be interested in checking out. Like I said, they're not sponsoring us or anything. Oh, yeah.
    45:43
    But it's cheap. We like cheap. Exactly. exactly hey I think that's about all we got time for today or at least we don't have anything else to talk about no probably next week I think things should start heating up a little bit next week for the digital world so stay tuned hopefully alright gang so until then go plunk some quarters wherever you can find a place to plunk them in the meantime we'll talk to you all next week bye bye see you later
    46:16
    wizardamusement.com the site to visit for custom pinball shooter modes easy to install, totally unique mention Blockade Podcast for 10% off your order wizardamusement.com sales, restoration, customization don't forget to leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that Blockade is delivered to we can't improve unless you tell us how now stop listening and play some pinball