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Episode 108 – Zero Insertion Force

Slam Tilt Podcast·podcast_episode·analyzed·Sep 20, 2018
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

Slam Tilt Podcast tech episode covers pinball repair fundamentals and troubleshooting methodology.

Summary

A tech-focused episode of the Slam Tilt Podcast featuring host Ron Hallett with guests Zach and Scott C. The hosts discuss essential pinball repair and maintenance skills for machine owners, covering multimeters, soldering, alligator clips, forum research, and troubleshooting methodology. They share real repair stories emphasizing how simple diagnostics (bulbs, dirty switches, connectors) often solve problems that owners assume are complex, and discuss EM machine repair approaches, tournament game selection, and specific machine issues.

Key Claims

  • Top three skills every pinball owner should know are: multimeters, soldering, and alligator clips for diagnostics.

    high confidence · Zach and Scott C answering Scott Larson's direct question about essential owner skills

  • Most pinball problems stem from simple issues (power, wires, connectors, bulbs) rather than complex electronic failures.

    high confidence · Scott C and Ron Hallett consensus from multiple troubleshooting anecdotes

  • Nick Schell's EM bulletproofing process involves disassembling every relay and cleaning contacts with alcohol swabs and a Dremel carbon steel brush.

    high confidence · Ron Hallett referencing Nick Schell's methodology

  • Gottlieb EM machines are more difficult to repair than Williams machines due to cramped design and finicky mechanical tolerances.

    high confidence · Zach and Scott C consensus, reinforced by Nick Schell appearance reference

  • EM machines are significantly cheaper than solid-state games, making them attractive to budget-conscious collectors.

    high confidence · Zach explaining why he owns many EMs: 'They cost like a quarter of the next best thing'

  • A Spanish Eyes machine's scoring failure was caused by a dirty center saucer switch contact, not electronic issues.

    high confidence · Zach's detailed troubleshooting story about Spanish Eyes restoration

  • Williams relay switch stacks have longer blades with greater travel, making them more forgiving for adjustment than Gottlieb or Bally designs.

    high confidence · Ron Hallett comparing relay designs across manufacturers

  • Addams Family has become problematic as a tournament game due to post-passing exploitation allowing monotonous ramp/scoop repeats.

    medium confidence · Scott C referencing Cleveland stream footage of Addams Family tournament play

  • Steve Ritchie has approximately a 50% success rate on game design (citing Flash as great, Star Wars as terrible).

Notable Quotes

  • “Because you can do so much with an alligator clip. If a coil's not firing, you could ground the coil with the alligator clip, or you could ground the transistor tab with the alligator clip.”

    Zach @ early segment — Core advice on using alligator clips for EM diagnostics

  • “Forums, there's online stuff there's, I mean, pin wikis out there. It's not for the faint of heart, but I would recommend just like buy the worst thing possible and just bang your head against it repeatedly until it finally works.”

    Scott C @ mid-segment — Experiential learning philosophy for tech skills

  • “People make it too complicated. Like, if you walk into a room and you turn the light on and it doesn't work, most people would be like, oh, the light bulb's out. But for some reason on a pinball machine, they just go other areas.”

    Ron Hallett @ mid-segment — Core thesis on troubleshooting bias

  • “You don't want to do that because you'll take a game that probably was somewhat working or working and you'll make it not working.”

    Ron Hallett @ mid-segment — Warning about over-aggressive relay cleaning on EMs

  • “EMs cost like a quarter of the next best thing. But how many people in your area repair EMs? One, pretty much.”

    Zach @ mid-segment — Explains EM collector motivation and regional repair availability

  • “They wanted me to buy it, completely restore it and fix it up for them, and then sell it to them for $325. And I said, no. I wouldn't even pick it up and deliver it for a $50 profit.”

    Zach @ mid-segment — Reflects on labor economics in EM restoration

  • “As in the switch. Oh, just the switch itself was dirty? Yep. Yeah, so the kick-out hole started working eventually because the EM self-cleaning action, you know, burned it off.”

    Zach @ mid-segment — Resolution of Spanish Eyes troubleshooting story

  • “I love EMs because the game's short. I appreciate that aspect, but I really don't like replay where it's just the whole point of the game is moot.”

Entities

Ron HallettpersonZachpersonScott CpersonScott LarsonpersonSteve RitchiepersonNick SchellpersonClay HarrellpersonSlam Tilt PodcastorganizationSterncompanyWilliams

Signals

  • ?

    technology_signal: Hosts discuss essential repair tools (multimeters, alligator clips, soldering irons) and proper technique, emphasizing that most issues are simple and diagnostically addressable with basic tools.

    high · Zach emphasizes alligator clips for coil and transistor diagnostics; Scott C advocates for multimeters and forum research; Ron reinforces simple-first troubleshooting approach.

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Discussion of manufacturer-specific relay design philosophy, with Williams praised for robust/forgiving designs, Gottlieb and Bally noted as requiring more precision adjustment.

    high · Ron, Zach, and Scott C consensus that Williams relay stacks have longer blades with greater travel and adjustment tolerance; Gottlieb designs are tighter and more finicky.

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Nick Schell's systematic EM relay bulletproofing approach: disassemble every relay, clean contacts with alcohol swabs and Dremel carbon steel brush, ensuring factory-new condition.

    high · Ron Hallett details Nick Schell's process and notes the trade-off between reliability gains and risk of adjustment errors, especially on cramped Gottlieb and Bally machines.

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Addams Family identified as problematic tournament game due to post-passing enabling infinite ramp/scoop loops, making matches tedious and skill-variable.

    medium · Scott C references Cleveland stream showing repetitive play pattern; discusses potential playfield mods to eliminate post-passing but notes sling geometry complications.

  • ?

    community_signal: Strong emphasis on learning through forums (pinrepair.com, Pinsight), hands-on experimentation, and peer mentoring rather than formal training.

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.453

0:00
Check it out, Beavis. A window. Yeah, cool. Whoa. He's taking her clothes off. Whoa, cool. Take it off. Take it all off. Hey, hey, hey. Your underwear next. Oh, no. Now he's getting naked. Ah.
0:21
This is pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go for it. Yeah, yeah. Do it. Do it. Go for it, dude. Do it! Do it! Do it!
0:34
I wish he'd hurry up and do it instead of just putting his arm around her. Yeah, really. Come on! Grab her thingy! Come on!
0:42
Yeah. Grab his schlong. Yeah! Yeah, come on! Coming to you from beautiful upstate New York, this is the Slam Phil Podcast, the show about all things pinball. I'm your host, Ron Hallett, here with my... Well, actually, he's not here yet. He said he might be coming by later, but he is going to be late or possibly missing entirely. So in order to make up for this, I've secured two guests. when we were asking for some tech emails, and we did receive some, and we said we were going to have a tech-based episode. So here it is, episode 108, Spider-Man Homecoming, and I have with me Zach. Hi, Zach. Hi. And Scott C. Hello, Scott. Hey, Ron. Hey, Zach. And have either of you seen Spider-Man Homecoming? I have. I haven't. Pretty good.
1:53
So you thought it was pretty good. Zach, you haven't even seen Star Wars, and you own a Star Wars machine. I have seen Star Wars. It was just a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I see what you did there. What version, what special edition of Star Wars did you see? I don't even know where I saw Star Wars. I just know that I've seen it at some point. So it could have been in a theater as a rerun or something, or could have just been, like, off a DVD at home or who knows. Well, the theater reruns were in 97, so you were like, you probably wouldn't remember that. You don't think David would have done them again?

low confidence · Zach's joking comment at episode end; appears to be opinion/jest rather than factual assessment

Zach @ tournament discussion — Personal preference about EM game length and replay mechanics

company
Gottliebcompany
Ballycompany
Spanish Eyesgame
Flashgame
Star Warsgame
Addams Familygame
Dragon Fistgame
Top Cardgame
Laser Ballgame
Target Poolgame
Mini Poolgame
Pin Rescueorganization
Pinsightorganization
Clevelandlocation
Allentown Showevent

high · Multiple hosts recommend forums and peer learning; Scott C shares story of self-teaching via worst-case Laser Ball restoration; Ron warns against premature relay disassembly based on personal mistake.

  • $

    market_signal: EM machines cost approximately 25% of modern solid-state games, making them accessible entry point for collectors and repair skill-building.

    high · Zach states EMs 'cost like a quarter of the next best thing'; $275 Spanish Eyes example; target pool at $75 with $75 backglass value.

  • ?

    operational_signal: Significant regional variation in available EM repair expertise; some areas have only 1-5 qualified technicians within 1-1.5 hours, creating self-repair necessity.

    medium · Zach notes only one EM repair person in his immediate area; Ron previously provided machines to Allentown tournaments; Pin Rescue mentioned in Lambertville.

  • ?

    product_concern: Dirty relay switch contacts are a common failure mode in EM machines, appearing as black discoloration but often still functionally appearing 'adjusted properly' until they completely fail.

    high · Spanish Eyes story: all four score relay contacts were too dirty to function despite appearing adjusted; self-cleaning action eventually burned off deposits.

  • ?

    design_innovation: Cost-effective EM repair technique: rebuilding switch blades from components (contact blade + bake spacers) rather than replacing entire switch assemblies.

    medium · Zach notes switch blade components are cheap; Scott C mentions discovering this approach after struggling to find complete replacements at good prices.

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Flash restoration involved replacing all switches due to factory assembly errors (rivets assembled backwards) causing premature wear even without filing.

    medium · Zach describes Williams Flash switches with reversed rivets causing rough-on-smooth contact degradation; required full switch replacement for reliability.

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Certain EM games have problematic tournament characteristics (low-engagement loops, high score variance, skill-gate entry shots) limiting their suitability for competitive play.

    medium · Scott C discusses Dragon Fist and Top Card as high-variance games with skill gates; Ron mentions preferring tournament games with high novelty factor (Dragonfest, Mystic).

  • ?

    content_signal: Slam Tilt Podcast features technical experts (Nick Schell, Clay Harrell referenced) contributing to community knowledge base via guest appearances and forum participation.

    medium · Nick Schell mentioned as prior podcast guest; Clay Harrell's pinrepair.com guides referenced as foundational learning resource.

    • 2:29
    That was the main re-release. I don't recall them doing that again. I know I saw episode three in theaters. All right. I have a poster for it. My condolences. What is this episode three you're speaking of? I don't know what that is. episode 3 is it's this high budget fanfic that they made about a decade or two later that's about right it was on Facebook someone was asking put the movies in order best to worst so I put I was kind of a dick I put Empire number 1 of course and I put Star Wars and then I put Distant Third, Return of the Jedi and then underneath that I put, and there are no other movies, Star Wars ended in 1983. Hey, come on now, you're forgetting Star Wars 7 and 8. Hmm.
    3:26
    But we're not here to talk about Star Wars, are we? I thought this was the Star Wars podcast. So, no, it's not. This is the Slam Tilt podcast, and we're going to talk about tech. All right. Aren't you so excited? I am thrilled. Let's get right to a question. let's do that first because we actually did get a tech question, not about a specific game, but here we go.
    3:54
    This is for a tech episode. This is from Scott Larson. He asked, what are the top three skills every pinball owner should know? I own 13 games but am a novice at tech issues. Who wants to help out Scott? Zach can go first. Volt meters are good.
    4:14
    Soldering's good. But most important is using alligator clips, I'd say. Because you can do so much with an alligator clip. Like what? If a coil's not firing, you could ground the coil with the alligator clip, or you could ground the transistor tab with the alligator clip, or you could alligator clip the other side to another coil to check for a bad high-voltage side.
    4:37
    Or if a light's not lighting, you could alligator clip that to another one to try to fix it. and you can use them on boards for all kinds of fun activities if you know what each individual pin on each individual resistor does, which is usually a bad idea, but I still do it. I think more for EMs, you probably use alligator clips a lot more. Yeah, and EMs you can fix nearly any problem, or just diagnose any problem just using multiple alligator clips.
    5:03
    Yeah. I would say probably the best thing you can do as a new owner is read various forums. And I know Ron will be shocked to find that I'm actually trolling on that Pinsight a little bit. No, not shocked at all. Okay, answer my question today.
    5:22
    Did I? No, no one has. I don't check it very often. I've stumbled with Pinsight yet again. Well, that's not surprising.
    5:31
    Yeah. That's true. Every time I read a tech question on Pinsight, Zach's usually jumping in there with something. But I will second the multimeter, learn how to use a multimeter. look for information on various forums. So that would be my second tip.
    5:46
    Third tip. See, did he say what kind of games he has? I mean, does he have, like, early solid states, later stuff, EMs? Well, how would it differ? Well, in the way you're going to diagnose an EM a lot differently than, you know, a late WPC game or, you know, going into Stern games, the new ones.
    6:06
    But I don't really do EMs that often. all you need to know is how to replace sockets yeah pretty much yeah learning how to solder that's like kind of a lost art but people need to learn how to do it correctly and I've seen a lot of people do it incorrectly like the worst is people that they hold the soldering iron you know nowhere near the connection and they melt the solder all over the tip and then I think they put it on the connection and they think it's going to magically flow into the connection and it's just not because all the flux is gone, and there's nothing that's going to draw it towards it. It'll still do that a lot. Come on. Hmm? It'll still do that. Yeah, that's not the right way to do it, though. Do you solder that way, Zach? I don't use it as a main strategy, but, like, if I'm re-tinting connectors, I'll, like, solder the first one. If you have to. Yeah, if you have to do it, yeah, you can do it. So I don't have to solder as much. Yeah. But, oh, I guess the biggest tip would be, you know, find friends around you that have done it before and they can just show you. You learn by doing. So his second question was pretty much along the same lines. Best way to bulk up on tech knowledge. Most of the stuff I see is really detailed. I usually see topics like how do you set speed clock on my Ferrari when traveling 180 to 195 miles an hour. I need to know where the gas is and the dipstick is first. Yeah, I don't know with the car thing. I mean, I guess it's just an example, but it's usually the simple things first. You're going to look for something simple, and I found that when people are asking advice, they're convinced it's something that they don't understand because they don't understand it. They usually come out and say, oh, it's a chip. It must be a chip. I don't understand why this isn't working. I mean, it might be a chip, but, you know, let's do the simple stuff first, like power, wires, wiring, connectors. And I've noticed that when they have a problem, you have to dig down into it and say, what did you recently do to the machine? And if they're like, well, I just put LEDs in the machine. And I said, well, did you short anything out when you were doing it? Anything like that? And they're firmly convinced that it's not that. And then finally, you know, 20 messages later, it's like, oh, yeah, there was a short. You know, I didn't notice. But as far as the best way to bulk up on technology, like what Scott said earlier, forums, there's online stuff there's, I mean, pin wikis out there. It's not for the faint of heart, but I would recommend just like buy the worst thing possible and just bang your head against it repeatedly until it finally works. My first board repair was on a laser ball that had major acid damage and a hole burned under the CPU and like multiple other issues and I spent a year just slowly teaching myself how the boards work how to read schematics and how, like, a CPU and MPU works, until I finally got that running again. And I was like, oh, I can just fix you into any board now, because none of them are that bad. That's true. I would say, from my end, I mean, I'm not at the upper levels, but what Scott said earlier, people make it too complicated.
    9:14
    Like, if you walk into a room and you turn the light on and it doesn't work, most people would be like, oh, the light bulb's out. But for some reason on a pinball machine, they just go other areas. It's supposed to be wiring. It must be a connector. It must be like, did you just try replacing the bulb?
    9:30
    Just simple things. And I've screwed up before doing that. I think I told this story before. I had no fear where an entire string of lights was dim.
    9:41
    So it's like, oh, there's got to be something wrong. It was GI lights. There's got to be something wrong with the general illumination string, this string. But then you're looking at it, and it's like, well, wait a minute. This crosses multiple strings. So how is that possible? And you look at wiring, and you look at all this stuff for like, you know, 15, 20 minutes, and then it's like, well, wait a minute. You do, you know, I did the first thing I should have done, which take, you know, one of the lights that's not dim, put it in the socket of one of the ones that is dim, and the light's fine. And I looked at the bulb, and the bulb, and this game was from like Germany, the bulb was like, it was a 12-volt bulb. It wasn't like a 44 or a 47. It was some bizarre bulb. and they were all like that.
    10:21
    It's like a 193. Simplest thing. At the same time, the thing that you did which was wrong in that case is usually a great way to approach stuff. Like, you know, if this one thing is having an issue and like you know five causes of it, see what things are linked to that other cause, you know, find patterns between what is or isn't working to narrow down, let it show if you can do any testing, you know, just by looking at it. That's kind of what I, And when I first saw it, I'm there like, oh, it's got to be the same GI string. So I'm looking up the GI strings. I'm looking at the wire colors to see if it's all on the same GI string because I figured that's the problem. So it turns out it was just that somebody went along and replaced every bulb. Yeah, in that string.
    11:04
    Yeah. In that line. They weren't even on the same string. That was the funny part. But, like, Zach will give these little teasers, these little, like, why don't you give them the Spanishize one? Because I like that one. Because he basically gives you the clue that tells you what it is, but you spend so long looking at the schematic, convinced it's something else, you just completely don't see the issue. I mean, now that you say I've given him the clue, he'll know to look for the clue. I don't know. I think I could say in a way you still wouldn't look for the clue. Here it is. We have a Spanish. Wait, your Spanish eyes is broken now? No, my Spanish eyes. My second Spanish eye is broken. Oh. No. So it was never working when I got it.
    11:49
    Correct me if I say this wrong, but I believe it was. You start a game, and the reels all reset to zero.
    11:56
    They all work correctly. You hit things on the play field, and the reels do not advance. It does not advance your score.
    12:05
    So that's the issue. Okay. And the score relay, the switches on the score, the score relay is working, and it is closing the switches as it's supposed to. And it's still not scoring. And I made sure the switches were adjusted correctly, but every single reel is not working. And then he sends a picture of the schematic, and when you look at the schematic, it's like, it's a straight shot. It's like, relay closes, reels move.
    12:36
    There's nothing else in between. so we're staring at this I'm staring at this for like a long period what do you think the issue is?
    12:47
    I don't know, a connector? no, no connector between them and also I you have to advance the ball one it was on ball one I even like, I went and I checked continuity between the lug of the score relay switch and the coil on the score drum unit and the continuity was good and then I used my handy alligator clip just to make sure, like, the economy may be good, but maybe there's actually, like, a really weak wire that couldn't carry enough signal or something. So I alligator clipped between them, and that still didn't fix anything either. But still, the connection is definitely fine, though, because I bypassed it completely. So is this a stumper that you haven't actually solved yet and we're just supposed to figure it out, or you're actually looking for ideas? No, I didn't give him that stumper until I figured it out. Yeah. And he had his clue, which I'll give now, which was the center saucer was not working. Yeah. The center saucer did not work. It would not eject the ball, but it wouldn't be able to score. It would just sit there spinning. So it would score when you went in the center saucer, but it wouldn't do anything else. Yep. And that actually advanced the reels? No, that would not advance the reels. Oh, okay. So we just clicked the relay. You could see all the belayers were going and the score motor would turn and it would keep turning because the ball stayed in the hole because it wasn't kicking out. And I was looking at that and then I looked at some stuff and tried it and a while later it just started working.
    14:16
    Was that a broken wire on the coil lug? Nope. Connection's all good. Is it something stupid? Yeah, yeah. I mean, after obsessing over this for like, I don't know, 20 minutes, Zach said, like, you just needed to look at one of the first things I said. So I scroll back up and I'm looking at it. You know, what kind of thing happens when something isn't working and then kind of starts working? What is that usually indicative of? Something you screwed up. Or something being dirty.
    14:50
    Yeah. As in the switch. Oh, just the switch itself was dirty? Yep. Yeah, so the kick-out hole started working eventually because the EM self-cleaning action, you know, burned it off and then it started working fine. And so since all the reels didn't work, I naturally thought, you know, like Ron did with the bulbs, that, oh, there must be some common chain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All four score relays, the contact was so dirty, it would not work. so if I had any tip it's like go for the simplest thing first even if it seems too simple I mean most people look at the switch to see like oh it's adjusted properly okay no it's adjusted properly it's closing even though the switches like they all look black when you look at them unless you pre-clean them all like Nick Schell suggests but that's a lot of work but like usually a completely black colored switch will still work just fine you know, so the fact that it looked dirty doesn't really stand out to me as something that's obviously wrong. And the Nick Schell's tip is what? He suggests on all his EMs to bulletproof them, he disassembles every single relay, then does swab, swish, schwab, or something like that, which is alcohol and a Q-tip, I think, clean the contacts and then use a Dremel with a carbon steel brush on the contacts to clean them up nice and shiny, and then another swab of alcohol on them to get rid of any other particles that might have been stuck. And he does this to every single contact and every single EM he has, and they all work 100% because they're back to pretty much factory, brand-new, super-clean contacts. Yeah, that makes sense to do that. If you don't have the experience of doing that, though, You don't want to do that. Yeah, because on Williams, it's not that bad because the relay is nice and big. So you can't get in there without disassembling them. But on a Gottlieb, you also completely take the switch stack apart, not lose any parts, put back together correctly, and then possibly need to readjust every single contact because they could go out of adjustment from the cleaning. So it's not for people who don't already know how to do EF stuff. I mean, that takes me back to when I was newer and probably when Zach was born in the early 2000s. And I found pinrepair.com with Clay Harrell's guides. And he says right on it, he says, listen, I'm going to show you how to clean and adjust every switch. But he says, you don't want to do that because you'll take a game that probably was somewhat working or working and you'll make it not working. And I said, oh, I got this nippet here. I'll go through and I'm going to clean every switch. I don't care what he said in there. and I took a gain that was mostly working and I made it non-working.
    17:40
    And I ended up selling it before figuring out how to fix it. But I don't recommend anybody, until you have experience doing that, and I definitely agree with the Godley relays and the Bally relays, you don't want to be taking them apart. Like the Williams ones are a breath of fresh air because of those really long blades with a lot of travel on them. So there's actually a lot more fudge factor with them when you're adjusting them for the self-cleaning action that Zach was mentioning. But a couple other places do that, take the relay apart. I know Pin Rescue in Lambertville does that. He takes every relay apart, and he cleans them all up. It will play like new, but the other thing with EMs is make sure you play them a lot.
    18:21
    If you let them sit a long time, stuff will just, I guess, gum up, maybe if there's old lube and stuff like that in there. Well, hopefully you can get that out, too, while you're in there. Well, yeah, I'm working on a hotline right now, and I'm cleaning out just solidified grease from just years and years and years of just being in there. I mean, it's probably the original factory grease from 1966, and it's just turned to a solid mass.
    18:48
    Now, the interesting thing is, Zach, let's face it, you're a fairly young guy, and you're really into EMs. I'm really into pinball. Oh, pinball, too. But, I mean, you have a ton of EMs. That's because they're cheap. Is that the main reason? Yeah. I mean, I would have a lot of everything if I could afford it, but EMs cost like a quarter of the next best thing. But how many people in your area repair EMs? One, pretty much. For the next, like, maybe like an hour, hour and a half, five, you can find the next one if you know what direction to go.
    19:22
    And is the one person in your area you? Yeah. Okay. so zero there's really zero other people that you could go to so you have to fix it yourself well why would I go to someone else to fix my games what's the fun in that well exactly yeah well some people just don't have the talent to fix their own games or they don't want to be bothered but EM's are definitely cheaper there was just a Spanish Eyes near me on Craigslist or Facebook groups I don't remember which it was $275 and I would have bought that well somebody wanted to buy it They wanted me to buy it, completely restore it and fix it up for them, and then sell it to them for $325. And I said, no. I wouldn't even pick it up and deliver it for a $50 profit. Oh, man. I would have paid $50 for pickup and delivery, but probably not $75. Well, my problem is I don't have any room to store these things, Zach. What do you think I have? Like tons of room or something? He does not have tons of room. I can vouch for that. We need a third Spanish rise for the bar. Well, the other person that does have tons of room is Ron. He has a ton of room at level zero. That's what I've been told. He should get some EMs. I do. The Spanish ice is sitting down there. You need more EMs. I need more. Okay. Well, let's go on an EM tangent. You were mentioning before the Williams, you know, preferred the Williams switch stacks. And I noticed when we had Nick Schell on here, he kind of went on about how, you know, everyone loves the Gottliebs, but there's such a pain to repair as opposed to, say, a Williams game.
    20:59
    And I believe, Zach, you believe that is also true? Yep. So I should be getting, like, a Williams or a Sonic? Or maybe a Bally. Ballys are next in line after those two. I think single-player Gottlieb wedgeheads are really easy to fix because you don't have the whole multiplayer thing to worry about. single player Gottliebs are nice because they're probably like the simplest most minimalist designs of any of the games but they still have the crappy Gottlieb mechs that are just a pain to work with it's like a really easy reason about well it would be easy reason about if they had like actual names that really isn't just random stupid letters but you know if you have a problem with like and the score wheels always get stuck and stuff like that so like it's going to be more of a pain to do the mechanical aspect of it On the plus side, all the mechanics won't be cracked and falling apart. You can just rebuild them really easily. I guess it depends on how much of a basket case you end up with. I'm sure Ron remembers the target pool that you picked up for me at Papa. The one that was painted brown? Yeah, the playfield. That's orange. I think it's painted orange. Oh, yeah, you're right. The cabinet actually has the original paint on it. It's just peeling off. I'm sure I left many flakes in your car when you went and picked that up. But, I mean, it was $75. I mean, the back glasses were $75 on it. I'd pay $75 for that.
    22:24
    Yeah, exactly. And, I mean, sure, it took six or seven years for me to have it picked up. And, you know, it took Papa threatening to sell the building that I was like, oh, boy, I better get that machine out of there.
    22:36
    But it's pretty much in my back stock area. I haven't exactly worked on it or anything yet. I'll give you $80 for it.
    22:45
    You're a pal. I might take you up on that later. You never know. Well, Zach, you have the other version. I have the mini pool I just picked up. The edible version. Yeah, so I need to complete, you know, the set. That would be kind of neat.
    23:02
    I know a lot of people like edibles, but I'm not really into the edibles. I don't want my game to be longer. I like EMs because the game's short. I appreciate that aspect, but I really don't like replay where it's just the whole point of the game is moot. Yeah, there are games that, what is that one that they use in the tournaments all the time now? Is that Papa Card?
    23:27
    Or the one with the four target banks that you get them down and then there's nothing to shoot for but the hole for special? Or you shoot for the out lane to get your bonus? I mean, the hole also... Top card, right? Is it top card? That sounds right. Yeah, well, they're using it all the time now, and it's like, that's like the flavor of the month. It's a fun game to watch, but I feel like it's a horrible tournament game, because, like, you know, if you don't just manage to get one banked down, like, you're just screwed completely. Yeah, there's a lot of games that are like that. Scores are just so variable in that game.
    23:59
    So what games do you think, what games did they use in tournaments a lot that you think they shouldn't?
    24:06
    Well, I got to say, from watching the Cleveland stream a couple weeks ago, So they should never use Addams Family anymore, because unless you like watching people, you know, pass over, shoot the ramp, shoot the scoop, shoot the ramp, shoot the scoop. I heard about that. I need to watch that. It sounds fun. I love watching really long-term games like that. Well, you can probably watch it at, like, five times the speed, and you can just see it over and over again just doing that.
    24:31
    It sounds like they have a game where you can pass over which breaks any Addams, basically. Yeah, pretty much. I wish there was a way. I probably should fool around with this, but games that you could remove, like, post-passing from to do that, but you're going to be changing the sling geometry when you do that, so you probably don't really want to fool around too much with that. People probably aren't a fan of drilling extra holes in play fields. It seems like if you can, you know, just do minute adjustments to an atom so that when it comes down to the right in lane from the ramp, there's no way to get it safely to a trap. Like, you either have to take a pot shot at the scoop on the fly, which can be dangerous if you miss you hit the pop numbers, or you have to fling it off to the little side upper ramp thing that feeds the upper flipper. You know, then they're going for a side shot, which is dangerous.
    25:21
    Yeah, I don't think that they – I mean, I guess you take what you can. I know when I used to provide games to the Allentown Show about a decade ago, I would specifically think about what I was bringing over. I mean honestly I would bring over games that I know people hadn't seen like maybe Mystic or definitely Dragonfest nobody had seen Dragonfest at that point and they were like what the heck do you do on this game and plus it's so ridiculously fast that's a good tournament game I think it has the same bit of just like if you don't manage to complete that right three bang that would be your whole game is just trying to make the opening shot Yeah, well, you're kind of being in jail. And I noticed that at Stomp, too, that Ron's center X was locked on. And I could definitely tell the people that were in my group didn't realize that the actual lit bank was the right bank. And they were shooting the center bank over and over again, and their multiplier wasn't going up. All right, Tech guys, why does that keep happening? And it'll go away. Then it works fine. And then it'll come back. Then it'll go away. I mean, if it's a locked-on transistor, shouldn't it always be on?
    26:35
    Well, the cynic in me would say that it's probably because you're using the modified software in it. It doesn't do it on my game, but it does it on your game. So that would be Ron's.
    26:47
    Have you tried just swapping the light board? You know, it's not like you have any other classic strands or anything. No, I haven't done that yet. But I'm just saying I would typically think if the transistor was locked on, why would it randomly just start working correctly again? I would picture it's not the transistor, but it could be something else on the driver board. Or it could be some intermittent short, but that seems harder to do. It could be something really simple, too. It could be the bulb. Remember, we were just talking before. Well, no, the bulb could lock on. It could only turn off when it should be on. Yeah, I think I've swapped the bulb anyway. And the thing is, like, when you turn the game on, like as it's booting, if it has an issue as it's booting, it'll be on. Yeah. Some of the lamps are on naturally just when you turn it on. But the lamp board, you don't have to, like, swap it, swap it. Just take a spare one, which you probably have, and you can just put the connectors on it and have it hang free in the back box. You know, you'll know right away if it's something like that. I love hanging boards. Yes, yeah. Zach doesn't believe in mounting them. Or if he does, just with one screw, you know, just so enough that it doesn't fall. I put at least one or two on each board usually, except when I'm in a rush and I forget it because it's, like, 7 in the morning and I need to get to the Saratoga show on time.
    27:59
    Yeah. The other thing about the Dragon Fist, I'm thinking more and more, like, you know how the slings were, like, randomly not firing at times? As you brought to my attention. I don't think that's the reason. Because the upper pop-up, or the one on the right, will randomly just not pop, not register. And then it will. So you've got a bad switch column? Yeah, I think I have something with the switches, honestly. Because it's always... Well, they're probably all filed. I mean, most operators were still filing switches at the time, and I replaced them all. Like, the sling switches, they're usually all mangled anyway. I just build new switch blades, and I just stick them in there. It's the easiest thing to do, and then you don't have to worry about it. I never thought of just building new blades up. I was trying to buy the complete thing, and I could never find them at a good price. But the blades themselves are cheap, so that's a good idea. Yeah, there's a blazing contact, so you can rebuild the switch for less than a buck. I've actually done that a lot because a lot of the switch stacks you'll get are not the same thickness, the same amount of, what would be the right term? You know, the little wood, the spacers. There's like, there'll be more spacers or less spacers. Yeah, the little bake-like pieces. Yeah, the bake-like pieces, they have like more or less than the original one had.
    29:18
    And, you know, I want to have it the way the original one was because I figured that's how it's supposed to be. And a lot of times you'll get more or less. So I've taken so many of them apart, I have a ton of those bake-like ones in the blades. As long as it's not rifted, then that's a pain. Well, you just drill the rivets down and you can put screws in. Yeah, but that would be a pain. Yeah, well, it's something you can do while you're doing something else. Like the flash that I got a couple years ago, I had to replace every single switch on it because they were not only were they filed, but they were those Williams switches that were put together backwards from the factory so that the back of the rivet was hitting the face of the other rivet. So even if somebody hadn't filed them, it's naturally just going to break through the plating because it's rough versus the smooth contact. I had to swap all the switches on the flash that I regrettably had to keep in my house for a while to get them working reliably, but couldn't do it fast enough to get rid of that piece of crap. What? Flash is a great game. So boring. Which one are we talking about?
    30:23
    What, Flash? Flash or Flash Gordon, because a lot of people use them interchangeably. Well, they should use... No, not Flash. William Flash.
    30:32
    Okay. You know, the bad Flash, not the good one. Wow. You are besmirching the name of Steve Ritchie. Steve Ritchie has, like, a 50% success rate. That's true. Flash is great. Star Wars is terrible. Now, like, when he makes a good game like Star Wars, it's really good, But then he makes games like Star Trek Next Generation, Black Knight 2000, Flash, that just complete pieces of crap. Wow. Yeah, that's true. I was actually rather surprised because I was already eliminated at Stomp, and I looked over because I saw that Ron's Star Trek Next Generation machine was, the legs were leaving the floor. And I was like, what's going on over there? Zach managed to rage tilt three balls in a row. I don't think I actually tilted all of them, to be fair. You did. You think so? Yeah. I mean, people that have never tried to move a Star Trek Next Generation machine, it's one of the heaviest machines ever made. It's really light when you just have the pure hatred of having to play that absolutely awful game, fresh in your memory. Wait a minute, Scott, didn't you own one? I still have mine. Okay, there you go.
    31:40
    Isn't that great? You'll be happy to know, though, I did set the kickback to easy, just in your honor.
    31:48
    My honor? No, in Zach's honor. Although it's a little too late for him, unfortunately. Can we turn it on 100% on both outlanes? Or they can make it alternate between the two outlanes. Then it might be okay. Okay, so make a code change. So we'll make a code change. And a physical installation of a second kickback. I really want a right outlane kickback on a game. Where are my right outlane kickbacks? You guys are overthinking it. You don't need a ROM change for that. Just put a nail on the playfield like most people do. Blocking the outlane. Even just like an outlane extender, like a quarter inch taller on each side would make that game so much better. They made those. Did you know they made those? I know they did. But for some reason, Ron has not installed that recommended mod on his game. You don't need it if you don't shoot shots that tend to vector towards that outlane. Yeah. Too bad I can't hit a single shot in the game because they're all in horrible locations. The worst play shots on any of the super pins. Do you not know how to make a wide body? You're the only person who's never done it before and you still got it wrong. Worse than Popeye? Popeye does not have really far out orbit shots that are not where shots should be. Most of the Popeye shots are actually up the center, you know, where you'd expect shots to be. I always love the not where shots could be. Like, who decides where the shots should be? Well, have you ever played a Star Trek Next Generation?
    33:09
    Yes, I played one just the other day. I mean, I'm thinking of things like, okay, if I play, like, Future Spa, and it has those spinners like on the outer, outer, outer orbits. Yeah, or a laser ball. Like the super-duper, super-duper wide bodies that have the outside shots just don't work. The other future spa? The other future spa. Like it's almost exactly the same layout, but they put more drop targets in it. Yeah, but like I can hit the orbits in my Star Trek Next Gen. I can never hit the orbits with any authority on future spa. Like, you could hit them, but it just doesn't really hit them hard.
    33:48
    Yeah, that was a little too wide. They shouldn't have gone to the 30-inch and 31-inch wide. I mean, Paragon's probably the best game that's that wide, and if you look at the shots on that, they're not really on the outside. They feed from kind of the sweet spot in the center. You mean Paragon, the game of, like, two shots at all, anywhere, on its entire wide-body play field? Yeah, pretty much. It's amazing how much real estate they waste on those early Bally Y boxes. Well, look at the gorgeous artwork that's on it. There's space for that lovely artwork. Yeah, you can watch the artwork as your ball just bounces back and forth. Oh, wait, no, you can do it as you wait for the ball to, like, come to a trap on the left flipper before you just do a tap pass again to shoot the only two shots from the left side of the play field.
    34:35
    What's the second shot on the left side of the play field? Spare it? Yeah. Eh. I mean, yeah, eh, but, like, if you've already shot the drops 20 times, like, you need some bonus somewhere. You might as well shoot something. Okay, okay.
    34:52
    Let's go back to the tech subject here. Since you guys have worked on so many games, what do you say are the things you least look forward to? In other words, like, for me, every time I get a new stern, it's like almost every socket is bad. lamp sockets are like the worst thing they just suck probably lamp sockets do suck and i i got really annoyed on my dragon fist and i i flipped the play field over and i replaced every socket because i was like i'm really tired of all these bonus lamps not working and i think i have it down to only one socket that doesn't work but um i'm super duper lazy when it comes to the sockets and i'm surprised you didn't remark on it wrong with the the stars that i brought up to you half the lamps were out and it's like, I don't feel like replacing the sockets. It's only the bonus ladder. Nobody needs to know that. I guess I hate lamp sockets because I never, I never like replacing them, especially on games that I'm going to do a play field swap on that in the future. And then, then I'll do all the lamp sockets. Like when I did my firepower, that's like, I'll use this opportunity. I'll put all new lamp sockets in, but I hate doing lamp sockets.
    36:04
    At this point, I don't really like doing board work. I'm just like, I don't really have time to do this, so I'm going to stick to good working boards and things.
    36:15
    But really, like, involve problems with board work. I'm like, I just don't have the inclination to do it anymore. All right. And the thing about that, stars you brought, and this will lead into my next subject, basically the projects you guys are working on, that was a unique stars in the fact of what it was running. Why don't you get into that? Well, as many know, I've taken apart the software code in many early Valley Stern Williams games and then rewritten them or changed rules and things like that. And just for last, I wanted to see if I could transplant the Williams System 7 interpreted code language that it uses, the multitasking, onto the Valley board. and I mean I had to have somebody custom make a ballet board that had much more memory in it because you need a lot more RAM to do that and everybody was playing that Stars was the prototype for that and I don't think anybody really remarked on anything other than Zach pointed out that the track mode was wrong but I mean it doesn't mess the illusion. I still maintain that the speed of the scoring and stuff is wrong on the bells and things.
    37:31
    It's probably faster, but I'm used to playing at that speed because my original Stars board was always an MPU200, and I was too lazy to change the jumpers to the slower clock speed, so it was always faster so that what I used to But that would be easy enough to change At least you don get screwed out of points On the original Stars you get screwed out of points if you hit two drop targets down at the same time And it doesn't give you the 500 points for when it's resetting. It just gives you the 3,000. So I think you should get the 500 points, and then you also get the 3,000 because you got the whole bank down.
    38:03
    So there are things like that. But that Starz software was basically a proof of concept, as in, I wonder if I can make this work. And it did. And next game up for that is going to be Flight 2000, completely rewritten with that engine. And then the game after that is going to be one of Ron and Bruce's favorites, Black Hole.
    38:26
    How do you plan to handle the MPU-200 sound effects when rewriting Flight 2000 through that? while I'm transplanting the code from the Agilister MPU200. You'll just take the whole block of code to do that? Well, it needs to be modified heavily because it is, since the soundboard on the MPU200 is essentially timers, there is rather strict timing requirements on it. And I don't have it working 100% yet. There's some errors going, so I'm going to have to play around with it a little more. I'm surprised you're not curious how I'm going to put a bally board inside of a Gottlieb black hole. That seems pretty straightforward to me, minus maybe the amount of transistor requirements. And wiring harness changes. Yeah, making a whole set. I mean, I would just do an adapter harness, but that would still be a pain. That's pretty much what I plan on doing. I hate to modify the original harness if I can help it. Yeah, no, I'm not going to do that. But, I mean, they already have that 8-ball deluxe that uses the Gottlieb-style Futaba low-voltage displays, so I assume that conversion must not be too complicated.
    39:40
    I think they have a helper board with that. I was actually in contact with somebody that has one of those, but apparently they won't give the software out, so I couldn't even, like, look at it. It might be available somewhere, but I was going to write new drivers for the software. I might put some helper electronics in it my inclination would be to put some kind of new microcontroller type thing in it and just dump all the crap out to that that's unique to Gottlieb and just have that run the hardware at that point why not just use the LISY80 board I think that exists now right? yeah it does I don't know to see if I can do it myself that's a good enough reason Yeah. And that's the reason.
    40:27
    Yeah. Okay, so what is Zach working on? Well, most recently I've been with Scott's assistance and reference for the Williams System 7 code base, I've been trying to do some simple modifications to my Black Knight ROM to basically, originally it was just make the extra ball worth points because basically 90% of that play field is devoted to lighting extra ball. So it sort of ruins the game somewhat in tournaments when the whole goal is just get multi-ball and then trail for as long as possible to make the most use of your 3X.
    41:04
    So I modified the system 7, offering system ROM to award points and 7 extra ball, which is also cool because it'll work or should work with any system 7 game, not just Black Knight with the same ROM change. So I have to try that in my laser cue as well sometime.
    41:22
    Is that working now? The score? Yeah. Yeah, that works. Once we went through the board saga. Oh, okay. So a lot of the problems that we had been emailing about were because your board was not working with the ROM adapter. Yeah, I used the Siegecraft System 3 through 6 combo ROM adapter in a System 7,
    41:51
    which I thought would be easy because all it required was replacing the oscillator component, which is located next to the CPU of a smaller one so that the board could fit over it, since the System 7 layout is not the same as the System 3 through 6. And that worked fine for the custom software I was writing for my Pharaoh, but it did not work in the Black Knight so and then you said that you'd never gotten that board to work with your System 7s so now I'm just very confused about why my Pharaoh MPU works fine with the board but my Black Knight MPU doesn't but I was tired of trying to figure that out so it's probably just like some weird you know like maybe a different manufacturer for some of the logic chips or something like that. Yeah I think that's what it is and that's what Hans at Seascript thought as well.
    42:38
    I think that board has actually disappeared from his site. I'm not sure that he's actively still selling it. I have a bunch of them here. But I emailed him, or actually I was looking for a blank one so I could populate it with a zero insertion force socket for easy swapping ROMs, and he sold me a blank board to use. Yeah, I actually bought them all as kits from him. I said, listen, I'm going to need like 20 of these. I'll just put them together myself. Will you sell me the ports, Bear? And he's like, sure. Zero insertion force. Oh, my. I had to say that. Yeah, Ron, you actually need that because all the ROM chips I've been sending you,
    43:18
    I was thinking that maybe Ron doesn't like to test all that software I'm sending him because he doesn't have Zip Sockets in all of his games like I do. Well, I was talking about this with Zach recently, that I'm using the Kahlout board. How do you say it right? Kahoot. Kahoot, whatever. The Kahoot board. Yeah, it's K-A-H-O-U-T, so I don't know where the W comes from. Kahoot board. So I'm using that in my Firepower and working with Scott. We have a System 7 version of Firepower. And every time he sends me new code, I burn it, and I have to put it in these machine pen sockets, which are a pain in the ass. I mean, it will literally take five to ten minutes per socket sometimes to get these things in there. Yeah, just get rid of those, throw them out. Yeah, I mean, it's just such a pain because you have to line up all the pins perfectly. Yep. You know, even if you – and I don't recommend anybody – here's a tech tip for people that are getting into board repair. Those machine pin sockets with the round pins that everybody seems to be in love with, I won't say they're garbage, but I mean I guess if you're going to fix the board and you want it to be fixed once, you're going to put one chip in it and you're never going to change it, it's probably okay. I mean you'll still spend like three hours tearing your hair out trying to get the chips to fit in, but like at least they only have to happen once. Exactly, but then everybody gives semi-helpful advice when they say, oh, well why don't you reseed all the chips, and then if you're pulling the chips all the way out, you're going to have a double of a time getting them back in, so like why do it? I just use the dual-wipe sockets now when I'm replacing sockets. They're a lot cheaper. And I don't know if you've tried to put ZIF sockets on your Firepower run, but the three sockets actually don't line up next to each other. I had to build little helper boards that moved the ZIF sockets out of the way. What's a ZIF socket? It's your insertion force. So it's actually, instead of just having, like, little sort of springy sides, like a normal socket does. It has a little lever to clamp down these moving sides of the socket onto the legs of the chip so it locks the legs. Your EEPROM burner, Ron? Yes. That's a ZIF socket. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So it's really nice because you can just flip the lever up, just pull the – the chip will just fall right out of the socket at that point, and you can just set another way. Honestly, if I didn't have ZIF sockets available, I wouldn't do any software development. It's a pain in the ass right now. I'm doing Bally Atlantis tournament software.
    45:56
    And the Zip Sockets, while they fit physically on the board, Bally was using really cheap sockets at the time, and the Zip Sockets have slightly shorter legs on them, and they actually won't touch the contacts on the sockets, so I have to do what you're doing with the firepower. I'm pulling out and pushing in the EPROMs individually. It helps, too, if you have a little handy thing that RadioShack used to sell. It's an IC pin straightener, and you just put the chip in it, and you squeeze two sides of it, and it makes the pins the exact width that they need to be to put in the socket. But in your case, I would get two ZIF sockets and put them in for the two ROMs I'm always having you change.
    46:39
    Yeah, because the thing is, with the machine pin sockets, you'll think you have it in, and you start pressing down on it, and you'll see that one pin that's bent up. Yeah, it'll bend on the side or it'll bend underneath and you won't realize it. It's always one. Yeah. And it's always one, like, in the middle. I mean, how many, what's your population of chips? How many do you have? That's the other thing that I didn't really think of because I have, you know, thousands of EPROMs and I burn them and then I just kind of leave them in a stack. I have a ton of 2532s. Oh, that's good. You could have me burn. I don't know how I got that many. I think I got them from eBay, and they were just super cheap, so I got a crap load of them. So, yeah, those I have. I bought some 27 128s off eBay, and one seller, the tips were fine, but then the other ones were from China, and I'm pretty sure they're Remarks because none of them burn, and I'm trying to get my money back on those right now. But did you try the new software I just sent you, or that's a weekend thing for you, Ron? A weekend thing, probably. Yeah. Do you want me to just do the latest and greatest? Because you were having me go back. Yeah, just try and do the latest ones. It was just curiosity's sake that I wanted to see if the earlier one did the same thing, because we finally got a – Ron sent me a private stream of the firepower code. We were trying to nail down the issue that he had with his machine, and we finally saw something logically that happened every single time. So that was a good starting off point. Something I actually caught, and that it bombs on, if you play a four-player game, what is it, ball three of player one is when it dies every time. Yep.
    48:21
    And that's good because that version that I had sent you, I had eliminated any other threads that possibly could have, I guess they're like zombie threads. That's what it ended up being. It was a zombie thread. Zombie thread. Yeah. and it should be fixed on the latest one along with the bonus countdown issue. The bonus countdown issue I actually did have on mine, but it never gave extra bonus or anything like that, so I just figured it was. Yeah, the bonus countdown issue for the listeners are going, what the hell are they talking about? It would like count down the bonus and then it would kind of just cut and then like seemingly start again. Yeah, it was actually running the routine, the out-hole routine twice. So I just added some checking for that.
    49:08
    So since we're speaking about all this burning, what ROM burner do you guys use for those who might want to start experimenting themselves? Well, the problem that I have now with this is I use a Mini Pro. It's a TL866CS, and recently Mini Pro discontinued this one, and you can only get the A or the 2 version now, and it does not provide enough voltage. It taps out at 18 volts. Now, what about the plus?
    49:38
    If it's the latest version, I don't think it's going to work either. You'd have to double-check with it. It's tough because the website is in Chinese, Chinese and English. But they did make a change, and the highest voltage that it can do is 18 volts. So I went out and I found an eBay seller, and I actually bought two extras just so I can have spares. That's what I did, too. Yep. And I also have a data I.O. one that's ancient. It's a Chip Writer Plus from 1998. That one doesn't burn 2532s correctly because the definitions, which are non-editable, only burn. Yeah, it only, well, the Mini Pro at least lets you change the parameters. So when I need to change, for instance, when I burn 2532s, the definition I use is for, you have to build an adapter to have it work. I sent one to Ron because he didn't want to build the adapter. but most of the definitions you have to use the 2732 definition, and most of those are 12 or 16 volts, and you have to change the voltage to 21 volts anyway to get it to burn. Actually, that's a good question for you, Ron. Do your 2532s, are they the A version, or did you get the B one? I think they're A.
    50:50
    Yeah, so you had to bump up the voltage. Did you bump up the voltage to 21 volts, or did you just use a 2732 definition? 2732 definition I'm using, and it works. The only issue I ever have with my burner is I could not burn the 2716s. Supposedly they're burnable on that. I was in contact with somebody that said they got it. I've never had problems with them. Yeah, Zach's never had problems. Every time it would start to burn, like it wouldn't fail immediately, like if you pick a wrong definition or something or do something stupid. It would, like, start to go, get maybe halfway through, and then just bomb. and if you ran it again, like, it might get further, but it wasn't finishing consistently. It wasn't working. So what do you mean bomb? Like, you can hear it and it's not halfway through? Yeah, you would see the meter come up, and then it would just, bomb.
    51:40
    Yeah, it would fail on the verify function. The other thing I have noticed with the verifying is that it can verify and then actually still be bad. So what I've taken to doing lately with that specific burner is I'll clear the buffer out of it, and then I'll read the chip back in and then save it, and then I'll do a DOS compare on it to make sure that it's correct. But, I mean, I do have the backup burner, and then Ron and I have the same eraser. I'm surprised Ron bought this one. Me too. Because he does 40 chips at once. But you bought the refurb one off of Amazon, right, that was like $125? Yeah, something like that. Yeah, you bought the Amazon warehouse deal, and I said I'm not dealing with the Amazon warehouse deal, and I just paid $200 for that same one. But, hey, I can erase 40 chips at once. That it can. Yeah, but I mentioned before also, I don't know how many people are familiar with Valley Atlantis, but I'm going through the code in that just to make it a game that you could actually use in a tournament. I mean, I don't know what Valley was thinking. There is an away stock to turn off extra balls, for instance. and there's all kinds of crazy auto-percentaging things in it that it's supposed to make it for location so that the operator would never have to make the game harder. I'm not sure why Bally didn't realize that operators don't change options on games. They just set them up, and then they walk away. So maybe that's why they did it, but operators don't care if a game is harder or easier. They only care if the coins are going in. How soon was that after High Speed came out? I'm curious.
    53:17
    Well, it's 1989. Oh, that's a while. Yeah, so... Picture all the manufacturers scrambling to add auto-percentaging after... Well, I mean, Bally was part of Williams at the time. It actually has a Williams soundboard in it, but it still has the Bally. It's the last Bally 6803 game.
    53:37
    And they put in... It's actually got two 16-digit displays, just like Elvira has in it. but the software treats it as if they're four seven-digit displays, so there's a blank digit in the middle of each display that it just never uses. And I was looking to see, like, well, maybe I can utilize that, but it's really ingrained in the code. Everything is towards the seven-digit displays, so I'm not even going to attempt to fix that.
    54:08
    And actually, Zach, what are you changing in Fero? Pharaoh, you said you're doing Pharaoh changes. What are you changing in that? Oh, I'm using my custom operating system I wrote, and I'm writing a new ROM from scratch, which mostly my main wish for it is just that the number of Pharaoh letters would carry over and that you can get a second multiball because the Pharaoh multiball, the way you let your locks is you get, like, the fourth Pharaoh letter, and the Pharaoh letters don't reset during a ball, so once you use your one multiball, there's just no way to ever light another multiball until you drain so that's I want to make it so you can light the locks some way that's not ferro letters and have the ferro letters carry over or somewhat carry over but because as with your black hole I like just doing things the hard way for fun so I'm ready that's like yeah stars and flight 2000 it's like well I wrote the operating system or I cobbled it together and obviously it's heavily modified. It wasn't just like, oh, copy the code from here and put it there and have it work. It's not that simple. But a lot of it is to see if it can be done. I don't know if it can be done at this point because I've done Alien Poker and Hot Tip already before. So I'm just like, well, I can just do this. It's just the method. So you ended up rewriting Alien Poker as well? Yeah, although I'm not happy with the rules they designed for it. So I sort of dropped that. Oh, okay. Sometimes it's just really hard to come up with a different rule set on the same layout. Yeah. Like, for instance, on the Stargazer ROMs that Raymond Davidson suggested, and then we made it happen for Stomp, but I was watching, you know, the players in my group playing and other people playing, and it kind of changed the game from backflipping the rollovers at the bottom. Which is good. Yeah, and, well, that's good to get that out of there. but it changed it to and of course there was always the people that liked to shoot the center spinner but it changed it to shoot the targets and then just shoot the spinners and people were still ignoring the bonus and I'm like well the bonus isn't exactly completely removed not to ignore the bonus on that because you can't go for most of it on purpose you know they're just not shootable you're not going to just shoot a ball into the pop-up on purpose just to hope it hits the targets you need oh I do that I guess I'm weird in the way I play it, but the game is much better than it was previously, I think. But I think there's probably some more tweaking that needs to be done on it, so if anybody has any ideas on that. Well, how do you guys feel about these modified games and tournaments? It seems to be a very hot-button topic. I mean, we might have a minor bias here. Yes, you do. Well, we probably have a major bias because we're actual principals that are changing. the software. You have the arguments that the players won't know, like they've had no chance to play this, and how do you know the code is thoroughly tested enough where it won't bomb? I mean, you should probably go through arguments one at a time so then we can rip them to shreds, but... Okay, okay. What about the, you know, I've never played this ROM before? I mean, I've never played this. This is completely different rules. How am I supposed to know what it is? Well, let's do this, you know, one goes and then one the other, because otherwise we'll probably talk over for each other. So that can go first on that one. I mean, I think that's a good thing. You know, part of playing pinball is learning the rules to pinball and making up strategies. And if the only thing you ever do is just go on pin tips and find out what the one dominant strategy is and do that mindlessly, then, like, I feel like you're missing part of playing pinball. So anything that can make the players have to reevaluate their strategy, whether it's a ROM change or just something like some physical modification like they do a lot at Indyth, like on the Party Zone or on the Theater of Magic, you know, making feeds different or things like that to make people re-evaluate their strategies live is, I think, positive for the tournament and makes you evaluate more aspects of pinball skill. Okay.
    58:23
    Well, I think those are good points as well. People can see the physical things, but they wouldn't know that the code has been changed. I mean, you have to tell them. I mean, even if it's a physical thing. Like, a lot of them, like, if you're just changing the way something feeds, you might not be able to see that by looking at the game until it happens. Oh, like Theater of Magic, for instance, if you didn't tell them that it was dumping the ball instead of doing the theater letters, people would be like, oh, there must be something stuck there, or they might keep shooting it over and over again and saying, why am I not getting the super scores? You know, so anytime you're modifying a game from stock, even if it's just a setting in the generic game, I feel like best practice is to note that somewhere.
    59:05
    Well, I mean, I think in terms of the software modifications is that there should be, since people do like to use pen tips, me included. I mean, I was playing games at Stomp that I was like, ah, what's the strategy for that? So I was actually on my phone looking up, you know, at pen tips, like, what can I do to just get some score, especially for the newer Stern games that I'm not as familiar with. Your phone has internet?
    59:29
    Yes, my phone has internet. You don't have a flip phone? I do not. But there should be just a section that says if it's running, you know, this ROM set, you know, this modification. I think the big issue and the controversy came up on Tilt Forum is because at some tournament, I guess it was in Canada or Buffalo, they were using Tommy with modified code that, yeah, I knew where the website was that explained what the code had modified, but I imagine other people didn't. And apparently there was a bug.
    60:05
    It didn't say on it that it was modified, right? Yeah, I was at that tournament, and, like, I've owned a time in the past, and I installed modified software, so, like, I knew all the rules, and I was like, hmm, I wonder if this has, you know, the modified pin code software or not. So I specifically looked for things when I started the game, you know, to tell me which is the skill. Yeah, like the super skill shot or something, right? It's sort of a skill in its own right to be able to do that. The same like walk-in-through game and you see what version of software a new Stern is running by noticing little differences if it's not displayed. But still, especially on less common stuff like that, it would be really nice to have a... That's why I always make sure for my modified software that when you turn it on, it actually shows the version number.
    60:51
    And in the case of the software that Ron has in his Stars, which is the older, you know, just stock Stern software with modifications. When you go into the menus, it actually tells you the date and the version, but it'll also say it in the match display. When you turn the game on, the match display will have the version of the software, which most people probably, if they didn't know, oh, look at the match display.
    61:13
    Or they might not even see you turn the game on either, I guess. Yeah, well, I mean, in the case of Atlantis, it actually replaces the winners don't use drugs message with the version of the software. So I can tell you exactly what version it is. To be fair, for Stomp, I did actually have a printed, basically, game list of where anything deviated from stock. Placed it three areas around the level zero facility.
    61:40
    Well, no, I had everything. I still think you're missing a few things, but... Well, do tell. What was I missing? The Black Knight lock memory setting, I don't think was on there if I remember correctly. Okay, so I should have to say hard lock setting.
    61:57
    No, you did say hard lock setting. But hard lock setting determines whether the locks are lit by default. You need to shoot the turnaround. The lock memory setting. Yeah, he means the carryover. So that if you light it on one ball, it's not lit on the next? Correct. Or even if you lock a ball and then you drain, you don't have your lock on the next ball on Nam's game because the memory is turned off. Is that even an option? Yeah, it is. I don't think that's an option. No, it's an option. It is? What version of the software is that an option in? It's L4, to be specific, because I had to do it. Yeah, but maybe that's why I wasn't aware of that one because my Black Knight came with L3. Maybe that's the difference on them. It's in the manual, though. It's one of the adjustments, so I don't know. Is it? It's just a manual I have. Well, I never would carry over a lock on Black Knight anyway because it's so easy to lock the ball. I'd argue that if it's so easy to lock a ball, it's not going to make it harder for the good players, but it'll make it easier for the bad players. That's just something that I think you should have on in the tournament. Yeah. Wow. All right. Well, I had this stuff placed, you know, little notes. I tried to have everything on there to let people know. But some of it was funny in that things that had nothing to do with the ROM change, people, I had at least two people ask how to increase the spinner value on Dragon Fist when it actually says so on the play field.
    63:22
    Which I thought was pretty funny. Yeah, it says it on the play field and the instruction card. Yeah, but it doesn't say near the spinner. Maybe that's it because it says it by the X, you know, the 2X, 3X, 4X, and most people aren't. They're going to look by the spinner. Well, I mean, when I was running my tournaments, I actually gave like a pen tips type strategy for mine. Um, maybe people want that. I don't know. But, uh, I mean, that's just game knowledge. And obviously there's 302 dragon fists in existence. So not many people have a lot of knowledge of it, but it was printed on, you have an instruction card on yours, right? It tells you on the instruction card how to do it. Yeah. On the playfield how to do it. So, and plus it's a classic stern and they're all kind of the same way. It's like do something on the playfield and then it'll, uh, it'll increase the spinner value. Yeah. I feel like that's a case of, like, at that point, the tournament director should not be giving out info about the gameplay because it's completely stock and written on the playfield to boot. Yeah. I was actually thinking of a Dragon Fist modification. And, I mean, it's pretty much perfect as it was, other than the error with the bonus step. But I was thinking maybe start with all three Banks-Litfer bonus. and then when you get them all down, then it'll do the moving like it does. Because, like, we all said at the beginning that if you can't get that first bank down, it's just like, oh, well, you're in jail. You can't increase your spinner. So you think that would be a good modification to try out, Ron? So you have, like, all three Xs are lit to start.
    64:53
    That's right. And you hit, so they'll stay lit. So if I hit one bank, then the other two are still lit.
    64:59
    Yeah. And after I get them all down, then it starts rotating? Yeah. That seems nice. That does seem nice. And, man, it is hard to get a lot of bonus on that game. It is. Even with the corrected ROM. I know. Even with holding over the Xs, you hardly ever get a lot of bonus on that game. Ever. Exactly. It'd be cool if the roll-up in left orbit, like, also gave some extra bonus depending on how many lights were lit to make that more valuable as opposed to the spinner as well. Yeah, that would be an idea as well. That would be... You could hold the bonus over, too. I mean, I thought about doing that with holding the actual bonus ladder over, and I wondered if that's what they had originally wanted to do. And then I said, well, that's just going to make it a bonus fest. And Scott clued me in into an incorrect setting I had on there. Because I was trying to go through all the games to make sure, like, if you get a special, you get points.
    65:51
    Yeah. Dragon Fist is kind of the exception because I didn't realize one of the ways it gives out specials is how many spins you have.
    65:59
    Mm-hmm. so what is it like 20 40 or whatever 20 40 60 or 80 if it stops on that it'll give you a special yeah which is horrible it's like I'm glad you told me that before the tournament because someone would just randomly get some kind of special award like oh what did I do see Ron doesn't read his own instruction cards either because that's printed on the instruction so yes it is whatever another I would consider like a super bonus like Bally on Dragon Fist might be good like a certain Like hold over the decade, maybe? Like if you've got 10, 20, 30, 40, whatever, and just hold that over? Or maybe only like 30, 60, 90, or 20, 40, 80, or something. Kind of like Skateball and Centaur and things like that.
    66:44
    Well, that would be worth trying out. I mean, what do we have? We have the people on the phone right now have 1% or more of the existing Dragon Shift population. And I had Bruce's for a while. Yeah. So how about the other argument about bugginess, like testing the software? You want me to go first on that one? Sure. All right. Well, the software testing mythology I use is I have other people play the game as well as me playing the game, because I found that even when I repair things physically on a game, I play a game a certain way because I'm used to playing it that way. and the best way to get something to break is to have somebody else play it because they'll find a bug right away.
    67:31
    The insinuation on the specific thread where this came up was that only game manufacturers should be the ones coming up with code and testing it because for some reason, I guess people that work at game manufacturers are better at it than anybody else, which to a certain extent is true. They do it for a living. And they also have the actual code instead of reverse engineering it to start.
    67:58
    Well, it depends. Like the guy with the Tommy, I think it was in the Tommy thread, so I'm pretty sure he reverse engineered the code. I don't think he rewrote everything. A lot of the things that I do now, it's a complete rewrite.
    68:14
    So it's not. It's just easier. It is, and then any bugs that are in it are your own. which was what was really interesting about Ron's Firepower, because previous to going to System 7, we were doing a lot of the same things on System 6, which was almost a complete rewrite, but the architecture is so different. And then he was getting similar bugs. I'm like, well, that's why I thought it was hardware on his game, because it's a similar bug. But it turns out that the root cause was not.
    68:47
    But actually testing the software, you get it out there. I plan on bringing the Atlantis machine to the Allentown show next year and offering it for the tournament, so it'll get tournament tested. But it's getting played pretty heavily right now. I do need other beta testers for it, so if anybody wants to beta test it that has a Valley Atlantis and can burn ROMs, email Flamtill and Ronald Florida to me. That's flamtillpodcast at gmail.com. Is that the email address? That's the email address, which I keep forgetting to mention. I know it's the last couple episodes. I haven't been mentioning our email address, our Twitch channel, our YouTube channel. I've been very lax in that regard.
    69:24
    But, you know, for testing, I mean, it's tested. It's not something that, like the Firepower ROMs that I send you, I don't send you a ROM that I've just, like, made a modification to, and it hasn't been in my machine. You know, it's especially difficult. People have requested ROM modifications for machines that I don't own. And then, you know, I don't have the machine here. So, you know, you're doing everything in simulation, and then you're depending upon their observations. It's very helpful. Ron has a, you know, a Twitch stream that he can send me and say, hey, look, this is what was happening. But most people don't have that, and they're just saying, well, I put it in, and it didn't work. And I said, well, when didn't it work?
    70:08
    So you almost have to teach people a testing mythology of, you know, do it this way. Test this, this, and this, even if you have to test it with the glass off to make sure that everything works as intended. I imagine it's probably difficult for Zach as well because he's wrote the underlying operating system for his. I mean, I'm just building on top of the existing thing, and he wrote an entire new one. So, I mean, Zach, what happens when you run into a bug? You really have to say, hmm, what's in my underlying code that might have caused this? I mean, the advantage of that is that, like, I have my full annotated commented source code, you know, so as long as I can reproduce it in a debugger, like, it's usually not that hard to track down. So if it's like a crash or like a jumping to a random memory address, then it can still be an issue. But, like, I've opened my own operating system, but there aren't that many facets of the operating system, really. you know so like you know like it only has like five utility functions that you really do much so if there's a bug in it you'll usually find them the first time you use them anywhere yeah you're not doing so much in your back end that is causing problems yeah I mean that's a myth I think with I'm sure the Tommy code was like completely tested and like you said in the thread you thought it was because the trough switches were messed up.
    71:38
    I had that on my Tommy, and it's definitely a really bad mechanical design issue with the game that it's just susceptible to. Trough switch issues on a stern slash data east? Yeah, data east with all physical switches on a single opto. Yeah. I mean, trough switches, they get beat up all the time. I have issues on my firepower that, you know, I have to replace the one switch. It's the one switch I didn't replace because it has one of those plastic lifters melted onto it. So I'm like, well, I'll keep that one.
    72:15
    I probably should grind out the rivet and just put a new contact in it. You know, that might be the easiest way to do it. But, yeah, switches can definitely be a pain. I mean, if you're in a multi-ball game and you're counting the number of balls, you have to know where all the balls are. I mean, you're going to run into this with Pharaoh, Zach. you're going to be like, oh, I need to know where all the balls are. See, I actually have not had any issues with that so far. I'll give it time. It was surprisingly easy to write the code, except for the part where I mixed up the trough eject and the out-hole kicker at the beginning, which was very confusing. But once that happened, it all worked the first try throughout all the multiball stuff.
    72:53
    Actually, the logic for it seems simpler than the single-ball logic, which made me concerned about my single-ball logic. but uh yeah i would be concerned with that because single ball logic's just like oh balls in the out hole uh pause a little bit make sure it's still there and uh then we go on that because i've got built-in switch debounce in my operating system yeah well you have to think of you know strange things that could happen like uh on stock firepower software if the ball doesn't see the out hole if the trough logic doesn't see that the out hole was hit first and it moved it over it'll just eject the ball into the shooter lane. It'll assume that the ball is there in error. Yeah. Which I always thought was weird. Fair also probably is a bit easy because it's only a two-ball game with only two balls in the throw. And so there's no time where the ball's ever held in a lock on the play field. It's just as soon as it sees a switch in multi-ball, it just ejects it. You know, so I'm sure... Are you going to change that behavior since you're rewriting the whole game? Because I'm not a big fan of, oh, you got the ball locked for multi-ball, let's just release it. I like having to do something to get it out. I like that, but then on the other hand, if you fail to do something, either you're going to get your ball back or you're going to just watch the ball drain. And I've heard many reviews from irate fellow pinball players that watching your ball drain from a lock is really annoying.
    74:17
    Well, I'm saying, see, this is where the complex multi-ball trough handling comes into play because you now have to say, okay, there's a ball up there in the play field that that player locked and somebody else can steal it, but then you have to take that into account. What if the next player doesn't steal it? Not allowed. That's the other thing with Pharaoh is, you know, if there's a ball in the hole and you shoot the hole again, like you might be able to block the ball out of the hole or other things that are just going to be a pain to code for. Yeah. But meanwhile, like I always wished in Firepower, because it has the star rollovers in front of the kickouts, like you could have a non-lock ceiling firepower by just registering the star as the rollover if you shot it when there's already a ball in there and count that as locking the ball. Oh, that's an idea because I already added in somebody, the other beta tester that was at the Texas Pinball Festival. He wanted that feature so that when you, but he wanted a feature where if there was already a ball locked in there and you went over the rollover, it would actually give you a two ball multi ball it would be like a steel to lock but that's a good idea too that it would count it like so if you had a ball locked in there and your lock was qualified so you had a ball in there and you had the flashing arrow in front it should register it as a lock when you roll over the rollover Yeah and turn it solid
    75:39
    That's a good idea, actually. I think I will add that to the next version of the code. Oh, boy.
    75:46
    Anything I can do to help get rid of the scourge of lock stealing. Yes, we know you hate lock stealing. But I wrote such elegant code to get the correct locks going. And actually, both Ron and the other beta tester complained about it. They said, why does it light like this? How come I have a ball in there and it's blinking? And I said, well, yeah, you have to get it in the open one, and then it will release it. And I pointed out that that's stock behavior. Oh. Yeah. That's exactly the way William said it. Yeah, it doesn't really have lock-stealing power. I mean, you're just kind of screwed.
    76:19
    Like, you end up having the ball in the top. Well, the stock software will, yeah, it will always light a hole that you can lock it in. at least one hole will light that you can lock a ball in. Speaking of tournaments, I want to bring this up, because Scott actually brought this up, I think, when he was at Stomp. If you watch a lot of these, like, I think IFPA did it. I think Buffalo might have done it. When they were using, like, valleys, specifically like the older valleys, like, say, you know, Frontier, 8-Ball Deluxe, you know, that era of game. Fathom. They would do this deal where you got a four-player game, But they would play players, they'd play two games, and they would use player one and three, both games. So they were protecting against tilt-throughs. But then, Scott, you said something very interesting, and what was that? I had pointed out that tilt-through ROMs have been available for all Valley Classic games that use the 17 and 35 board sets for, I believe, 2012, 2013, something like that. the people in the Pacific Northwest have them I forget the guy's name, it's Noah something he had beta tested all of them and they were using them in tournaments as far as I know and it just makes it act like Stern style so that if you tilt with no score the player will just get their ball back and Valley itself freedom from the factory does it freedom firewood that everybody loves So Bally was thinking of that when they came out with their first electronic game. Of course, they didn't do it in any of their other game stock, but I'm not sure why people don't know about the ROMs or they don't use them. Well, they do. Well, where can you get these awesome ROMs? Well, I guess that's the hard part. You have to know somebody that has them already and get a patch file for it. The main problem with most people get their ROMs from the Internet Pinball database, and it seems like a crapshoot when you try to upload ROMs there. Like, I've uploaded the patch files to them and they just say we're not putting them on the site because we don't really do modified software. But then you look at, you know, random games like Fathom, for instance, and there's two different bootleg versions out there. And it's like, and it says it's a bootleg version, but... And Dragon Fist and Meteor. Yeah, well, the Meteor was a bug fix ROM, but then it was determined that the bug fix was actually fixed by Stern, so they eliminated the bootleg version because they didn't need it because Stern had a factory fix for the endless bonus ball countdown.
    79:07
    The Dragon Fist one, I think I just uploaded the text file that explained how to modify it. Has it been updated to be the actual ROMs at this point? I thought it was. it would be really nice to have, like, a central place to, you know, keep track of all the different ROM mods and things like that. Well, I have it on my site. Yeah. I mean, you have yours on your site. I have some of mine on my site. But, like, people need to find the site and look at it. Mm-hmm. Well, my site doesn't have any downloadables on it. It just has checksums. for most of the Soren ROMs, for instance. He always provides checksums for the patch files.
    79:54
    He does the System 11 and newer mostly. And then for the older stuff, where I have the file, I can get the checksum, or if it's obviously something that I've originated myself.
    80:06
    Generally, I just send patch files to people that ask for them. I've been thinking what would probably work pretty well and be technically legal is if you could write a web app that had a patcher in it so that, you know, you load the web app and then it automatically downloads the patch and you just tell it where your ROM is locally and then it completely locally in your computer does the patch and gives you back the copy without ever having, you know, you're never putting the ROM out. So as long as the person has the stock ROM. Well, yeah, all of this stuff exists already. So I'm not, you know, you can use a program called Lunar IPS, which the ROM modding for Nintendo. Yeah, but people seem to constantly be confused by those apps. Yeah, like, I use that. What is the patch file? They don't know that stuff. But, like, you could do this all completely, automatically. How much time does it take uploading the ROM? Because when Soren put his last couple, like, you know, you need a patcher, and a lot of people get confused on how to use it, you know. And I actually, I used it, and I had to let him know one of his, either his check sum was wrong or he put, like, the wrong one out there on one of them that he had to fix. It was one of the ones that I used to patch her. But, you know, what Zach said, if you literally had a site where you just, like, I want this patch, and you just point it to your actual ROM file and just modify it, done. Make it happen, Zach. Yeah, Zach can make that happen. Make it happen. Yeah, they'll probably try to sue me anyway, but I'm pretty sure that would be completely legal. Yeah. Yeah, if you own the ROM. I mean, you're not... But it is modifying it, though. That's the thing. Well, that's what the patcher does. The patcher's legal. The thing I worry about is people not understanding that a web app is not uploading it to the Internet. You know, it's still happening all locally.
    82:05
    Yeah, and some people don't understand, like, it's a patch file. They think it's the actual ROM. Yeah. I've seen that a lot. It's like, this doesn't work. Yeah, did you notice it's much smaller than the actual ROM? Because this is on Paramad. Yeah.
    82:20
    But cool. Cool. I love that idea. Got to make that happen. But, yeah, no, the tilt-through ROMs, I mean, that's – I don't really laugh when I see people using the things, but – and, I mean, these are same tournaments. I mean, the ones that Josh Sharp runs in his house, you know, they play, and he's obviously familiar with modified ROMs because he has a Barrett Cora that has double scoring in it during the multi-ball like his father intended when he designed the game and Stockett doesn't do it. And I know they use that at Florida as well. And I'm like, why don't you just put the tilt ROMs in? And they're like, I don't want to do that.
    83:00
    It's like kind of laziness, I guess, maybe at some point. I mean, I imagine just like some tournament directors don't have access to a ROM burner. Although, like, it's $40 or something for the manual. It's like the cost of getting one ROM burned by, like, a professional ROM burning place. Well, the problem with the professional ROM burning places is that their license agreements with Bally and Williams to provide the software, they're not allowed to burn modified ones. Well, yeah, exactly. But, like, even if you just wanted, like, when I was working on my first game, you know, with the burnt MPU, and the ROMs were bad in it, too, I never even figured out why, but I'm like, oh, you know, I can pay like $30 or something. I don't remember what it was to one of these companies to get the original copies of the ROMs, a new copy burnt and sent to me. Or $40, I can just buy a ROM burner and then be able to burn my own ROMs forever. Like that was a no-brainer to me. I guess the difference is probably when we got into it because when I got a ROM burner, They were over $1,000.
    84:10
    Yeah. I think one of them is surplus, but... Even the better Von Berners now are like $150 for the Jeep or whatever it's called. Yeah. You know, it's almost... I almost just provide buying that for myself if this one ever dies, but then I bought a backup, which I hope to have on someday.
    84:28
    Oh, you got it on the slow boat from China like I did? Yeah. Hmm, hmm. Yeah, but my... Well, even like... I mean, Ron's in the technical industry, and there was definitely a lot of back and forth when you first got your burner with, well, how does this work and how do you do this? And it's actually always been like that because, I mean, I've been reading electronics and computer magazines for the early 80s, and it was always like, oh, look, here's an EPROM burner that you can build. And EPROMs then, you know, at 2716 cost $60.
    85:00
    So, you know, it was a pretty expensive mistake if you messed up the voltage. I guess it's kind of a black art maybe to upgrade stuff maybe that's why people don't want to deal with it they just want to order the chips and pop them in I mean it's basically like you learn how to do it once though it's the same thing so you figure out once and the ROMs are pretty cheap now I'd recommend it to anyone but even like I rewrote Hot Tip with modified rules and a whole bunch of people seemed really interested in that, you know, they're up for the idea, but then none of them have ROM burdens or access to them. Everyone was like, you know, oh, will you send them to me? Will you send them to me? And, like, you know, I don't want to be packaging up, like, 20-plus ROMs and mailing them out and trying to get to the post office on time. Like, it's way too big. I think I probably, I mailed Ron the ROMs originally when we were doing all these projects, and I probably should have just bought them the minute I would just send them it directly and said, here's your burner. It's coming pretty soon. Well, I got sick of it after a while. It's like, you know, did I just burn these myself? Like, what do I need to do? Yeah, and now you have a burner so you can, you know, repair all your other games that need new ROMs. Yeah, I've noticed that it's a pretty high bar for people. They don't want to learn or they don't want to pay for it or they don't, like, I don't know, Bruce doesn't have one either, right? He probably uses a new sack. I'm the only person I know of in, like, the western half of New York with a ROM burner. It's sort of ridiculous. The thing is, I used mine to, I mean, there's a Soren getaway ROM that fixes all the weird crap. All the bugs like we saw and the one actually Zach saw in the tournament, when you're in multiball and then another multiball starts. Just bizarre crap that's in that game, and it's basically all fixed. There's a fixed ROM that fixes all those issues. And just, boom, you know, burn it. It's in the game. Great. All set. And so now, so you were kind of a beta tester for it. Did you find any bugs in the fixes? No, I wasn't. I tested the Demoman one.
    87:03
    That was it. All the other ones, I think he had other testers. Soren. Because he had a big batch of them that he released like all at once as patch files. Yeah. I mean, my contribution to the Demoman was testing it and then asking if he could also do the profanity ROM version of the claw fix. because that's what I had in there. So he did that.
    87:25
    So I got a question for you guys, and this is the same question that was, I think, last week, the tech question about the Flash Gordon where Scott gave some advice. But we'll go over the original question. This was at Flash Gordon.
    87:42
    Three of my bonus inserts, and this is from Mike Dimas, I believe the Canadian Pinball Podcast. It says, three of my bonus inserts on my Flash Gordon operate perfectly as they should, but they flicker on and off to the exact sequence of the back box lamps, which illuminate the words Flash Gordon on the back box. Hard to explain, but these lamps mirror the flickering effects of the back box lamps. I replaced the MPU, the lamp driver, and the auxiliary lamp driver, and the effect is still there. I repinned J4 on the MPU, which is for the lamp data, and still not resolved any suggestions, which Scott suggested, look for a diode on the coin door, short it against it, go into the lamp test and unplug the coin door to see if the issue goes away.
    88:24
    And Mike wrote back what he did. He said that didn't fix it or he didn't find anything that was shorted, but he started a game, unplugged the coin door, and then got the bonus inserts lit to check if they were still flickering, which they were. The bonus lamps behave normally in lamp tests, so I would not see the issue in lamp tests. Thanks again, Mike. Now, have either of you owned a Flash Gordon? I have not. I did a long time ago. So it has that strobe, too, right? Yeah. Yeah, not on all of them. Not on all of them. So the Flash Gordon lights are animated, and there's a strobe behind them as well? It's in the middle of them. So there are controlled lamps back there, too. Like, it's not just a strobe. Yeah, there's a strobe board with high voltage on it. Mine, actually, the strobe was broken on it, so mine just had a regular bulb in there that blinked. Yeah, but I believe what you're talking about, it has the flash Gordon lights, I believe that. Yeah. Yeah, they go in a pattern, right? It's like the KISS lamp board or anywhere.
    89:23
    It's canned, right? The MPU doesn't actually control it, I don't think. I think it's just the circuit board does it. It's like got 555 timers on it, like black holes, chase lamps are. I thought all the Bally's were controlled ones.
    89:37
    I'm not sure. I mean, this was... I do love how the Gottliebs all do that, though. They just have the one 10-lamp. Yeah, one control. Yeah, turn on, and then it just does it, yeah. Although we really need reproductions of those.
    89:50
    They're pretty much impossible to find now. The transistors they use aren't made anymore. It's like the one in my black hole, only three of the lights work.
    89:57
    Oh, really? Yeah. I've been meaning to, like, try to make, like, a new one with, like, adjustable speed. Seems like a pretty simple board. And, like, LED dimming and stuff, but I never got around to it. Actually, Ron, does he have LEDs in it? Actually, I don't know if he's – I read you the original question, so it does not say.
    90:14
    Yeah, because if he has LEDs in it, it could be, you know, ghosting issues. Because LEDs are so sensitive, and even if you get the Ghostbuster ones, they could still get fooled because they're being controlled by SCRs as opposed to transistors. And if it was LEDs, he might have gotten the Alltech board or the inline plug-in adapter boards or the manual resistor technique.
    90:40
    But since he said in time with the other lamps, that makes me think it's not LEDs. Yeah, that's why I was thinking short. It would usually be the 60 hertz from the wall plug in the case of LEDs.
    90:57
    But that's why I said to look on the... It's pretty common to get the coin door diode shorted against the coin door, and then it causes the lamps to do funny things like blink in unison. but apparently that wasn't the case. But that's the simple fix. We were talking earlier about, oh, what's the simple fix for something? And just from experience, I'm like, oh, yeah, the diode on the coin door. Any ballet game that has, like, lamp issues where they seem to be like, well, why is this activating? I mean, it's definitely a weird issue, but I still think he has a short somewhere.
    91:30
    Like, unplug the boards and, like, unplug the headlamps, see if it goes away. What lights was it specifically again that we're strobing? Let's see. Three of my bonus inserts on my Flash Gordon operate perfectly as they should, but they flicker on and off to the exact sequence of the back box lamps, which illuminate the words Flash Gordon on the back box. So it doesn't say which three. No, it just says three of my bonus inserts. Or which of the bonuses, because there's two sort of bonuses on Flash Gordon. So I feel like we need more info. to really narrow this down. All right. All right, there you go, Mike. We need more info. Which of the bonus insert lights are there? Which three? Or the LEDs?
    92:17
    And the other bonus all work fine, I assume, since you say just the three. Like, if you get four bonus, the fourth doesn't.
    92:26
    I'm looking at the schematics right now to flash Gordon and bonus targets. I'm trying to see how the animated lamps are controlled. I see on the auxiliary lamp it lists one flash Gordon, two flash Gordon, etc. Up to six, I think. So I'm guessing that those are them on the auxiliary board, which is not the same board as the others. Although you could picture like there being some weird issue with the latching between the auxiliary and the normal board. Yeah. So they didn't be used. That's less likely. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking about because the way the auxiliary lamp driver board is addressed in Ballet World is it just the lamp matrix is stored as 15 half bytes, and then anything that's for the auxiliary lamp driver is right after that, and it's all done in the lamp interrupt. It's just the one wire different, right? Yeah, there's just one wire, which one it's strobing versus the other.
    93:24
    Do you remember if the – you know how some of the early Flash Gordons have the vocalizer board like Xenon has in it? Do you know how many control lines are on that? Is that four or five? They don't go the same as the solenoid board, like on other sounds?
    93:39
    No, you mean the solenoid bank select? Yeah, because that's how they control the sounds normally in the valleys, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're using the solenoid select lines. Well, the earlier ones don't. They use five lines, like, you know, the 51 soundboard. That uses five signals instead of four. but they needed that specific strobe for the 7th digit when they went to 7th digit displays, which is why their newer boards only use four control bits, and they're using the Solonite Bank Select. It would be interesting to see if the lights were all on the auxiliary lamp driver board.
    94:18
    I mean, the bonus deck, they aren't on there, so. Yeah, they aren't, but if it's leaking over for some reason, like, and it's just activating it, And maybe, did he replace the MPU board too, Ron, or just the lamp boards? It said MPU in the email. Okay. So that may be something with the connector or he has a wire that's touching, but you think it would be intermittent then? You can also try unplugging just the auxiliary board completely and see if that changes anything.
    94:46
    So there you go, Mike. There's some stuff you can try. And if it doesn't work, you can just sell me your Flash Gordon. Or me. I'll take it too.
    94:54
    I'll take the hit for that. You're closer, so... There's nothing wrong with ELO. What I did on mine was, because they use wood screws, and I mean the real solution would be to drill it out at least the outer ones and center it correctly and put t-nuts in it what do you mean the outer ones? the outer ones there's three screws in the lane guide so typically what Williams would do is like the two outer ones the one nearest the flipper then the one to the left wouldn't those be the inner ones? no they're the outer ones the other ones be toward the edge of the game. Oh, God. Okay, if you're going to... Label them 1, 2, 3 in a row. You're talking about 1 and 3.
    96:33
    Yeah, they were typically just it would be a machine screw going through a T-nut. So the thing wouldn't move around. Or wouldn't, you know, because they figured that out at some point. You shouldn't do that as if you have like a an older game. If you have a fast moving ball, it's going to beat on that lane guy. and it's actually going to move it down. What was the first Williams game to use those metal cut lane guides instead of just the wire guides? Williams?
    97:02
    Don't most of the 70s ones have those metal guides? Yeah. I know Hot Tip uses just a wire form guide, but then, like, Gorgar uses the specifically cut metal. So somewhere in there. It could actually be, you know, it could be Gorgar somewhere around there. I mean, they all have them. Firepower, Time Warp, Triad. Yeah, they used the hell out of them. They used them forever. Although, Gorgoraz are special. But the metal ones that are thick like that, they're, you know, stock. They're not. They're just wood screws. I mean, they weren't using the T-nuts until much later. I know Black Knight has the T-nuts, right? Maybe the limited edition was. Well, mine had the T-nuts. I'll say that. It might have been limited edition. Well, you could always add them. The thing that's common with all of this is that you need some way to adjust it, and there's really no way to adjust it, you know, other than, at least if it's a wood screw, you can, you know, pop it out and fill the hole and then drill a new hole. But if it's a T-nut, it's a lot harder to move. Well, they have some play around the thing that I found. Yeah. Not much. Or you can do the real solution, just buy a cliffy set for it.
    98:10
    That's what I have in my firepower. Yeah. They're the best. That's for the Williams stuff. But back to TNA. So how'd you fix it, Ron? What I did was lame. But, I mean, I really didn't have a choice. I mean, it's a wood screw going through there, so I can't really ream out the hole anymore unless I'm using a much bigger screw. And I'd want to ream it out, like, in a certain direction. Because it's not even... Oh, my. The hole's not even centered on the artwork. I mean, it has, like, a little circle. And you figure the hole would be dead center. But it's a little lower than that, not surprisingly. Hence the flipper hop. I'm assuming it should have been in the center of the little circle. But whatever. What I did is on the lane guide itself, it's just plastic. So I just took a drill and I reamed out the holes in the lane guide itself.
    98:57
    Not much. Just took a little of the plastic out, you know, drilled it out a little bit so there's a little more play.
    99:05
    And then when I screwed it down, I just pushed it up as I'm tightening it, and there you go. I mean, it was very minor. It must have been very minor for a prop that has to work. And I didn't want to take a ton of material out. I didn't want it so it was so loose. It's like barely any plastic left holding the thing on. But that's what I did. And, you know, if you take the ball and you put it near where the flipper is, like on the lane guide and release it, it'll hop a little. But if you do the full, like put it in the in lane and it comes down, there's no hop, which is what I was looking for because just like Jason here is having an issue. Like he can't hit the lock shot because he's getting major hop. Yeah. I'm not getting hot now, so I can hit the lock shot on the fly. And especially on the right side, I want to be able to, if it's in the in lane coming down, I want to be able to crush that spinner on the fly. I don't want it to hop because it was doing that badly. Yeah, it ruins your shot. It ruins it, especially when you're trying to get, you know, build, you know, get the reactor critical, and the thing's coming down, you're like, oh, yeah, I'm just going to crush that spinner, and then it frigging hops on you, and you can't hit it. It's still frustrating. So that's what I did for that, Jason. Hey, did you happen to look at the flipper? Was the flipper mounted too high? You know how sometimes they're not centered in the holes? The flipper was fine.
    100:24
    It's centered. So you took the flipper bat off to check? Yeah. And the other thing you can do is you could also, and I did this with Dracula, I believe, the rubber that's on there, some of the rubber is tighter than other rubber, depending on where you get it from. And if you get the tighter rubber, it's not as thick, so you won't get that alone. Oh, my. Oh, God. That alone made... First when you need them, right? Yeah. That might fix a lot of the hop. It got rid of it on my Dracula when I went to... I actually used black flipper bands.
    100:58
    I hate that Dracula. I hate the Dracula, too. Yeah. Did you print a new sign for it? You took my sign off, you bastard. So, all right. As an addendum to before. Yes. Disco Fever used wire in-lane guides. Pokerino, immediately after it, had four flippers and no in-lands. And then Phoenix had in-lane guides. Ah, Phoenix is the first one that I own, so that's probably good. So thank you, Barry Osler, for the metal in-lane guides. Is that what you're saying? Yep. So now we just need to go and disassemble all the games after Phoenix and find where they started using machine screws.
    101:38
    These are the kind of questions that Zach gives me all the time, folks. This is how I come up with the stompers. These are what you call cool questions. Like, what was the first metal guides to use machine screws? You said your Black Knight uses it? Yep. And all my other double levels also use it. Black Knight's the earliest. And I have not checked my alien poker. I'll just check my firepower and my flash. I think they're just wood screws. I'm pretty sure flash is just wood screws. Yeah, I'm pretty sure flash is, because that's always loose. Do you have another stumper for us, though, you mentioned? Oh, I have a stumper. Well, the supper we had last week, which was games that have, like, three balls in the drop, but actually only have a two-ball multiball. And I mentioned Creature from the Black Lagoon.
    102:24
    And then I had another. The other one I mentioned was Jokers. Yeah. We had a listener who sent me another one. Steve Daniels actually sent me Dr. Dude does the same thing.
    102:38
    Yeah. So do we know any others? Were there any games after Creature that had just a two-ball multiball even?
    102:48
    I mean, I guess the first multiball of Jackpot is the... Yeah, but there's three balls in there, though. I think the reason they do it is when we were talking about the coding for multiball troughs, that's kind of a standard thing on Williams games, where the code's already written, very tested, and very debugged. So I think maybe they said, why fool around with it and, you know, test for two, you know, and then have to retest everything. Let's just keep using this code. Like for Jokers, they probably just said, let's just keep using the code that works. Yeah, although Jokers was made by Bill Hudson Router. Yeah, Hudson Router. Sure, yeah. And I thought of it that, like, he had redone a lot of the operating system for, like, his own. He didn't necessarily redo it, but he didn't use a lot of the built-in codes.
    103:45
    Did you know he wrote the software for Flight 2000 also? Yes. I didn't realize that until I was doing some research on Flight 2000, and I said, oh, look at that. And I said, I'm surprised I didn't recognize the coding style.
    103:59
    It's very convoluted. That's why I want to rewrite it. Stumper. Stumper, yes. This was actually from Zach, so he'll have to give us the answer.
    104:10
    WPC games typically have, well, unless they're WPC 95, but WPC games typically have five GI strings, five general illumination strings. That are individually controllable. Individually controlled, each with their own fuse, I believe controlled by Triax and WPC system. Pre-WPC, what games had, well, you say it. Like, what was it? What games have the most? The largest number of individually controllable GI strings. I thought it was just any that we were going for. Because, I mean, I know of two that have two. I mean, one that had three, which wasn't the one that Zach was talking about. I know one that has three. I don't know of any with four, and I don't know of any others with three, except for the two that me and Ron know. So I guess it's up to you to guess. Well, one of them that has dual GI strings on it is Valley Atlantis. It's got red light and white light that it can swing back and forth between. And it'll also control the back box, but those are all relays, not necessarily... Relays count strings, though? That's three separate strings. Space Station has dual illumination. so on atlantis can it control the back box separately from yes the red and the white yes all right every relay is total yeah there's a a red string which will illuminate during special modes or if you get a tilt warning um the white string is normally on and then the back box will turn on and off as well it's a bit of confusing messaging right there so we got another one and space station is that the same does it have two and then one in the back box station has yeah when you're redocking and during multi-ball, I think.
    105:55
    I forget what color the light is. Is it green? Yeah. Well, at least all of them I've seen is green. I guess you can put whatever color you want in it. Well, yeah, they're post. That's how they get the red on Atlantis as well. It's just a post. Oh, it's not a colored bulb?
    106:11
    No, they put the bulb, and then it has the sleeve that Bally liked to use, the color sleeve that usually fades out to yellow. The lamp condom. No, it's a tube. Oh, all right. It's more like a penis pump as opposed to a condom pump.
    106:27
    That's interesting because, like, Black Rose uses red condoms on its red GI strings. Yeah. Well, I mean, Atlantis was a bridge game, so they were probably using up parts. Yeah. Were there other ones, though? Okay, what about Elektra? Does an Elektra have a GI string in it? That's one of the ones I was thinking of if it had separate ones for the three different playfields. And Black Hole and Haunted House, well, Haunted House maybe not, but... Well, they have GI that turns on for the lower play field. Black Hole cannot control the back box, but it can control the lower play field. Yeah. And via the tilt relay, it can control the main play field. And I don't know about Elektra, but the one I guessed, Black Knight 2000.
    107:12
    Okay. The only reason I knew that is because I owned it. I remember that it had... I've owned it too, but I don't remember. Yeah, it had a lower play field. I guess it did turn on and off. Yeah. Because it would do it in track mode. It's like a multi-ball start. Yeah, that's what it's all for, the awesome multi-ball start. Well, I mean, if you're going to go that way with controllable GI strings, I mean, a lot of Williams games have that. The System 11 world, there's a shit ton of relays all over them for GI stuff. Like Whirlwind has lighting effects that are sort of GI.
    107:42
    Like what? The lightning. Like it can light the pop bumper areas individually. Because they're just control lights. Well, they act like GI. I mean, if you're going to define GI as being on all the time. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I guess it's how many lights it takes towards GI.
    108:00
    Well, what was the one you were thinking of, Zach? We never even got that one. Well, Black Knight 2000 should give you a clue. Well, that has to have multiple play fields. I was trying to think multi-level play field games. Oh, there's only so many of those. Pharaoh? Yep. No. Well, it's not too hard to figure out because that's what you're working on. Damn, that was easier than I thought. That might have been a better clue, right? Yeah, because you're obviously controlling it, and you would find that out right away. Like, I wonder why all those lights aren't lighting. Another useless tech fact on Bram Stoker's Dracula, it changes it up. It doesn't do, typically they would do the three strings in the play field and two in the back box. That one does not. It actually splits them between to do the lightning effects. You can see it, too, very clearly in the attract mode. So part of the GI is the string. So it's a string. Like, you'll have one string in its back box and play field, at least two or three of them. So Electra has two controllable, lower panel and top panel, whatever that means, looking at the schematics. Bally called play field panels, I think. Yeah, I think it's just your regular play field and the upper play field is alone. And then the lower play field, it only turns on when you do the bonus game. When you have your electric units built up, it'll activate. So to totally change the subject, who here has played Deadpool?
    109:36
    You guys. I have not. I was at the Deadpool launch party at the world-famous Rock Fantasy this past weekend. Hi, Steve. And I finished third. So I did pretty good. Don't you usually finish third at those things? Well, I got money. Wow. Oh, you'd be cashing, right? I was in the money. And, Zach, you'd be happy. I played Star Wars, and I got a billion, which I'm sure is nothing for you. But for me, that was pretty good. That's pretty good for me, too. And I lost my billion. as Anthony the kid he got like 2 billion and um it was it was his night in the finals he like he blew up he blew up uh Iron Maiden then he blew up Star Wars so he had already mathematically won by the time we got to Deadpool which I got to play and I had a weird issue that occurred in that and maybe Zach could refresh my memory. The first Ninja Multi-Ball, is the lock just lit for you for the three locks, or do you have to actually light it? The ones that I've played, you needed to light the locks. All right. Maybe, like, one was lit at the beginning of the game, but the Ninja lights two. Yeah, that's what I thought. And pool, the pool targets are supposed to be the lock. So I lock two balls, and I'm coming up on ball three, and I want to start the Ninja Multiball. And, you know, the lock's not lit, but I only need, like, say, one of the O's in pool. So I hit it, and it registers. I mean, it does a little flashy thing. Okay, you completed the bank, and I notice no lock.
    111:20
    Like, huh? So I shoot it anyway, and it did the, like, the balls are locked on the sword thing, and it took one and then released one and gave it back to me, and I'm still in single ball play. Like, huh. Sounds like a bug. Yeah, I dead the other target, so maybe I was wrong. Maybe it wasn't pool. Maybe it's dead. I only needed one target there, so I hit that and completed it. Now, did that light the mode? And still no lock. That's the thing I don't even remember because at that point after I lit it and the lock still wasn't lit, I ended up draining soon afterwards.
    111:54
    And I thought they were streaming the game, but it looks like they literally turned it off. They stopped the stream right before our game. It's a conspiracy. It is a conspiracy. Like, literally, you could see me playing on Star Wars, which was the previous game, on the stream, and then they shut it off because I think the Deadpool portion of it was done, and that's what they were filming. So I have no idea. And I asked around. It's like, isn't it supposed to light a lock? And everyone said, like, no, pool is supposed to light a lock. And it didn't for me. Were you in any kind of mode that precludes it? No, I wasn't in a mode at all. It was, like, right at the beginning of the ball. I don't think any of them are precluded either except for the little Deadpool. Yeah, I don't think so.
    112:35
    Speaking of Deadpool bugs, though, have you seen the other big bug on Tilt Forms that's been discovered? Like, if you go through the status screen, when you get to player three, it locks the entire game up.
    112:49
    That's cool. Yeah. Wow, that sounds like a major one. Yeah. Speaking of the high-quality code released from professional manufacturers. Hey, let the record show that I didn't say that We know who would say that I would say it, I just wouldn't say it publicly Not to be like insulting to the CERN guys Hi, Timmy If only there was somebody there that you guys knew That you could email them and say Hey, maybe you want to look at this I sure they know but like It is beta code And yet it being used in a whole bunch of tournaments Hmm What are you saying What are you saying I mean it like version 1 Oh, no, it's not.
    113:28
    I mean, again. That's why my software never comes out of beta. It's always in beta. Dude, unlike a lot of people, I'm perfectly fine with Stern releasing beta code. Actually, it's pretty cool. like, if they rebalance the games, then, like, as you, while you own the game, you get to, you know, relearn the rules and learn different strategies multiple times as the code comes out. Look at Guardians. Yeah, like, Guardians or, the big thing that always stuck out to me was the Stern Star Trek, where, like, every single update, like, you know, like, one of them you want to time out the modes, the next was, like, some multi-ball, and, like, it got to that. But I'm hoping now that we have a lot of, you know, pinball players that work for Stern that we're going to see some changes in the way the rule sets are. I think that's a positive thing the people they've been hiring that have been tournament players and they're top tournament players and I mean Lyman always was but he had a lot of constraints put on him you know just because he was the only guy you know there that's like hey let's do this like look at all the stuff he's stuck into ACDC you know that's like he's got all that deep stuff for those people that love the deep rules yeah it's not deep but that's good so what do you think of Deadpool so I don't like the shots or the layout much feels very clunky and rattly the modes seem pretty cool it's more than just shoot the lit shots like every other game except the last three Dwight Sullivan games High Star Wars and it has like the Megalodon quest mode I was interested to see like there's actually multiple color inserts just for that mode of like blue shots or ocean shots because you've missed the megalodon but you've you know you shot the ocean it gives you some points when like there's a red shot moving around that's actually the megalodon so you can hit that that's worth way more points you know and lots of cool more involved rule sets in the modes which I appreciate but hopefully just because it's still in beta there's absolutely no instructional text anywhere to tell you what you're supposed to be doing or explain anything to you. which really makes it hard to play, especially when you only have a few games on a location game.
    115:43
    I still like it. That one shot worries me, though, because I got multiple rejects from the main, you know, it's the main shot of the game, the identifying shot, I would say, where you look at it like, ooh, that's unique, where, you know, you hit the little, the mini-orbit, and then it goes up the ramp. I had at least a couple times where I just nailed that dead center, and it was almost too fast where it went around and just rattled and killed it and didn't make it up the ramp. I was concerned. It's not super consistent, at least on the one I was playing.
    116:19
    And the other thing is that rebound shot, like that play field multiplier shot, like I'm trying to, is it supposed to be, I'm supposed to hit that target and have it go up a ramp? That's like the only thing that gives it to me? Yep. Because it just seems like I hit it by almost accident, and all of a sudden I see a thing, you know, please don't multiply or increase it. Go. Yeah, that's, I'm really not a fan of that. I hate when, like, you can get, like, really big scoring opportunities. Like, that, please don't multiply that game is major, and you get it by accident more often than on purpose. Like, that, I don't like that. But other than that, I mean, it's, I like most of the other shots. I like the left ramp a lot. I like the theme. Like, I like Deadpool as the theme, but because I haven't really, paying attention to the game or anything like that. I'll probably end up seeing it at Allentown next year and probably not playing it again. I haven't played any of those new turns.
    117:13
    Iron Maiden was there last year and I didn't even play it. What do you think of Maiden, Zach? It's pretty boring. It's pretty boring? Wow. There's going to be people thinking you're high or something. How is it boring? From what I've seen on streams, I didn't think it looked boring.
    117:30
    It does play long. But what makes it boring? Everyone universally loves this game. I don't get it. But, like, all you do, or all I do pretty much is, like, I shoot the middle, which advances me to a mode. Then as it comes down to the upper left flipper, I bash into the capture ball, which progresses you towards mummy multiball. And the rebound after that hits the drop targets, which progress you towards trooper multiball. And then the ball comes back down, and you catch it. Then you shoot up the center ramp again, and just repeat that over and over. and you get modes and both multi-balls all off the same one single shot. I thought, like, the modes later on, though, the center shot didn't count for any letters. After, like, the third mode, I think, the center shot stops counting.
    118:14
    But, like, first of all, if you get through three modes in a competition, like, you're probably pretty set. And even then, like, then you can just start shooting the left spinner, which is, like, the next easiest shot. It's also by the center. If you miss it, you still hit the captive ball, and it's still pretty much the same until you get to the last mode where you have to combo the ramps. That's just a giant pain because those ramps are not the easiest thing to hit. So not a fan. Yeah, and lots of other reasons too. So what you're saying is that I shouldn't even bother to play it. Don't listen to him. He's not always right. You like Star Trek Next Generation, so, you know, maybe you'll like it. I didn't say I liked Star Trek Next Generation. I just said I owned one. Why would you own a game you didn't like? Well, I do like it, too, but... But you like Guardians, though, right, Zach? Guardians is pretty fun.
    119:06
    I have played Guardians. I thought it was okay. I mean, I like the movies, but... Was it on the newest code? Yeah. Because it used to be Group Ball. Then it was Orb Ball. This is months ago, and I don't even think that was a thing then. I was just playing it casually. I don't play in that many tournaments, so it was just a casual play. Oh, let's see what we could do. and it was at an arcade that had no tilt on it, so I was like, let's see what I can do walking around. That's one of the things I like about Guardians is the way I play it in tournaments is the same way I'd play it for fun. You know, just let's see how far I can get. Let's play the modes.
    119:43
    The tournament strategy, as far as I can tell, is basically maybe which mode you choose first somewhat, although there's multiple valid choices there. But the way you play a tournament is you just start playing the game as it was intended to be played. The same with Star Wars, you know, like, the way to do well in it is to play the modes and do the stuff. Yeah, I like playing, I like just playing the game. Like, I think somebody at Stomp said, boy, you're not really into holding the ball, are you? I think Ron said it. He's like, boy, Scott doesn't do any, he doesn't do any, you know, flipper holds or anything. And I'm like, well, you don't need to. I mean, if you're going to make the shot, you're going to make the shot. if you practice enough and you're going to be a flow player. And I think more people that are writing this offer, you should get a bonus for making a quick shot. You got the in lane? Make a shot right away. That's why I like Star Wars. Does that do that? Not quite like that, but there's the shot multiplier, which goes up to 40x based off of your... Yeah, which everybody seems to hate, but... But it's just off hitting stand-ups. you know so like if you want to keep it high you're either going to purposely shoot death targets or if you play a bit more on the fly you'll just naturally hit them you know off rebounds and stuff so like in order to score like pretty good it actually incentivizes playing less controlled and just you know playing it more naturally so all of the people that are complaining about Star Wars are complaining about it because they're probably you know stop and aim players that but also The shot multiplier is very confusing to use, which I just ignore it nice and sometimes, and it's perfectly okay to do that, which a lot of people do not get. There's enough stuff in Star Wars that unless you know it well, you should just ignore some of it.
    121:34
    There are multiple ways to score good. You don't need to pay attention to all of it. I like games that do have multiple strategies that, oh, if I do this, I can get this. I can do this, and I'll do this. And if you do all of them, all of the weird strategies and put them together, you're just going to have like a totally killer game. Obviously, tournament playing is slightly different than just playing, you know, for a high score or to see if you could do it. Well, I'll say this tournament, the Deadpool launch party, I had a situation where I finished third, but I had to win a four-person playoff game for the eighth spot to get into the playoffs. so one spot for four players and we played Star Trek not next gen the new Star Trek the good one the one that you sold yes at least five people now have asked me why I sold it starting to get old people another game that really incentivizes flow play combo shots and I had let's see I was playing the modes going through the modes, getting my, you know, what is it, the away shot or whatever the hell it is to get more stuff and whatever that's called. I never get the terms right. But I had Frank Guida, the dad of Steph Guida, the pinball princess, was in the lead with like 100, probably like 110 million. He's player one. I'm player four. I have like 47 million.
    123:07
    And I have a situation where, like, I have two balls locked, and I have the three locked targets are all flashing. So I have to hit all three. And I'm figuring, like, I'm going to soft plunge and try to get the targets. So I soft plunge. I hit two of them. Slick out the ball saver, let it drain. Soft plunge again, get the third one, and then actually lock a ball. Like, holy crap, I did everything right. But multi-ball starts, and literally for the entire ball save period, I do not hit a single jackpot. But I managed to trap up, not panic. I still had three balls, and I started to take the controlled approach.
    123:46
    Zach would have loved my stage flipping to get the two jackpots on the side ramp. That was sweet. It actually worked. And I only needed, I think, one more shot on the right orbit to get all the jackpots before I drained out. But still. The right orbit is always the damn thing. Yeah. Then I got right into vengeance, and I got through that. That got, it basically, I ended up winning like 100, I had like 116 million.
    124:13
    And I realized, like, yeah, I still really like that game. Why did you sell it? And everyone asked me that again. Yeah, I was like, you know, Ron, you always kill this game. Why did you sell it again?
    124:22
    Is it because you always kill it? And you can always get it back. I mean, it's a newer star. Star Trek LE, though. Yeah, I had an LE, though. I had an LE. Will you ever go to just by spending that much money on it again, though? No. No, I can't. Even if it is good. Even if you did regret it. But, you know, yeah, that might be regret. I've never had one. That might be my first one. I don't know. You've never had a regret on a game? Have you ever re-bought a game that you had? I've bought, yeah. You've been sold, Ron. A game I bought, yes. As far as games I've sold, no. I've had a regret that I got Ghostbusters, although not really. You got that for free, basically. Because I got it for free, basically, and got my money back, so it wasn't really a regret. Family Guy. You regret selling that? No, I regret getting that. You regret buying it, okay. Yeah. That's about it. Yeah, you generally don't go for the Pat Lawler games. I was surprised that you would. I wouldn't have dialed in, but Zach doesn't like that either. It's like the second least Lawler Lawler. Debra Lawler.
    125:27
    My opinion's definitely changed on it a little bit. I mean, I liked it when I first played it at the Allentown show like two or three years ago, whenever that was. but of course because I couldn't do anything on it at Stomp but it's like it's a little busy you know and then the sim card scoring seems far out of you know kilter compared to everything else on the game so don't worry you won't be able to hit it anyway if it has a protector on it yeah exactly so you've got to make a mod that extends the side vamp right over the sim card hole to make the side vamp These just block off the hole completely. And then just score the SIM card from the side ramp? No, it just never gives you SIM cards. Never gives you SIM cards? That happens.
    126:13
    Then you should like mine then, Zach. I mean, you never can get SIM cards on mine. No, except when you call them by accident, which is even worse than, like, having it being hard to hit. You know, the same would be with the Deadpool ramp shot. If the main way to get the multiplier is by accident, I think it's a bad design, personally. Yeah, well, the thing is, that's the actual design in Deadpool. and dialed in, literally, if you take the SIM card protector off, then you can actually hit it. But it also falls down. Why do you take it off? Because it'll wear like hell immediately.
    126:44
    Isn't it underneath something? You won't see it anyway? No, you'll see it. I played a couple now without the SIM protector and they were both worn big time. Yeah. And they both played much better.
    126:56
    Isn't that the ultimate goal? Don't you want a better playing game? Yeah, I guess. Like, can you put a piece of, I mean, what's wearing? It's wearing the wood away, just like all, like, Yeah, it's a bizarre angle, too. Like, maybe if you put some ball-ending foam on, like, the sides of the scoop, too, like, that might help. I'm surprised someone hasn't come up with something yet, some better way to protect it so it doesn't reject constantly. Well, half the problem you have is that there are people that don't, they own a lot of games and they don't want them to wear because they paid a lot of money for them, which is understandable, but they're not really players. I mean, I'm sure you both know people that have gorgeous collections, and then they don't actually play their games.
    127:39
    So maybe... So that's why they keep them gorgeous. Yeah, well, they keep them gorgeous. I mean, generally, a lot of those people are like, why are you shaking my game? You know, get out. I mean, speaking of yellow cards, right? I mean, Zach didn't get ejected from the tournament for picking up the Star Trek Next Gen machine. I didn't pick it up. I just split it. Oh, the legs were definitely off. The legs were definitely off because it went like a foot and a half forward. It was like an inch from my freaking septic pipe. The only thing I did was slide it like a foot to the side. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, now he's... No, no, no, no, no. I had Bruce had to go underneath it and basically lift it up and pull it back from the freaking pipe. If only there wasn't film on this, right?
    128:25
    No, there was no film. Oh, darn. There was no film. That would have been bad if he had broken his septic pipe. The whole thing I did was sliding it to try to get it to stop going out the death out lane thing over there. Maybe the first fall.
    128:39
    There was definitely some rocking going on. There was some raging going on after that. I honestly think he was trying to save it, but once it was down the out lane, there might have been some rage rocking.
    128:52
    There was rage right from the plunge when it moved my skill shot. Oh, yeah, you got really upset about that. Pisses me off. Like, I used the flippers to select a skill shot. That means I selected it. Stop moving the selection. That's not the way that works, though. Yeah, but blame Dwight, your hero. He programmed that. See, Dwight figured it out when he got to Star Wars. You know, Dwight has a lot of issues with his games with delays on things. I mean, he did the Johnny Mnemonic, right?
    129:21
    Wasn't that his first game? No, no. Dwight's first game was for a little gambler. Ugh. Yeah. All right. Let's shore this up here. This has been a very long tech discussions occurring here. I have one more subject Zach actually brought up today.
    129:44
    Laser Lord. Who remembers Laser Lord? Does Scott remember Laser Lord? I remember seeing the flyer for it, And I remember all the pictures that came out for the wide-body version of the prototype that wasn't just a Quicksilver play field. Yeah. So the long story short is the Blazer Lord was going to be the next game after Ice Doom Orbiter 1.
    130:11
    And it was going to be a wide-body. And the prototype was in Joe Joes. Am I saying his name right? Joe Joes. Joe Juice was working on it in a Viper cabinet, and he was building up the prototype for Laser Lord.
    130:29
    And then they ceased, I believe they ceased pinball production, but they were still doing video games. So it just sat there, went nowhere.
    130:38
    Then in like two years later, in one last ditch effort by Stern, they decided to bring a game to the, what, the AOMA show, whatever it's called, the industry show. So they basically took a Quicksilver, did different artwork on it, took the Laser Lord back glass from the other game, and boom, it was Laser Lord. They did a flyer up for it, and I don't know what happened at the show, but I assume nothing good happened because they basically closed down right after that. Well, if it was 1983 or 1984, I mean, you could see why that wouldn't happen. I mean, pinball was going through a definite downturn at that point. As was video games. Yeah. It was just bad for our cage. Just like last year, I believe, I think it was a plumber was working at someone's house and finds this game, the prototype, the original wide-body prototype Laser Lord game. Yep. And he eventually sells it to someone else, who I believe is in Michigan, and he is currently working on this game, trying to get it fully back up and working. and I noticed on there he said there were some issues with the software. Wouldn't surprise me. It's a prototype. Yeah. So, Scott, you want to fix that? Any interest?
    131:56
    I'd have to give me the game to fix it. Ah, there you go. So if you want the code fixed, send an email to slamtillpodcast.gmail.com and we'll get you in touch with Scott. And then you can send the game to him, and I'm sure he can get the software working for you. What's wrong with the software? I mean, did he say what was wrong with it? Did he say, Zach? I don't think he said. There's a non-functional number. It wasn't specific. We should give out the link to this blog. It is laserlord.blogspot.com. There you go. Laserlord.blogspot.com. Laser with a Z. L-A-Z-E-R.
    132:37
    Testing an Alltech MPU board. Well, that's probably his first mistake. Well, there you go. because, yeah, Alltech doesn't have Laser Lord in it, does it? Well, it does. It uses the one from IPDB, which is the one that he's using, which is the part of the story that makes no sense. Yeah, it's really weird. It's really weird, and this is the part that never made any sense to me. About maybe four years ago, the Laser Lord that went to the AOMA, whatever it's called, show, the Quicksilver clone, it came up on eBay. Someone bought it, and they dumped the ROMs. And that's what's on IPDB. When this guy got the actual, you know, the prototype wide-body Laser Lord, he had the ROMs dumped, matched the code. It was the same code that was on the other one, which is impossible, because the wide-body one actually had the code. It's coded for multiball. And obviously the other one would just be a Quicksilver clone.
    133:36
    So it makes no sense. That's the part of the story that never made any sense to me. Maybe Quicksilver was intended to be multiball. Did they ever verify that the stuff on the Quicksilvery Laser Lord was the same ROM as on normal Quicksilvers? Oh, it's not. I don't believe it is. So, like, what Stern liked to do, like, with Dracula slash Wildfire or Pinball slash Stingray, was they'd reuse the same ROM in a second game, even though the layout was pretty different, and they'd, like, leave switches out, put holes in parallel. Yeah. So maybe they wrote this multiball ROM for the original Widebody Laser Lord, and then they needed it for the Quicksilver-y Laser Lord, and they wired it up, and they just never put the lock holes in. And because of that, multiball would never start because there's no way to lock the balls. And so maybe the code that works on it is actually... Well, I could probably look at that and see if that's the case. That would be pretty obvious.
    134:37
    I see that Bill Futsenreuter did the software for Quicksilver as well, and he probably did Laser Lords, and it's a JoJo's game in both cases. So maybe he based it off of it. Maybe when he was designing the Laser Lord prototype, he said, I'm going to start, and I don't want to bother the software guys because they're probably busy like most software guys are, and so I'm going to just go with the same switches and things like that so that I can get something up and flipping. So, I mean, it could be modified from it. It says a few minor gameplay glitches. In non-software programmer speak, that means that there's a shit ton of stuff that doesn't work.
    135:18
    But, like, there is apparently lots of it does work because they talk about, like, rules of the game, which is interesting. they stay there's a multi-ball you put the balls in the locks and they stay there until you release them by doing something there's two releases which is one is a top lane one is behind a full bank of targets there are the top three lanes of the bonus multiplier but after you complete the lanes you then have to go over one of the lower lanes there's weird stuff like that makes me think again of like this layout is not what the code was designed for or something. The thing that concerns me is the last update for this is March.
    136:01
    Yes. And I know this guy was working on his original plan was to get this thing ready for one of the Michigan shows. Uh-huh. Then it was going to be there, so I don't know how that's going or if they've had the Michigan shows yet. I'm trying to remember what they're called because there's like two of them, isn't there? Yeah. Well, there's three if you count the Ann Arbor. You've got the Ann Arbor show. Yeah, it wasn't that one. It was one of the other two. That's actually coming up in a week or so.
    136:31
    And then there's the Michigan Gaming Classic. And then there's Pinball at the Zoo. Okay, Pinball at the Zoo. Yeah, it was one of those shows he was supposedly going to bring this to. I would be curious to see. I'm just looking at the pictures, and it would be curious to see if the scoring actually follows it. Like there's some kind of grid thing with the four banks, so I'm like if that's the four bank from Quicksilver.
    136:56
    Yeah, there's also, it says that you have to shoot the laser-load targets in order, so one flashes and then it moves to the next, which definitely does not match anything in Quicksilver normally.
    137:07
    No, yeah, it wouldn't. Yeah. and it looks like I don't know I mean the Quicksilver Laser Lord all the rules written on the play field match the Quicksilver rules do they yeah so yeah so that one's just an art re-theme that's strange that it had the same software in it if the rules or maybe the artist just followed the original game for the art but then the rules were something different for all we know we'd have to actually see the video of that one playing to confirm.
    137:41
    Yeah. I mean, I'd like to see it as a classic spare nut. I'd really love to play this thing. Is there like a complete shot? I don't see a complete shot of the play field here. I mean, I have them saved somewhere and I think they're on the mobile database. Yeah, they're both on the database. Yep. Because this would have been the next game, so they were going for another Y-Body after Viper, after Orbiter 1. Because that worked so well. Another wide body. They made probably some of the... Did they make, like, the most wide bodies? I feel like Gottlieb must have beaten them on that. I don't think so.
    138:21
    What about Williams? I don't think so. Well, if you count their super pins... They only made, like, five. If you count their super pins... 11 counting super pins? Yeah, if you count their super pins, they probably beat them. Well, you have to count super pins because, I mean, the wide bodies that Stern made are only 24 inches wide. Half the wide bodies are Bally. Yeah. I mean, Stern had, you got Big Game, Cheetah, Flight 2000. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Hurry, hurry. I need six wide bodies.
    138:52
    Freefall. You had Iron Maiden, Viper, Orbiter One. Yeah, that's eight. They made eight. Blazer Lord would have been the ninth wide body that Stern made. Gottlieb made 22. 22 wide bodies? Yeah. Circus, Caveman, combination with that one. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Devil's Stare, Force 2, Genie, Goin' Nuts, Haunted House, Krull, Mars, God of War, Panther, Pink Panther, Punk. Punk's a widebody? Punk's a widebody? No. I don't think Punk's not a widebody. That doesn't sound right. Rocket, Roller Disco, Spirit, Star Race, The Amazing Spider-Man, Timeline, Volcano. Were they high? What were they doing? You really have to ask that question? Of course they were high. Of course they were high, but I will argue that, like, Gottlieb's wide-body dimensions are the best wide-body dimensions. Which wide-body? The super wide-body or the super wide-body? The more common wide-body. Like Black Hole? It's about the same width as a super pin, maybe a bit wider. It's also a bit deeper, so you have more play field room that way. It's longer. Yeah, it's longer. The interesting thing is the valleys aren't. they're wider, but the length is the same, which is interesting. Yeah. I mean, I can understand why they do that, but, like, it's cool having that extra room to do stuff in. Like, I think like, if you weren't Gottlieb and just high out of your mind constantly, like, you could do some pretty interesting designs with that amount of space.
    140:23
    Well, sterns are deeper also. Are they? Yes, they are. I just know because I got the playfield glass, so I know they are also. They are slightly deeper, but because I put a... I think the whip is the same as black hole, but I tried to put the glass from one end to the other, and it was too short.
    140:45
    Yeah, I think they are slightly. The sterns are slightly deeper that way. Is the super fin wider than a Gottlieb or a stern-wide body, or is it narrower or the same?
    140:56
    Maybe that's the glass that I put in. I think it's the same. I think they're 24 inches. There was a guy, there was a thing somewhere that had all the glass dimensions on it. It's probably on the Saratoga show, we'll tell you too. Yeah, that's what I was thinking of, because you had them all. And then Bruce bought my, whatever. I think that Pinball Resource used to list it too. They used to list the glass sizes. All right, I got them. WPC is 23 and three quarters wide.
    141:24
    Gottlieb System 80 is 24 and five eighths wide, for comparison. and he doesn't lift his stern, darn it. But so a Gottlieb Cistern Media is slightly wider than a WPC.
    141:36
    Oh, the glass is the same length on a Gottlieb almost. But the WPCs are slanted more in the cabinet, so you lose some of that. I'd really like to play a game that's like about one inch narrower than a super pin,
    141:54
    but still wider than a narrow body. I think it'd be interesting. well design it aren't you I thought you were designing your own game why did you make that dimension I'm constrained by existing lockdown bars make a new lockdown bar I don't have the tooling to do that or to build a cabinet to put it on I'm just going to come up with a new lockdown bar design I mean there's a wood one like the old wood rails I would like to have it like the old valleys where the whole glass hinges up with the side rails and lockdown bar I think that's very cool. But again, that's even more construction that I do not have the skills to do. Yeah. What we need is, can someone please send a perfectly legal, why is this copy of SolidWorks, and send it to Zach so he can design his game?
    142:45
    Yeah, someone wants to just drop like the $8,000 necessary. Hey, you know, you never know, Zach, unless you ask.
    142:51
    You know what Stern Pinball uses? That SolidWorks could be some of the most innovative designs coming out, but they're stuck on Zach's computer. I mean, yeah, you have to, well, you know, if they're innovative designs, Zach, you should go to, you know, interview with Stern, and maybe you can be the newest junior designer. Yeah, Stern, give me a call. I'm not sure it works that way. I think you might have to, you know, produce something first. I can work like Ted Dale. I'll just send you the designs if you give me the equipment, and then you can produce them if you want them. Somehow I don't think when Ted Dale was doing SolidWorks, he was, like, actually, you know, putting shoes on. Ted Zale was doing SolidWorks. Do you know the story of Ted Zale? It was SolidWorks, you know, 001 Alpha, you know, where it's like, oh, yeah, it's the physical version. It hasn't been computerized yet. Do you know the story for Ted Zale, though? What's the story for Ted Zale? Noted pinball designer. So, supposedly, you know, Ted Zale, who was a Valley EM designer in the 60s, like around 69, he's like, oh, I want to retire. you know, I don't want to keep working on this, but Bally's like, hey, you're a pretty good designer. You know, we really want to keep designing games. So they got him like a mobile trailer and then filled it with all the workshop and tools and parts necessary to build a white wood and a whole bunch of, you know, wood and pop bumpers and everything and just delivered it to his house in like Arkansas. And so he would just go in there when he was bored and tinker and design new games and then just send the design to Bally, and Bally would be like, oh, okay, hmm, and they'd make a few tweaks, and if they liked it, they'd just put in production, so that's how, like, the later quarter of Ted Zales' game actually designed was just him on his own, just with a workshop setting the design. Yeah. So, have you built anything up, like, on your own custom game, or you're just, they're all in SolidWorks? I made one whole custom game from scratch, just by eye, you know, not using CAD, And then I built half of this one I designed in SolidWorks, and now I run into problems because I don't know SolidWorks. But the impression I got from, like, Keith Allen's hiring is that, like, oh, a lot of people can build a game, you know, but there's a lot more skill necessary to actually design it all digitally in a way that can be mass-produced down the line. Well, of course. so I would bet for getting hired at Stern that being able to show them a complete 3D design if you don't have actually built it at all at this point if you don't have SolidWorks experience they're just going to be like nah that's not going to work for us Elwin did not use SolidWorks for his design the original Archer but he's learned it since then he used a different CAD tool and then when he went to Stern he had to learn how to use their tool which is apparently SolidWorks. But sadly, every single CAD tool is incredibly expensive.
    145:55
    It is. Yeah. Start a GoFundMe for it. Oh, yes, GoFundMe for Zax SolidWorks. Hey, why not? Come on, just send us a fully licensed copy. Make sure it's legal. We don't want anything nefarious going on here. I'm sure you can download a fully licensed copy that's somebody else's, but, you know, it's probably embeds whoever's license key that is in all of your files. We don't talk about such things here.
    146:21
    That's true, Ron. You're probably the software police on your network, aren't you? Yeah, we can't have illegal shit. Well, of course not. We're like a credit union, you know, financial stuff, that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, that doesn't work. And I used to work IT in a school, and it was the same thing, even though schools are notorious hotbeds of buying one copy and then putting it on, you know, $500. Well, I'm sure. I'm sure.
    146:47
    So, anything else you guys want to talk about? We've been talking almost three hours at this point. It's almost time for me to actually go to work. When we said we were going to do the tech episode, man, I wasn't fooling around. I don't think we got nearly enough tech done this episode, to be honest. Yeah, I don't think so either. Like, we really glossed over a lot of stuff. We only had like half of an argument. Yeah, that's really... Remember when you have, you know, you have three different people talking, you're going to get four different opinions on how to do something. Huh? Well, because one person will change their opinion when you get around to them again. Oh. I think that's called, like, using, you know, new ideas and evidence to, like, improve your concepts, if I remember correctly. Like, that's how that works, theoretically. Okay. Doesn't happen in real life, though, so I can tell. All right. So this has been episode 108, Spider-Man Homecoming. We are the Slamtail Podcast again for the at least fifth time. Our email address is slamtailpodcast at gmail.com. You can check us out at our site, which I've been forgetting to mention lately, slamtailpodcast.com. Also check out our Twitch channel. Just search for slamtailpodcast.com on Twitch or slamtailpodcast and YouTube channel. I've uploaded the TNA stream I did so you can see me get to reactor I think 5, I think it was on reactor 6 you can see me sweating playing a game of Total Nuclear Annihilation I'd like to thank Zach and Scott once again for joining us or me, I guess it's just me this week no Bruce was busy he's fixing games and so will I, I will have to fix I got a couple things I gotta fix But thanks, everybody.
    148:35
    Say goodbye, Bruce. Oh, wait a minute. That doesn't work. What am I going to do? I don't know what to do. I'm lost.
    148:43
    Goodbye, Ron. Goodbye, Scott. Bye, Zach. Bye, Scott. Ten, twelve, eight, if you try. Oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my. I guarantee to keep you alive.
    149:20
    Oh my. Oh my God. Yay! You want to double check the recording so we don't get mute Scott again? Mute Skype? No, that was Mute Me.
    150:01
    Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, well, that's fine. Your phone sucks. Which one? Wow. Well, I mean, I assume you don't have a cell phone either since you can't use Skype, so. No, I just don't trust Skype. Trust it?
    150:20
    Yeah. I don't put software on my computers and phones that I don't trust. I can teach you how to set up a virtual machine so you can sandbox. I have several virtual machines running already, thank you. And you still don't even trust it there. Nope.
    150:36
    It's pretty bad. Oh, shit. All right. This is like a web app, right? Hmm? Wow, I feel like I should be recording this. Maybe I'll buy a burner cell phone and I'll put it on that. No, the cell phone still, unless you get a burner smartphone,
    150:55
    which you'll then need a Google account to get into to install the app. So it's not really a burner anymore. Those Google accounts are hard to set up, aren't they? This is going to be in the outtakes, isn't it?