Episode 439 - Multi-Bingo Fine Tuning, Multi-Races Playfield Wiring, 1958 Bally Skill Parade

For Amusement Only EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·19m 44s·analyzed·Jan 17, 2019

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.023

TL;DR

Multi-Bingo prep for TPF, Multi-Races wiring strategy, and deep dive into Skill Parade mechanics.

Summary

Nick Baldridge discusses fine-tuning his Multi-Bingo homebrew machine ahead of Texas Pinball Festival (March 22-24), including menu speed optimization and odds animation rendering fixes. He also updates on the Multi-Races playfield wiring challenges, RoboFrenzy electrical troubleshooting, and provides an in-depth breakdown of the 1958 Bally Skill Parade game mechanics and artwork.

Key Claims

Multi-Bingo menu system now returns to menu in under one second instead of ~30 seconds
high confidence · Nick Baldridge describing recent optimization work on Multi-Bingo
The spotting disc and mixers on Multi-Bingo did not rotate to random positions when entering a game, which was a mistake discovered during menu system overhaul
high confidence · Nick Baldridge discussing bug fixes found during code review
Multi-Races uses a Turf King playfield in a Victory Derby cabinet
high confidence · Nick Baldridge describing Multi-Races construction details
RoboFrenzy had a wiring error where 30V, 50V, and 6V commons were all tied together incorrectly
high confidence · Nick Baldridge troubleshooting RoboFrenzy electrical system
Skill Parade allows up to seven coins/replays maximum with guaranteed odds increases per coin
high confidence · Nick Baldridge explaining Skill Parade game mechanics from instruction card
Multi-Bingo features 70+ games with custom coin flash animations
high confidence · Nick Baldridge describing odds animation programming complexity

Notable Quotes

“I am prepping it for heading to TPF, Texas Pinball Festival, March 22nd through 24th in Frisco, Texas.”
Nick Baldridge @ early — Announces Multi-Bingo public debut timeline and venue
“So if you hit two in the blue for 600 and then go and play Frolics, you know, Frolics just eats Money. That's pretty much what it does. It's a hard game and you don't get very many replays for it.”
Nick Baldridge @ mid-early — Explains game balance decision to disable replay carryover between games
“I made to encapsulate only one number in that set of three so all i doing is rendering three in a row and then throwing it away five in a row throwing it away and i'm doing all three of those at the same exact moment essentially it's invisible to the player”
Nick Baldridge @ mid-early — Technical explanation of odds animation rendering solution
“The spotting disc and mixers did not actually rotate to random positions when you first enter the game. That was a mistake. They should have. This changes the portioning dramatically in many different ways”
Nick Baldridge @ mid — Identifies significant bug affecting game difficulty balance
“Victory Derby had a couple of interesting features which I thought were kind of cool. There are these two metal interior side walls which come off and they're angled out in such a way to prevent the ball from getting hung up”
Nick Baldridge @ mid — Notes design features of donor cabinet being reused in Multi-Races
“I plugged it up and boom it blew the lamp fuse, the 6 volt fuse really badly, like exploded that fuse.”
Nick Baldridge @ mid-late — Describes electrical failure on RoboFrenzy requiring further troubleshooting
“I would love to play one of these. However, I've never seen one.”
Nick Baldridge @ end — Personal reflection on rarity of Skill Parade machines

Entities

Nick BaldridgepersonTexas Pinball FestivaleventMulti-BingoproductMulti-RacesproductRoboFrenzyproductBally Skill ParadegameSkill RollgameVictory DerbygameTurf KinggameSkill Derbygame

Signals

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product_launch: Multi-Bingo scheduled for public debut at Texas Pinball Festival March 22-24, 2026
high · Direct announcement: 'I am prepping it for heading to TPF, Texas Pinball Festival, March 22nd through 24th in Frisco, Texas'
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design_innovation: Menu system optimization reducing return-to-menu time from ~30 seconds to under 1 second; dynamic odds animation rendering solution
high · Detailed technical explanation of menu speed improvement and odds animation fix
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product_concern: Multiple bugs found in Multi-Bingo: spotting disc/mixers not randomizing on game entry, Miss America payout position failure, odds animation overlap issues
high · Nick Baldridge identifying and fixing multiple code issues discovered during testing
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manufacturing_signal: Multi-Races playfield wiring strategy being refined; decision between modularity (Jones plugs) vs. direct board connection for space/durability tradeoffs
high · Detailed discussion of wiring bundle challenges and connector strategy options
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product_concern: RoboFrenzy electrical wiring error: 30V, 50V, and 6V commons incorrectly tied together; 6V fuse blown during testing
high · Nick Baldridge describing fuse failure and electrical troubleshooting process
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design_innovation: Multi-Races project reusing Victory Derby cabinet features (metal side walls, playfield centering) with Turf King playfield

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.059

0:00

What's that sound? It's 4 Amusement Only, the EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast. Welcome back to 4 Amusement Only. This is Nick Baldridge. I've been working on various projects, but the thing that's consumed most of my attention since last time we spoke has been the multi-bingo. I am prepping it for heading to TPF, Texas Pinball Festival, March 22nd through 24th in Frisco, Texas. So what do I have left to do on this? I had mentioned previously that there pretty much wasn't anything left to do. Well there were a couple things. So the first was I changed the menu system so that instead of it taking approximately 30 seconds to go back to the menu after you've played a game, now it goes back in under one second. Pretty happy with that.

0:59

And here's what was lost in that change. So I was tracking the position of every unit within every game every time that it went back to the menu.

1:10

So if you for example left Carnival Queen The game would remember the position of the magic screen. It would remember the replays that were on the register and so forth and All kinds of other things. And, you could go back to it and it would pick back up from that position. Now portions of that were not coded in. For example, the replays were not set to carry over from game to game because one of the things that I found was that it gave you a bit of an unfair advantage on some games which are much much harder than other games. So, for example, if you hit two in the blue for 600 and then go and play Frolics, you know, Frolics just eatsMoney. That's pretty much what it does. It's a hard game and you don't get very many replays for it. And it doesn't give you things very easily either. So, it just seems a bit odd to be able to do that. So, I'd I disabled that functionality and instead I was still tracking every position of every unit but you know it's only going to matter to me pretty much. People who came up and played the game you know likely weren't going to be wowed by the fact that you know the game remembered the position of the magic squares when they left off playing. So instead I converted The other thing that I manipulated was the odds animations. So I have talked ad nauseum really about coin flash animations and all the programming that went into those. There were five games where the odds animations overlapped in such a way that it rendered over top of the previous odds in the sequence. So, for example, if you look at a game like Variety, the odds are structured in such a way, the lamps themselves, so that if you were to draw a rectangle around the odds, you would see that the bounding box there goes into, it bleeds into the odds position number two or number three or whichever odds position you're looking at. So what I had to do was figure out a way so that as it was rendered and it blanked out the odds, so as the odds sweep happens, it is rendering and then throwing away that render multiple times and in some cases multiple times a second. So making sure that it didn't bleed over was actually more difficult than it seemed until I realized that basically all I needed to do was brute Kim Knapp, I did is rendered each individual bold dynamically and what I mean by that is again if you look at varieties back glass you'll see that. Kim Knapp, You have sets of three odds so for each position on the odds unit you have your odds for three in a row your odds for four in a row and your odds for five in a row and so my bounding box I made to encapsulate only one number in that set of three so all i doing is rendering three in a row and then throwing it away for no throwing it away five in a row throwing it away and i'm doing all three of those at the same exact moment essentially it's invisible uh... to the player also from the players perspective if you were to look at uh... the way that it acho? МУЗЫКА doesn't havechant And there were a couple of bugs that were found at York. One position on the Miss America games did not pay. And I figured out why and went through and reimplemented that for each of the games. It's very tricky in those games. My algorithm is such, I've described this before, but it's such that it expects there to be unique numbers in a sequence in order to count them. If you have two and then two, for example, in a row, it's going to throw away one of the twos, expecting that it's got some junk data in there. So I have to kind of override it for Miss America or The Twist or any of those games where you can have two of the same number in a row. It's kind of an unusual situation, so it doesn't happen that frequently. And Miss America actually has quite a few of those. I think there are four or five scenarios where you can have two of the same number in line with itself. I really like the layout of those games. It is really fun to get a hit like that. It's so much different than just about any other game on planet Earth. So as part of that menu change that changed the dynamic nature of the various units within I was forced to re-examine how the units were structured and how the game started them, just to make sure that they were as dynamic as needed to be, and I found a problem. The spotting disc and mixers did not actually rotate to random positions when you first enter the game. That was a mistake. They should have. This changes the portioning dramatically in many different ways, and it's much more It's more like stepping up to a real game because you have no idea where those units are positioned, obviously, as a player.

8:00

And no matter what I did to change the portioning, it didn't make a difference What matters here ventilation is for 하면서 couple of Nvidia san lieberes van Pourquoi. The condition of your I'm going to take that and wire it to the P3 rock and the various switchboards and so forth. And then I'll be able to see how the code works within the game. So far everything fits pretty well. Again, this is a Turf King playfield in a Victory Derby cabinet. So Victory Derby had a couple of interesting features which I thought were kind of cool. There are these two metal interior side walls which come off and they're angled out in such The prevent the ball from getting hung up thought it was just kind of cool design uh... so i've left those in place the other thing that they do is they center the playfield so the playfield has to be absolutely in the center of the cabinet in order to lay down and be flat uh i just think that excellent so uh that what it doing and we see how that works uh... the wire bundle uh... it's a little troublesome i wanted to run it down through the front right or front left of the game and then uh... feed it through some jones plugs uh... i think my plan might have changed because the playfield wiring is a pretty large bundle and it needs to go I'm going to do what I can to prevent that from being a problem and one of the ways I can see to prevent issues is to make the playfield slightly less modular and make it so that it plugs directly into the switch processing boards instead of in the Jones plugs and then the switch processing boards. I don't necessarily prefer this approach because it'll be easy to damage the boards if I try to lift the playfield out, for example, without unplugging it, but it will free up some space in the front of the cabinet, which I think is important, and it will just be easier to do and require less wire. So that's where I'm headed there. I'm not exactly sure if that's what I'm going to do or not yet, but I'm thinking on it. And RoboFrenzy, since the last time we talked, I wired up the 30 volt transformer and plugged it in and the 30 volt subsystem just didn't work at all. And I took a look in the game I was in the gym and I noticed that the 30 volt commons were tied to the 50 volt commons were tied to the 6 volt commons which is not right. So 30 and 6 volt were supposed to be on the same commons and then 50 volt was supposed to be its own thing. So I moved all the commons over except for the 50 volt and what do you know, plug it up and boom it blew the lamp fuse, the 6 volt fuse really badly, like exploded that fuse. So, I've got a super dead short somewhere and I haven't had a chance to really dig into it much deeper than that, but hopefully this weekend I'll have a moment where I can take a look at that. I'm trying to move all of my projects forward just a little bit each week, if not more than a little bit, because there's a lot I'm in the middle of and I feel that if I can make some progress on these, it'll make me feel better. So, that's what I'm doing. Next episode I hope to have some really good information for you about RoboFrenzy, some good news rather, and if I'm lucky, I believe I need to order some connectors, but if I'm lucky I'll have multi-races wired up as well. Multi-bingo should be in heavy testing rotation ahead of TPF, and I'm looking forward to having I'm going to be doing a little bit of a review of the game, and I'm going to be bringing some local folks over to check it out and give me some feedback as well as to point out any horrific bugs that I've managed to program in. So far so good. I have done a lot of heavy duty testing as I've been programming, but as with every other facet of that project, I've learned that once I test it in the cabinet itself, as opposed to on my development machines, I tend to shake out different bugs. So, we'll see. Well, let's talk about today's game. It is 1958's Bally SkillParade. And SkillParade is one of the skill series of games that Bally produced in the 50s. The most famous being SkillRoll. And in these games, you take a nickel and you are physically lofting it. Don't forget to like my videos! Skill parade operates similarly to a slotmachine or some of the other upright games like it from the fifties and earlier in that the nickel that you're flinging across the playfield is going to travel through one of several different rollovers and these rollovers equate to an animal. The animal that you hit you're trying to match through the entire sequence. So if you hit a monkey, as The first role you want to hit a monkey on your second and then a monkey on your third If you do that you get the best reward for the monkey And there are different animals that equate to different rewards within the odds So the lowest is two monkeys. Then you can get three monkeys, two or three jaguars. If you get two jaguars, you can get an elephant and that'll count as your third. Two or three hippos and if you get two hippos and an elephant, the elephant counts as your third. Two lions or three lions and if you get two lions, the elephant counts as your third. And best of all, if you get three elephants, you get the highest reward. So your odds go anywhere from two all the way up to 700. So for two monkeys you get two replays. For three elephants you can get up to 700. Now one of the interesting things is on the final row, again there are three different sets of ten rollovers which are arranged The pinball is pitched horizontally and each of the sets of ten is a point where the player controls where that nickel is going to fly. So in the first set of ten you have four different rollovers which are dedicated to the monkey. Only one is the elephant. Only one is the lion and everything else has two. In the second set, three are dedicated to the monkey. Again, one to the elephant, one to the lion, two for everything else, but if you notice, there's one monkey different from the top row. So, what did they replace it with in this middle row? The answer is a camel. And the camel, you might realize, doesn't actually help you with anything at all. So, unfortunately, if you hit that camel, your only chance of The only way of scoring at all is if you got two monkeys with your other two shots. The final row and this one has a bit of a difference to the other rows which we'll get into shortly. There are three monkeys and there's one hippo, one lion, one elephant, three jaguars and then one special rollover. The special rollover always gives you a payout, no matter what. It can also be used in combination with the two monkeys. But as far as I'm aware, reading the scoring instruction card, it only pays this separate set of odds. So those odds go from one to seven. So if you hit the special, you're guaranteed at least one replay, which is pretty cool. The replays in this game work on a guaranteed basis. And what I mean by that, it's like a slot machine where you put in money and you're guaranteed that the odds will go up every time that you put in a quarter or a nickel or whatever denomination it uses. So in this game, you can put in up to a max of seven coins or replays. This game, I believe, has the most appealing art package of any of the skill games. I say that, and I haven't talked about Skill Derby, which is another one that I'm really enamored with. But Skill Parade is just a really cool package altogether. It's a circus theme, and the circus is actually walking through town as you're rolling through. So you have clowns and cars and elephants and ladies on floats and then ballerinas and a horse down in the foreground. I just think it's a really cool package altogether and the game itself is very neat. I would love to play one of these. However, I've never seen one. So I hope to do that at some point in the future. Well, that's all for tonight. Thank you very much for listening. My name again is Nick Baldrige. Thank you very much for listening and I'll talk to you next time.