I'm Mike Dus and [music] this is Pinball Shenanigans. Okay, it's been probably 3 weeks since I've been working on Gamatron. Been distracted by uh Close Encounters project over at my garage. a little sidetracked by shack attack. And then I did a little trade. I drove to New Market and traded my shack and I got some cash and a Cyber Knot. And poor Gamatron has been neglected. But part of the reason I had to pause on Gamatron is because I was waiting for something in the mail from fellow shenanigander Bigfoot Bruce, but Canada Post decided to go on strike, so that delayed things. So I kept myself busy with the other said items while I waited. But I finally have got my envelope and we're going to open it up first. Let's turn on this light. Make sure we have lots of good light. This thing is pretty. Is it the nicest gamutron in the world? Do you think it's got to be top five? Like I put money down that this is a top five gamatron in the world. Considering there are who knows a handful of these in existence, it's kind of not that hard. It's not a whole lot of competition out there. But man oh man did Kevin ever do a beautiful job on this cabinet. So, I remember a few weeks ago I did a few little minor things uh off camera so I can go over those things to get all caught up here. But first, let's see what's in the envelope. Let me set up my uh tripod. Okay, let's see what is in the goodie envelope from Bigfoot. Bruce, jack of and master of all trades. Bruce can freaking do anything and everything. My buddy Paul Der is messaging me as we speak. He is the guy I got the Gamatron off of. And he just showed me a photo of a new old stock City slicker playfield, which you probably haven't heard of because they only made 300 of those. And I actually have one in my garage that I'm going to do one day. And he knows I have one. So, he's asking how my City Slicker Playfield is. But, uh, I think it's a bit of a dud of a game and I don't think it's worth much. So, I don't think it can afford a Playfield swap. So, uh, don't think that's going to happen. I'll have to see what his and Paul Der's last message was. See what he's saying. But firstly, let's get into the goods here. All right. So, we got another layer of protection here. Going to need my knife. Oh, I see. Goodness. All right. Um, one moment. Okay. Here we are. Check this out. How cool is that? That is awesome. So, shout out firstly to Mark Benovvena who initially made this decal for me, the uh the art. And um I sent the file over to Bigfoot Bruce. We tweaked a little bit. We changed the color of the yellow, made it a more u dark yellow, and I think um added red to the pinstar word here. Let me pull up the original concept. So, here is the uh apron decal. All right. You can see this color yellow and the whole everything is the same color. And then uh Mark based his design off of that. And then with the tweakage, we've got that. So, I am excited to stick that on there. Uh, it's going to look killer. Pinstar, why did you go with this weird yellow anyway? I mean, it doesn't match anything. Almost want a new decal for the apron, but that'll be fine. That's going to look awesome. Okay, so yeah. So, Bigfoot Bruce, wonderful job on this. It looks awesome. And I thank you. And I noticed there is what do we got here? A spare and another spare. We're getting ahead of ourselves here. I did also ask Bigfoot Bruce if he could make me some spinner decals. And boy did he ever come through. Look at that. That is beautiful. Let's compare that to the original. That's perfect. That is perfect. So, let's see what else we got. There's one other thing. Okay. Yep. I thought there might be a second set there. Beautiful. This is Oh, wait a minute. Oh, this was another uh concept that he did as well for spinner decals. Pretty sweet. Actually, I feel like there might be more in here. Gamatron. Love that. And two sets of those. Those are all the same. Okay, that's [clears throat] everything there. And then we've got this. Oh, wait a minute. Hold on. But wait, there's more. Oh, extra decals for the spinners as well. already um cut and ready to go. Bruce, you always outdo yourself. You're amazing. Check this out. I am equally excited about this. Even your packaging is uh kickass. And good job, too, managing to just kind of ship it all in an envelope. Um, I would have kept the sheep the the shipping cheap, not the sheeping chip and uh on both ends cuz you know we we like to get dinged for duty, customs tax, handling fees, extra charges, taxes on top of the fees and charges, but I did not get dinged on this uh envelope whatsoever. And there we go. Custom apron card. I think we um we used a an existing design out there, but again did some tweaks. I know what it was. Um one moment. Okay, I remember it was um Loser on Pinside sent me a link that had all kinds of goods for his Gamatron project that he did, but it was the uh other Gammatron, the one by Sonic. So, the uh font was a little bit different. The GameTron lettering and font on the Sonic one is doesn't have all this like multicolored stuff on it. So, we uh we used the majority of what he provided, but with the uh the Gamatron multicolor customization. So, I'll keep the originals, of course, but that's going to go like that. Actually, no. Instructions are always on the left, right? Isn't that how it goes? So, put these guys here and this guy here. And that's going to be killer. So, now I can um proceed with doing the final tweaks. So, near the finish line here. I've got a list of things I did I'll I'll share with you. Uh let me uh get myself organized here and see what Paul Doer is saying cuz he just messaged me again. Okay, before I get into uh what I did off camera, I learned a cool thing about uh Gamatron that the character is actually based off of this dude from this comic called Rom Space Night. And uh does it say what year that is? It's going to be um you know at least early to mid80s I'm guessing. But uh this is Gamatron. He is the ROM Space Knight the Lethal Laserium. And uh oh here's a date. January 2nd. Cost 40. And check this out. This is another photo someone sent me. So, there is the action figure of Rom. That's pretty cool. He's got some weapons. And then, um, Julie's man Tim. Well, Julie and Tim were both in Robert Englunds recently, and Tim is a big comic book guy, so he knew all about Rohm. And when he was in Robert Englunds, he saw this ROM action figure sealed in the bubble pack and I think he actually purchased it and brought it home and for like £25. That is awesome. So I think Tim actually has this. I kind of want it, but uh he is a comic book guy and this is this is one of his favorite comics. So, it's probably better in his hands. Um, but how effing cool is that? Okay, let's see what my notes say here. Missile to switch intermittent. Okay, I know what that is. Drop targets. Yeah, I know what that is. We'll get into that. Settings. Oh, yeah. I think I messed with that. Clean adjust top lock switch. uh that uh I thought missile switch 2 was that but no those must be two separate things. So that's what's on the list. But this is what I did so or wanted to mention like the robot art history. So we can cross that off the list. Oh yeah, in my last episode I broke my headlamp and uh I managed to fix it. I took it apart, soldered a wire. It was a pain in the butt, but apparently I wanted to mention that uh drop target temporary fix. Okay, so two of the center drop targets were not consistently resetting. They would try, but they would fall back down. And I did find a fix that I wrote as temporary, but it's probably going to be more likely permanent. someone else who uh did a gamutron did a very similar fix which resolved the issue for him and uh I'll show you what that is. Okay, this is like my prototype fix just to test the theory. It don't look pretty, but it actually works. So, this is quite the span here for drop targets and the middle just doesn't have as much ump as do the corners. And you can even see if you look closely little stress tra stress crack and an Ellie hair. Get out of there. Hopefully Ellie comes and pays us a visit. But yeah, there's a crack in that corner. And there I thought was one in that corner, too. It's kind of hard to see, though. I don't know. I can't see. And I'm not wearing my glasses anyway. So maybe before the stress cracks, they worked fine. But my solution was just to add a washer right here and here. Kind of see the humps and then just tape them on just to give them that extra little bit of height that they needed. And honestly, that is working like flawlessly. So, I'll probably make this look a little prettier, but I think this is going to be the best solution for this issue. So, drop target uh issue is resolved. Okay. So, uh yes, transformer cage. Uh Kevin had that had painted that for me and I found it in the coin box when I was kind of going through it and so I installed that. So, here's how that looks. Looks good to me. Uh, while we're in the backbox here, I decided against installing a knocker because when you do get a high score to date, it plays you like a little melody. So, I thought the knocker is kind of redundant. So, I am not going to install the knocker. So, we can cross that off the list. Uh, transformer cage. So, looks like I lubed the spinners. Let's go rip those for fun. And the kicker mech is gummy. I'll show you what I meant. All right, let's see how these spinners rip now. Oo, that's smooth. And this guy. Oh, that's beautiful. So, this kicker mech here is what I was talking about. Uh I noticed after playing that when it would fire it would kind of just slowly go back into place and that's just the typical like pivot points getting all gummy. So removed that, cleaned it, put it back in and now it is good to go. So what was my missile 2 switch intermittent? Which is missile 2 switch? That's missile 2 armed missile two switch. I don't even know what that is right now. And then clean adjust top lock switch. So yeah, every once in a while the ball will go into this lock switch here and my finger stuck and not register. So, I'll just give that a little adjusting and we'll install the Bigfoot Bruce goodies and then we'll be darn near the finish line. Okay, let's start with the more simple stuff. Installing the apron cards. Uh, this is actually a/4 inch too big sadly. So, I think I'm going to have to cut off might lose some art, but I'll see if I can strategically just cut down some of this blue border and get it in there without losing like any of the pinstar letters. Okay, I trimmed down the apron cards and they are installed and they fit great now and they look awesome. All right, let's see if I can install this coin door decal without screwing it up. At least I have couple backups just in case. All right, here goes nothing. Okay. It's not perfectly aligned, but it's pretty darn close. And I think that looks incredible, really. So, thanks again, Bigfoot Bruce. You are awesome. Job well done. Okay, on to my missile 2 switch being intermittent. That is this guy I remember now. And should be simple enough. It's just a leaf switch. And maybe I didn't clean it. Or if I did, maybe I didn't do it well enough. So, I'll probably just go ahead and clean all the switches to be safe. Uh, that should do the trick, though. Oh, and a quick shout out to Jenna who says that she feels like I am the third member of uh her relationship with Alex Stagger because he's forever playing pinball shenanigans videos in the background and she just hears my voice constantly. So enjoy. Okay, I got all the drop target switches cleaned up. That should solve that. Now I am in switch test and let's see how this switch behaves here. H. I hear it clicking. Okay, watch this. Okay, let's give it a second. Push it down. I hear it click. But it is not registering. Oh, now it is. Okay. It is intermittent as suspected. So, I'll figure out what's going on with that. I don't know. It's one of those like bigger micro switch thingies. And I don't know if I have one. It's got like the arm where's my switch bin. It's got the switch actuator arm kind of like built in. It's not really removable. Like these guys. See how that switch just goes right in there? You can't just swap them out as far as I know. So, I do have some whether I have one that has the same style arm. We will see. But hopefully it's just some sort of adjustment. So, I'll fiddle with that for a bit and report back. Okay, I know what you were just thinking. That uh Oh, wait. Hold on. Kevin just sent me a link to a marketplace listing. I must check that out. Could be a good deal on a machine. Okay, so Kevin sent me a link to a catacomb for sale by Shane Jackson of Maple Pinball for 5,500 bucks CAD and it uh looks to be in real nice shape. So, someone jump on that cuz catacomb is pretty rare. All right, so where was I? You guys were saying in your head, Michael, you should test the switch with a ball. And you guys are right. You really should. Let's see if I can have the switch fail on me. Testing it properly. H seems to be working perfectly fine. Well, I can't fix something that's working. So, that kind of slightly annoying. Yeah, works perfectly. So, I guess I'll just keep an eye on it. I almost forgot. I got a couple other minor things to do. I did get my darker blue flipper rubbers, so I'm going to install them if they look better than the light blue ones that I have in there. And then this old pretty scratchy used pop bumper cap. I splurged and bought this brand new one. Yeah, it's a little bit lighter in color, but a lot less scratchy. So, how do these look compared to the blue that I got on there now? I think I'm going to like them better. So, I will swap those, find a couple pop bumper cap screws, and be right back. All right, I think it's time for a play test. See if there's anything else lingering. But I tell you, I installed three brand new, very nice shiny bubbles. You can go with the high polished chrome on a game with no magnets. You don't have to fear those balls getting magnetized. So, I like using them where I can. All right. Got to say this game is looking amazing. This LED job. Oh, and have a look at the uh new flipper rubbers and pop bumper cap. Really does make a difference having a nice brand new pop bumper cap. It is pretty. All right, let's uh give this a try. As you can see, the drop targets did not fail when I started the game. All right, it's been a couple few weeks. Let's uh gamutron it up here. I do recall spending a little bit of time trying to sort of master the rules. Wow. It's not entirely true. We do have to spell gamutron. Oh, I thought I had my A up top there. So, Gamatron is all the orange lights. There's another letter. Did you see that? I just trickled down that number two switch and it didn't register. Oh, I just did it again. I don't think I got a sound effect for it. just to see what happen here. Even if they're not lit, they should give you a sound effect, right? Maybe I just didn't clean that switch well enough. I mean, that's most likely the case. It's hard to do this live. Let's just go with our fingers here. See that? That didn't make a sound and didn't give me any points. What about five? Same thing. It's weird. Can't imagine that being a software thing, but I can't imagine it being four switches not working. Okay, let's try this again. One. Oh, number two fell when I did that. That ain't cool. There's our sound effect. sound effect. Let's try this again. Why are you dropping number two prematurely? And why are like half these not registering? Work there. Work there. Not there. Not there. That's bizarre. And that is annoying. Okay, I might need to uh beef up that washer thickness a little bit more with some tape and recclean all of those targets. So, let me just throw that on the list. One moment. Okay, so we got drop target woes does not make me happy. There's like really only two things that can be finicky on this game. That's the drop targets and the ball walker mech. And I'm having issues with them. Wow. We'll see if that top lock is uh going to behave or not. Okay, that was very uh unsatisfying. Another weird thing about this software is that player one, game one, it doesn't give you this sort of cool audio start. Look at that. It happened. Can you believe that? Hm. Let's give it a wiggle and see. Ouch. Okay, so that in theory should just be a minor adjustment. [clears throat] Okay, that is potential. Good news. Yeah, when you start up the game, it gives you this really cool audio like but never on game one player one. If you add a second player, it will Here. Watch. Listen. I'll add a second player. See, we didn't get that on our first start of our game. Okay. So, our two Whoa, that was cute. Two locks. Say they're lit. the white inserts. So, what does that mean? I got to hit the drop targets in order now. I played enough Flight 2000 that you'd think I'd kind of know what the heck I'm doing, but like I said in a previous video, when I'm playing Flight 2000, it's usually in a tournament and uh I'm just going spinners all day long. So, I never go for the multiball on purpose. Well, my locks are no longer lit. So, I think you got to Wow, those outlines are hungry. I think you got to spell gamatron. Oh, that's because I'm two players, right? Okay, my locks are back to litigum. So I think I think what you have to do is spell gamatron and once you do then you hit the drop targets in order. 5 4 3 2 1. Then you have liftoff. That will light your lock. So I need um couple more letters. Let's hit that one for fun. See if anything happens. No. Let's try and can shots. You hear that? The spinner didn't make any noise. What the hell? All right, I need to adjust my spinner switch as well. Huh. It was working perfectly fine before, but such is pinball, right? So, all this fine tuning. It's like the first 90% goes usually pretty well. It's the last 10% though. takes a little extra effort just for all that fine tuning. I should probably just bail on this game and go address these issues, but I just need one more letter for Gamatron now. So, see if I can pull that off. Try and shhats my N here. Nice. One more drop target cuz uh in lane spot you drop targets. There we go. Now my lock is lit in the top left since I already have two balls in there. That should be multiball start. So I mean it's a lot of work to get multiball. There we go. Definitely very satisfying when you get it. Got the whole ball walker thing happening, the sound effects happening, and the chaos happening. And then during multiball, you just try and stay alive. Okay, that also lights the WOW in the middle, which I think I set for 100,000 points. So, I'm at 755 right now. Yeah, I remember now having to add a capacitor. Oh no, the out lane turned off my Wow, so I can't even cheat it. All right, I'm going to go mess with a couple switches. I'll be back. Ellie, I don't know how I'm supposed to get anything done with you uh chilling in my lap. Huh? All right, Ellie has left and I can get back to work. So, I've adjusted this spinner and cleaned it. It's good to go. This switch here I also adjusted. I just bent it up a little bit. Seems to be working perfectly. The drop targets still weird how they sometimes don't register. The lit one always registers. It's the unlit one that is picky. So, I made a post on the pinball repair help group. I also posted in the Gamatron pin side thread. So, we'll see if um that's just a Gamatron thing. It would be kind of weird if it is, but who knows? Okay, a quick editor's note here. After recording all my videos on Gamatron, I got the answer that I was looking for about my drop targets not registering when I thought they should have. So, I got a reply from Mike Wy, who is the foremost expert on Gamatron on the planet because when I posted that I got a Gamatron in, he commented and uh mentioned that though there weren't a ton of kits made, I somehow ended up with seven Gamatron machines over the years. So Mike knows more about Gamutron than anyone on Earth. And he did a couple uh custom paint jobs himself, which look amazing. And he might have been the only one to know the answer to my question as to why the drop targets were sometimes not registering. So there is a perfectly good answer for that and it has to do with the fact that flight 2000 had memory drops. So it had an individual coil for each drop target. Gamatron does not have that. So it's really just a byproduct of Gamatron not having those extra solenoids to reset the target bank if you hit the targets out of order. So Mike says normal for Gamatron. Flight 2000 has memory drop targets after resetting the drop targets at the start of a new ball or when all have been knocked down but out of sequence. The program automatically drops the drop targets of the lower number than the lit sequence target. Gamatron doesn't have the second coil to drop them. So any target before the lit target which ends up ends up in the up position and then is hit is simply ignored by the program. So there you have it. The behavior of my drop targets other than the number two falling down occasionally is perfectly normal. So the last adjustment here I'm working on is this number two switch or drop target. All the other drop targets are are good. This one just keeps falling back down. So, I did loosen up I removed these two screws actually and loosened up the ones on the side. These are all like kind of individual entities. So, now I can kind of adjust the whole individual bracket here. I think it might have just been a little too close. So, I'm going to like move it back a bit and hopefully that will solve that problem. All right. I literally just added the thickness of a business card spacer to kind of force this whole assembly back just a tiny bit. And I think it is uh centered pretty good now. I think that actually did move it back a bit and put all the screws back. So maybe that little adjustment might do something. All right, let's see what happens when we hit start. Well, that's a good start. And let's do like a soft hit on the spinner. Much better. And now the switch up top. Instant registration. So that seems to be working uh perfectly now. Spinner good. Top lock switch good. All right. Give me that ball back. And let's test out the number two drop target. You know, if occasionally an unlit drop target doesn't register and I can't seem to do anything about it, then I will have to leave it. But I at least want the number two target to not be falling down all the time. Actually, it's already an improvement. I can tell. Oh, did you see that? It just fell down. So, it's like the vibration Why did you reset there? Oh, because how does this behave? If there's a lit target that you hit and there's a drop target down, it will try and reset them all, right? No. Okay. When does it choose to reset them? That looks like it's struggling a little bit um to hold drop target assembly. It doesn't It's not like going up very snappily. It's kind of fighting. So, are you going to reset now? Oh, maybe if the one that is to be lit is down, then it will have to try and reset it. So, that should try and reset now. That makes sense. So, now two should try and reset. Okay. And now one should reset. Five wasn't down there, was it? when I hit one. So why did it try and reset there? So this should reset. Yes. And this should not This should not not Well, but yeah, that does look like the drop target assembly is struggling a little bit, but as long as that behaves, then I'm not too sad about it. So, that appears to be better for now. Okay, I think I'm happy with the state of things. If there are some final minor tweaks that need to be done, I'll do that on my own time cuz I am wrapping up this video. Okay, sorry, I just got sidetracked there for a second. Where was I starting a game of Gamatron and here's startup sound effects. That's cuz this is the second game since I powered it on. The first game had balls locked and um it didn't spit them out. So, I'm like, I can't have two free balls locked. That's not fair. You mother effer number two. Drop down as soon as I hit number one. There comes a point where you might just have to live with certain things, but we'll see. We know for sure that my number two drop target is not 100%. Let's just pretend that is not a thing right now and let's just focus on gameplay. So, I got a ball locked. That is I thought, you know, maybe I should put on the rubbers on the outlanes uh for this game play so that I could last more than 8 seconds of all. And bye-bye. Oh, Gameatron, love you. Hate you. Love you. Hate you. Oh, I thought that was game over. Okay, we're back in love. Okay, so when you lock a ball, that white light comes on and it basically says that next ball you lock, you're going to get 10,000 points. When both lights are lit, when you have two balls locked and you shoot it up there, you get 10,000 plus 20,000, so you get 30,000 points. I think I'm getting too far ahead of myself. I just have to like play this game, let alone try and explain all the rules. [snorts] Oh, see that? So, new game. And since I already have a ball in the ball walker mech, I've got a free lock. So, you know, unfair advantage to me if I was player two and if this was a tournament, you'd have to like reset the whole game in between players. So, there that was worth 10,000 points. I know we can't see the score. So, now that I have two balls locked, if I shoot it up there, it's going to be 30,000 points. Then once I spell Gamatron Oh, no you don't. No, you don't. Okay. Yeah, you do. This might be the worst gameplay video I've ever taken. That was a nice little nudge, though. This is basically just my final harrah cuz I'm wrapping up this video. I'm wrapping up this series. You know, if I have to do a couple minor uh things off camera, then I will. So, I'm not going to go out like that though. Gamatron. I thought I would remove the outlane rubbers so that the machine would be, you know, not a long player, but then that's uh maybe uh a little too much at the moment cuz no matter what, it tends to go to the out lane once it's anywhere near that vicinity. Okay, spell gamutron. Now we need our countdown. Oh, surprised I uh didn't tilt there. Three, two, I'm missing my uh flight 2000 speech all of a sudden. Hey, wait. Oh, I must have got credit for the uh drop targets through like outlanes or whatever because the green light at the top left says fire is actually lit. So, I want to be on the right flipper, please. I tried like uh on the fly shots there and uh yeah, I missed. All right, so ball three. Going to get this multiball come hell or high water. And here we go. Uh-oh. Don't you dare sh the uh post pass wasn't seeming to work. The rubbers are too new. Like it just puts the wrong spin on it. Okay, how about that? A little early. Tap pass. Hey, that actually worked. That was a little late. Oh, early again. Let's try the tap pass again. Almost. Let's tap pass on the fly. Almost failed. This is very satisfying. I do enjoy the multiball start. And bye-bye. Oh, and I think if I lock a ball, I might lose my multiball. Let's try that theory out. Here we go. Look at that. I killed my multiball. I don't remember that happening in uh flight 2000, but it must cuz it is the same code. All right. So, now what? Let's try and rip a spinner on the right. Anyway, I don't think I've hit that yet. Remember, it's late on the flipper. Oh yeah. So after playing multiball, the left spinner is now lit. So that's 500 more points per every gamutron letter that I've collected. So, you know, got a couple little finicky drop target situations, but the game is totally playable and very drainable. Well, there it is. That is basically my farewell game for this series. Um, let me throw on the lock bar and we'll have one more look at the finished product. Okay, I'm calling it a wrap. End of Game Gamatron, end of the series, but I probably will do a gameplay video at some point in the near future. Probably add some outlane rubbers, do a proper horizontal video, figure out the rules a little bit better. I got a pretty good grasp. But she is a beauty. Maybe one of the nicest gamatrons in existence. It's top 10 for sure, right? Kevin did a wonderful job on the cabinet. The white spackle really brings it to like more of a 3D look, outer spacey. All the high polished metals, the powdercoated legs, new leg hardware. Kevin had to rebuild like oh 80% of the entire head because it was a pile of rot when I got it. It's a miracle that the back glass in is is in as good shape as it is. Well, back plexi. It's got some scratches, but you know, it's uh a little better than this guy here with the big crack all the way through it. We got the polished coin door and lock bar as well. New lock, the coin door decal and apron cards courtesy of Bigfoot Bruce. Polished plunger and housing. And then um of course the playfield cleaned up very nicely. All plastics are in good shape. Drop target decals, spinner decals are good for the most part. Little tiny wrinkle on that one, but I've got backups. And uh the new pop bumper cap and uh body because the OG body was dumb. Oh, and of course all the fun with electronics we had. That was uh quite the adventure and learning curve and I don't regret it. I think um you know I wouldn't have been able to tackle a project like this years ago cuz I would have been too scared and I would didn't know what the f I was doing. Now I have a little bit more confidence with every machine that I do to take on something like this. So hope you enjoyed the series. That is Gamatron finished product.