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#136 - Better, Stronger, Faster - The Classic Pinball Podcast

The Classic Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 17m·analyzed·Jan 27, 2026
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.032

TL;DR

Pinball repair stories from Gloucester trip covering Stern and vintage game maintenance challenges.

Summary

George and Dave, hosts of The Classic Pinball Podcast, discuss pinball repair and restoration work from a recent trip to Gloucester, including challenging repairs on early 2000s Stern games (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Simpsons), vintage electromechanical machines, and reflections on the complexity of maintaining older pinball equipment. The episode includes technical troubleshooting anecdotes, discussions about game mechanism reliability, and venue exploration.

Key Claims

  • A Rotten Dog SAM board had its DAC chip installed upside down from the factory, with pin 1 and pin 14 reversed

    high confidence · George describes discovering the manufacturing defect and consulting with engineers John and Jim Rutherford, who predicted 50/50 chance of chip survival; chip ultimately worked when flipped

  • Pirates of the Caribbean has a known ramp motor shipping mechanism problem that is difficult to repair and many technicians report as 'a giant pain'

    high confidence · George encountered the issue on a customer's POC machine; the ramp motor wouldn't sink down properly in test mode; George researched online and found others reporting the same issue

  • Older pinball machines (late 70s, early 80s) require 50-70 hours of work to make reliable, versus newer games where repairs stick after shorter service

    high confidence · George reflects on difficulty of day spa work on vintage games, comparing to 'an old car where everything goes wrong' vs newer equipment that stays fixed

  • Repinning the lower left connector on the NPU and right side connectors on the solenoid driver board are must-have reliability improvements for Valley and early Stern machines

    high confidence · Dave provides technical guidance based on personal restoration experience, noting these are essential vs optional upgrades

  • A glass playfield glass sheet can shatter from minimal contact on a stone tile floor, whereas wood or carpet floors are more forgiving

    high confidence · George describes breaking a playfield glass on a customer's Pirates of the Caribbean when setting it down on tile; had not brought protective pads (from Pinball Life) to the service call

  • Back to the Arcade Media in Winchester, Virginia offers $10 all-you-can-play pricing for a day with lineup including King Kong, Attack on Mars, Metallica, Stranger Things, Venom, Addams Family, and Funhouse

    high confidence · George describes visiting the venue, a record store with arcade games in back, on a Saturday morning

  • Water left on a freshly waxed table surface can turn the wax white, and Novus 2 polish can remove the mark through buffing

Notable Quotes

  • “From the factory, they installed their chip upside down. So pin 1 was pin 14. And pin 14 is pin 1.”

    George @ not provided — Discovery of manufacturing defect on Rotten Dog SAM board that caused audio issues

  • “According to the AI, Google AI says, you just screwed the pooch. That chip is gone. 99% chance you burned it out.”

    George @ not provided — Illustrates tension between AI predictions and practical engineering experience; the chip actually survived

  • “They all say this is a giant pain. I did take this part three or four times every time. It's a pain in the ass to get it right.”

    George @ not provided — Confirms Pirates of the Caribbean ramp motor mechanism is widely recognized as problematic

  • “Do you really understand what you're going to buy? Because you're thinking it's going to be in there in perpetuity. It's gonna work great. And it doesn't.”

    George @ not provided — Core tension in pinball market: buyer expectations vs. mechanical reality, especially for older machines

  • “These things are like an old car. Everything goes wrong in 10 hours. It's hard to hit everything you need to hit and make this thing reliable.”

    George @ not provided — Characterizes complexity of servicing vintage electromechanical machines

  • “I just barely even put it down. I didn't even feel like I touched the floor and like boom, explosion of glass in my hands.”

    George @ not provided — Dramatic account of playfield glass breakage on tile floor during service call

  • “If you do those [repin the NPU and solenoid driver board connectors], chances are at least the game will be reliable.”

    Dave @ not provided — Technical best practice for Valley and early Stern machine reliability

  • “That's what happens when you put a 230 volt line into a 43 volt line. Yeah, that can kind of cause problems.”

Entities

GeorgepersonDavepersonJohn RutherfordpersonJim RutherfordpersonTimpersonRotten DogcompanyTanya P. HoltpersonPinball Lifecompany

Signals

  • ?

    product_concern: Rotten Dog SAM board shipped with DAC chip installed inverted (pin 1 as pin 14), causing audio distortion. Defect was factory-level manufacturing error.

    high · George discovered and documented the inverted chip installation; confirmed by consulting engineers; Rotten Dog acknowledged and provided replacement chip

  • ?

    product_concern: Pirates of the Caribbean ramp motor shipping mechanism has chronic reliability issues; multiple technicians report difficulty; machine may ship down instead of up

    high · George encountered issue on customer unit; researched online and found multiple reports of same problem; labeled 'a giant pain' by other technicians

  • ?

    operational_signal: Older machines (late 1970s-early 1980s) require 50-70 hours of skilled labor for reliable operation, contrasting with newer machines where repairs are more permanent

    high · George expresses hesitation about day spa work on vintage games; reflects on time-intensive nature and compares to 'old car' maintenance model

  • ?

    technology_signal: Two competing sources for SAM Stern/Sega replacement boards: Rotten Dog (fast, sketchy quality) vs. Australian supplier Tanya P. Holt/Fives Knapp Arcade (higher quality, longer lead time, higher cost)

    high · George discusses sourcing options when selecting replacement board; chose Rotten Dog for speed despite known quality concerns

  • ?

    operational_signal: Essential reliability upgrades for Valley and early Stern machines: repin lower left NPU connector and right side solenoid driver board connectors; single pin error can cause catastrophic damage

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.232

0:00
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Classic Pinball Podcast. My name is George. His name is Dave. Hello Dave! Oh, what's, wait a minute George, hold on a second, let me shut this off. Ah, there we go, okay. Yeah. Hello George. Little, little snow blowing out here. Yeah, Snowmageddon has hit the country. You guys got a pretty good amount of snow. We had a little bit of rain and a little bit of sleet and snow. So how much you got? I don't know. It looks around 18 to 20 inches out there. Yeah, we had we had six and people's hair is on fire here. The stores are looted. The gas stations have run out of gas. Wow. They don't handle it very well here. But I did hear a statistic today. And I think most of the country is being affected by it. We're supposed to be in the mid 40s here. It's in the mid teens. It's like a 30 degree differential and it's going to be like this all week. I feel bad for the people down in Tennessee and Mississippi. I don't know if you saw the pictures, but man those people had an inch of ice on trees. What a mess. Yeah, well there was a lot of sky writing last couple days, so there's that. We're not going to discuss that. People will think we're absolutely crazy. But maybe someday we'll do that. The Do you have do you have anything to start show uh... well just on the top of the topic of snow still first office is uh... the plow guy around it didn't do that good of a job uh... and uh... one of just have fire my snowblower and the only guy on the circle with a nice snowblower so i wanna you know doing their job for them on on getting my neighbors unstuck and you know they're all plowed with two three feet of snow in front of the car so they did all that and i was and here's the thing I powered the snowblower up a day ahead of time and I said let me just check the gas situation. It's like oh not much gas there. Let me go in my shed and because I use the true fuel, the good gas, not the stupid down the gas station where they use the ethanol stuff that plugs up your engine. You can't store it for a while. I use the good stuff that costs like 20 bucks a can and you can store it all year long in two years or whatever. It doesn't gum up. So I looked, checked my situation. I got not much left and I went down to Home Depot a couple days ago right before the storm and it said hey, Where's this that well we did have that we every time we get submitted goes right away I think there's nine more left let me go check nope it's all gone it's like but we do have some in 30 and 40 minutes away from here they got 50 cans here and 30 cans there you can try that it's like all right so I said you know what I'm not going to go drive I'm just going to go online and be smart about it pay for it reserve it okay put my name on it and then go down to Worcester and I went there it's like well while I'm here instead of go picking this up I'm going to go I'll just go and maybe I'll get a couple more cans while I'm here and see what this stash is. I go look at the stash, it's all gone. And within about an hour or two of that guy saying that 50 cans, they're wiped out. So I'm so- What do you think I made the comment about stores and everything else? And this is, they're not used to this here, Dave. Schools are closed until Wednesday. It's Monday. It's, it, they don't know how to deal. No. It's really weird. Believe me. I'm going to be really weird coming from New England. Six inches in New England is like, okay, it snowed, great. Well, it's a little more than that. Well, people are still kind of freaking out around here too. Well, you got a foot and a half of snow. I'm saying six inches of snow, Dave. That's nothing. Six inches. Yeah, that's nothing. Right. Walk in the park in New England, they laugh at that. Ha, ha, ha. Yeah, exactly. That's all you got kind of thing. Well, one more thing. When I went into the courtesy desk and get my can, they said, oh, yeah, it's right here. I was sitting right here and I looked in the back there and I saw the names on about another 20 or 30 cans like, oh, other people have the same smart idea I did. They all reserved them and they all prepaid for them. You know, smart. Way in the world, man. And I'm so glad I got that because I filled the tank up, I used it all last night and I looked in this morning, it's like nothing left. This thing is a gas hog, this thing. It ate the whole tank. You have one. I do. So I had to do the old shovel routine with Janice, but it's fine. And they probably don't have plow guys near you, right? There's no plow guys, right? I didn't see a plow guy until late yesterday afternoon just before the storm ended. But you can't hire one down there, right? There's no plow for hire, is there, for your own driveway? I doubt it. If they are, they could pretty much name their price. Wow. It's very strange. Like I said, coming from New England to here, it's a whole different world. They're not used to it. They haven't seen anything like this in ten years. I know. Wow. Right. Anyway, let's talk some pinball. Sure, pinball. Yes, yes, on to pinball. You first. You've got quite a few stories. Yeah, alright, let's go with... Well, you went to Gloucester. Yeah, let's do with that one. Yeah, we'll go with that one. Nick This is still winter though. And no snow. No, there was no snow at that time. No, this was like, I don't know, a couple weeks ago or so. And real nice place. I love heated floors. You know, it's that floor heating. People like radiant heating. That is fantastic. I love that up in this house. We had it all week long. We just went out every day to go do day spas and games. We did a really good seafood over there too. Day one, we did a Star Wars game. This week we have a new game from the Star Wars trilogy, which is a Sega game from the late 90s, which basically is like an early 2000s Stern, because Stern and Sega were the same company. Same boards, different, you know, writing on them. And he had this game, you know, it's old, 1997. He hasn't used it in like 10 years because I guess the batteries leaked at some point. He just left it, so it leaked some more. And there was so much battery damage on this main board. I'm glad he showed me pictures ahead of time, so I ordered a new Rotten Dog board for it. The only game in town to order for these Stern SAM systems and Sega systems is Rotten Dog. He's the only game in town, like him or not. And you know, they're okay but they can be a little sketchy sometimes. But they work for the most part. But they're not the best rep in the world for boards and stuff. The only other option is our friend Grant in Australia has a great option. The guy down there that makes these boards. Tanya P. Holt, Fives Knapp Arcade.com It looks like a lot better quality board, but you're going to pay for it, and you're going to wait for it. And I didn't have the time to wait for this, so I had to get one pretty quickly, within a week. So I got the Rotten Dog one. So I went on site there. Oh, I had the board shipped to the, and they usually do this, the Airbnb. I said, can you let me ship? Well, you don't do that, but in your case, since you're doing a business trip here, I'll let you do that. So I shipped the board right to the Airbnb. I got it in time for the next day when we were first morning there. Went out to work on the game and put the new board in there, did a day sparring of the thing and powered it up and I got all kinds of scratchy sounds on it. Now I'm swapping over all the ROMs and all the chips to the new board, right? And I'm getting all kinds of scratchy sounds and I even burned a new ROM for it, a game ROM in case this game ROM was damaged and it was damaged. And I couldn't really adjust the volume, it was scratchy and everything I was working on it and I was like this isn't right, something's wrong. So I emailed the owner of Rotten Dog. I actually got in contact with him and I showed him pictures of his board and what the situation was and listen I'm not close to home, I'd like to get this thing resolved, what's the warranty situation. There's really not much of a warranty for them on these boards but there is like a 30 day sort of guarantee kind of. So he worked with me and said oh I think it's Oh, your, uh, your digital analog converter, your DAC, digital analog converter chip, uh, something, something, there's a problem with that chip. It's probably faulty or something. So I'm going to send you, I'm going to overnight you a new one. It's like, okay. So hung up with him, went back the next day to see what else I could do with it. And I, I had, as soon as I saw the pictures of, of his boy, I looked more closely to see what chip he's talking about. I looked at the chip he's talking about and said, aha, I found the problem. From the factory, they installed their chip upside down. So pin 1 was pin 14. Really? And pin 14 is pin 1. Yeah. So what does that do to the game? Well, according to the AI, Google AI says, you just screwed the pooch. That chip is gone. 99% chance you burned it out. It's crap. Start again. Don't pass go. Don't collect $200. Well, you flipped it over. I did, but before I flipped it over, I also, my two engineers on retainer, John Day and Jim Rutherford, said, hey guys, what do you think about this, with this DAC? Is this something that, you know, and Jim said, nah, I think a 50-50 shot, you're gonna be okay, but I wouldn't say 99% it's dead. I think a 50-50 shot, it's still gonna be good. And I told him about AI saying it's not. He goes, well, let's see about that. So I turned it over, flipped it around, plugged it in, turned it on, bingo, everything worked great. So AI, wrong AI, you got it wrong. It's the chip was fine. So but the guy did send me a new chip so I have one extra anyway for my troubles. So I got him all set to go. That Brida Pinbot that came back for, what did it have wrong with it? Oh I know, yeah. It was blowing a fuse after we did a day spar on it like about a week or two earlier. We were working great and then all of a sudden it blew a GI fuse. One of the five GI fuses and it blew one of them, one string blue. And they also broke the plunger. But the plungers on these games, the shooter rods from Williams, they weren't that good. What do you mean they broke it? Well, they broke it. It's a plastic black shooter rod, not like the ballads with the chrome and silver. Okay, okay, I'm thinking metal. Yeah, no, you think this is like 90s Williams or even 80sWilliams. They use a plastic knob and it would always over time break into three pieces, like three little pie wedges break off it. So he broke off like one or two of them. The kids were playing it all night. They broke it, but it kind of had wear and tear, but still they broke it by beating on whatever they did. So he called me about that. So I had all that stuff with me. I did all that. And then I did some research like, well, why this thing? I looked at his old board. I put in, I put a new rebuilt driver board that I did and took his old driver board. I'm looking at the old driver board now. It's like, huh, his, this same fuse that blew, it was overfused instead of five amp slow blow. Someone put a 10 amp in there. It's like, why did, why did they put a 10 amp in there? They must've been having a problem. So I went through and I looked at all the, the, the, the sockets in that GI string. I think it was maybe 10, 10 or so lights. And I looked at each one of them. They're all good except for one. I'm going to take that out, put a new socket in there, and button it up, and then put my, you know, new fuse in there, and it's worked great. I haven't heard back from him since, so that was it. So basically an iffy socket, not a real hard short, but enough for a short that's going to work. I'm waiting for the punch Line. Where's the really difficult game that you repaired? Well that's the Space Invaders but that's a grip and drama that I'm still working through. So we gotta wait for that story? We gotta wait for that story. Yeah that's not quite there yet. I'll give you the whole one next time we meet our heroes. I'm going to put it in my notes for next month. That's going to be a whole thing on that one. That one kind of makes me think about, do I really want to do day spas on late 70s and early 80s games? We talked about this the other day. Yeah, you and I talked about it on the show. You and I talked about it. It makes me kind of gun shy because these things are like an old car. I'm a little car and everything go wrong in eight or 10 hours. It's hard to hit everything you need to hit and make this thing reliable. You need like, you know, it needs to come here and do like 50 to 60 to 70 hours on it. So I need to kind of, I don't know, circle the wagons and kind of set some expectations on some of the stuff for the real older games. The newer stuff like the 90s and even the, especially the stuff from the 2000s and newer, that stuff is new enough that you do stuff to it, it stays. The older Games are, I don't know, there's so many connected, there's so much stuff to do on them. It's just time intensive and money intensive, so I got to figure that out. So that's that. What else do we, oh we did The Getaway. This guy had a huge collection, rock and roll, heavy metal memorabilia everywhere. You know, it wasn't, let's say we weren't going to the Taj Mahal when we went in the The He did like his cigarettes. And a lot of skull stuff. A lot of skull stuff. I don't know. I'm really not going to leave Maureen in this house alone when I'm going to get some parts. A little black magic going on? Yeah, I don't know what the hell's going on. I think he's a nice guy but it's just kind of... He never looks you in the eye the whole time. He's never looking you in the eye. It's kind of a little strange. He had a problem with the rear ramp on getaway. There's a ramp back there. It's like a slam ramp. It goes up and down so many times. And so many people have a problem with that ramp. And he had a problem with it. So I spent a lot of time adjusting it, modifyingifying it, cleaning it, and it's real hard to get to. But I think I finally got it so it's working well. And then also Dave spotted the game. And then I worked a couple of his other games. I think he had about, I don't know, I want to say eight or ten games in a small bedroom. The I don't know, eight games or so in a small bedroom in an old house. That's like, you know, instead of getting all these games, why don't you maybe, you know, restore your kitchen or maybe restore your bathroom with all the money spent in these games? You can make this house a little better, you know, but priorities, I guess. So, yeah. So and then he tells me, oh, yeah, I have an order, a

medium confidence · George accidentally spilled water on Airbnb furniture and successfully used Novus 2 to remove the white spot damage

  • Pinball buyers often don't understand the mechanical complexity and time required to dial in machines, expecting perpetual problem-free operation

    high confidence · George and Dave discuss customer expectations vs. reality of pinball ownership and maintenance requirements

    • Dave @ not provided — Consequences of miswiring during connector reseating; illustrates dangers of precision work

    Pirates of the Caribbean
    game
    The Simpsonsgame
    Star Warsgame
    Pinbotgame
    The Getawaygame
    Pulp Fictiongame
    Six Million Dollar Mangame
    Blackjackgame
    King Konggame
    Attack on Marsgame
    Metallicagame
    Back to the Arcade Mediavenue
    Straight Down the Middle: a pinball showmedia
    Pin and Pixelscompany
    Novus 2product

    high · Dave provides technical guidance from restoration experience; George demonstrates risk of misalignment (Six Million Dollar Man incident with 230V into 43V line)

  • ?

    product_concern: Playfield glass sheets highly susceptible to shattering on hard surfaces (tile floor); minimal contact can cause breakage; wood/carpet floors more forgiving

    high · George experiences playfield glass explosion when setting machine on stone tile; describes minimal contact as cause; notes protective pads availability

  • ?

    venue_signal: Back to the Arcade Media in Winchester, Virginia operates as record store with arcade games section; offers $10 all-you-can-play pricing; modern game lineup (King Kong, Attack on Mars, Metallica, Stranger Things, Venom, Addams Family, Funhouse)

    high · George provides detailed venue description, pricing model, game list, and personal gameplay experience

  • $

    market_signal: Buyers of pinball machines often underestimate mechanical complexity, maintenance requirements, and ongoing service needs; expect perpetual problem-free operation

    high · George and Dave discuss customer expectations vs. reality; George reflects on customer lack of awareness about ramp mechanism issues on POC

  • ?

    code_update: The Simpsons (early 2000s Stern) updated from version 4 to version 5 code

    high · George performed code update as part of day spa service on customer machine

  • ?

    operational_signal: Unplugging and reseating connectors on driver boards can resolve intermittent electrical issues (chiming, lamp registration) in vintage machines without permanent damage

    high · Dave resolves Blackjack chiming issue by reseating connectors; George uses same troubleshooting approach

    • 16:02
    Pulp Fiction. I was like, where are you going to put it? Oh, I'm going to put it right there in that slot, right in front of the closet. I won't be able to get in the closet anymore. I'm going to put it right there. There's one more slot in this room. It's like, you're going to be tight and stuck in here. You know, I don't get it. He's asking me about what games do I want to sell. It's like, well, I know where you'd put it, but I have a nice Gorger I'm going to sell down the road. And so I told him what, you know, what that is and so forth. And, you know, I don't know. We'll see. I don't see where he's going to put another game. Oh, as for the Airbnb, so that place is really nice. It's up in Essex. And he had all this nice furniture around and well, except for I will say to sit down in a comfortable chair anywhere in this house. Not so much and but I find that most houses don't really have a nice place to sit. Especially what I'm used to sitting in with with lumbar support, all that stuff. So these things know not the greatest, but the he had, he basically I'm a little sign there is so please be careful of our furniture you know with the wood don't put down a wet glass or whatever this is a glass coaster look like glass ashtrays go to lip on them and there's glass coasters everywhere in the bedrooms and that's a disuse okay so so I put my I always have a glass of water before bed and I put it down on top of the glass ashtray thing next to the bed and went to sleep and middle of night got up and I was kind of thirsty it was dark I reached for the glass and tipped it over. Under the wood. This wooden end table. And then, I don't know, I'm tired. It's like, well, I'll just kind of see if I can sop it up a little with the thing I had. I think I got it. I'm going back to bed. I get up the next day and it's like, oh, the water's still there. And that was a big white spot under the water from getting into the clear. Oh, that's from the wax. The wax. Oh yeah. Oh. If you leave water on a table that's been freshly waxed, I think it makes the wax turn white. Okay, well that's what happened. And it's a bitch to get out. Well, I'll tell you what. We found a fix. A pinball fix. Dun dun da da da. Novus 2 to the rescue. I'm not telling that until I give it my best effort first. If I fail, then I'll tell them. But I'm going to fix it before I say anything. So, I went outside, got my Novus, went on there, kept buffing, buffing, buffing, buffing, and I said, hey, come here, honey, look at this. What do you see? He said, wow, yep, got rid of all, it looks like a brand new table. Buffed it right out. Perfect So Novus 2 Didn say anything Right but you had another episode Oh yeah that episode How did you do that Okay so that the recent episode The picture you saw Right Yeah Yeah okay So that was about a couple days ago So this was a good this was a nice handoff from Tim at Pin and Pixels who sells modern Stern games brand new So he We get calls once in a while to work on games this and that And it not really what his mission statement is So he basically, he forwards them to me, which is great. So I got this guy, local guy, a couple of towns away. He's got two early 2000 Sterns, a Pirates of the Caribbean and a Simpsons, which is right in my wheelhouse, it's perfect. and he wants to get them just you know cleaned up and you update in this and that is and it's okay it sounds like a perfect day for the thing for our day sponsors you know oh it sounds great just what I need you know and the the price range I shot him was he said oh that's fine it's right right where that's great so didn't didn't blink at that which is perfect so now I got two games two day spas and like you know ring the bell you know so I was happy with that so went on site for day one did the Simpsons that took you know all the incident of this I was just about to put it down on this stone tile floor. It looks like wood but it's actually stone hard tile floor, George. Yep, wrong. And I just barely even put it down. I didn't even feel like I touched the floor and like boom, explosion of glass in my hands. I got cut. There's glass everywhere. It just should do be shattered, you know. So, uh... Yeah, it should do be shattered. Then you showed me the picture of the thing from Pinball Life that you have. Yeah, so... Why didn't you have those with you? Uh, laziness, George. I had them with me. I had them with me and I usually don't need them, but on this situation, when you have tile like that, I mean, you can get away with it on a wood floor or carpet. You don't need it. Right, well, you... But that, you definitely... You thought it was one thing, it was another. It wasn't a voodoo glass or one of those... No. No, regular... But it was a nice sheet of... I'm really upset. But I'm pretty sure it was a nice sheet of glass so it wasn't all scratched up so I couldn't just go grab one of my scratched up sheets and throw it on there. It's like I didn't get one of my nice sheets of glass. I'm going to basically replace like with like. So that's what I did. So I did that and... Did you tell him? Yeah, I did tell him. Well at first, he wasn't home so at first it's like well let me just... I found a shop vac there. I used his shop vac, backed up all the glass underneath different...all in the room. It went everywhere. I was at the We were doing a cleaning service as well, cleaning up all that glass everywhere. Good thing only a little bit went into the game. A couple shards went into the playfield. Not that bad. Got rid of that. Got all that out of there and then put it back and then I think he saw me, you know, oh he said, I said, oh, I, oh, I know you just left. It's like, I just got home. It's like, oh, we, I say, I just had a, we just had a mishap. I'm just coming, come back against him. I was like, yeah, brought the glass out there, about to put it down, it exploded in my hand, so I got a new sheet of glass for you. He wasn't phased at all by it. He didn't phase it at all. It was like no big deal. So I put that on the game, told him about it. It was a first, though. I've never had it happen to me. It's really strange. I was going to update his code, but his code was off the date. I updated the code on Simpsons, doing it from 4 to version 5. The weird thing with Pirates of the Caribbean, the ship, There's a problem with that game. And this game didn't have that many miles on it, either. But the ship is, uh, it's supposed to go up to the left and back down and then ship, the ship was to sink down. I was in test mode. I could not get it to go down. I could only get it to do certain things. Even in gameplay, it wouldn't. But the game would never, it would never give an error out. So, I think that's the way this game was, already. And he's used to it that way. We were already there for, like, eight hours. I've done everything else in the game. It's like, you know, this thing's going to take me, Another I looked online for other people that did this, you know, working this thing. They all say this is a giant pain. Yeah, I did take this part three or four times every time. It's a pain in the ass to get it right. Say, okay, this is going to be another day. This is going to be another special, a special assignment day for more, more cha-ching to do that because that wasn't in the scope of work. I'll tell you. So it works. It works well enough the way it is with the ship like that. But he didn't even know it because that's the way it's always been for him. It's always been, you know, like, well, we talked about this. That you're people by these games not realizing with this customer doesn't seem to have an issue But others they just don't understand the complexity of the mechanisms. No how much time it takes Oh yeah to dial them in and They can't do it, and I always say to myself Do you really understand what you're going to buy? Because you're thinking it's going to be in perpetuity. It's gonna work great And it doesn't And especially you said it with the older games. I had, you know, my blackjack just stop chiming on half the game. And I'm like, it was late, I'm going to forget it next morning. I just unplugged, you know, all the all the connectors on the driver board, put them back in and it worked. It stopped doing what did it what did it stop doing? It stopped doing what? The chime for the hole on the right for the bonus, the bonus countdown didn't work and the four targets at the base for the dealer and the player, you know, the yellow and red targets, stationary targets, they didn't register a chime. So it was just one of the, you know, normally it doesn't happen, it normally happens when you have a game that you don't play. But I play this game all the time and it just was one of those things. But my point is, A regular person, they'll look at it and go, what's wrong with the game? I don't know how to fix it.
    25:36
    Yeah, especially with the with the dot 100 connectors on these on these early valleys. They always you gotta do them. Well, this game was all repinned. I mean, it was all done. Yes. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was it wasn't that it was just, you know, it burps every once in a while. It happens. You know, yeah. You unplug them, you put them back in. If that doesn't work, then the hunt begins. But, you know, I don't have a lot of stories about repairs, thank God. My games have been working very nicely, thank you. The biggest things to repin on these baleys and sterns in that time frame, it's basically a must-have. The other things are nice to have, but these are must-haves to keep the thing reliable, is the lower left connector on the NPU and the right side connectors on the solenoid driver board. If you do those, chances are at least the game will be reliable. You might have a couple lights out or some other little things going on with the game, but in general you'll be able to play the game and do pretty well. So going forward I'm doing that, but you've got to really pay attention to which pin you're doing and where it came from, because you can mess up and go to the wrong pin. I just did that on my $6 million man because I have an issue and I put one pin, like one pin off, oh, that can wreck your whole day. As soon as I did that, I heard like a, a song that just go, argh, it was going full and then, and I realized what I did, oh, that's what happens when you put a, a 230 volt line into a 43 volt line. Yeah, that can kind of cause problems. I double checked. I almost did, I almost did it when I was reseating one of the connectors on blackjack. I looked, I said, double check, don't, and sure enough, I was off by one. I always do that. I even take a picture of the connector ahead of time and I really should have just, as soon as I'm done, I say, okay, does this picture match what I just did, you know, and begin. You have to. You've got to double and triple check because like you said, you just stated it. That's, you know, that's the end of your game sometimes. Oh yeah. This one was recoverable. It was just basically a new transistor and a new fuse because it was properly fused. So you took out a fuse and took out a transistor. How much time do we have? We have... Let's see. I think like 10-15 minutes. Oh good. Yeah. Okay. Do you have anything else right now? I got a couple of things I can do if you need to collect your thoughts. Yeah, I do. Well, the next thing I can talk about, I can talk about it later if you want, is the $6 million man restoration and some, you know, some of the things that we're going to do. okay, okay, okay. Alright, alright, alright, alright. Okay. In the meantime we'll have questions and answers for you guys online and thekuja1$4es, Bethany languages Kingsримlytextapply arom типis表ठ$3ks and polyg婭isailsф honors. » gost of jeffundaus frragenä Sponge א� Clinicaläัstä Getting ٍ� یӓənՊ youéŋ I have a couple of short things. Okay, first thing. I went on an adventure again. Went to another arcade. And this one is located in Winchester, Virginia. The name of it is called Back to the Media. It's a record store, used records, CDs, etc. But in the back, they have pinballs and video games. And Ten bucks, all you can play, got there first thing on a Saturday morning, 11 o'clock. Only person there, had at it. Here are the games that were in the lineup. All moderns, Venom, Stranger Things, Metallica, Attack for Mars,Godzilla, Adam's Family, and Funhouse. I spent the majority of my time on, not Godzilla, what did I say Godzilla? Wrong. King Kong. I do that all the time. KingKong. Spent a lot of time on KingKong. Attack for Mars, one of the flippers didn't work, Metallica, I don't get that game. Not for me. It's going to hit the sparky over and over again so you can go... I just, I don't know. It's like destroying the castle of medieval madness. Stranger Things, the room was dark that they had all these pinballs in. Stranger Things is a dark game. I didn't like playing it in a dark room. I don't like it either. Venom, no, not me either. Adam's Family, not me either. Funhouse, not me either. So, I spent a lot of time on King Kong. So, that's gonna feed into the next piece here. Humor me. Alright. I'm not a Reddit guy, but I heard about this thing that was posted I'm going to read a question that was posted and I know it's old folks but bear with me it ties into King Kong. There's a Reddit post out there that said what would happen if you took a silverback gorilla and put it up against a hundred men? Who would win? How big is a silverback gorilla? I don't know what that is, a silverback gorilla. I'm a fucking gorilla. One of those, what's the woman, Jane Goodall, the one who, you know, lived with the apes or whatever? Allegedly. The guy in Gorilla, they would crush your head in two seconds if it got its hands on you. Yeah, she talked to Coco, the guy in the suit. Right. Guy in the gorilla suit. Big, big ass gorilla, okay? Yeah, sure. Humor me for a minute. Are the men armed? No. Okay. No. There's a whole thing on this. And everybody else right now is shaking their head going, what is this? What are you guys going with this? My money's on the gorilla. Okay, well wait. There is no definitive answer because it's never been done, right? That's so far. You've never put a gorilla in a space with a hundred men and say, hey, let's see who wins. Right. So I thought of it a different way. I'm bringing it back to pinball. Okay. So what would happen if you took a hundred men who don't have any experience with King Kong the machine by Stern. But they could have played pinball before. They just don't have familiarity with the game. They don't know the rules or anything else. And if you put a reasonable, and I couldn't get this out of anybody, you can comment on this after I'm done. I couldn't get anybody to tell me what is I'm a pinball machine. Three ball with a reasonably set, um, score threshold. Yeah. How many do you think would win? What's the caliber of the player? I just told you. Some people have no pinball experience, others might have a lot. It's a random, just a hundred random people. I don't know, you probably could beat that threshold. How many people out of the hundred actually beat the game? Playing one game. One game per person. This week's topic is... 10. I'll say 10%. No way. You don't think so? You think more or less? Not even close. You think it's less? Absolutely. Really? Okay. Think about it. Okay. You're not coached. There's no warmup. You have no idea what the rules of the game are. And you're let loose to try to figure out the game. John Papadiuk这几次相遇迹像里有没有几个别的 verstehen呢? The King Kong! Okay, okay. Are you paying attention? No, I think I'm smoking weed over here. Are you paying attention? I'm telling the story of the silver doctor. Okay, okay, okay, Kong. I'm getting it. I'm getting the vapors here. Yes, I understand the Kong thing and the silver doctor. I see where you went. Yes, I think they have a good chance because the modern ramp game is built to get people that don't know much about how to play to be very fair to them and give them a free game. I'd say yeah, 10. I think 10 people could do that in that game.
    34:41
    I would like to see that happen. Me too. How do we make that happen? That would be a really cool thing to do at a show. Yeah. But you would get people that know how to play the game. It's got to be people who don't, you know, because you've never rumbled with a gorilla, so you can't say, well, this is going to work or that's going to work, right? And is it, you know, Where the conversation ends up is, well, is it one person at a time against the gorilla or could all 100 rest the gorilla at once? They should have a good term like a King Kong rumble. Like say for a... I mean you could make it even faster and just do one ball and say, because you can set the stirring games to one ball, correct? Yeah, one ball has a threshold to beat for one ball. contracted Nạpäťhə awarded sareḑşógç, guneden áŝè Petersburgšť
    35:50
    in teng The Stalk Stern score to be... Yeah, no gimmicks, no gimmicks. Yeah, I think they would. I think they'd get lucky. Well now, do you allow everybody to watch the game as people play it or do you do it as a blind test? Here's the game, you walk in, you can't watch somebody else play it. That has an effect too. It does in fact, you see what they do and what... Correct. Yeah. Oh, that scores a lot. Right, right. So, anyway, I just thought it was It's me playing King Kong. I saw this thing. I'm like, yeah, that's pretty interesting. Yeah, and if I'm gonna weigh in on the silverback gorilla
    36:37
    the only way you would be able to take that thing is to bum rush it and Poke its eyes out or you know break its neck or do something where you're disabling it because other than that No, you know you're not punching it
    36:53
    You punch it the things gonna Grab me and throw you into 90 feet! Exactly. Right. Yeah, you gotta rock, you... First of all, who the hell even came up with this thing online? Someone who hates silverback gorillas. I guess. I hate her.
    37:12
    Oh, that's a good one. So you like King Kong as one of the better new Sterns right now? Oh, he was kind of pissed off when I listened to some other shows and everybody's like, oh, you know, Dungeons & Dragons, This Week in Pinball, Trash Talks with John Papadiuk, Black Water, Kaneda's Pinball Podcast, Twippies Awards, We last left off. Where? Well, you were going to talk about your repairs and gremlins in Six MillionDollarMan. All right. So I still have yet to put this out on my YouTube channel, but I'm going to shortly, hopefully this week, maybe even today later. As I think we told everybody, I had a little bit of a recovery from a little bit of surgery I had so this was kind of my project to kind of as six minute all man getting better I getting better and and it kind of cool that I did it during my whole recovery process and now he good to go and I good to go So and yeah it was really neat What are you saying my love Stronger, faster. Yes, better, stronger, faster. So much so that we had a little pinball party over here to celebrate that. I had, you know, six guys including me and we did a six player tournament on Six Pin Dollar Man as well. Well, that was like the side tournament. The main tournament we had was, uh, did our usual match play, random match people together in random game. Did about eight rounds of that. That's about an hour and a half. Right, but you had some new games that I have not seen in your lineup recently. Uh, well, hmm, not really. I had Six Million DollarMan and Funhouse, but I didn't put Funhouse in the tournament. Okay. Because it's a ramp game. Those are the only two you changed? That's the only two I changed. Yeah. I didn't see Fathom, right? Did you take that there? No, Fathom's in there. Fathom was there. Eight Ball Deluxe? That's all there. Yep. Eight Ball Deluxe, Fathom, Blackjack EM, Stars, Flight 2000, Quicksilver, Stargazer, Six MillionDollarMan. Nice line. It was a lot of fun. I wound up doing Crappy. I was doing the Crappy. Nice line. It was a lot of fun. I wound up doing crappy. PJ and I kind of bombed out. I paid the top three players. We did like just a small one, 10 bucks a piece. I paid out 30, 20, 10, first, second, third. And it wound up being a three-way tie for first, so that's going to be one, two, three. It was Joel, Scott, and Adam. I think Adam took it, Joel in second, Scott in third, I believe. John Day did not have a good night then. I think he won one game out of all the matches he played. He was hit an off night. He's usually pretty good. And I didn't have the, I did okay, but I just didn't get in the finals there. So I said, okay, well, after you do that, let's do $3 a piece on Six Pin Dollar Man as the, you know, Bionic Showdown, you know. And so we did that. And I only had maybe five plays in this game. I had this just freshly done. We're still in playtest mode, so anything can happen. So I've only had five plays on. It's playing pretty well. And previous to that day, I had Mike and Chris over before the party, and I put up a Whopper. So I flipped it over plus $500. I put in $1.5 million on the game earlier in the day. That was like game number three I had on it. And so then, so going to this thing, I wound up kicking ass, I think, on Balls. I had like 550y thousand, everyone else had like ninety thousand points or something. And then all of a sudden, bloosh, the lights went out, the games went out, there was a power situation and what it wound up being, I've had this happen before so now I fixed it. I had everything, you know, not the best, I could use an electrician here to kind of wire up some more outlets for me, I'm kind of taxing things a bit, especially if I have all the games on. All the games were not on. I had them almost all off for this. I had some Christmas tree lights on and some other stuff, but not really not much. But what I did have is an old surge Protector that's been there for like 20, 30 years. You only have so much life on those before they actually will fail and do weird things and go off before they should. So that's what happened. It got tripped. So I redid that. I said, okay, guys, here we go. And I said, oh, no, you can I'm going to take it. You won the thing. It's like, well, yeah, I was way ahead, but I don't know. Here's what I'm going to do to make it fair. So I'm going to take five bucks out of the winnings, out of the 18 bucks. I'm putting it down out of the winnings and we're going to play again for five bucks for a second try at it. So we did that and I wound up winning it again. So I got it all. I got all the money on that one. So made up for my losses on the main tourney, but everyone came away loving that game. Lifeline arrival, The period right now. I've been looking. And people are holding on to their old stuff. New stuff, dime a dozen. Old stuff, not so much. Like old stuff meaning like Bally Stern stuff or not? Yeah, Bally Stern stuff. And if it is, it's already been restored and it's a high price tag. Like I saw a ten, you probably saw it too, that $10,000, $6 million man out in California. I did not see that. Dentur zurез collecting CNY A Mais Nys liquidate ZR platmas original Iek Geang Crypto I don't know. I don't know if you restored them or what. Okay, but California Okay, cuz I do know that you know by doing these playfield swaps in these games You know, I got like I think I was telling you every John but look some of your you know The usual people out there some of these people just do a playfield swap They're just like swap stuff over not rebuild anything and just kind of call it done and They might do it for a friend or for a business and do it really cheap So they get a cheap price on it, but they didn't do anything. They didn't really do the hard work on it So to really dial these things in, that's why I said this thing is like a, I think it's 70 or 80 hour restoration for me on this game. Cause to dial all the gremlins in, everything else to optimize things in the right way, it just takes so much time to dial it in right.
    44:53
    Case in point, here is a, here's a fix, here's a weird fix for this six pin dollar man. So the pop up, the extra play or what's it called? Play more posts. Play more post, the play more post that this game has, PowerPlay has, and I think some other EMs from Bally and maybe even Williams maybe back in the day in the EM side of things. I think they had it as well, the orange lit up pop-up post.
    45:23
    It's hard to get that thing when it goes down to be level with the playfield and then, you know, and come back up the right level and this and that and to have it work right. So, someone was in there and messed with it and kind of, when I first found it, they had a broken orange plastic, they glued it in there, I had to get rid of all the stuff, I put a brand new one on there. And I take it all apart to adjust it and level it. And you have to shim it on top of everything else. You got to shim the assembly and level it, because you need to level it the right way, it doesn't, it never sits flat with the game, just because the way the, uh, Yeah. The latching mechanism holds the post that holds that orange plastic lit up piece. The way it holds it, it holds it at an angle. So you have to put spaces underneath theactual assembly underneath the play field. You have to spacer it, so that you're kind of making it flat when it's sitting up flat. When you do that, you're also taking away some height. So I had two problems with this one. So one problem with the game I had is really couldn't figure it out right away was you turn the game on. The game is supposed to put the pop up up as it's booting up and suck it back down. So okay, I'm ready to play. This thing you boot the game up, it pops it up, brings it down and pops it right back up again. So now when you start the game with ball one, you have an unlit play more post up that's up and it shouldn't be and so it's easier for the first person to play the game on ball one. After ball one, the whole game acts normal. Everything runs fine. It goes down when it's supposed to, stays down, goes up when it's supposed to, stays up but when you first turn on, there's some kind of timing issue that's not quite right. So basically it's timing and so I'm going to play a little bit of a thing here to lead us into what the fix was here. Don't miss the party train. So don't miss the party train. This is the timing. So how How it works is this is a latch plate and it's an EM latch plate that is supposed to suck in, let the thing go up, when it comes back down, throw it back out and it stops from going from popping back up. Well this thing it's so fast that if you're off by a couple milliseconds it misses the little little party train latch thing there and just sticks up. So originally I thought, I said oh I found my problem. I put an extra spring in I'm a little bit of a fan of the assembly. They have it go spring up. I thought I didn't realize it was already one on there. Stupid me. So I put in an extra spring. Oh, that's why it's so much spring tension on the thing. It really wants to go up really fast, really strongly. That's the timing part that I'm missing. Okay, I'll just take it apart a little bit. Get rid of the spring I put on there, you dummy, and put it back together and now it's gonna be fine. And it wasn't fine. Same problem, same post. We just start the game up. It would go up and down, stay up. It's like, oh, boy, I thought it would be it. What else can it be? Well, then I remembered someone like my friend Stu who works in EMs a lot. He told me before that these EM latches can have residual magnetism. Boys and girls, the letter R for the day, residual magnetism in your EM latches. Really? Yeah. So how does it get magnetized? What's the point of this? Well, because it's an electromagnet that sucks the plate in and holds it for a while and then lets the plate go. After so many times of, you know, it's like putting an electromagnet against a piece of metal. You're charging it so many times, eventually the charge holds. It's going to hold, right. But it's very small. It's not like it sticks on there. I can never see it stick. It just holds on for enough milliseconds of extra magnetic hold 오븐� observation
    50:04
    I took a small little piece of mylar. I'll have to call this guy back. I will call him back later. I took a little piece of mylar. I put it in the back of the plate. And then try it again. And guess what? It works phenomenally. I kept turning the game off and on, off and on, off and on. It works, works, works, works. It fixed it. I'd like to thank all of you for joining me. We'd really appreciate it. Residual magnetism, a little bit of mylar, a little spot mylar, on the backside of the plate that touches the relay magnet, that'll make your whole day go happy. That's what the fix was that one. So I was very pleased with that. The only other weird thing the game is doing, and I think this also games like Eight-Bottle Luck suffer from this too, is they get, Bally decided back in the timeframe, oh, voicemail, I'll check the later. Ballet did things back in that time frame where they put the signal wires in a bundle, a tight bundle of wires for the whole game under the playfield mixed with power wires. So the power for the coils, 43 volts, are tightly up against the power for the signals for the switches. So if you have a coil Fire, it's like an electromagnetism thing, it can induce a voltage into a neighboring small signal wire all of these go the same time expanded to make that signal say hey I Jesus got hit and fire something once in a while so theapore a polluxal world you'll see their I their kickers will fire randomly by himself the kind of a ghost kick me tried the poppers will be high a popper will kick a about in my embryo yeah that why here why everyone in the uh... in the five volts signal line and how williams fixed that in their stuff they did it in the in the uh... in the uh... eighties and nineties they separated the bundles of wires for forty-three volts or one bundle the signal wires over here in their own bundle. they don't mix them together they don't they never have a problem with uh... missed crossed wires and weird stuff like that like bally has so this was the same thing. every once in a while You go to the pop up for nest and six-pillar man the right kicker might fire once all by itself this from that you know the real big fix for as you take apart the whole bottle why why yeah yeah yeah not doing that no no way uh... the other small fix i might do for this is i might find the exact why which i think it's i think so the top left pop up for his one is doing it that's what inducing the problem i might actually take that wire and just sneak it out of the bundle and just have that I don't know by itself or something and see if that still causes it. You know, I'm going to see if I can just do a little bit of work on it to stop it. But it's really not that big of a deal. John Day when he was here, he's like he noticed it but he's such a nice guy he didn't want to tell me because you know but I said oh yeah I saw that. He noticed it happened but he just attributed it to being the phantom valley firing So, so there's two little tech tips for your folks out there. That's what, uh, the fans want to hear. And then, okay, I got something for you. Sure. We got, you remember us playing, uh, the head to head game battle station by myth pinball. Remember we played that? Oh yeah. Yes. Where did we play it? We played it at, well, I played it at, but we also played it at, at Alton. Correct. Are you aware that there are two more of these games out there? One, I don't know, couldn't find much about it. There's a Japanese version of this called Super Panic Ball. I've seen a couple of them for sale in auction sites. But there's a brand new one and we've interviewed him and you remember him by the Dukes of Hazzard machine, Jake Danzig. Oh, that guy. Yes. Yeah, he's coming out with it. It was actually the best of the show for Expo Monster League Hockey. So this head to head thing is becoming a thing. So it's all but they all rob it from the from mythmaker guy from that guy. The you know, you know, it's not the first guy in the party thing. I'll shake things up a little bit. My guess is we're going to see Myth Pinball again at um, Pintastic and Allentown because he's in Massachusetts. That makes sense. I don't think Jake is in Arizona. No Myth Pinball. He's out in Pennsylvania. I thought. Oh yeah. I think he's a Pennsylvania guy. I don't think he's a I don't think he's a mask guy. I think he's out towards that. Either or. It's accessible is what I'm getting to. I'm just, I would like to see these games in the same area so you could do a compare and contrast. I'm really wondering how much the games differ. Isn't that play kind of crowded now? Now you're crowding out that kind of... It's all the same game, isn't it? It's all the same stuff. I don't know. Again, I watched the video. I'm guessing the hockey game is more hockey based. The Battlestation game is more of a... I don't know, a combat game, I guess? I can see the hockey game working. I think that theme done right, that would be a seller. Right, he's doing it with Monster League. He's doing it with monsters. It's like that baseball game, Zombie baseball. Don't know it. You know, the company, well, traditional pitch and bat game. They did a traditional baseball theme, but then they did one with a zombie theme. Okay. Not so much. I don't know. I'm going to go to the next one. Anyway, so I wanted to put that on the radar just in Jake was interviewed by another podcast. If you're interested, yeah, go see. I didn't see any pricing on that. I know myth is now taking money. I don't know, seven, $8,000 somewhere in that range for that game. Anyway. Okay. Uh... let me go to uh... Funhouse. So, I wanted to test out some uh... some driver boards I had and they are... they're early rev driver boards. Williams did some weird things on some of their revs. They all work the same uh... in all these different games. All WPCs use the same driver board but they're different revs. So, um... so anyway, I want to test it out and say, well the easiest one to I'm going to test out Maureen's funhouse. I haven't had her funhouse up in quite a while. And she's not really one to play the game unless I'm playing, you know, pinball with her. And I don't really play the game that much, so I usually say, well, I'd rather not have a ramp game. I'm going to put up a nice, cool, classic game instead of that. I sure people out there are saying what You have a beautiful funhouse Why don you put that up That deserves you know time in the sun This game it a brand new Mirko playfield not the Mirko from today but the one from way back when where they used the good quality wood You can actually see the wood grain in the shooter lane, and it's nice and none of that weird glue stuff in there, and it doesn't have any clear coat problems. It's lots of clear on this game, and the clear is nice and solid. It's a really well done field when they first started doing these years ago. 808 sillman,
    58:40
    Lidchen Mills, Geek discipline, bidetfilmsетьheel.com This week's topic is the most popular topic in the game. I typically use his nice lighting. His lighting is even better than comet lighting. A little more expensive but it's worth it because as you know George, the light that he uses looks really very close to incandescent but brighter. The same color temp and the same look to it. So I wind up putting those typically in the kickers on a classic game. Sometimes I'll put them all sporadically in the other GI section of the game to intermix with regular Incandescent lights. But as for the six-minute-dollar man, I put them in the kickers and everything else was incandescent 44 bulb. And I looked at it next to the funhouse, next to it, the funhouse looked dim. And the six-minute-dollar man looked nice and bright. What kind of bulbs do they use in funhouse? They use the, uh, they use 44s. Oh, okay. The Yeah, 44 44 is for the most part. Let me think here for yeah. Yeah for under the playfield Yeah, pretty sure yes, it is a mixture for regular bayonet is what you're saying Yeah, regular bayonet and a mixture of the 555 stuff the wedge In the bed some of those some of those two so so what I did mix and match those. I Don't know why I did that. Oh, then you might have had leftovers I think for the GI on the playfield they went with the bayonet and for everything else they did the GI in the backbox and the feature lights are all 555 wedge. So what I did is say okay I'm going to do my common LED, warm LED, two SMDs to the funhouse. So I did that to the GI and then I also put warm trough lighting in it which I think is It was really nice on the Modern Ramp Game. Put that in there. And what else did I do? Oh, I have some side blades, some mirror side blades for these games. And I bought them over the years and I keep buying them and I specify on the site. Do you want it for Stern? Do you want it for Bally Williams? Do you want it for Bally Williams remake? And I keep saying I want it for the original Bally Williams. And what do I keep getting? The remake one. I think because they have an extra stock of this stuff. Oh, it's all the same thing. So I keep getting those and it's been a couple years. I tried putting in Maureen's game. There's a hole cut out in the back. Why it doesn't it doesn't fit. This is why it's not the same thing. It's close but not the same. There's a hole in the back where the hinge goes where there's like a bolt that is a hole inside the mirror blade does not line up. You're about an inch off. So you'd have to like recut that hole with a hole saw or something to make it work. But it sucks. So now I have these blades for Bally Williams remakes. How many remakes are out there that I need these stupid I'm the poor sap that paid 300 bucks for this crap and so I'm stuck with them until I can figure out what to do with them. So I didn't put any mirror blades on her game but I did all this other stuff I did to it so that's looking much brighter now in the way it should be. So she's all, big smile on her face. When she was playing the first time with me down there I saw her playing and I saw her smack rooting the mouth and he goes, ow! You know she was having a grand old time. Especially she likes when I was rocking her and she was like, oh, I'm going to get a new one. Fast succ komtun job hunting free trial team call 302-855-XB48 Social Information http://www.patrex.com.au http://www.patrex.com.au I'm going to play it, but I hate to take it back down. When's it going to come up again? You know, so I don't know. So I might take her game down. I might bring the $6 million man upstairs and I have four upstairs and make a fifth. But when I put a five, fifth game up there, it's the room is I think better with just four games. You can cram five in there, but it's kind of crowded for the upstairs game room. So I like four in there. So we'll see but I have a Star Trek Next Gen I got to put up, Twilight Zone, Doctor Who and a Monster Bash. So these are some of the games that we're going to hear about in months forward? Months forward. You're also going to hear about a Skateball months forward. I think those five. I think... Okay, good. Probably and probably a Sea Witch too. I'm going to be doing a Sea Witch for PJ. So I got that too. Hopefully I want to get that. He's been waiting for a while for that and he's been very patient. So I want to get that done for him. And yeah, other than that, I'm going to be doing, we're doing another Simpsons real soon. Pinball party, early 2000s. This one here, it looks like he got it, he bought it from the pinball company and you know, it did a pretty good job on it. They still have some black rubber on it, which I'm not a fan of, but no, it was doing fine. I was on the phone with a guy and he said that all of a sudden one day the guy said that he had no sound. So they told me, oh just buy a new, buy a rotten dog board and put it in and it should be all good to go. And so he did that and he swapped all the chips over and now he has no sound and also other things not working on the game. So I looked, I said send me pictures of all your boards. He sent me a picture of the original board. Original board has no battery damage because they from the from The pinball place he bought it from, they put NVRAM in it and took the batteries out and it says no batteries. He put a big sticker saying no batteries needed. Well, there's no battery holder either so you couldn't put them anywhere anyway because he took the battery holder out. So it wasn't battery damage and I think basically that DAC chip that was upside down in the Rotten Dog one, whatever. You think it's the same thing? I think it's the same thing or it's something else. I think part of his sound problem, I looked at the work he did. He had one of his chips that he put in, it's upside down. I can tell. The notch is the wrong way. So that will wreck your day. So he wants me to go and do a whole big day spa in his game anyway. So I'm going to do all that work and fix his sound problem and do that. That's coming up actually tomorrow. Going to do that and then we got another another road trip to this part down to Connecticut down near Foxwoods. This guy's an Airbnb and he's got a space and bit no space he's at it not that one. Some like space invaders silver ball mania, the small space invaders. There's one to throw a bit of money at it's in this Airbnb and he has one of these boards that I'm not a fan of the one the board that makes the game you know be all different with one of those You know things. Right. You know, I'm just not a fan. I just, I don't know why people, but he loves it like that. He likes how the game, he thinks the game is boring without it. He bought the game like that from some guy up in Troy, New York. And I saw some work, he sent me some pictures. Oh, I saw that game. You did? Yeah, that's the guy who owns an Airbnb up there. Up in Troy, New York? Yeah. He sold to me. He advertises the Airbnb as like the pinball Airbnb or something like that. Yeah. Wait a minute. So wait, he sold it to another guy with an Airbnb down in Connecticut then. That makes sense. Oh. Okay. I mean, look, it could be anybody else, but I remember seeing that machine for sale. Okay. How long ago? Not long ago. Hmm. Okay. Then there you go. That's the same. That's weird. It's the same game. No, it was advertised on Pinside. I remember looking at it because I was like, and it wasn't crazy money either if I remember. And I can tell this guy's having problems. This guy's having problems with the game, you know, so and so I see some questionable Why do you think the guy at the Airbnb in Troy was getting rid of it? Yeah, I know so now I'm gonna be you know, right then they're asking me about well when you work on the game What you know are kind of the price and you're what kind of war The game should come to your house. Yeah. That's going to be one of those, you're going to look at it, you're going to need to think about it, and when you're on the clock, you know, people start pacing, they're like, what are you doing? Well, he's not going to be there. He basically said, I can stay at his Airbnb for a couple nights while I work on it, so we're going to get a free Airbnb stay out of it. The game is connected. I have all the boards I need. So as long as the connector is right, you know. But I was trying to get rid of the stupid Arduino thing and just put it back to regular. Because maybe that's introducing some problem into the game. I don't know. It could be. I'm going to have some weekly stuff on me anyway in case I have to do a boardectomy. So we'll see what happens. So do you have anything else? That is it. You can go. We got about eight minutes left in this segment. Okay, well, I'm not going to need eight minutes so we'll end a little early.
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    Not to bring everybody down, but I lost my sister last month and people reached out to me. I had not spoken to my cousin Kenny since my wedding like 40 something years ago. Wow. Well, he's traveled the world anyway. That's not the story. So I said, Hey, Kenny, you know, I got a pinball collection. And he's like, Oh, yeah. I go, you guys used to have he's got three brothers, but two of the brothers lived in the basement of this house in Brick, New Jersey, with my aunt. My uncle had passed and they had a 1965 bankable. Oh, I got I got a same game flipperpool same situation. So is that a good game? Yeah, not a bad game, especially well the only I don't like any game from the 60s. You actually get a Load the ball yourself and then plunge right? Well, that's what he said. He goes do you remember I go I absolutely do and my one cousin Bruce is He's MacGyver he can fix just about anything and I said to him, you know How did you guys keep that game running? He goes Bruce would just keep it running. They paid In 1977, they bought it from the Italian ice shop up the street from them for $175 bucks. I didn't think that was too bad for back then. That's not bad. You're paying up a little bit. Is it a working game or not? Yeah, yeah. Every time we'd go over to his house, you know, the game would be there in the basement and we'd play it all the time. It was great. That's not bad. Not bad at all. It was good to connect with cousin Kenny. I want to give a shout out to all you New Englanders. Dave probably doesn't even know this. Well, he probably does. The Patriots won yesterday. You didn't watch, did you? Of course not. Patriots? Who? What are they doing? Basketball? You didn't watch. They're in the Super Bowl. Tune in two weeks from yesterday. The Superb Owl. I'll be watching. Okay, so another thing shout out to our good friend and correspondent in Australia today is January 26th when we're recording it's Australia Day there Don't ask me to recite what Australia Day is about. It sounds like it's kind of like our Independence Day
    71:13
    but Salute out to Grant and his wife Sue. Happy Australia Day Grant and Sue. Right. So I think it's kind of he was partying yesterday So good to hear that. I'll leave you with this. You've heard me say time and time again my love and hate for robots, but I really do want a robot like a real live, you know, Rosie the Robot. Do you want Rosie or Sister Jessica? No, no, no, no. Here's what I thought of this morning. Well, well, after I came in from shoveling, I said, wouldn't it be nice to have the robot? What do you think of the new robot go out and shovel the snow? Well basically what we're going to get is a whole new slave class but it's going to be robot slaves. I'm getting one. Alex is already a slave that way we're gonna have more of this stuff. They might want their own rights. Okay so humor me. Humor me. If I do ultimately get a robot do you think the robot would be able to play pinball with me? Down the road, yes. Yeah, but not right now. But yeah, eventually, sure. Yeah. You think the robot would get good enough to beat you? To beat? Uh... I don't think they have hand-eye coordination. They need a lot of hand-eye coordination. Maybe. Down the road. I want to see that. I'm sure I'm not the only person who's thought, well, you look surprised. © B ada JONGHAN gaia QEDYAornalist inform merlist Red Body setzenfors JingarrR dessaDak-Raj It would be nice to have that aspect. I'd basically tell Rosie or Jessica the Rogue, but don't you have work to do around here? Don't you clean the floors and get some Oh, that too, but I'm saying There's someother things that would be helpful. Make me a Cookie, make me a Sandwich. Don't know about that. нач தיμε Bathe sawea N不會 inhalevolla Top Street A I'm calling me that, Master George. Exactly. Then all of a sudden it's going to turn red. The eyes are going to turn red and then it's going to turn on its own. The lasers are going to come out and blast me and then you're going to find Cook George next to his pinball collection in the basement. Yep, Skynet. We're building Skynet, George. We're building our own enslavement. We're going to be technology traps coming up soon. I think for the older generation that need help and they don't have a younger crew or whatever to help them out, they're going to need help. Well, I wanted to call it something, but I'm not allowed to. How bad were you going to call it, George? Well, I just remember as a kid, my grandfather always liking to have me around or one of my cousins to do the things. Hey, what do you call you? Oh, that's kind of it. It's kind of derogatory. That's why I don't say it on the podcast. But I think everybody gets what it is. Boy, hey boy, pay attention when I'm talking to you, boy. I think I know. Is it a racist term, George? I think you know too. It's controversial in today's world. But that's kind of how I'm looking at the robot. I'm saying, Oh, boy. The Robot you could do that, but you have friends over they might kind of follow. Yeah
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    Well, hey, that's not a dog that's a robot Boy oh boy. Oh Be nice be nice be nice to your robots Be nice to your robots don't be calling them derogatory names. Anyway, that's all I got. Sorry Sorry, I strayed from the pinball. Well, not really. Not really. You were kind of there. I try to keep it relatable. Anyway. Nice. That's it. Next month. Tune in, folks. Second highest rated program of 2025. David Marston has agreed to grace us with his presence and we will talk all things pintastic. So stay tuned. And I am going to be getting an interview with John Day pretty soon. I'm also going to try to get Jim Rutherford. I'm going to get him for a little interview. Okay. So I'll have that as well. What's that? Yeah. Hyperball. Hyperball. Yes. Who's got a hyperball? Jim does. Oh, that's right. You've talked about that. A nice one. So it's going to be nice. I'm going to pull all that together from a couple episodes ago and talk about all that stuff. Okay, so folks until next month, my name is George. Stay lit and tilted. Hopefully all you folks down south get your power back and stay warm and we'll see you in February. We'll see you in February and hope you survive the snow coplet apocalypse. Yeah, apocalypse. And hope all of you have bought some gold and silver over the last couple years because if you are, you are ringing the bell. Oh, we are the boys in chorus, we hope you like our show. We know you're looking for us, but now we have to goooo! Who do you call when you want your pinball machine restored? Dr. Dave! Dave? Who? Dave! D-A-V-E! Yeah, Dave! A-right! George, you don't know what you're saying! You're under their control! George, we've had it with you. Say no rodeo, bro-dad. Hasta la vista, baby.