Aw yeah. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. I'm your host, Alan, as always, one of the owners of Wedgehead in Portland, Oregon, a pinball bar. But I'm here with my co-host, one half of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast, it's Alex the Waterboy. How are you doing? Oh, I'm doing great, Alan. I'm doing particularly great because it's my turn to plug our coffee fundraiser. That's right. If you're a fan of the show and you want to show your appreciation for all the hard work Alan's put in and the easy work I've put in over the past 97 episodes, you can go throw us a few bucks on coffee.com slash Wedgehead podcast. That's ko-fi.com slash Wedgehead podcast. We really appreciate it. We use that money to fund our trips across the country where we get to go check out location pinball in places other than Oregon. You also will get an invite to our discord where we're always in there chopping it up with the gang and hanging out talking pinball, getting into all the rumors and stuff that we never talk about on this podcast. All the goofy stuff, all the things that we never really talk about on the show. It's all in there. If you want to interact with us, interact with other fans on the show. I got to be honest. I, I still read every email I get in every dm but i don't always respond and it's just like i'm glad everyone you all like the show please know that if you send me an email or a dm i will probably see it but i might not respond we still i still got a whole business to run and that's like my day job there's a little bit of stuff going on making you know 100 episodes of podcasts is taking a bit of work too it's a little bit of work and so we prioritize a lot of maybe too much time inside the discord so if you want to just donate even five dollars say thank you to the show we are active in the discord and that probably is the best way to get a hold of either one of us yeah 100 but uh today's episode what are we talking about we're talking about the humble flipper pinball is a game that evolved from bagatelle and other early tabletop games that had literal pins hammered into the wooden playfield up until 1947 pinball machines quote unquote didn't even have their most iconic piece of hardware yet that's because the flipper was invented in 1947 by designer harry matt working for gottlieb on his game humpty dumpty and thus changed the game forever yeah it's notably the one thing in pinball that wasn't invented by harry williams or Steve Ritchie yeah yeah the only thing ever those two guys who we've done episodes talking about both of them those two guys invented fucking 95 percent of what you can point to in a pinball machine but they didn't invent the flipper that was that was the other harry that was the other harry harry maps harry maps i thought it was Harry Mabs no like the because the machine's called nabs no i don't know i just thought it was no that's nags i think that's williams nags we're going off the rails sorry sorry but the flipper of today that you all play on the modern game it's changed a lot over the last 75 years or so undergoing the switch from AC to DC power, and it featured many changes in size, shape, and power throughout the decades. Flippers have been pretty standardized over the last 30 years of pinball's history, but that doesn't mean that they are all created equal even today. Because of the modern solid state era, programming has a lot to do with how a flipper feels, and we are going to discuss all the different changes of flippers throughout the years. So shut your yappers, we're talking flappers. Oh, good. That's why we're doing this. As your parents will say. Yeah, hit the flappers. Okay, we're starting with early history, the early days of pinball flippers. Alan wanted us to shout out the legendary Russ Jensen, who was an avid pinball historian. His studious documentation of pin games during his life is the basis of so many different photos and flyer images available on the Internet Pinball Database, IPDB. We're pulling a lot of this early information directly from an article that he wrote called The Evolution of the Flipper. If you guys want to really get into the history of this, we recommend you looking up that Evolution of the Flipper article. I'll tag it in the show notes. But yeah, Russ Jensen was a famous pinball collector and early historian. And a lot of those images you see on the IPDB, especially of really old games, will have Russ Jensen's name on it. And he wrote this great article. What's funny is today, like the flipper again, you don't even think of a pinball machine if it doesn't have a flipper. We even call flipperless games like bingos or you're like, oh, that's not pinball. It's not pinball until it gets the flipper. Yeah, we always call I mean, we always will call them bagatelles or bingos depending on what they are. And what's funny is like in France, they call the game pinball flipper. So it's like it's called by the flipper. So pinball wasn't the first thing to have this mech. They were actually the old pitch and bat style games. The bat and ball baseball games already basically had a flipper mech beforehand. But Gottlieb was just the first to make pinball machines with flippers. And the first game, Humpty Dumpty had six and they faced backwards as compared. They didn't face each other. They faced away from each other. Unlike today's orientation, Humpty Dumpty had three flippers on each side. and the games only had two solenoids controlling them meaning that three flippers on one side shared together linked together into one solenoid with a long kind of linkage and three flippers on the other side the flippers were pretty weak because of this yeah and humpty dumpty kind of just sucks like even compared to like it's like you can play pre-flipper games that are actually like fun and engaging and Humpty Dumpty it's like the flippers were the gimmick and once you've played like modern flipper games or even like wood rail flipper games and then you play Humpty Dumpty you're like this one like it's very much the flippers there is a gimmick you don't really gain any control they're not serving much purpose yeah they can extend the length of the ball and obviously they were a big deal yeah absolutely but it's funny because it's like they really are just sort of a modification of the pitch and bat game design the old em pitch and bat games steve cordick is credited with the first use of flippers being in their now accepted placement at the bottom of the play field kind of above the center drain they were still backwards on the first game that he made a game called genco's triple action they were at the bottom of play field there was just two of them and there was a center gap in between them like modern he's sort of the guy that put them there, and he's very proud that he put them there, that they basically stayed there since. Yeah. But they were still backwards. They weren't facing each other yet. Early 1950s, all the companies had started to switch the orientation of the flippers to face each other rather than facing away from each other. So we get basically the modern orientation, the way it's been ever since. Gottlieb was the first to do it with their game Just 21, released in 1950 and during the time of the invention of the first flipper three years earlier 1947 up until 1968 all flippers used by all manufacturers were roughly two inches long williams was the first company to switch over to longer three inch flippers on their game hay burners 2 in 1968 although they still made a couple a burners is one a hell of a game it's fun and theme i've never played that thing but i'm just that's a good name it's a good time it's a good time it's actually not even like a standard length play field it's like a short play field funny yeah it's a fun game but they did continue to make a couple games afterwards with the short flippers it's not like they went yeah the three inch didn't immediately take off like most things in pinball like the new things they kind of like they debut they may or may not be a hit but then it takes years for adoption either way if they're popular or not popular it still takes years for them to become universal valley way their first three inch flipper game in 1969 so a year after williams and gottlieb was the last company to fully switch over to the longer flippers my gottlieb being slow to adopt the technology that the public is asking for no not my gottlieb gottlieb didn't go into the three-inch flippers until 1972 do you know when like the last like well i guess that's kind of a trick question because there's still two-inch flipper games you know like yeah pbr can crusher casa bonita as it's now known yeah when when did they really like kind of abandon them in mass do you know i don't know if that's in here i might be skipping ahead they still released a couple they it's hard because they would also do the thing where they had the longer flippers and then they would have two inch flippers higher up the play field yeah everybody's always joking they were like using up that stock yeah so it's not a great like this is the last time they did it well yeah and because they kind of still keep making them still do it every once in a while a game comes out like safe cracker or you know won't ellie or whatever that has the little flippers yep in the mid-1960s bally designer and madman ted zale also made a series of games with the smaller flippers that would close together and eliminate the center drain gap between them completely these were called zipper flippers because they zip they zip together zip right together the last game to have them was nip it all the way in 1972 so this was one of those instances where the longer flippers even by gottlieb were out now but valley was still releasing a game with two inch flippers they did close yep but it's weird to see it at this stage but that game was a pretty famous alligator themed pin and it was the game prominently featured in the tv show happy days even though that tv show was supposed to be set in the 1950s even though it was filmed in the 70s flippers sold it you know they're like yeah it looks like an old enough game to me it's got those little guys at the bottom so that works and then we get to sort of the evolution of the flipper here because these up until then all the electromechanical games use ac power coils and for most of the games that you'll regularly see from this era the coils were 24 volts are you saying that with 100 confidence because i thought the later williams ems are dcs i believe like in grand prix because it's like they don't make the buzzing when they when you cradle i believe i said for most of the games that you'll regularly see from this era, the coils were 24 volts and AC. Okay. Most. Yeah. Oh, my bad. My bad. I read that wrong. But I want to ask you. So when I say Williams started moving their coils over to DC voltage during the 1970s and the DC voltage packed a bigger punch, the other manufacturers did as well. And in the late 1970s, early 1980s, the manufacturers that also jumped the voltage from 24 to 48 volts DC. Gottlieb was the lone outlier that kept their flipper voltage at 24 volts until the late 1980s. Just classic Gottlieb shit, man. Through and through. I always love it. But yeah, so to get into a little bit of nerdy shit, I really didn't prepare well for this. I don't want to speak out of turn and lose my legitimacy because anybody that's followed the show for a while knows I am an electrical engineer. Well, I want to ask you about this. I want you to explain this to the listener if you can. the concept of AC versus DC voltage and why or why not that would feel different on a flipper. Yeah. So the big difference between AC, it stands for alternating current and AC power is delivered in waveforms. You stack, it's usually three, I mean, it's three phase when you're getting in a house. And so you stack three waveforms and they kind of all overlap and you're getting the power out of the peak, one of those waves at any time. So they do their best to always kind of be close to that 120, the peak or whatever, but there will always be the little valleys before the next wave kind of is coming up and that's why you can get inconsistent power if you're playing an em sometimes you hit the flipper and it does not feel like it has the juice sometimes it feels like oh that's a fresh flipper and that's not like a matter of maintenance or something it's just literally the power is not being delivered as consistently when you rectify that power you smooth it out to make it into direct current dc power it's going to be the same the early dc power is kind of shitty It still kind of has lumps in it, but it's going to be a lot more consistent than the AC power that was going to the solenoids before. Yeah. So back when we had the electricity wars in the Industrial Revolution, Nikola Tesla basically was the champion of AC voltage, which is what we use in our homes and our day-to-day life. You know, this is when you experience electricity in your life, you're using AC voltage. So you plug anything into a wall or whatever using AC voltage. And then it immediately gets turned into DC voltage. Yes. Because AC voltage is really nice for traveling long distances without loss, but it's really useless with modern electronics. Yes. Edison was the one that was championing DC voltage, and he famously used it to shock an elephant to death with voltage, right? Yeah. So he killed Topsy the Elephant famously, right? He's like, mine's superior because you can kill an elephant. And back then people were like, damn, that is better, isn't it? But like Alex was saying, not to get too far into electricity, but we should touch on it since it matters to us in pinball. It matters a lot with the flippers. And the problem with DC voltage and the reason why we've we changed the AC voltage in our day to day lives is because DC, it's really hard to transfer over large stretches. Right. You would need massive power substations everywhere, like literally everywhere. and so ac makes it easier to send the yeah it's easier to transmit that's why we have it and in the early em era all the coils were using ac power so they're gonna be weaker and like alex says the main thing you'll notice as a player is it'll be a little bit varied when you're hitting the flipper because it's on the wave you get really weak hits out of them sometimes that feel horrible that's the nicest thing about going to they also buzz like crazy because they like when you run like when you run that much current through a coil that's my understanding is the buzzing is just literally because it's like the inconsistent power so it's just like the little vibration in there and they they make a ton of noise if you cradle if you hold the flippers even though they will as we'll get into they have lower power coil windings in them so it's not going to burn anything up or shouldn't well within with an end of stroke switch that's what they're there for i think even a lay person you don't need the electrical engineer to explain this but when you jump up from 24 volts up to 48 volts, the flippers are going to be stronger, right? You're running more voltage. They're going to hit harder, right? It depends what you're doing with it. But yes, there's going to be the ability to get more power into there. It's not as simple as Gottlieb flippers are twice as weak. Yeah, they're not twice as weak. But they are notably weaker. So yes. Gottlieb, during their System 1 and their System 80s, they were still running flippers on 24 volts when all the other manufacturers, they went to DC, but they're 24 volts instead of 48, which is the other manufacturers jumped to the 48 and they feel a lot stronger, you know, and that's the industry standard. Now Gottlieb went to it in their system three in 1989, I think is when they started, which is funny but they finally get there But even then they sort of do weird shit They always lag and they always do weird shit Yeah But up until 1989 all flippers also had dual wind coils That means the voltage to the coil would remain the same when the flipper button was pressed, but the end of stroke switch would switch over and reroute the voltage through a higher resistance winding to lower the hold voltage so as not to burn the solenoids out when a flipper button was being held in by the player. Yep. Does that make sense to you? Do you want to elaborate on that? No, other than it's like a really cute way to handle that problem. It's interesting because it's like, yeah, you want as much power going through the solenoid as possible. But if you do that, it'll get really hot really fast. If you have a coil and it sticks full power, if it doesn't switch to lower power, if you have a stroke switch out of adjustment or whatever on an old game, you can burn up a coil and just like start melting. I mean, you'll probably melt the solder or something is what will happen. you'll like you'll melt the wires off of it because shit gets real hot real fast when you run it like full current for too long yeah and not even like 30 seconds a minute like it doesn't take long send stuff up and smoke really quick you'll basically it's always like it's it's kind of funny if you see a coil stick high it'll go up and smoke so much faster than you expect and when i'm saying coil i'll give a quick example for the for the layperson listener basically the way everything moves in a pinball machine when we say coil or we say solenoid we're using the term interchangeably. Coil sort of describes like the way it looks like if you were to cut off the paper and you would see it. It's just a piece of wire wound around itself. If you put electricity through a wire, it creates an electromagnetic field. So if you have a whole bunch of them in a little stack, it makes a really strong electromagnetic field. And we use that to pull a little cylinder of metal up into it when you let that current through. Yeah. And that's how flippers move or pops move or slingshots or anything solenoids get used across like everything all kinds of industries and it's funny that they're so ubiquitous in pinball machines yeah it's like it's like the only reliable robust thing that can kind of like keep taking hits and keep functioning very well yes there's a major reason that all mechs that aren't pieces of shit are like made with coils and when you start putting motors in having teeth in a pinball machine like gears you have to really know what you're doing with the engineering it's hard to mess with all my point is coils are remarkably robust whereas other moving pieces are not and relatively cheap yeah and and understood yeah there's a bit of copper in them but like other than that it's really simple like alex was saying what's interesting about the way they handled the problem of like you want it to be really strong when you flip so it can it's strong enough to move that heavy steel ball off the flipper and to hit shots at the top of the play field But the way they decided to handle it back then was to run two separate windings around it, one with thicker gauge wire and one with thinner gauge wire. And the idea is that you run it through one side and it goes full voltage. You hit a switch. The switch opens. It reroutes the path to the other winding of the coil, which just causes less or more resistance. Yeah, on the old games, it's like literally the path changing. It's like a trolley switch kind of. Yes. You know, and it's like, oh, it's going through the one where the trolley is moving faster versus slower kind of thing. And that's kind of what, yeah, I just wanted to, I wanted us to be able to explain what's going on. Because I get asked that by people all the time. They don't really understand how pinball machines work or, like, how solenoids work. It's very weird. And, like, if you've not, like, done little, like, science kits or you've not, like, gone to school for it, you really don't see this shit outside of pinball machines in your everyday life. But in 1989, Data East debuted the first single wound coil. So Data East, which is now Stern, in 1989, decided we don't need two separate windings. We're going to do this a different way. So instead of relying on the end of stroke switch to change between high and low, they used the MOSFET transistors on the board to pulse high and low voltage to the coil itself. So they used the same winding. Now they're just changing how much voltage they're sending to the coil versus other pinball systems up until this time and even after this time, would just handle it with two separate windings, trolley tracks, like moving it high then low using the switch, right? But Data East was like, now we're going to use these MOSFET transistors on the board to control it. And in 1990, they modified the design further with RoboCop, which was the first game with what they called solid state flippers. And they removed the end of stroke switch and just had the game pulse high voltage for 40 milliseconds. And then it would switch automatically over to hold. Yeah, which is a really interesting change for Data East to make when there wasn't a big motivating factor. And I have to imagine it's because they realized they could do this cheaper because a lot of innovation you see like this in pinball. If the previous thing was working fine and it changes, even if this does end up leading to, I put in the notes here that people refer to these as the walnut crackers. I don't know if Stern did that themselves or if that's just kind of what they did. And I think there's Gary Stern on the flyers. Yeah, right. Like, these can crack walnuts. Yeah. Yeah, because these are wicked strong for the era. Like, Robocop flippers rip when they're fresh builds. And it's interesting that they did this because it's like, I don't think they necessarily worked. I don't think that was necessarily the goal. I imagine they did it to be cheaper because it's less wire and it's like less hardware required. And it's cool that they did this because moving to solid state flippers means the power is no longer passing through the flipper switch. So up until this, the power would go to the actual flipper switch. The player would press that switch, close it, and the current would flow through that switch into the flipper. And when you have that, you have a potential, you have a failure point, potentially. And yet it's also something that when it gets dirty and it has worse contact over time, it impacts the strength of the flippers. That's why when you play, like, a lot of, like, Gottlieb System 3s famously used, Yeah, they use direct power until like Gottlieb used it until the end. And a lot of those games, even after a fresh flipper rebuild, feel like shit. And it's probably because of ancient flipper switches or filthy ones. You can clean them up. Yeah. So that's kind of a big advantage of this is that it's like you're not relying on an actual contact point to get the power. It's coming directly from a board. Yeah, it's coming to the board to the coil. It's not having to pass through the cabinet switch to then the end of stroke switch on the flipper. Right. And through the coil. Correct. So even Williams games up through the 80s, they didn't switch over until 1992 when they switched over to the fliptronic system, which was kind of mimicking Data East's first foray, even though they still kind of kept doing it differently. Williams continued to use double wind coils. They do handle it a little bit differently. We don't need to go too far into that. The main difference that I wanted to highlight was basically just that Data East went to a single wind, and they're controlling it with a MOSFET transistor on the board. Can you describe what a MOSFET transistor is? That's getting into something that I haven't thought about in 10 years in school. I can tell you what I think it is, and then you can describe it if I'm wrong, I guess. Sure, yeah, do that. What I understand is a MOSFET transistor acts as a gate that can open in different directions. Yeah, basically. I'm trying to get like a MOSFETs functionally are just passing. It's to me, it's basically like a controlled relay where it it's weird because I don't actually understand the difference. Like, I don't understand fundamentally how they work, but they get used just to pass high voltage. It's it's a way to control high voltage power from like a low voltage board. So it's like, oh, it's like on a driver board. You have a whole bunch of MOSFETs in the little CPU chip is telling them like, OK, now let like I got this input. So send high voltage to the flipper wire. For this amount of time, for 40 milliseconds. Yeah. Yeah. That gives you an unbelievable amount of control. It puts all of the flipper handling into the hands of your software. Yes. Which is a good and a bad thing. We'll talk to you. And what's interesting, that Data East made this switch and Williams followed suit and Gottlieb famously never made the jump. Never did. This is, it's interesting when they make this switch to solid state flippers, it's the first time you kind of see a little bit of pinball magic lost in my opinion because you lose a little bit of physical like you you lose that you lose having the flipper power to go directly through the button that is in the player's hands and it's now being controlled by a computer and every time we lose something physical with pinball a little bit of the magic lost and on this one when you go to solid state flippers you lose that finesse control you lose the ability to do like replicable tap passes yeah most notably once you're once you're in a solid state game tap passes i mean they're still possible if you're really going to the solid state it's like when you don't have the actual power going through there you no longer get like the ability to just do a little soft thing because power doesn't really work in a discrete like when you're closing a physical switch it doesn't actually just go from off to on it has a little arc which creates like a weird little surge it's it's a really hard thing to replicate and we're going to get into that a little bit more at the end of the episode but it is an interesting change and that's why there's a big difference in feel going from 80s games to 90s games yes there was also some interesting alternate flippers oh yeah during this time that we got to talk about oh we got to talk about the bats that's how this show started this show started with an episode about flipper bats we're almost at episode 100 so we got to get back to flipper bats right talking about flipper bats and some of the interesting alternative flippers like i said they're basically all three inches long and in this day no matter what manufacturer they're the same length and they're basically the same size williams won the battle of the shape of the flipper yeah right like dude they're like the ones that like look good and feel good and like function well and so even stern which uses different mechs uses fundamentally the exact same flipper bass yeah you can put one bat swap one bat out for the other and you'll never notice the difference other than the w logo and so banana flippers were probably the most interesting alternate flipper ever yeah by far the most interesting and they were curved bats and they were yellow so they looked like bananas yeah they're curved bats with like so you can't stretch around rubber around them because there's like a convex right yeah cave concave so you can't stretch around the concave so it has like a rubber sheath that kind of like slips over the top yeah so bizarre which has also made them really expensive to buy because they're like an abnormal thing to manufacture so it's they're worth a lot of money now which is interesting you can't easily source replacements and people know people that have them they know they're sitting on gold because everybody wants these banana flippers they came on two games that williams made time work and disco fever it's very notable to me that they came on two games that in absolute no way called for banana shaped flippers did you hear the story too where they said women really like them they thought for whatever reason that women were really gonna like these every time the like the pinball engineers got up to some goofy shit that people were like i don't know about this they're always like listen guys you might not like it but the ladies love this which i think if genuine is kind of like it's cute like they're actually like okay we're trying to make products that appeal to women that's good but it's funny because it's always on like flops and i feel like they're using as a defense mechanism they're like oh we were trying something for the girls didn't work out i just have no concept of why women as opposed to men would like the trap easier that's like the like it's so it's like i don't know maybe i will say women appreciate things that are fun playing a banana flippers very fun because you're gonna you can watch the ball you just hold the alley or not alley passes like roll passes what do you call that where you just let the ball roll off the end of the flipper they're so fun because it's like whoop and the ball just like pops off like a little bike ramp yeah so fun so if women like watching fun ball like you know flipping off the end of the flipper i guess i don't know what the other i don't know what the other reasoning would be but i heard that they were working on a high lie game because high lie apparently got super popular in america for like a six month period in the 80s yeah and then it crashed in popularity by the time they actually had sent these out for machine rollerblading in the 90s right it just has a real short flash in the pan and it's like so they were working on a highlight game and that would make a lot of sense because that's like if you're making a highlight pinball machine it makes if anyone doesn't know highlights that it's like a weird sport that's still popular in other countries somewhere right yeah i think it's a big sport in brazil and they have like those curved kind of uh basket catchers and you catch a ball and you use it to whip the ball at a wall. And it's similar to like racquetball or something or squash or anything like that. It's very defined by its little, I don't know what you call the fucking baskets that you hold, the little catchers. But they're curved in shape. And the ball moves fast as fuck, too. That's the big thing. The ball moves crazy fast out of those things. So regardless of the truth of that, I would love to see somebody make a homebrew game with like a highlight homebrew game with banana flippers because the two games that got them time warp and disco fever suck. Yeah, they're not great novelty because of the banana flippers. But it's like they I think both those games, they had those games and they're like, this is weak. We need to spice this up somehow. And they're like, well, we ordered like 10,000 banana flippers, that highlight game that we canceled. Don't want time warp because that's the only thing that game has going for it, in my opinion. yeah and some people switch these flippers out for normal flippers and i think the game still sucks so yeah you know it's kind of thing it's kind of like it definitely doesn't make the games better it's like why would you take off why would you clip an angel's wings yeah the banana flippers at least add novelty if you have banana flippers and you don't want them sell them to me because they're getting really like i can never find them on ebay or anything i need to set up an alert i love a set just to throw on games for fun like throw them on godzilla or something throw them on kong i think yeah has said he's got the he's got a kong in his office with banana flippers on it i'd love to throw some on a game backwards so they can be true droopy floopers yeah please if you got even just one i would love to buy it off you the other one we covered is lightning flippers which alex alluded to which is our first episode the first episode of this show go back two years ago it's very rough compared to where we are now yeah we did not know what we were doing but it's a really tight episode it also it's a really good topic because lightning flippers rule they're the best dude they were 1 16th of an inch shorter and so that combines for a 1 8th inch wider center gap when they're placed together they were developed to appease william's biggest european distributor and they came factory on fishtails dracula popeye saves the earth and black rose and yeah they're very very and i want to stress this extremely slightly shorter like people act in their mind like they are it's a massive difference it's half the length it's crazy and you're like no we're going from three inches to two inches and 15 16ths which in anything else would be called a rounding error. Yes. But when it comes to like pinball players, egos is like the biggest thing in the world. It's amazing. And the coolest thing about these lightning flippers is they embossed, they paid for another mold. So they have a lightning bolt that goes down the top side of them. So when you look down a pair of flippers, you could see the lightning bolt on them and they look cool as hell They do look cool as hell The only flippers that are arguably as cool in the the only other flippers in the conversation are the the Sega ones with sonic the hedgehog on them those are pretty cool those are cool every but like those are second and they also just fucking badass because they like they make the game a little bit harder they're just a cool thing to do when you see a set of lightning flippers on a game you know whoever owns that game cares about no one ends up with lightning flippers on a game by accident absolutely that's true if you see lightning flippers regardless of your feelings on them and if you're like oh this operator's trying to steal my money or whatever you might think it means that whoever has that game cares about that game yes because it's not something you would ever just you know when it just has an extra pair in their bag no you go out of your way to get that extra one-eighth of an inch combined center gap which is again it just changes it a little bit just tweaks it just a little bit and it's fun it's kind of like the bad boy move of up in the bad boy move for sure they're the bad boy flippers the opposite of lightning flippers that have a fucking lame name and are dork shit are bally's carrot flippers called carrot flippers because they were orange on a lot of games and they have little lines running perpendicular down them that make them look like carrots i don't know if these were invented for bugs bunny birthday bash no they were they were on games before but they're used on bugs bunny's birthday ball They were used on Bally. They were developed at Bally right before the merger with Williams, and they continued to use them after the merger on some of those Bally games anyway. Like Alex said, they got segmented grooves on them. We call them carrot flippers. If you're swapping, so lightning flippers, swapping them onto games that didn't have them from the factory, cool. If you're swapping carrot flippers onto like a Ghostbusters because Ghostbusters is too hard for you, that's fucking dork shit. Don't do that. That is dork shit. That is absolute dork shit. We're pretty positive on this show, but I'm like, don't. If I see you swapping carrots onto something, I'm like, carrots belong at best on a game that came from the factory. Better yet, in the trash. They belong in the trash. Carrot flippers are not cool. They're lame. But if you want to be lame and not cool, you can buy carrot flippers and you can make any game easier. That's true. And so maybe I shouldn't be so harsh, because if you are a new player and you have something, you're like, God, this Dungeons and Dragons is the hardest. Actually, you couldn't do it on that one. Oh, because there's a shield. It would hit the shield. That'd be funny, though. It's like binding. You put the shield up and you can't flip. But yeah, it is another tool. Like really, lightning flippers and carrot flippers are an option. I'm surprised we don't see people swapping them more either way, because it's just an option to tune your games. They don't know that the carrot flippers are necessarily a little bit longer, but somebody's always quick to point out. It only takes one person in a town to tell you about the lightning bolts. They have that person whispering in their ear and like the operators here to fuck you because of these games. And my favorite thing about lightnings is the best part is pinballs, a mental game, dude. Oh, you let them get in your head. The factor of difference. If you believe that you're going to play poorly because of it, you will play horribly when you see those lightning bolts. Yeah, they will. Psych. They will psych you out. If your name is Greg Dunlap, these things will eat away at you. They will eat you alive if you let them. My favorite thing in the world, if you're at Wedgehead and you want to see, come up and introduce yourself. Tell me how much you love the show. Spend $300 or $400 at my bar, and I will be happy to come over and show you the difference between the two flippers. You don't have to do all that. But you come up to me at the bar, and I will pull out a standard 3-inch bat and a lightning bat, and I'll let you hold them. You can see the difference with your own hands and your own eyes, and you will be stunned. You have to put the caliper out to actually definitively know that one's shorter than the other. When you just put them next to each other, the round edges make it hard to tell that one's shorter. They're close. They're so slightly different that the reason that they even put the lightning bolts on them were so that they wouldn't fucking mix them up at the factory because they're literally that similar. They're that close. It's pretty funny. It's funny. The magic of the lightning bolt, dude. It's crazy. And I love them. Lightning Flippers, the fucking best. The best. If you want to make a game more fun instantly, put Lightning Flippers on it. I agree. I agree. It's why I'm slowly swapping them into everything that comes through my house. I'm approaching 50% of my games having Lightning Flippers on it, and none of them had them from the factory. It's awesome. But the last ones we got to talk about are the Pointy Boy Flippers. We talked about, we did a whole episode on Gottlieb's infamous System 3. they're the ones that are extra pointy they're at the tip yeah they're like a triangle it's like flipping with a little pyramid yeah and they're fat at the base of a like they're they look like a cartoon drawing of a pinball flipper or if you see people do like kind of half-ass artistic drawings of pinball like in the flipper is all wrong as far as like exactly they look more like yes like if you draw a flipper in ms paint it comes out looking like these gauntlet flippers in the bats i don't think themselves are the problem the problem is the mechs attached to the bats are pretty bad like we talked about this era has very weak flipper these this generation of gauntlet leaves is very weak flippers compared to their contemporaries and they're prone to bad maintenance they're susceptible to becoming weaker due to neglect this is the problem is like throw the throw makes it easier to trap which sounds good until you're stuck in a really long game where you can't lose the ball and then everyone eventually comes over to the other side of the fence understand like they were better received in their time than we might think from what i've seen it's like people kind of just liked being able to trap up easier a lot of location players were not very good back in the 90s when these games were coming out and it's one of those things that's like i think there's like a short term benefit to making your games easier because when people play your game for the first time and it's easier they're going to have a more positive perception of it yeah but then it doesn't have the long lasting yeah and now when you play these and you're used to like modern game flipper throw you're like jesus these things go up at a 90 degree angle yeah you can like almost always on any feed to the in lane on a gottlieb system three stop the ball without any work just by holding the flipper up which is lame and then we also have pat lawler goes back to the well and creates two inch flippers uh or thing flippers right he uses them as auxiliary flippers in a lot of his games and the main difference between these in the EM flippers is they're just a more modern shape and style. They just are literally like an inch shorter version of the modern kind of more pointy flipper shape. And they're also single unit construction. They're not a multi-piece assembly like the old EM flippers were. Yep. They don't have flipper embossed on the top. Yeah. And then, yeah, there are some other little oddball ones. The safecracker flippers are like a quarter of an inch longer or something. Yeah. They're in between. Yeah, they're not threes. They're close to twos, but they're not. They're like two and a quarter, I think. And then recently, Ultraman and Halloween on the upper playfields have, I think, two and a halves. They might be two and a third or something. They're an abnormal one, and I really wanted to order these to put on games, but they are single-piece machined aluminum. They made their own flipper bats in that unique size, which is really, really interesting. Very interesting. Very interesting indeed. A lot of work to get... A lot of work to do something where it's like, you could have just used twos. It doesn't fucking matter. Like, on that, on those upper playfields, I guess they probably were struggling with... Now I'm thinking about it, the upper, upper playfield is a really late tip of the flipper shot. And I bet that was impossible with a two. And they're like, we got to do something about that. And it was easier, rather than redesigning the game, to just fire up the CNC machine and make, you know, 1,500 of those flippers. Yeah. Interesting stuff, though. That's all like the objective stuff, right? Now we get into subjective stuff. Flipper feel. Do you have like a favorite generation of flippers? What do you think? What's your gold standard? And I think this is different for a lot of people. So I think what's interesting is we got, I don't have it on the notes here, but we probably got to start with the EM era, right? Like, so the EM era has a different feel in general. Like we were saying, they have AC and then they transfer into DC at the very end of, some manufacturers did at the very end. now you get to you do a lot of old forum digging and i have my own feelings of this too but basically the gottlieb flippers of the em era always felt a little bit weaker than the williams or ballys did yep even when they were both using ac not even considering the dc switch but they also felt way more consistent i versus the williams or the ballys you'll get like kind of trampoline bounciness off of them dude the williams for some reason it's really hard to get that like into stroke feeling right yes on their late flipper like like my grand prix yep and so a lot of the time it's like it's really hard to do like live catches and just like stuff like that you get you get weird little like hops yep and so it depends on who you're asking because obviously you need to adjust an end of stroke switch on these it's crucial on any em game or any early solid state game even up until the change of dad east and williams into the 90s but up until then that the end of strokes which is absolutely the end-all be-all of flipper feel and how it's going to change over from high to low right but the variance got leafs just felt better yeah they felt better they're slightly weaker williams would feel strong the strongest especially the late ems but then they would get remember we were playing that yukon yeah and that thing ripped yes for an am and you're like and that was ace i'm pretty sure that's an ac williams is two inch flipper game for sure but i don't know when the cutover was but that thing was fast and i was like whoa there might be something to these two inch williams games that was like the first time i've been impressed with an early williams and so it's just one of those things where it's like i think a lot of people prefer the gotley flipper there are definitely people that prefer the williams flipper because it's especially when he gets a three inch it's the modern shape and and it's strong They get the power. They get the power, but they get more dips in their power, and it gets bouncy. Yeah, it's just they don't really have the feel. Yeah, they don't have the feel. See, I think that's the thing. I think a lot of people, more power makes a better flipper, and that is what they're looking for. And I think that's why people think, a lot of people, I would say popular opinion is probably that modern sterns have the best-feeling flippers. I do think of modern manufacturers, sterns have the best-feeling flippers. maybe can get into that a little bit but i really think a huge huge part of that is purely the power yeah but like so going back to the classics do is your personal preference got leaps when you're talking about ems i don't know i work on a lot of ems and like i like two inch flipper got leaps feel appropriate once you put a three inch bat on that and you get to the end of the flipper and you lose that like it's got too much leverage the weight they start feeling mushy so i think too inch i'm also turning into a two inch gottlieb guy in general i used to only like three inch games the two inch gottliebs are the best for the best for whatever it's i really think it's just a matter of it's like you know how you back in something you get more power than on it yeah it's why like the the right orbit ramp on jaws is just doesn't want to cooperate sometimes because a late flipper shot doesn't have as much power just because of where it's at on the stroke and those the gottliebs the two inch games they play well that's how i kind of want an em to play that being said something like grand prix that's pretty good dude no well that's also that's why you're also talking about very late that's like right before the turnover it's so very different approaches we should be considering more of like the flipper feel of like uh spanish eyes like 72 yeah versus like a gottlieb with three inch flippers from 72 spanish eyes but yeah but it's like how the gottliebs i like i mean i love spanish eyes right you're playing the pot more the flippers on that thing it's just a little bit of different feel but i will say i definitely like to high tap got leave games for sure i like to high tap all of our games when you get a got leave that's high tapped and it's like all cleaned up yeah like fresh rebuild and like clean contacts and everything that is about as good as an em can get yeah you wax the play field and it's the ball slipping across it you're like this is good shit okay early solid state so solid state era pre-ramps what would be your pick you want to kind of like run us down the nuances of the the notable ones I would just say that like Gottlieb, those fat boy flippers before the pointy boys, the fat boy flippers with the 24 volt DC. Those things are indestructible. Like literally like you never rebuild them. Can you can literally never rebuild that? That's what I was like. I've done it on my rock and it made no it makes no difference. Right. Sure. They had never been rebuilt since the game was new. And it's just like it's like, oh, shit, that was a waste of time. Dude, it's crazy because every other era of game you rebuild a flipper and you notice a noticeable difference. On the Fatboy flippers, you really don't at all. And so they're very stiff, dude. Like when a ball hits that thing, their flipper doesn't bend or move in any way. Compared to their contemporaries, they are weak. They're very weak. But it's like if the game works with that, it's fine. Like I don't think anyone's complaining about the flippers being weak on like an Alien Star because it's like, well, you want to rip that spinner off of a rip from the, because, you know, the spinner's only lit when you've just done that in-lane rollover. So you're ripping that spinner when you have, you're not ripping the spinner from a cradle. If you are, you kind of like fucked up. Yes. So it's like the game, the designer had to play into that. If they didn't, it starts feeling worse. But the other thing is like the Bally solid states, the early Bally solid states probably had the best flipper field. Oh, yeah. And then the Williams kind of still had that bouncy hollow. The Williams have the power, but they don't feel good. And I would say sterns are kind of, sterns feel really snappy, like stern electronics from the East. They feel really snappy in a way that it feels like there's no weight behind them. It feels like the stern linkage probably weighs half of what a bally linkage weighs. And I don't know if that's true. It's just they're rickety, but I kind of like it. And that's how those sterns play in general. Everything in a stern feels like it was made with half of the material of a bally or gotlead. and i really like the stern electronic i love dude very similar to the bally's but they well also some of the bally's had linear flippers we don't need to get deep into that but those are garbage but then when they switched over to the different linkages they get better i love so bally's to me are the king of like the classic flipper feel like those are the bally's are the only ones i can really consistently tap pass and shit on so i'm just partial to them yeah i'm like they've got that down and i don't know why they tap pass nicer than the other ones because they're all kind of using the same shit it just works way better for me on them like you're saying like the more we take away we lose little bits we shave off you shave margins with physical differences and that's why it's like i don't like that more power is better and like that's the only thing it's like i love fast pinball but i'm like oh man i kind of like weaker flippers with shallower ramps that are still fast it's like we don't need it because so from there that's our solid state pre ramp era do you want to jump into the 90s from there do you want to talk about the 80s there's a late 80s there's a lot of weird kind of shit going on all the manufacturers are dropping in and out i think we should really just talk about the 90s the solid state flipper era between the battle between williams and bally who had merged at this point versus what was dade's then became sega then become stern yeah but they're sharing the the flipper setup and basically double wound and the fliptronics of the Williams versus the Stern era which was using MOSFETs And I will say that the Stern flippers are definitely stronger Yep. Very, very strong. Very similar to the modern Stern. Yeah, they basically feel the same. The difference is what people will complain about them is that they get fade or they get hollow, whatever. They still get kind of a little bit of bounce in them in the way that, again, Williams like Gottlieb EMs. The flippers, when you snap those flippers, they're strong. They don't trampoline at all. The ball hits them. You cradle, you snap. On a data East, at the end of the stroke, it can kind of like, phew, get off of it a little bit more often. Just with the way MOSFETs are aging on boards and the electrical connections and over time especially. But it's because, especially on the early games, Stern now, but data East then, right? They were programming like, 40 milliseconds and then it'll shut off and it'll go they just gave it a straight time its own time versus williams was going it's when you're holding the end of stroke switch it's high power or you know you press the flipper button and it goes to its full stroke and then once it hits the full stroke it turns on the lower power hold so it's still being controlled literally by the end of stroke switch yeah if you ever want to see the difference in that if you have a bally williams game you can remove the end of stroke switch and the software will compensate yes it'll essentially turn it into a stern and you'll realize like it's building up heat faster and it doesn't have the feel and you'll get knocked down if a ball like if you have a scoop or something ejecting directly at it it's kind of funny because it was like that was the backup for bally williams that was not the intended design and that's the intended design of data east yeah that's the early sterns yep and so for me i think the williams flippers and for a lot of people just far better like just overall like flip tronics williams flippers far better than those yep data east early stern segas so i think a big thing between these two games is that if you go play like if you go play all the segas and stuff if you're a decent player those games you can play all fucking day you can just absolutely be like just nailing ramps and like it's like it feels hard to miss a shot on those because when you're playing with such strong flippers you don't get ramp rejects any sloppy shot to a ramp as long as you get the ball between the two posts into the shot into a ramp entrance it's probably going to go around in bally williams they feel great they're not the most powerful flippers in the world and the designers knew how to play into that i would say Barry Oursler more than anybody and there's a lot of bally williams games with hard ramp shots that you have to hit on the fly or you have to hit clean perfectly clean or you'll get a reject like when you're playing like i'm thinking of dracula the left ramp or if you're playing um uh what's the clint eastwood getting dirty harry there's other examples of it where it's like you'll actually get ramp rejects and ramp rejects are not something that you get on sega's data east or modern sterns because the flippers are so powerful unless you like slop into a ramp but like if you if you get the ball between the entrance you're gonna make it i think that's impacted pinball design much more than people understand like stronger isn't always better and i will say that like now and i think it changed around the sam era which is kind of like what you were talking about when you were like oh you got a white star game at your house and then you're playing that's a secret don't tell the listeners that oh sorry i have an Undisclosed White Star game in the garage. And, you know, like, I've been running Terminator 3 at the bar, and you're like, the difference between... The mechs are basically the same. Stern's using basically the same. They're controlling them with MOSFETs, basically the same. The change that has happened isn't that they went back to double-wine coils and utilizing the end of stroke to control it. They're basically... It's the same thing, they just cooked a better recipe. Yep. Like, the programming's better. You got really good at it. Yeah. You got really, really good. The modern, I do think modern stern flippers feel really good. They just have a lot of power, and I keep being like, I think that might be a problem. Well, you can also, on modern sterns, if you want, turn the power down. No. I would never. But you could. See, that's the thing. I guess I could. Maybe I should. Maybe I'd be like, hey, this is starting to feel more classic. Now we got to talk about the boutique manufacturers. Yeah. Alex's favorite subject. Yeah, it always is. As the resident boutique manufacturer, Stan, the guy that loves boutique games more than anybody I know, a lot of them use Williams mechs because they're off the part. Those are our favorite. And yet, they still have really bad flipper feel. Yeah. And that's when we start getting into the differences. The mechs aren't everything. There are more bits of the hardware. where someone that, anybody that's played a Pinball Brothers game, their older games, I should say, Queen and ABBA are the two that come to mind for me, knows that coils make a massive difference in how flippers feel, and those things are the most noodley, loose, worst-feeling flippers I've ever experienced. But, like, even amongst the people that are using standard Bally Williams parts, off the shelf from Pinball Life or whatever, there's a lot of variance, and it comes down to the programming, and how they're pulsing things and how quick they're doing things. Well, I think a lot of it is that they're 100% following the Stern lineage, where they're trying to just pulse voltage, and then they're just missing the recipe. We talked to Aaron, I can't remember his name, with Fast. They make board sets that are used by Barrels of Fun, and they're now used in the newest Pinball Brothers game, Predator, and I believe the Pedretti games use them too, but they're also available for homebrew use. Fastboards, you most commonly see them brought up with homebrewers. They did a major redesign on the logic of their flipper control based off of trying to replicate the waves they saw in solid state flippers to the point. So like they hooked up an actual oscilloscope and they're looking at like the slight button like presses, like when you just barely tap a button what does it actually do because you see a surge it's not like it doesn't just immediately turn on and then turn off you see like a little surge you might see just like a little blip and they they did their best to replicate that and they massively reworked how their flippers feel on fast games and to me it was like night and day playing a barrels of fun playing a labyrinth with the old flipper logic and the new logic and all it is is like basically like how are you pulsing that thing how are you ramping up the power how are you going to react in different situations when you when you just tap it for a second but then you tap it all the way it's different than if you just tap it for a second and if you just slam it on all the way it behaves different than if you do that kind of like a little bit of hesitation and they've mapped all of that and they have all these different flipper profiles you can really get into the nerdy shit it's very very cool if you ever talk to the fast guys they will educate you on so much stuff that you've never thought about and it really illustrated to me just how much nuance there is to flipper feel and why some games feel good and some feel bad and what's very interesting to me is even after doing all that programming because everyone's using mosfets now they might be using williams max but they're using they're using mosfets instead of sending the full voltage when the flipper button's pressed and then cutting it to low voltage with another stroke or yeah or actually they're just changing the resistance of the coil they're not changing the value they're just changing the path of the trolley and that's why the williams flippers always felt a certain way and felt strong. They started using those Williams-Max, so they're still using the off-the-shelf double-wind coils. They're not using... They're just using a single winding. They're using the single winding, and they're treating it like a stern. They're using the MOSFET to go, we're going to pulse the different voltages. And so what happens is you end up with mushy, weak, hollow-feeling flippers. And the problem is that I agree, the fast guys did a great job. They really upped the capacity. What I still find at shows, and I'm going to shout out Barrels of Fun's new game, Dune, that I went to go play at the Northwest show, and then at our buddy and generous patron to the show, donates to the show, let me come up and play as Dune up in Seattle. Dude, you play Dune on the factory settings? Flippers are kind of weak. A little bit hollow, hard to make the left ramp. but they don't feel strong and snappy and i got that at the show too where you couldn't hit the jump ramp to destroy the harvester even a clean shot doesn't want to hit and even set up flat right yeah and so when he was at his game i had the keys and i'm like like i want to see what these coil settings are because that's the benefit of using mosfets is you can vary the voltage right so most manufacturers will allow you to adjust those now it used to be an on and off now you can vary it they're set up in the factory at 50 so they're set up at half potential strength yeah right and so i went in there and was like oh let's put them up to 100 let's have some fun immediately way better like immediately way better so i just want to say this to anyone that owns a boutique game or anyone that owns a game i want you to go into your coil settings if you feel like you have a Stern Godzilla and you're like, why did these flippers feel good? But my flippers on my labyrinth don't feel good. Turn them up. Go turn them up. Go turn them up. And that's what I did on my Hobbit, too. I forgot. And to barrels of fun, turn them up from the factory straight up. I'm going to give some unsolicited advice here, but it's already been passed along. But I'm going to put it on wax here. Turn them up. Take them to the show. Make them play strong. Because here's the thing, and I'm not sure if people are telling you this, but you hear it on the forums and I hear it in real life. people go to the Northwest show. They wait in line to play King Kong. Then they wait in line to play Dune. They walk away from Dune going, that's a cool game. The flippers feel weak. Yeah. The first interaction with any player is with your flippers in the ball. When you're, especially I'd say when you're playing a game in a show environment and you can't even find shots or anything, all your kind, that's like one of the things you're really going to judge more than anything else. And so what I'm saying is fast redesign this board and you're using Williams max. and when you turn the flipper power up on them it starts feeling like a williams amazing yeah and i'm like why are you allowing people's first impression to be bad it's in the game there's no modification like i mean i modified it in the settings but like for the love of god like it was night and day it's just a set point if it's on there at all as an option it should be that is the default when one is good and one is met let people turn them down rather than forcing them to turn them up because most people whether it's an operator or a home collector they're not going to know it's in there they're not going to go do it yep sterns will allow you to tune them down but they start at a high level not every game starts at max but they start them high and so people's feelings of a stern are the game snappy it's fast i feel like i can hit the ramps your game should feel like that and it can feel like that and i just want every boutique manufacturer barrels and spooky and everyone else stop shipping them weak as the factory setting i don't understand why they do it i really struggle to understand it because people walk away from and go oh i guess the flippers suck because they feel bad bad first impression and first impressions with boutique games are incredibly important man and especially with the dune phenomenal game absolute phenomenal game totally impressed with that whole package that whole game i love that game and it's far better when you turn the flipper power up i will say it has a third flipper put that up to 100 knock that one back down a little bit uh because it was flying off the wire form it lets you control the flipper power individually that's sick that's interesting so i you know like there's a little bit of tuning there but i just think that barrels if you're listening yeah next update change that default set point please people will overnight appreciate every single person that updates their game will be like whoa the flippers feel so much better yes anyway i think that's basically covers everything we wanted to talk about everything there is to talk about with flippers right alan believe so man it's gotta be i think that was by far the nerdiest episode of the wedgehead pinball podcast it feels great we're having a really good run up to our hundredth episode we had one of the best guests one of the best coolest guys in pinball on the show chris granner we got into where we came from our roots flippers next week's episode not nerd shit probably the coolest episode we've ever done one of the most important look forward to that and then way more important than flippers to pinball machine is next week's subject so what do we got for uh what do we got cooking for 100 the big uh we're hitting the triple digits okay so we got some very cool shit coming up for 100 it's gonna be we gotta line up some schedules it's gonna be a controversial subject that is true it's gonna be hard to get recorded and released the information our guest says is dangerous yeah and will upset some folks and incite mass hysteria and rioting he says but i don't know about that but we're we're very excited for our 100th episode we got something very special planned we're trying to answer an age old pinball question definitively and i think we got just the guests to do it and so we are very excited on our march to episode 100 we want to thank you for listening to this episode another episode of the wedgehead pinball podcast go out play some pinball on location go play a game with flippers that should be an easy one for once easy one go out and play a game with some flippers know the differences across different generations and stuff and think about it and you know and if you want to talk about your favorite flippers come come into the discord there's a few bucks added up but until next time good luck Don't suck. 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