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 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?