Hello everyone and welcome to episode 30 of the Classic Pinball Podcast. My name is George, and today I'm joined by my co-host Dave. Hello, Dave. Hello, George. Today's episode was prompted by Dave doing the repairs or restoration of a game for one of his customers, and that game today is Harlem Globetrotters. I also have owned this game in my collection for quite some time, and Dave, I believe you own one as well, correct? I do. Yep, I have two Harlems, and this one here, the customers ask me, hey, what do you have for sale in your restoration queue that I could contract for? I give them the list, and this particular person thought Harlem would be perfect for her family. So now I'm going to just have one Harlem for my keeper for me, and one is going to be going to her. Well, I think we both agree that this is a very family-friendly game, How long have you owned the two games that are in your possession? I think probably at least 10, if not 15 years. Yeah, I'm at least at 15, approaching 20. It was one of the first games I bought. And again, they were very inexpensive at the time. We'll leave it at that. Yeah, I bought mine as projects, so not working. you know so these have never been set up I've never done anything with them you know and so I when she said Harlem I was like great I can actually restore this game actually play a nice one you know it'd be great to play restore Harlem quote tries yours is nice too no no you know bad shakes on you over there but one of my own that I've done myself and get to play myself it's great you know yeah my game came out of New Jersey from a collector uh John Toast who I've known for probably 20 years and it was the only game i believe that actually no i that i take that back it was probably the the first game that i had that ever worked and it's a pretty decent game it's got a mylar on it it's day one mylar which i have not taken off because it looks pretty good uh the only thing is like most harlem's faded cabinet but the way that i have my game room configured you can't see the cabinet anyway, so I'm not going to put the work or time into it. But it's got a nice back glass, and, you know, I've done some of the mechanics over. I redid all the flippers. So game, I've been playing it recently, knowing that we're going to do this show. It's played great. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, I just play tested for the first time. Yesterday was the first time I actually got everything going on the play field. It's all done. And I had my friend PJ over. And, yeah, he came over. He said he wanted to get out of the house. He was sick of being cooped up. And he said, come on by. Help me play test. So he did. And, yeah, he was loving it last night. He played until late into the evening. Played the Harlem. At one point I said I had to go upstairs and get some other work done. I kept hearing him cracking knocks off and winning the high score. And he's, like, shouting at the game. And, you know, he was really enjoying it. So that's good. Let's save a little bit of the gameplay for the next segment. I want to kind of focus on the game and all the statistics. So if we look at the game, it was released back in September of 1979. They made 14,550 units, which is probably one of their more successful games, I would think. I can't think of too many that eclipse that number. That's a big number. Yeah, it's a big number. And the design is by, you know, I'm not sure I'm going to say his name correctly. Is it Greg Kemic? Nope. I thought it was that way forever until my friend in Maine, J.R., said it's Mayak. So the K is silent. The K is silent. Like Knife. Okay. Okay. Well, if you look at all the games that he has been involved in, it looks like he was the in-house person at Bali back in the heyday. Would you agree with that? I mean, he's done a lot of games. Yeah, that makes sense then. Yeah, if you do a lot of games for one manufacturer, you probably are the in-house guy. Yeah, that makes sense. I don't know that for sure, but it sounds right. Well, I'll list the game that you own, Bow and Arrow. Bobby Orr, which I have. Captain Fantastic, Brown Dirt Cowboy. Grand Slam, which I don't like. That's a midway. Obviously, Harlem. Kings of Steel, which you just brought in-house. Knight Rider, Old Chicago. Paragon, Skateball, Spy Hunter, Supersonic, $6 million man. Vector, Wizard, Xenon, X's and O's. I mean, that's a lot of games. Yeah, that's a lot of games. A lot of good titles in those too You know his special signature right? On his games Actually if I had not looked at IPDB I would not but I did take a look Yesterday to see his name On the play field As well as They called her the artist but it sounds like She was the screen cutter for the For the play field and He gave her kudos on the play field as well in one of the basketballs. A Margaret Hudson. Margaret Hudson, yeah, because she did 8-Ball Deluxe. Oh, okay. You were going to say that. One thing about the 8-Ball Deluxe, that's why that's one of the few games that's not, you know, a beautiful babe on the back glass. It's got a big Grizzly Adams-type guy or whatever because a woman drew it. She didn't want a girl in there. She wanted a guy in there. Same thing with, like, Frontier. I think she did Frontier as well. So that's a little side note there. Oh, yeah, the special signature item on all of my X Games. It's the opaque red post that he strategically put somewhere on the – Oh, that's right. I forgot about that. And I tried it. When I serve a play field down, when I do a restoration, I take all the play field stuff off, and I always remember, okay, This thing has to go back here where Greg put it. You know, I'm not going to put it somewhere else. I'd like to hide it where he hid it so it stays original that way. Right. I always take pictures when I do a play field swap to make sure that I put it back in the same spot as well. Let's move on to the artwork, which is Greg, and, again, I'm hoping I say his name correctly. Is it Freris? Say it again, George. Someone's trying to call me first. Freris? Is that how you say his last name, Greg Freris? Oh, Ferris. Paul Faris. No, no, it's Greg. Greg Freres. Yeah, well, I'll spell it. F-R-E-R-E-S. Oh, Greg Freres. Ferris, okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he did Big Juicy Melons, I believe. I'm going to give you the list. He's still prolific. It looks like he's done a couple of the Elvira games. I'll go through all the Bali games he did I'm looking through the list right now yeah he did he did do that game you're right back in 2000 wow that's almost 10 years old already when they did the first when they did the first one in 2011 that's why already wow that seemed like just yesterday well Stern put it out obviously they did it first and then Stern picked it up in 2015 but that's still a long time away and if you look at all the list of games this person's done he's been around for a while i'll just start with the games that we collect fathom frontier hot dog and harlem uh let's see what else is there rolling stones skateball speakeasy uh looks like he did nope star trek no he did the other star treks it looks like no that pretty much wraps it up but He's been around for a long time. Speaking of Rolling Stones, I've been so busy buried with customer work, but I've actually been getting a little more caught up these days, a little more time to actually pay attention and getting restorations done and keep it going. I'm about six deep right now, and I still have my Rolling Stones, beautiful ballet Rolling Stones. I've got a play field that's touched up and auto-cleared. I've got a cabinet that's repainted beautifully. nice new back class for it and new side rail everything so this is going to be one of my you know signature restorations like pretty much everything you know even like little touches like new side rails that kind of thing which not all my games get that because usually I'll go with original if they're still nice but if they're dented they they gotta go these are dented so fine with me and put the new new side rails on this one because it deserves it anyway but uh when I can finally talk to air and do a game for myself again the last one I did for myself was hot-dogging about a couple years ago. And so it seems like every year or two I'll try to set aside time to do one for me. So I think Rolling Stones, I've never owned one. I haven't played a really nice one since 1980 back at Funny Games Arcade. So I'm looking forward to playing one of those, maybe later this year. We'll see. I don't even remember playing one. And what I did want to ask you is, did you have a chance the other night to check in on Chuck Webster doing his restoration of his game? I did, but all I saw in that, I thought it was going to be a lot of play. All I saw was he's just putting boards in. He's just putting boards into the head. That's all I saw. It wasn't the whole hour-long thing of him installing pieces into the head. Right. I caught him when he was restringing wire on the backbox for all the displays. I guess he's preparing to go to seven digits. Is that a six-digit or a seven-digit game? It's a six-digit game. Yeah, I've done that too. It's not that big a deal. You're adding like one extra wire going to all the displays, all four displays, not the credit display, of course. Well, that's what he was doing. It was kind of like watching paint dry. I only pointed it out to you because I know you had the game, and I said, well, you know, Dave should at least see what he's doing. And it looks like he had the cabinet done because that looked pretty good as well. Yeah, yeah, because mine looks like that. I love the guy, Dave, who did my cabinet, Matrando. He does really nice work. The cabinet, you can't really feel an edge on it, which I love. it feels like a real back in the day paint job on it. Not something you feel the paint edge all the time, like on a lot of paint jobs, you know? No, I remember when you got that game back and that is a beautiful looking cabinet. He does really nice work. If I, if I'm going to give any advice to Chuck, I tune in the other day and all I hear is the Rolling Stones, which I'm a fan of, but you're doing a, a broadcast. You should be able to hear what you're doing. He's doing a restoration. I couldn't hear what he was doing. And I was trying to be polite online and say, just turn the music down a little bit so I can hear you. That didn't work out very well. And that would be my critique of his broadcast. I don't know. I don't think he's a big fan of doing play by play. I kind of get that impression watching him on Twitch. yeah at one point I was thinking of doing something like that too a while back I was talking to Mike Salpedro he goes hey you should stream your Twitch through Twitch your restorations while you're doing them it's like yeah but then you're always on camera and it's almost I don't know it's almost like big brotherish a little bit like you're always on camera it's like I don't really want to be not a big audience Dave I watched him the other day just to see what he was doing I think he had three people and then uh ryan from franklin new hampshire i can't remember his last name who did uh who won uh at fantastic last year for the flash gordon and the roller coaster game help me wasn't that him um oh roller coaster right but wasn't that him didn't he do that game yeah he did yep Okay. He was broadcasting as well. And he's doing a custom game for Sonic the Hedgehog called Spinball. So I was watching him and I'm like, I never even saw this, heard of this before. So it was interesting, but it was kind of funny. he's got like a makeshift cabinet like if you took the cabinet and cut it in half so there's no bottom but you could rotate it on the rotisserie and have all the buttons and coin door etc the thing fell out of the cabinet and you should have seen him he turned bright white he was like oh my god i hope i didn't break anything or so so that's one of the that's one of the things you got to worry about when you're doing a Twitch broadcast. Hopefully everything goes well, but it's live. It's live. Without a net, you're going live. It's like, I don't know. It's not for me. I don't mind doing tape for broadcasts so I can edit things down, neaten things up, cut stuff that's dead, and keep everything going live. I'd consider doing something like that as an instructional thing. Yeah, but it's an interesting idea, and some people dig it. You know, so tweet girl. It doesn't draw big people, but, you know, it's interesting to watch, especially if it's a game that you're not familiar with. So this game, the two Harlems I have, I have like one of the few that didn't get a factory Mylar. Most Harlems got factory Mylar, and mine, my two didn't. So of the two I have, one is pretty worn play field, and someone put some Mylar patches on here and there. I scored a new old stock play field that I clear coded I don't know, 8, 10 years ago so that's slated to go into my game then, so out of the two that I have here, I took the better of the two playfields because the bad one's going to get tossed anyway with my new play field going into it, so when this customer won, I got slated for her I took the better of the two, which is a couple little bits of wear, but not nothing bad and I cleaned it stripped the whole play field magic erasered the whole thing, got the color nice and shiny in the back again, Novus 2 did. And then Maureen did her talented work with touching up, you know, different areas around the play field, look really nice and clean. And then I got a play field protector for it. This is my second one I've done. I'm really a big fan of the play field protectors these days, especially because you can just touch up the playfields, put this down over your touch-ups, and you don't have to have any spot clearing or you don't have to send out for automotive clearing. you can just put a play for protector down and it looks like a nice clear coat and uh this one was really especially good just like the kingpin i um i'm doing and also pinball pool i i did in that on these particular generation when they made these particular pray for the protectors they made them so you had to pull up the metal inlanes flipper feet in lane um metal guides You had to pull them out to put this down. They made small holes for you to put the metal guides back in. And it's a lot neater finish. It looks more like a clear coat with no extra cuts versus the new ones they're doing. They're making them more – they err it on the side of easier install because some people don't want to pull those lanes up. They want simple. They don't want OCD level. They just want simple. So they catered to that part for the newer plate for protection they're making, and they cut out the whole line for those in-lane guides so you don't have to pull them up anymore. But now you have these big lines of no plastic there that I think dirt can get into just doesn look as good It looks like you have a piece of Big, long arms. Big, long arms. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's like... So I made sure that these ones had the old-fashioned holes, like the original, hard to install, but better product when you're done. And it did. And once I put it down and I had the whole thing done And I had, it's almost done at that point. I had Maureen come down and look and she goes, wow, this thing is gorgeous. It looks like a clear-coated new old stock playfin. And I say, yep, that's the plan, you know. And from there, you know, I took all the posts, the red posts and stuff. Typically, if they're grungy or whatever, I'll throw new ones in. These ones here are good. I just put them in my, what's it called, that bath there, vibrating bath. Ultrasonic cleaner, yeah. I put them in there for like an hour, and they came out gorgeous. I cleaned them off. They looked like new posts, so I just reused those, put those all back in, and I buffed all the metal on the thing, took all it to the buffer for a couple hours. I did a big buffing session on that. Put all that back in, and then the final step was the grungy spinners. A lot of our work was peeled off, was beaten off with the ball hitting, because these spinners get whacked relentlessly in this game to get bonus points. kind of like bow and arrow in that sense. No wonder the same guy designed it. That makes sense. So I basically kind of wiped off most of that artwork and smoothed it out and grinded it down and then I took some appliance white epoxy paint to give that a real good coat all the way around, let that dry for a while and I took some stickers I got from Marco of Harlem Globetrotter basketball stickers and threw those on there, and they look like just brand-new old-stock spinners now. And installed those, did my usual tweaking the spinners for maximum spins. And, yeah, when PJ went down last night to play it, he's like, wow, these spinners, you've done it again, these spinners spin better than new. I don't remember this game spinning this much with this, you know, the way this thing's spinning now. These spinners go just like on Stargazer or whatever that you have, you know. I said, oh, thank you, BJ. I said, this looks brand new. It's like, cool. I'm glad. Play the crap out of it. I want to see if you can break it, you know. You sent me pictures, and obviously I sent you pictures of the couple sets that I had that were destroyed. you did a nice job and we should probably post those when we do this broadcast out on Pinside if anybody wants to see your handiwork. Anything else that you did to that game that people would want to know about? I have a couple of questions when you're done. What else to do the game? Oh, I also put in a couple things. I don't know if we talked about this earlier on different broadcasts. We'll repeat it again because it's worth repeating. I was wondering why when I was putting boards, so this game had no boards, so I populated all the boards in the game, the circuit boards. And I put an MPU that I rebuilt into it and the solenoid driver board and lamp driver all rebuilt. And I was wondering why I wasn't getting the MPU would not boot. It's a brand-new rebuilt solenoid driver board I rebuilt. And I found out that the 5-volt regulator you can buy, the redo one from the PU5, I think it's called, SB something. Anyway, it's a new linear voltage regulator that everybody's using on the WPC ramp game stuff. It works really well in that application. It does not work so well in the old-school Bally and Stern application because it draws too much amperage. So this thing is smart enough to shut itself down if it senses too much current draw, and instead of putting out 5 volts, it puts out 2 volts, and wah, wah, you don't get the game to boot. The game just sits there, and the MPU says, I need 5 volts. Dude, I'm not going to boot up until I get to 5 volts, and you're never going to get it. So I was talking to John Day about that, and he confirmed that. It's like, yep, that's exactly what it is. So I found another board I had that didn't replace the 5-volt reg, put that in, the game booted up fine um but just in case i i uh i also tried out um andrew's uh weebly mpu in there as well i had that in there just for for now until i can make sure the other mpu is still good which i think it is and what else did i do with that game oh i also put in um my first time using uh andrew's weebly um soundboard the sound card for that game because i didn't have any rebuilt ones for that generation. I have ones for the other games around that time. I think it's Dash 32 or Dash 52. But anyway, whatever flavor it was, I didn't have it for this game, so I bought one of his, and it's awesome. Do you have this soundboard? Did you buy a soundboard for me? No, you know, all my soundboards work in my games, but I did see that on his website, and I was always curious to hear a review. So here we are. That's great. I'm going to buy a couple more if I have them, because when I first put it in the game, it sounds good, but it's so adjustable. All his boards, a lot of his boards are just customizable. He just likes that customization thing, which I love. I love tweaking things out as best I can be. If I can actually turn some dials and make it better, I do. And he has the same philosophy, I think. So on his soundboard, the original board had volume adjust and sustain adjust so that you can instead of being like a staccato or like a long note being carried. This one, in addition to those two, he added a pitch control, which I was wondering because I first put the board in and it sounded okay. I said, well, it sounded okay. It doesn't sound quite like Harlem I remember. It's not quite there all the way. So I adjusted the sustain notes to be a little longer. I said, okay, that's better, but still not quite right. I said, oh, let me try the pitch. I just tweak the pitch a little bit, and boom, it's like, ah, that's Harlem right there. That's what you sound like. It's perfect. So I love how you can customize that sound to dial it right in to what you remember the game is supposed to sound like. I should probably buy one just to put it on the shelf because it does go in a handful of games that I own. So it wouldn't be a bad thing to have on the shelf. It's not bad for $100. It's a good $100 spend. That's not the first time I've done that. I have one thing. I wanted to talk about with Harlem and I guess other games. Do you remember when, I don't even know how to describe it, when the license was yanked for Bali bumper caps and targets and there was a run on that stuff? Yes. That was probably, what, 10 years ago? It was probably maybe even longer than that. On that, I was one of the people that bought, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds of dollars of stuff from Steve at that point. I was as well. But the one thing that I wanted to point out was the Harlem bumper caps. I have a set of three that are the reverse of what comes with the game. So all the colors, the red and the blue are reverse. And I don't know if that was done on purpose or not, but I didn't send them back. I said, they look okay. I'll just put them in the, you know, put them in a box and save them for a rainy day if I ever need them. But I thought that was kind of weird. The other thing, and I don't know if you've been out on Pinside recently, somebody was having issues with the ball gate on the right-hand side. Oh, yeah, I didn't think I'd just that. And I remember having issues. I don't know if it was on that game or another game. But the one thing you have to do is take it all apart and just clean it real good and maybe put a little bit of lubrication in there. I realized what the guy was saying, you know, kind of was sticking. And I've had similar problems, but it's really a cleaning issue. Are you finding the same thing? All I did, honestly, with mine to get – mine was pretty good anyway, but I like to buff everything. So I took it out, that paperclip gate thing. It looks like a paperclip to me. I took that whole thing out and took it to the buffer and put it back. And I basically lined it up so that it shuts nice and tight and aggressively shuts and aggressively opens. And I didn't have to really adjust it. I didn't lube anything. I just basically did a little bit of buffing mostly and a little bit of cleaning of the sleeve that it goes into, a little of that. But other than that, it just takes – you just have to get it lined up the right way so that you're not trying to fight against a sauna or trying to pull it in. You just have to line it up so that it's not buzzing on you and make sure that it's – it's two stop points are stopping where it should and not trying to go over the stop point where, you know, that it wants to go that way. So you're not struggling against it. That's all you got to really do. It's just a matter of – Just the good cleaning. I mean, whether you polish or clean, it's, you know, to me, it's sort of the same thing. Just how long has it been sitting there? And I always, you know, I always go in and just give it a once over to make sure it's going to work right. And I'm guessing you did the same with the drop targets. I know you probably did a flip or rebuild. Other than that on that game, there isn't really a lot of other stuff that can go wrong in my eyes. no um not really just the other gate thing could be can be wonky if you don't get that right how do you play the game you step up and you're gonna play what's your strategy well here's the thing i i start with a blank slate because i use the um i didn't have a harlem board that's all configured already. So I had the, I'm using Andrew's board. So I just went through the manual and said, okay, what settings make sense? I want to make it kind of tough. So I kind of went for a lot of conservative settings. So one of them I did was for the spinners to be independently turned on. So they're not all on at the same time. Usually, most games I've played, either spinning or hit, you're going to get bonus points the more you go through these spinners. The way I set it up, only one side is lit at a time. And I think the change is maybe by hitting a pop bumper or hitting a kicker or something, or maybe going in the hole on top. Something changes it so it goes to the other spinner. So it makes it more you have to be accurate, well, to which spinner you're going to shoot for to get the points and to get the bonus points because one really counts and one doesn't really count. So I did that on this one. And made for tougher games. I don't think many people have that unless you're maybe in a tournament or tournament mode. You might play this way, but I think most people have them both on. I mean, do you have yours? Mine are both on. Okay, so that's a typical configuration. A lot easier, and actually, I find it more enjoyable to play that way, but I want to challenge myself. I'm going to try it this way at least for a while, and I might go back. Especially with a customer, I might go the easy way for the customer just so I don't get them frustrated, you know. Right. What about the saucer? Oh, saucer. Okay, so how I adjusted that, I adjusted that so that the targets go back up once you go in. Well, do you put it so that it's random, or do you put it that you can spell? That's soft, so they're talking about the 25,000. Random. That's random top. Right. Yeah, random top. So, again, I'm going to ask you, what's your strategy to play the game? You step up. What are you shooting for first? I want to get globe letters. That's what I go for. I want to keep knocking that saucer thing up there. Then I guess I'm going for, I'm trying to whack at those inline drops, those multipliers. I'm going for that. But I'll tell you, on this game here, I'm having a hard time carving through those drop tires. I might get the first one down, but it's like it's just so squirrely on the left-hand side with the two flippers and there's no feed. You've got to do a lot of drop catching to get that right. So it's tough. But I guess it depends where the ball is. If the ball's in the left flipper, I'm going to go inline drop. If the ball's in the right flipper, I'm going to go for those orange player lights and light that extra ball. Okay, I take a different tact, and you'll understand why. I try to go for the inline drop targets first, because if you build up to 5x, your spinner on the left side could be 2,000 a spin. so try to get the bonus try to get the bonus up on the spinner and then start whacking that spinner and getting it up top to get the bonus up it doesn't always work out that way but i have another question for you so the feed so you hit the first target the first inline drop target now on the corner there is a post with a rubber which interrupts the feed and bounces it it's not smooth. Is that the case with your game and all games? Because I don't have any reference point. I'm going to take a look at mine right now and see if that is the case. Let's see. Oh yeah, the rubber at the very bottom. No, you know what? Mine does not do that. I think the ball comes out of there pretty nice. In fact, I think the ball comes out of that inline drop. I think it kind of comes down you're almost going to lose it down the middle when it comes out of those drops sometimes the feed from the drop seems to be I think going to your left flipper at the tip I get it bounced over to the left flippers but it all depends on how you hit that target if you hit the target more left it will come out smooth and hit the left flippers if you're more center or to the right it now is on the ball guide coming down and it hits that that rubber and then you know it can go pretty much anywhere it wants to so i i always question why that thing was there but i get it because it takes a whomping if you're you know if you're missing the targets that area right there takes a real you know hit no no pun intended it really takes a banging. Oh, yeah. And I, of course, put new drop targets in there, too. Those look so nice. Right. Anything else for gameplay other than you've got the players on the left-hand side, the five targets. I just let the random balls hit that, and if it opens up the, or it turns on the extra ball if you've hit that target on the right-hand side. I don't even know what it's called. I don't have it in front of me. slam dunk shot right that you know I let that be more random and if I get it then I'll try to get that that extra ball I guess one of the strategies doing this I definitely want to get just like in Paragon I want to get that 20 lit because I have the 20 30 40 stay on so it's kind of you want to get the 20 at least in your first ball so it's always there and you can always start whacking away at multipliers and you can just rack your score pretty pretty well with that. I agree with that strategy, but I try to combine it the other way so that when you're trying to get it up there, at least you're getting rewarded on the spinner. You know, at 10 points, you're not getting a lot, but obviously at 2,000 points a spin, you can, you know, hit that thing a couple of times and really, you know, do justice to your score. How do you have it set up as far as, you're not a big threshold guy with extra balls, so you probably don't have any thresholds, do you? You just play the game, right? I'll tell you, I think on this game... I think this game... What was it on? You know what we were playing? I told the story about it. You came up last night. Your name came up last night when I was playing with PJ. Because the extra ball thing. You grew up with the extra ball thing. I grew up with getting free games. No, I grew up with getting free games at the arcades, but for home use to me it's extra balls and high score so okay a little bit different it's a little bit different thought process yeah yeah well so i have a i'm working the paragon and a customer's house that's kind of on hold right now but i have the uh i have the mpu i was trying out to see if it's reliable i was fixing the old one and um i didn't realize it's set for extra balls we're playing it last the paragon and for a little sister game for harlem you know the wide body version of harlem pretty much is what it is. It went to 200,000 points ago It was supposed to be a knock All of a sudden I realized I got an extra ball It like oh wait a minute I have an extra ball in this game now Okay So this is how George has his game He like playing a George game right now So I don have this So on the Globetrotters, I have it set for, you know, free games and extra ball for extra ball, but not for thresholds. Thresholds give you a pop, you know, a knock. For me, it tells me how I'm doing. Because for extra balls for me, I want the game to end at some point. I find the game will go on too long by keeping the extra balls. It's like an add-a-ball thing. I'm not an add-a-ball fan either, really. But different strokes for different folks, you know. Well, I have my game set up as follows, and it's probably because I could find the right instruction card. 240, 480, and then 600 with an extra ball at each level. And last night I was playing, so I'm going to agree with what you just said. I got up to 1.8 million on the game. So it definitely does extend the length of the game. But that leads me to another piece, which is, would you put in seven-digit displays in this game? I probably – I think I probably would. I mean, as I'm playing this game right now, I don't need them because it's playing so tough. But as I play this game and get used to it and get better at it, I'm sure – Because when PJ got to the high score of 383 last night, he says, I just got the high score. It's like, yeah, PJ, you're starting out as a virgin game. Everything's fresh and new, and the MPU's reset as well. So he says, oh, it should be a lot higher than that for a few. Well, it's like, well, play another couple games, get higher. But he couldn't. He got like 383 with his high game after playing, I don't know, probably 20 games. Wow, so you got your game set up really tough, which, again, leads me to another thing, and I made you aware of this this week. Tommy Skinner who was on our program a while back for Lady Death was doing a Twitch broadcast and he was out there saying I want to start doing head to head with this game and you and I talked about it briefly the other day that all games need to be equal and unless the same person is setting all the games up like you they're all going to be varied But, you know, hey, I think it's a neat idea to get multiple people on screen competing. And we've been lamenting or people have been lamenting about this for a long period of time that one of our pinball games is going to become, you know, Internet connected. So I think there's a want there. Whether it happens is a whole nother, I guess, a whole nother story. Yeah, and like I was telling you before, to make it really apples-to-apples comparison, if you're in a tournament like that, a long-since tournament, there's a lot of things that have got to take place. But one would be, you know, it has to be restored and shopped the same. Like, you know, like my spinner. My spinner has been forever. Other people that restore games, they're happy with just like two or three spins and you're done. So that kind of hampers you on a score with that. And another thing I do is I make sure everything is kind of on a hair trigger, so you don't get extra hits, but you definitely, if the ball just grazes something, you're going to get credit for that. Like even the slam dunk guys on the left of the stand-ups, they have those nice and closely gapped, so you don't have to go crush the target to get a score. And I also go through and clean every switch with this Brasso grass polish stuff that actually gets those gold contacts nice and shiny gold again. It gets rid of the crud. And so it makes them nice and sensitive, and then I gap them the right way. And same thing with pop bumpers and spinners and all that stuff. So, yeah, it's a lot more sensitive, and you get all the points you need. But if someone doesn't do that on the other end, and their game is playing tougher, and you're not getting all your points you're supposed to, you can't really compare the two games. You know, you can't really compare the two players. So that's where it gets kind of – probably for fun you could do it, but if there was money in the line or something like that, it would be a little – It's not a fair fight. Well said. I think for entertainment purposes, it serves its place. But as far as a tournament goes or some kind of friendly competition, I don't think so, especially, like you said, if there's money on the line. I'll give you a last word on this. Is there anything else regarding gameplay, your restoration, anything we missed? Because I want to kind of go back in time a little bit. Sure, on this game here The cabinet was Decent but kind of banged up In the front especially In the front is what everybody kind of looks at So this is the first time I've done like a A repaint, but I've done a partial Repaint, just basically the front Face of the game, I gave it a nice Fresh, you know, sanded it down Filled in little holes and whatever and gave it a nice Fresh coat of the actual Colors it needs and I matched them up pretty well And then I filled in the rest of the game So now the whole cabinet would look kind of like a little bit battle-worn, you know, from arcades over the years of being banged around. Now it looks like a very nice cabinet. So this restoration is going to come out really well. I'm sure the customer will like the result once I get it all squared away. I think it should be done probably about a week tops, if there's things you're ready to go. Well, I'm sure the customer is going to be happy. That said, I'm going to go into our next segment, which is going to be titled, Do You Remember? All right. Now, I know you're a little bit younger than I am, but do you remember when the Harlem Globetrotters had their cartoon show? Yes, I do. Was it something that you watched as a kid? I didn't. I don't know why. I know the same time frame was Fat Albert. I used to watch Fat Albert, too. I love that, Albert. I love that, Albert. But I don't think Bill Cosby is somebody that's very revered anymore, given his plight. But we'll leave that for another day. Did you ever have the opportunity to go see them live? I probably had the opportunity, but I'm not a real sports nut. So I never wanted to. I never wanted to see them live. It's the reason why I asked the question. I never, you know, obviously I am into sports, but I don't know. That's one event I never did see. I saw some other crazy events, like Dad took me to Madison Square Garden to see Evil Knievel jump over the Snake River Canyon. About 20 other people in Madison Square Garden. It wasn't a big draw, but, no, never saw Harlem Globetrotters. play the Washington Capitals all the time that was their nemesis that was their nemesis it was always uh the fix was in it seems right yeah I it's always you know the good guy always wins I mean that's pretty much the I think the moral of the Harlem Globetrotter story I do want to point out that uh you know the the people that are on the back glass of the game and at least the ones that I always gravitated towards were Metal Ark Lemon and Curly Neal. Yeah, same here. And reading online the other day, I found out that Curly Neal unfortunately passed last week in Houston, and he was one of the big mainstays of Harlem Globetrotters. Metal Ark died a number of years ago, and I guess the other one that I remember, Beyond that, I couldn't remember anybody, was Geese Osby. And I always wondered, why did they call the guy Geese instead of Goose? Right. Kind of weird, right? I don't know. That's kind of weird. Yeah. Well, that was his nickname, Geese. I'm sure there's a story there, and I don't know it. And if somebody does, we'd certainly like to hear it. So I think that concludes. Oh, no. One more thing in the cartoon. And I don't know if you remember this actor. The characters did not do their own voices. They had character actors do it. Do you remember a guy by the name of Scatman Crothers? Yeah, Scatman Crothers. He did Hong Kong Fooey as well. Oh, right. Okay. I do remember that cartoon. It wasn't one that I gravitated towards, but he was the voice of Metal Lark London. So I always thought he was funny. I always liked him as a kid. So I thought I would just mention that. I think it's pretty timely that now you mentioned me doing this Harlem Globetrotter resto. It's kind of a, I can say now, it's sort of almost a tribute to Curly passing. It's kind of neat that way. It's like my little send-off, you know, another restored Harlem to honor Curly, Curly Neal. Well, I haven't gone back and watched any of the videos, but they were always entertaining. and again you're not a sports guy but when the wide world of sports was on ABC back in the 70s I loved the opening thing for that, the opening song and the opening, all that stuff that was the best part of the show spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat. The Cuban drama of athletic competition. This is ABC's Wide World of Sports. Well, let me see if I can find it. Oh, yeah. I'll edit that, guys. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Well, you sang the last time to the song, so I think I can do it again. Okay, so now we're going to come to my favorite portion, because I had a brain delay when I tried to remember this. And I went back into my notebooks and found it. So I'm trying to come up with a name for your segment. and my original one was going to be called your world which i thought was okay but until i went and looked at it well there was a news program called that but more importantly in 1969 i do remember this i don't know why there was a program called your world and welcome to it and the actor was a guy named James Thurber. Beyond that, I don't remember it, but I remember him because he's got a very distinct look with the glasses. Do you remember this at all? No. You're probably too young. So that was one choice, but then I came up with another one, and I hope you like it. I want to call it this week In Dave. And In Dave is one word. I-N-D-A-B-E I don't know if I'm totally grooving to it well you need to come up with one then because every time I come up with one I go out on the internet and look and I go well yep there's somebody else who's clipped that one so this segment is a restoration corner segment kind of thing I'm not doing anything that's unique. Everybody who does a podcast usually has a segment of, you know, what have you done this week or what have you done since we last, you know, we last talked and people talk about game acquisitions or whatever they're repairing, yada, yada, yada. And I just figured you're the one who's got all the activity because you have a business, you're doing restorations where me, Does anybody want to hear that I changed flipper rubbers or did an upgrade on flippers? Probably not. So you usually have more interesting stories, and I just thought it would be good to have a moniker on it. Well, we'll work on it. Wait, here's something that you can kind of go on a Paul Harvey thing. And now you know the rest of the story, right? Something with rest and restoration and resto. something like that I can't think exactly how it would go now you know the restoration of the story yeah something like that that idea yeah that's close but something we can now you know the hows of the restoration now there's something there but I gotta figure out how you got till the next time we record so let's shelve it and we'll try to come up with something along those lines now you know the rest of the restoration story I don't know something like that we'll figure it out let's see here's one question I think we could probably end I think we've I don't think there's anything else that we need to talk about the game but I just you know this was one question that I came up with while doing my research What makes this such a great classic Volley game? You first What makes Harlem a great classic Volley game? It just has all the meat and potatoes You want from the game It's got three spinners It's got inline drops It's got scissor flippers You know, on the left-hand side Which is tough And you're operating without a net Unlike Williams, which puts a little net there For you, a little bar, so you can't lose the ball Between the flippers, volley, you can and it's got two saucers. I don't know. It just has all those little components that makes for a really challenging pinball machine that has that just one more game essence to it. I agree. I don't think I could add to it. It's always a fun game to play. I don't play it nearly as enough as I should because of other games I have, but whenever you want to feel good it's one of those games you can step up to and have a good time with if you have friends over that aren't pinball players you can explain the game very easily to them and they usually gravitate towards it because they are familiar with the subject matter and if you really look back and you know there's a lot of talk on other podcasts about theme or, you know, theme integration, Bali was one of the first to go out after a notable subject matter and integrating that into their games. You know, that was, I believe they were the first, were they not? I think they were. I mean, look at a wizard, you know, and, um, Dolly Parton, evil, evil, Harlem Globetrotters. Power play with Bobby Orr. Bobby Orr power play. Right. Those are Rolling Stones. Right. Rolling Stones. the only thing that stern did like that uh they did nugent but other than that i can't think of any other thing that they did with a live uh what do they call uh licensed right licensed theme. Yeah. Just Nugent, I think is all they had. Unless you can correct me on that one. It's funny that you mention that game because last night, again, I'm going to mention Chuck Webster was on Twitch playing his game. And I'm watching and there are Ted Nugent songs with the game. Yeah. But again, because he wasn't looking at the screen or he was preoccupied, I couldn't get an answer. I'm wondering what he did, because every time he launched the ball for the whole ball, it would play one song. And the time he launched the ball, it would play another song. So he must have. His little car, the soundboard in there of some sort, I'm guessing it's an additional soundboard. So there's a little additional soundboard you can buy for, I want to say it's 50 bucks, 100 bucks. and it's, I think it's USB or one of those camera card things you put in there with a bunch of MP3s. It an MP3 player that has I think it eight or ten triggers to it So meaning that you wire it up in parallel with the switches in the game that you want to kick off to trigger a song or trigger an mp3 quote or whatever you want to trigger. And you can map it out any way you want and you run wires to it and then, so anytime like if a pop-up gets hit or whatever you want, that'll trigger, okay, that'll trigger this song or that'll trigger a random song. You can have it go random, you can have it I think a specific song, something like that. So that's what he did to his. So he has the original sound card in the game as well in parallel with that. So I didn't hear any of the original sounds. And again, I don't know what those original sounds are. Pretty crappy. Pretty crappy. But I guess my point is it made the game so much more entertaining with the soundtrack in it. I was like, wow, this is so we had talked. I know we had talked about I'm not sure we talked about it on the podcast that I had this Knight Rider. And after last episode, I kept saying to myself, wow, I know this is in John Day's wheelhouse. That would be a perfect game to put some trucker sounds in, you know, like the big air horn, the convoy song, the song that you sang, you know, some other stuff in there. It would, you know, air brakes just to give the game a little bit more punch because, yeah, it's a chimer game, but let's face it, that game you add some of that to it would probably be a lot more fun to play. Yeah, you could – you definitely could do this same sound card thing. You could definitely – you don't even – you could do this yourself kind of thing because, you know, Chuck isn't an EE at all. You know, he's a bright, talented guy with this stuff, but you don't need to have an EE degree to do this card the way he's doing it. He didn't have to reinvent the wheel and go into the ROM data and that kind of thing and reinvent stuff. You just basically get this extra sound card running in parallel with your game and just hook it up to different switches you want to do, and you load in all those with MP3s on the web or whatever, and you can record them into this card, and you can program the card, I think, through a USB cable or something. and is very doable on your game. It's not too – you probably get it. I still need a little bit of a blueprint. You know, I just need some guidance, I guess, so I'm not buying the wrong thing. And, you know, I could probably figure it out if given a long enough time. But somebody like you or a John saying, hey, you need one of these, you need one of these, you hook it up this way. Because John offered. I just haven't gotten around to it. to get some schematics to him and say, I'll be able to tell you right away what you could do. I'm like, okay. So I just need to reproduce some schematics and put them in his hand, and over time, whenever he's got a chance, take a look at it and give me some ideas. Yeah, he could do it that way, or if you ping Chuck, like at one point when I had a Nugent and I was going to keep it, if I could, and I was going to do the sound card thing, I was going to go to his house and see exactly how he hooked it up. I mean, it's even better. I can look it up myself on how to do it and figure it out, but have someone who's done it and actually show me exactly how we implemented it is a lot easier. I can actually just see what he did and kind of copy it and add or subtract things he did. But basically, it's a good blueprint to go buy whatever he did. I was going to do that until I had a customer who wanted to buy it. And it's like, well, I'll say, see, I don't really like the game that much. I liked it, but I didn't love it. So it's like I sent it on to his next home. So I dropped that whole idea. But if I was going to do like Nugent or something, and I was actually tempted to do an MP3 card with a bunch of sampled chime sounds instead. I was going to bring it, you know, do virtual chimes on the game. And I like chime games, even, you know, the old Stern games like Stars and Stingray. They sound nice, so I'd sample those and put those in other games. The early sound card on Stern games from the MPU 100 series games, the sound card sucked. the speaker is actually inside the cabinet and it's facing inside the cabinet. There's no outlet for the speaker to go. There's no outlet down. There's no hole in the bottom of the cabinet? Nope. No hole in the bottom of the cabinet. Nope. Oh, jeez. A really cheesy speaker, really cheapo cheesy speaker in the center where you'd find the knocker in a game like that. Down that. The coin box. and it's there. It just sits there and kind of aims towards the coin door. And it just sounds muffled and crappy and it's, I don't know. Have I said crappy enough? But it's... You really don't like it. We get the point. I don't like it. So that's why I would love to turn those games into actual real-time games, but it's not. Stern didn't do it that way. Stern, it's easier to do it to a Bally game than a Stern game because a ballet game uses its own sound card or its own... Right. Well, John was lamenting about that. He's like, look, Paragon you can't do it with, but a Chimer game from Bali you can do it with. And I own, you know, Mata Hari and Bobby Orr. So I've already got a couple of Chimer games. You know, again, we've talked about my Knight Rider, and it's not a coveted game, and it wasn't expensive. it would be the game to do it to because I've done so many other hacks to that game. You know, it certainly it would certainly warrant itself. And it's not an expensive thing to do. And it would be a learning experience. That's all. But the game, you know, to come full circle, you know, you mentioned your Rolling Stone earlier. Now, that would be a game to do it with. But again, that's got a sound card in it. So you can't. Well, you know, well, you could you could do the Chuck Webster version of it. You could do that. So that could – although I'll tell you, the sound card that they use in there is a lot like KISS. The KISS sound card is even more basic because Rolling Stones is 80 and KISS is 79. So when they went to 98, they got a better sound card with more capabilities, and it actually plays some riffs from Rolling Stones. It does a little bit of a jumping jack flash And it goes I think when you lose the ball I think, I forget what the trigger was But somewhere in there it does that And then it does A couple other tunes it does It does several little tunes, little riffs Of Rolling Stone tunes It actually reproduces in its own sound card way It's kind of novel Well, I get cracking on the game So, you know, it's complete And I can play it and then can experience it live. So we can do a show on that. How's that? That sounds good. I hope that Scott, who's been doing some of these rewrites over the years, that Rolling Stones could use a rewrite as well, a modification to its ROM. So I think he's doing a couple other games out there. He's been more active, and I think he's more active in the Stern stuff lately. But if he ever does a Stone one, it would be great, because it could use some good rewrites, kind of like Centaur. Centaur had some rewrites done, which made it a better game. Same thing with Stargazer made it a better game, tougher game, by the rewrite that he did in that one. Him and Oliver did a rewrite of Stargazer. So, yeah, there's some good stuff out there. And I look forward to doing the Stones one. I just have to – I've got to plow through this Harlem. It's almost done. Then I have a God Leave New York that I'm doing, a rare out-of-ball game. I just talked to Dave Marston, too, the other day. He called me up about Best in Play and some other things, what I'm working on. And when I mentioned New York, he goes, wow, New York. Because Dave Marston is an old school. He used to run the New Robert Englunds Pinball. I think it was called New Robert Englunds Pinball Show years ago, many, many years ago. I think back in the early 90s or 80s or somewhere. I think he was an operator at one point. So he knows all about EMs. He's a big EM guy. And when I mentioned New York, he said, you need to confirm with me, because that game was an Adaball game, but they rushed it to production. And it's a Spirit of 76, but it was made the same time that Pimmo became legal again in New York. That's what they did with New York, and they rushed the Adaball version into that game, redid the back glass on it, and sent it out there to get on top of it, because they had to put something out there for the new mark in New York. And to kind of commemorate New York becoming pinball legal again, the difference between this add-a-ball and other add-a-balls is this add-a-ball game, according to him, it does not show any lights like number ball six, ball seven, ball eight, or any kind of thing like that to tell you in the back glass. Instead, it uses the credit wheel with stars on it. And so the stars will go, you know, how many stars you have on the credit wheel is how many balls you have left to play. And I said, well, and how do you know if you put a couple of the two-player game and you're putting quarters in for a two-player game, how do you know? Maybe it just goes one and two players. Like if it has one, the credit number says 0-1-2, then star, star, star. He said, I don't know. That's for you to find out. Let me know. Well, that's a good tease. So when you get to that game, we will do a show on it and you can tell us more about it because it's a game I'm not familiar with. But I'm guessing anybody who's a historian of pinball plus our New York audience would probably be interested in hearing a little bit about that game. Sure. I think so. Well, I'm going to give you last word. Anything else that we didn't talk about? Oh, I just remembered. There is something. Well, I'm going to give you a minute or more to talk about your latest inquiry and request from a magazine. Yes, I have to get this right here. Hold on, because it doesn't flow off the tongue as easily. Let me see. It's called, let me pull it up here. This came on the heels of when I got Chronicle interviewing back in November, and then NBC Boston. They came out a couple months later. They wanted to do an interview with me. And then the NBC person interviewed me. She had a friend in publications that wanted to do it. There's a brand-new magazine that she's doing. Let me see. I'll bring it up now. Okay. It's called New Robert Englunds History and Heritage Journal. and so she pinged me. She emailed me and said, hey, I'm interested in doing an article on you. You've got some great stuff and great ideas and a unique passion, a unique hobby-turned-business. I'd love to interview you. I said, sure. So she gave me five questions, and I kind of put it off a little bit. The nice part is I'm having a little bit of extra time these days, so it's like, hey, now is a good time to answer these questions. So I did for her April issue. I just got it in time, And once I started writing the answer to these five questions, I basically knew she wanted to get it out pretty soon. I said, listen, I got some stuff done right now for you, and I get this stuff to you. I said, I'm basically writing a novel here. Once I'm starting to write about what I'm into, I'm just going to keep writing. She goes, no, no, keep going. Send it to me all at once. So the question she gave me. No, I'm not going to let you go there. Okay. That's a tease. Let's wait until the article comes out. Okay, good. Then I'll give you all the time in the world to go through all your answers. I don't want to spoil it for the publisher and for our audience. And it's always good to leave them wanting, right? Good idea. Good idea. Smart, George. Yes. It's a little teasing. I have an epiphany every once in a while. Okay, with that all said, Dave, again, I try to do a half-hour show. and it never works. We're now well over an hour, so I'm going to give you last word. Anything else you want to add before we do our closing? Let's see. No, I can't think of anything. I'm just keeping my head down, working like crazy on pinball machines these days, and it's going well over here. I'm thankful for all the blessings I've got with this stuff and just try to be thankful every day and it's working out well so far for me anyway Terrific, well I'm going to end this episode with the following everybody be good, be well, take care of yourself, wash your hands and your face and anything else and we'll see you probably in a couple of weeks with another game everybody take care and be well Have a blessed day and be grateful. Hello, I'm Larry David. Obviously, somebody put me up to this because it's generally not the kind of thing I do, But I basically want to address the idiots out there. And you know who you are. You're going out. I don't know what you're doing. You're socializing too close. It's not good. You're hurting old people like me. Well, not me. I have nothing to do with it. I'll never see you. But, you know, other, let's say other old people who might be your relatives. Who the hell knows? But the problem is you're passing up a fantastic opportunity, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stay in the house, sit on the couch, and watch TV. I mean, I don't know how you're passing that up. Well, maybe because you're not that bright, but here it is. Go home, watch TV. That's my advice to you. You know, if you've seen my show, nothing good ever happens going out of the house. You know that. there's just trouble out there it's not a good place to be so stay home and and you know don't see anyone except maybe if there's a plumbing emergency let the plumber in and then you know wipe everything down after he leaves but that but that's it okay Oh, you know But you don't know Where from It hurts to talk It hurts to talk And I can't even breathe I need drugs I need drugs So many to choose from I don't know Should I go to the doctor Or stay right here And watch this movie I feel down, down, down I feel down, down, down