Hey, when I was drawing in a radio topcast, it's my mistake. Norm and Shaggy. Hey, this is Kerman, even hot Russian chicks love listening to Norman Shaggy and Topcast. Hey, this is a time I wanted to say to Topcast, or in Shaggy. You're listening to Topcast, this old pinballs online radio. For more information, visit them anytime. www.marvin3m.com slash Topcast. Alright, welcome to another edition of Topcast. I've got with me my main man. Norm. Norm is here with us today on Topcast, so it's myself Shaggy and the infamous norm. We're talking about the Department of the Il Prepared. And the reason why I say where Il Prepared is, because Norm's here. I got a question. I want to know how many people are listening. So, Jarl, raise your hands. Wait, wait, wait, you're going to back, keep it up. Put your hand down. Stand up, you're kind of short. You're not a small person, are you? 47 and a half people. Alright, go on. Well, anyways, we're here in Norm and the reason why I say where Il Prepared is, because I kind of put out the message late this week that we're actually going to do a Topcast show, a technical show. This is obviously going to be our tech show. We're not interviewing anybody today. We haven't done a tech show in a few weeks, so I thought it was about time that we crank one out. And I put the message out to my minions that help us. We actually have a support staff. Do we want to talk about the support staff? Do we have one, really? I don't see them. Oh, is it Eric one? No, no. We got Al. Who knows? Right. We got Al in Corn. Al in Corn. Corn is sweet. It's children, nibblets. So they're helping us. And Al came through with his segment, but it was tough to get everything organized. Corn's dead pop. And this is a mother kettle. No, his dad is pop corn. Got you. His mother is kettle corn. But anyways, so speaking of which, right now, we've got one of our traditional segments that we run on every one of our tech shows. So here we go. It's time for... Play over, we win. Okay, it's time to call Trent up and get him on the horn and see what this week's play of the week is. What GAMEY has in store for us this week to make us a better pinball player. Let's give him a call right now. Play. Trent, my man. So what's the deal? Trent, you dropped from second place, past pinball player in the world, the third place. That's going the wrong direction, my man. Well, there's a lot of competition out there. The Europeans are starting to pick things up and they're getting excited about the new WAPA program and the competition's fifth. So who's this new guy that's now in second that took you over? Matt is from Sweden. Well, he's one of them ball. We were over there for the European Championships and he's doing a good job. So he came from nowhere and now he's in second place? Yeah, basically he's the Christmas on the Sweden. He goes everything. So he's been coming up in the pack then. Yeah, yeah. Is he better than you? No, of course not. Okay, so what are you going to do to get back into second and ultimately first? What am I going to do? Well, I'm going to keep practicing. You know, I haven't been practicing a lot lately so I think I try to get back into second place. I think I'll do a little bit better. So you went over to the European Championship? Yeah, I am Lyman and Chris Newsome Todd McCullough and Neil Shassall went. And how was it? Was it fun? Oh, it was a blast. It was unbelievable fun. Those guys are fantastic hosts and they do a top notch tournament. It's a lot of fun to play in, a lot of fun to hang out in Sweden. It's pretty cool. Well, what did you do? Did you meet any nice Swedish cows? Oh, there were gobs and gobs, the nice Swedish cows over there. You can of course meet some of our players, we're all too shy to go talk to them. So Sweden gets to talk to too many. Yeah, there isn't. It's not like you're the soccer star of Sweden. Right, exactly. So what else did you do there? Did you drink any good Swedish beer? I don't know there's any good Swedish beer over there, but there was definitely Swedish beer. Okay, so what else? What is our play of the week today? Well, I can tell you how to play pinball magic. Let's hear it. Well, the interesting thing about pinball magic is that... Well, wait, wait, wait. We should say that pinball magic came out what in 1996 by Capcom? Yeah, it was one of their first games, and I remember at the trade show they were previewing it. They were all excited about their new system. I think the most exciting thing about that game is they would... They kept shorting the 50 volts of the switch line and nothing would happen. That was their big breakthrough. Not a very good thing to have in that trade show. Yeah. What show was that? You know, supposedly they were running out to compete with theater of magic. But anyways, how do you play it? Well, it's basically... You've heard the old adage shoot the lit shot. Well, that's basically what pinball magic is. There's gonna be one shot pretty much this lit. You got to shoot that shot. And if you don't, does the world implode? I don't know. I don't know. There's anything else you can do. I think you can light multiball, but not really worth doing when you can shoot the lit shot. Is that the extent of the whole thing you're gonna tell me? Yeah, well, no, no. There are some slight strategies to it. Occasionally the lock will be lit or one of your modes is having a lock lit. And you can hit the multiball. You have to get one lock lit. You can actually do a short ones into the top hat. And when you do that, it'll start mini-may ham, which is a two-ball multiball. It's supposed to have three-ball multiball. Which I would advise doing... You know, it keeps your balls on the table at once and not one. And one in seven. And you can continue to complete your modes or your shots while you're in multiball. So you're a little bit safer in that regard. Especially when you go through, basically you go through, you do, I think, six or nine shots the first time. Then you go through to six or nine shots. And in six or nine more shots, to finish up stage three. And you can continue to do those shots while you're in multiball. And as you go through the different stages, the shots get to be a little bit tougher. You're going to main right now. What are you going to main for? I'm in main. We're training. We're doing some biking. We're doing some running. We just got down from a three-mile run around Jordan Ponds. Oh, this is nothing to do with pinball. No, although at the end of July, JR is hosting the New Robert Englunds Championships. I hit his place in main. And I would encourage everyone to come up to it. He does lots and lots of tournaments. And he's very good at it. And we're expecting to have a big turnout. And we should have a blast. So I would encourage everyone in the end of July to have the main and have some fun. Wapper points? I think there are a lot of points, but I can't confirm that. So is there anything else to pinball magic started kind of distract you there? Oh, no problem. Well, anyway, after you get through all the modes, the very last thing is this lady comes out for him assuming is the magician. There was a theme with female magicians around that time. And I have no actually no idea of what you're supposed to do, but because there's no instructions. And she just sits on the screen. Sometimes she flashes, sometimes she's sold or sometimes she gets younger. One of the sweetest guys did tell me, or maybe it wasn't one of the Dutch guys, told me that you need to keep shooting the ramp over and over again. But the main strategy when you get to that point is the very last mode to finish is very tough. You have to shoot that commuting and colored ball on the right hand side. That shot. And you have to shoot it six times and it's kind of a dangerous shot. So what you want to do is you want to start multiball. You want to finish up that commuting and you're going to shoot it six times while you're in multiball. And then you can have it hopefully. If you're still going, you can have multiball in the final mode. You shoot that ramp a bunch. It's hopefully you'll be a feeder. It's actually, you can sound like a stupid game, but the artwork is pretty good on the animation and the sound is actually pretty good on it. So it's worth playing every now and then. Do you own one? I don't think I have one right now. I'm actually looking for one. Okay, well that's Trent's play of the week. You got anything else to throw at us, Trent? Not really. You've covered quite a bit. I think the biggest thing is the new one, Tournament coming up. You know, there's a website, which I can't remember what it is. But if you search under Valley Man or JR or something like RGP or search under doing one championship in the RGU, you can probably find it. Cool. So I have fun up in Maine and you know, I'm going to expect next time I talk to you that you're back in second place and working on getting into first. I am. I'm working on it. Definitely. All right, take care, Trent. See you, Joshua Clay. That was our play of the week. So what do you think of Trent or man, man? He moved from the second or third. Yeah, he was in second and now he's in now he's in third place in the world pinball standings. In my mind, I'm number one. Number one in your own mind. There's something to be said for that. I know if you drink, you could be number one or anything. And he's, I want to go to his arcade and his, his hole in the ground is cave. When are we going to do that? His hole in the ground? He's got a Colombus. He's got an Indian cave that's in the ground. We should plug him. I think he said I always do. You plug him every time we have a man, you plug him. Well, he does this stuff for him. So I think he's, he deserves something for this. You don't pay him anything. So I think giving him that is certainly a good deed. And we got to go down there and make some stupid skit for a movie in the game. Give me for a next top video. Yeah. And now it's time for everyone's favorite. Game of the week. All right. Game of the week. This week we're going to talk about a game that's really norm, one of Norm's favorites. And this was his idea, not mine. And that is the Valley Classic 4-Player Electrical Game called Fireball. Art by, by our buddy Dave Christensen. You can see the, the guy on the webcam. We're using the webcam today, by the way, if you hadn't noticed. And you can see the Fireball back glass. And now here was one of the main things in the game is this Playfield spinner, which was this rubber disc. And the center of the game that when the ball hits it, it kind of spews it all over. The disc is always running during the game. Kind of like a whirlwind type thing. And you know, kind of an interesting feature. The other thing too is this game was multiball. So there was a lock, Odin lock on the left side of the playfield. And a Wotin or Woteton lock on the right side of the playfield. The other thing that's kind of interesting about the game, and here we're showing it on the screen, is the skill shot, which you know, it's kind of cool. It's kind of like this angled upper part of the playfield that you kind of kind of get the ball up. And you can see on the webcam. Like your webcam. Yeah, it's, yeah, right. And you can see on the webcam that I'm going to be not very successful at making this skill shot. Oh, I just missed it. I just missed it. But if you do that, it lights the all three pop bumpers for 100 points. Instead of just having the bottom one lit for 100. Now the other cool thing about the game, or a lot of people like, is the zipper flippers. And the zipper flippers, what they are, this game uses two-inch flippers. The flippers actually move together when you hit the center mushroom bumper. Like here we're showing on the screen, the zipper flippers contract it together. So you can see it doesn't let the ball drain between the two flippers. And if you hit either the two outside mushroom targets, the flippers move to the back to the out position. Or if you drain the ball, which is what I just did on this game. So, you know, it's kind of an interesting game. You know, is it worth all the hype? What do you think, Norm? Well, it's certainly different than all the other games that we're being pumped out. You know, a lot of symmetrical games. It's got a lot of variety to it. You know, it's frustrating. I remember playing in high school. Here's the old Odin lock on the webcam. Playing it in high school. There's a ball at station. I mean, a trap ball in there. You got a trap ball in there. There's a lot of features going on. And it's, I think it's a classic. You know, you're kind of tempted by knowing the history of pinball afterwards and saying, well, it doesn't compare to Monster Bash or this or this, but you got to compare it and everything that was... In terms of the 70s. 70s and what was before it? And it's certainly, you know, artistic wise. It's great play wise. It's great. It's frustrating. It's very challenging. There's times you get a ball with, you know, ten points just run down the center and you're, you're mad. You put your money in and it's, I think it was a quarter at a time. So you remember playing location? Yeah, it was a love hate relationship. I said I always wanted order, own one of these when I was 17, 18, I finally owned one about 20 years later. And you still play it? Yeah, it's a good game. I just... You know, it's one of those games where you can get a really low score and a really high score. It's hard to play it consistently well. Yeah, you can sometimes get in a groove and hit that skill shot once you master your game. And then they always seem to play, feels always seem to be in great shape. And every time I've seen one, I've never seen one. I've seen one with wear between the flippers. But I've never seen anyone that was like a complete war. Yeah, I don't know why that was the case. Whether that ball just didn't get... Well, you know, Tim Arnold says that the game is too easy. He says if you keep hitting on the right side the Wo-Tan lock, once you got a ball locked in there, what happens is that you can make that shot and it diverts the ball away from that retaining hole. And it goes straight down this little subway and then down and back to the flippers and you keep making that shot. He says you can rape the game by just making that shot over and over and over. That's right, that gate is open. Yeah, or you have the ball locked. You got to have the ball locked down. No, there's a lot of strategy to game. It's just not banging targets and, you know, I think it was at a bit of time. Yeah. And then they made how many different versions at later? Two other ones? Oh, yeah, yeah, they did. They made the Fireball Classic and they made another one... Fireball, or Fireball, two I believe it was called... Fireball's Mother. Yeah, Fireball's Mother. So they were both solid state versions. They really didn't rape. One was completely different and one was similar. And then they had the home model in there. Yeah, and they had a home model but that was completely different too. That was sold by Sears. Game of the week. That was our game of the week. But anyway, so let's go on with our Nesk's little part of our show. It's time for Mord's Weekend Update, the Weeks News in the ball. Okay, so we've got everybody's favorite Mord is back. Good old Mord is back because we know how much everybody loves Mord's hide. I'd like to introduce Mord with this week's news in pinball. Hi everyone, this is Mord. Hey, hi Shaggy. Hey Mord. And who's that other guy over there? It's Sonia. Oh, hi. Hi. Nice to meet you. Yeah, I went to the Big Bang Bar pickup. So how was the Big Bang Bar pickup? I had a horrible time. Mord, why didn't you have a good time? Mr. Cunningham was very, very nice to me and he gave me a nice sandwich. And I went to get my game. It was very nice to me. It was very nice. But I didn't have a good time though. Well, I picked up the game and I strived on the back of my Ferrari. And it was driving along in about 100 miles an hour. So I could get home to Nebraska in like 40 minutes. When the policeman pulled me over and arrested me after a high speed chase. High speed chase? You mean not in a Ferrari but in a Lamborghini no doubt. And he said something about my suspended license. And I would be spending 23 days at the Paris Hilton or something. Paris gets a lot of bad press more but let's put it through you this way. She would be the best looking girl that you ever spent 23 days within your whole life. No doubt. Well anyway, the Paris Hilton looked more like a jail to me. You understand me? Mord, that's because Paris was in jail for 23 days. You know? Well, I snuck out the back of the jail because I'm such a skinny little fella. You know? And I had to sell my BBB for $13,000 to pay for my legal expenses. And this is all true. It's just exactly how I remember it or made it up. Well, that's it for Mord. I'm bringing it in news as I see it. Bye-bye! So long from Mord's weekend update. What do you think of that norm? Mord is very inventive. I'd like his humor. Most people probably hate it but I think he's probably on meth and fetter means or crack. I can't figure out which one it is. It is voice. Doesn't his voice kind of remind you of like your ex-wife? No, it's sort of like a Jerry Lewis type of guy with somebody pension him, you know, like somewhere. And his pinballs. And now it's time for Tech Tech Tech. Oh, we... All right, Noah, we're going to talk about a Tech Tip. This is something interesting. I was working on, actually Eric A. sold this guy that I know a Black Rose, which is what a 1992 Valley WPC, Valley Williams WPC game. It's under the Valley Moniker. So, have you ever played Black Horse? I think I have, but not in a long time. Yeah, it's kind of an interesting game. It has that cannon in the middle of the playfield. No. It has a cannon in the middle of the playfield. You load the cannon and thing rotates back and forth. You hit the fire button or the flipper buttons in it and it kind of shoots the ball out from underneath the playfield. It's kind of a neat game. It's kind of a bunch of video modes and stuff. But anyways, this guy's wife plays the Pigeasus out of this game. I mean, she loves this game. And he noticed that a bunch of lights weren't working. So, he went and tried to change the light bulbs and would put in new light bulbs and the lights still didn't work. So, this guy actually had half a brain. He was pretty sharp in that regard. He went to the book and looked up on the back paes. There's like a lamp matrix, which is an 8x8 table, 8 rows by 8 columns. And he noticed that all the lamps were out or all in one row. But that's as far as he could take it. He didn't know anything about electronics. He was just reading the book and found that. So, he called me and I said, I'd come over and help him. A turn up went over there and he said, you know, I know that I might have messed up the connectors. So, I looked at the bottom right corner of the WPC driver board and the row connectors are stick out like a sore thumb on that board because it's the only 0.100 inch MOLX connector on the whole WPC driver board. Everything else is 0.156, you know, a larger connector. So, this has three in a row, three connectors like stacked on top of each other where you can put three different plugs. And what they do is they have one plug for the play field, usually one plug for the insert panel on the back glass and then a third plug for like if, you know, maybe the coin door area. And that's what this is. One of the lamps was the coin door, or not the coin door, but the start button that blanks and there was two lamps up in the insert panel and then the other six lamps or five lamps were in the play field. And when I first went through, I thought that since he did in fact screw up one of the connectors, I fixed the connector and it still didn't work. But then what I did is I took a light bulb and an alligator clip and I clipped it to the row. This was row eight. That was the lamp matrix rowing question. Excuse me, is this going to take more than an hour? So, then I took a light bulb and an alligator clip to one side of the light bulb to row eight. And then the other side to any one of the column numbers will row one through eight. It doesn't matter. Okay, no, I'm fine. And the lights were flashing at the game and lamp test and the light flashed. So, why wouldn't it flash when I hooked up the connectors if it had just one lamp on there? It would flash. So, you got any ideas norm? Why that would happen? Because something was wrong. You got any ideas norm? Because you know, I have some connections out somewhere. You're such a bonehead. Anyways, what was interesting was is that I was had the light bulb hooked up without diode. Normally in circuit, no, light bulb with a 1n, 4000 and 1 or 4000 and 4 diode. And I was just with this test with the alligator clips and light bulb, I wasn't using the diode and it was working fine without the diode. But when I hooked up the lamp matrix plug and I was just using the coin door one, or you know, the start button, which is just a single lamp, it wouldn't work. So, that's like a good comparison, a one lamp to one lamp with diode without. I thought that was really, really odd. And so, what I did is I reached through my toolbox and I found a diode, put it in, you know, circuit with the, with the roll, or how it was supposed to be wired. And also, it would work, sure enough. So, what I did is I went to the driver board and there's a tip 102 darlington transistor that controls the roll for the, the lamp matrix. And I decided to replace that transistor. Sure, you know, 50 cent item, why not? Replace it in bingo, also in it worked. You know, so it was interesting that the lamp test would work with no diode on the lamp. The transistor would work, but with the diode, it would not. So, the forward voltage drop out of the diode was screwing up the transistor. So, the transistor, I guess, was maybe just barely working. They, uh, I'm trying to look at it with, but it was interesting. I replaced the transistor. Sure, the save didn't you could have did a test and a transistor and they want to give you more information about what, what was wrong with it and then helped you with your logic. You know what I did instead? Through it away. Yeah, yeah, that's what I did. That's exactly what I did. Oh, you could have just figured it out, did a value and then you would have helped you with your logic next time. But you don't think that way. That was our tech tip of the week. You know, that's, if you want to give us a call with a tech question, you can call us and, uh, you know, when, uh, ask us any sort of tech question or you get some opinions or anything else on games you want to talk about. Or a crazy story. Yeah, or a crazy stories. Hey, George, I just had to call and tell you about this really great magazine, I guess. It's called the Ping Game Journal. It's the only magazine dedicated to a pinball. It's got great articles and interviews with designers and everything. No, George, I won't lend you my copy. Who knows where you'll take it to. You're going to have to go to PingGameGenerale.com and get your own subscription. But George, the guy says that each issue will give mail whenever he feels like it. What's the deal with that? All right, George, I got to go. Got to call Elaine and tell her, I can't believe how good this magazine is. Okay, Norm, we got some tech questions here. Why don't you go ahead? Yeah, I'm just waiting for the phone and just ringing off to the, well, there's this guy named Tom Palmer. He's from London, Ontario. And he's got a whirlwind maybe by Williams. And his question is, as we speak, I'm restoring a whirlwind. Well, a friend and I'm repainting and using a new decal set. Cabinet has a lot of damage. It was not possible to restore using usual methods. I was wondering if you and Norm are planning a video on decals and what it would call extreme measures to restore cabinets, back boxes, boards, etc. So all the repropods and decals and translates available, you can do amazing things if you keep up with out there. Sort of did that. Yeah, we did it. It's a small extent. In top seven, we didn't read decal a cabinet, but I took a cabinet that was pretty darn tore up, made my own decals for it. And made it, you know, I'm amazed how well that cabinet, it really does look like new. But we didn't apply any of these pre-made decals, like Illinois pinball, for example, cells. We didn't do that. I'm not a big fan of cabinet decals, to be honest with you. You've done a couple. I've done all, but I'm just not a big fan of them. I just explain roughly what are some of the tricks with doing one. You know, let me tell you first why I, you know, these people, they have slight, I would say very slightly damaged cabinets, and then they read decal them. I think once you read decal a cabinet, especially a cabinet that was never decal before, I take issue with that. I really think that that's a problem. So, you know, there's a cabinet, an original screen cabinet. Well, we should back up the, how are cabinets screened? You know, there's, there were some where they're actually screened directly onto the, you know, onto the wood, sort of speak. And then there's some where there's like a painted wall. You got painted ones. Well, there's, yeah, I'm talking about 90s games, which is beyond any of the screen or the stencil cabinets. So, I'm not talking about stencil cabinets. I'm talking about stuff that was, you know, 90s and newer. So, you have ones where, you know, the cabinet company actually screened the graphics directly onto the wood. You've got another style where they lay down a white kind of vinyl material onto the wood, and then they screen on the white vinyl material directly on the white vinyl material. Then you have actual cabinet decals like that were used on Monster Bation cactus cannon, which are, you know, like peel and stick style. The only one I would really consider doing a new cabinet decal measuring and would be, you know, the cactus cannon in Monster Bation, everything else, I would want to try and repair them as best I could. But you do it. Because you're going to be far more durable. Oh, what do you do with a bad faded cabinet like Indiana Jones or one of those? If you're really anal and you want to fix this thing up, what do you do? In the case of Indiana Jones, it was a four process color design, and they do, they use a lot of that sun bursting where they take like the red phase to kind of an orange, which fades to a yellow. And then the red obviously fades with time, and there isn't a lot, you can't really touch that up. I mean, you're never going to get a good look. So in that one, you really don't have much choice. You pretty much have to go to the cabinet decal route if you're, if you demand an unfaded cabinet. That, you know, that would be, that would be an exception to the rule. But let's take something like Adams family. Adams family is your basic black cabinet. Let's just a couple colors. I think that one's really, you know, fairly easy to touch up in this regard. And I would much rather touch that up and spray a very light clear coat over it after I touch it up, opposed to actually redecallowing it, you know, putting new decals on. Because none of the Adams families were decal cabinets. They were all, you know, screened directly on the wood or screened with the vinyl process. Let's get back to the question. You did do a decal. This guy's asking about it. You did the one on the cactus can and you had a white right and you turned a Elvira that was out of Williams into a into a cactus canyon. What issues do you have trying to align those, those decals, so you don't mess it up? That's got to be a big problem. Yeah, it was, it was a huge one. And what, and just to kind of explain to give people a little background. This was a game I got. It was a white wood cactus canyon. And I had the game working in a white wood. And it was in an Elvira scared stiff cabinet because, you know, that's typical for a white wood. They're in an older game cabinet because that's just how they did it. The graphics weren't completed yet. No artwork. Yeah, it was just a white wood. So the cabinet was just a cabinet, you know, it wasn't meant for anyone that. So I got this game and I got a working as a white wood. And yeah, I don't know if you ever played a white wood, but white woods just sucked a play. I mean, they're, it's awful. It's weird. You don't know what you're going after. Yeah, because nothing's really labeled so I did. But it's a great history. Yeah, it's great history. I, you know, I took little stickers and put them over the inserts. So I had some idea of what to shoot for. And it's the only one white wood, right? Yeah, I had no. There was, and this was not even a late white wood. There was at least three other white woods. And this one wasn't even a late one. So when I ended up doing is buying at the time, I bought a cactus candy and playfield brand new for 200 bucks for it from Williams. And a translate and a translate and some other accessory. Oh, yeah, I need a bunch of parts. They didn't even have the original. I, he couldn't get the light boards for under the playfield. So I basically, and the make matters worse, the light, the light, the lamp matrix was different in the white wood than it was in the final production game. So we're using production software. If the game went to light lamp number 10, which was extra ball while my game lamp number 10 was the left out lane. You know what I mean? It was like that. So I essentially had to rewire the whole game and there was no lamp boards. So I had installed a lamp socket for each lamp insert and actually do all eight rows and all columns. It was a big job. It was a huge job actually. And there were other issues too, yet to get the decals back to the decals. Yeah. Okay. So bought the decals. Now there's two way to put decals on. We're right. The decals. The Williams. Yeah, I got them right from Williams. At the time he could buy it. Williams parts department. I think they were already closed as a pinball company, but their parts department existed for another year or two before cutting and bought it. You couldn't get the gun tray either. You had the original one that they made. Right. Right. There was a couple things I couldn't get. The lower ball arch. You know, I'm using the white wood version that you know, which is just a black arch with a little sticker that they placed the guns to. Plus, it guns were a little different. But anyway, it's not that DV8 too far off course. What I did is I installed the decals dry looking back on it. That was just a bitch. I probably should have done them wet. You do them wet. What you do is you can actually buy. There's a company that that deal in in decal application. You can actually buy a solution that you put in like in a spray bottle that you spray down on the cabinet. You wet it. You wet it with this stuff and then you can put the decals on and kind of reposition it. You can float it. You can float it. Then it has some kind of time lag before it actually sets. Right. That makes some sense. If you don't want to buy it, you can actually use a solution of just soapy water. That works too. Or some people use Windex. I prefer the soapy water technique. I would buy the whatever they're soapy water. Yeah, I would buy the preferred method is to buy the advertised product. But some people aren't into that. If you're dropping four bills for things, what's another eight bucks or whatever it is here? It might not too. Now, I did it dry. It was difficult to do without getting any air bubbles. But not impossible. You just have to get the decal lined up. You got the cabinet basically. If there's any defects in the cabinet, you have to sort those out. Any sort of nick or scratch will telegraph its way through the new decal. So you have to use body filler and block sand it and make sure the cabinet is pretty much perfect. Now, in this particular one, you have to get a bite. You have to get it rough enough. No, no. You don't have to do that. No matter if you don't really want to do that because it makes positioning the decals more difficult. Any sort of roughness can telegraph through to the new decal. So you want that thing pretty smooth. The other thing you should do is paint all the corners black. Anywhere where two pieces of wood come together at a right angle, you need to spray paint a black edge along that. That way, if the decals open up a little bit or where they meet and you cut them with a razor blade, you won't see a white area. Instead, you'll see black and it blends better. Now, on this particular cabinet, it was the scared stiff. A lot of that stuff I didn't have to do because of this cabinet was basically immaculate. All the stuff that came out of Williams, these white woods and that, they obviously weren't beaten up the stuff. So the cabinets were really, really nice. Except the fact it's got pulled out of a dumpster. Actually, this one didn't pull out. That one, which one? The one I had, it didn't pull out of a dumpster. No, it came out of the end of the guy's driveway. He was throwing it out in a friend of mine went. The designer Matt Coriel was actually throwing the game out and he called a friend of mine and said, you know that white wood cactus can't have it? It's not the end of my street right now. The carage man comes tomorrow. If you want it, come over and get it. It's just amazing how it's a one man's trash and treasure. Yeah, so my buddy went and got it and it was the white wood and there weren't any boards in it that was one disadvantage. But my buddy worked at Williams at the time so he had a whole bunch of boards. So he sold the whole thing to me with boards for God it. I want to say 700 bucks. I think it was 750 actually. But anyways, try to make a really long stupid story a little bit shorter. I did it dry and basically when you, it's hard to explain. It'd be easier in a video format. But when you peel in the decals off, you know I'm kind of doing it in a large swipe and I got a squeegee. And anytime I got an air bubble as long as you don't go too far, you can kind of back the decal off. But you got to be real careful that you don't rip it. Yes, do you start on a corner or do you start on the edge? Start on an edge. Hold on a second. We're going to make a decal here. Hello, welcome to Topcast. Yeah, I got a question on a Williams space shuttle. Sure. The displays on it, everyone's in all, they just go black and then eventually come on on their own. When you say they go black, what do you mean when you're playing? Yeah, even if you have it on sometimes, all the lights that go out on the squirt display, the commas will still be there. Have you checked the ribbon cables just for fun? Yes, I've, when they're out, I've taken it off and wiggled them and it doesn't seem to make any difference. And you've reset the connectors or you know, redone the ribbon cables on the CPU board and where it comes into the master displays. Yeah, that's on that. I haven't taken the circuit board off and we thought and we floated the pins. No, I don't recommend you do that. I don't think you need to. Was that ribbon cable ever kinked in the in the backbox, so let's put together. Did it look for any creases in it? Norm is questioning how good the ribbon cable is, what kind of condition it's in. I don't think that's the, we just did that on Rob's cable. Did you? I really, I kinked it and we shut the display off. And then we took the ribbon cable with stuck between the backbox and the game and then we opened it up, got the ribbon cable on. We're lucky enough to bend it back and get it to work. So you got to look for a severe kink in there and that could be given you intermittent play. I mean, that's, that's a possibility. You got to check out any possibilities that I'm going to give you or he'll give you. So he's saying basically check the ribbon cable. Okay. Now that's just one, that's one idea. There's a couple other things to check too. And that's when it goes out, did you check the voltages? No. That would be another thing to do. If you can get it where it's out for, you know, long enough where you can get the backbox open and check the voltages, you got to have minus 100, plus 100, five volts coming out of the power supply. I believe the connector is on the lower left hand side of the power supply. You can check the schematics to be exact. Okay. I did replace the power supply. I did replace the power supply. And that made no difference. No. What about the pins? I put a, you know, aftermarket one in. That's fine. That's fine. That's okay. Okay. So the next thing would be to actually check the glass themselves. Do they'll all five of them called display glasses go out? Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of leading down that road to maybe the ribbon cable actually. Okay. How about the pins? It's, you know, that it would be honest with you, Norm. The pins on that it's, it maybe on one display it would go out, but to see all five displays go out. And it's sound... I go to the cable because this one was kinked really bad. I don't know if I've had an easy thing to find in the new cable. Yeah. Actually, they are pretty easy. You can have a maid or make them yourself. Do you have another ribbon cable you can try in the game? I don't. I could order something. I think it doesn't... Well, do me a favor. Get another ribbon cable. Try it and send me an email back and let me know what happened. This is the perfect stumped jump episode. I see it coming. Okay. Try the ribbon cable thing and then email me back and let me know what you found out. Okay. I also got another question. I have a ball bowler and they have a bunch of relays that use the blades on them. Have a whole spacing on where the screws go through of a quarter inch. Is there a source where you could buy those? Wait, you mean you want switch blades? Yeah, I've had one break and I actually made one from scratch. You could find those. Yeah, Steve Young sells switch blades. What he does is he sells them in links. Well, they come in... I bought a bunch of those in the contacts. For the relays on this, the whole spacing typically on pinball machines creates the two holes. And on these relays, they're closer together than a quarter inch. You're talking about the mounting point, the two mounting screws, right? Yeah. Who made this thing? It's Valley. Oh, no wonder it's Valley. Well, no, I actually took one of the ones from Steve Young and modified it. Well, that'll work. Are you cut it and re-sotted it? Well, actually, I just read it shorter. And I actually drilled two holes down below and made it work. I was hoping that... I was hoping that it would have a lot of relays in there. And I was hoping to have some on hand if any of them ever broke. This is what I would do or what you can do. So you take the spacing on the ones that Steve Young sells you. The holes are too far apart, right? Yeah. Okay, so this is what you do. You take one of the Steve Young ones. And what you do is you cut it in... Like, you cut it right between the two mounting holes. Then put them together. And what you have is one part of the blade is going to overlap the other one. And if it overlaps, so what? You see what I'm saying? And when you tighten the switch stack back together, it'll hold it all together. And the overlap thing is fine. So what you got to do is just cut it right between the two mounting screws, assemble the thing, you'll get a little bit of overlap, or a 16th of an inch of overlap, which is fine. And that just will be between the sandwich of the bacon-lite switch stacks plates. And you're good to go. That's all I would do. Okay. So, you know, that's pretty simple. Does it make sense what I just said? Yeah. So, there you go. There's the quick and easy way. Okay. All right. Okay. Thanks. Send us an email and let us know about the other thing. Okay. All right. Take care. See one of the problems with that cable that's connecting it back to this first problem, was that it's the hardest thing to find is an intermittent short in a wire. So, I think he's going to have to replace that cable. And once he does that, I think. You're talking about the ribbon cable? Yeah. Yeah. It's probably a good start. It's got a good crease in it, I bet. You know, there's a trick you can do. You know, back in the, when you buy like a new hard drive for your computer, you get these ribbon cables and they're like a million feet. They're longer than you need and the connectors are like, I don't know, 20 pins. You can always use those at least temporarily, even though they're too big. You can use them temporarily. Oh, that's the real answer. No, they hung up. So, you can use those kind of temporarily to see as proof of concept, to see if they, if they work or not. You know, and then if they do, you can always cut them. And if you screw it up, you just buy another hard drive and get another free cable. I'm just kidding about that. But anyways, back to our cabinet decal thing. I installed them dry. You just got to go slow and precise and it's not so bad. And if you start on an edge, why wouldn't you start in the corner? I know, I start on a, on a, on a long edge. I start on a long edge. What happens if you're like long edge? The problem is if you start in a corner, it's too hard to align the, like you're doing a side of a decal, the things for five feet long. It's too hard to align it if you started in the corner. You got to start on a big, I started the butt end of the cabinet on the big long edge, peel it back, get it aligned and then hold on. Hi, welcome to TopCast. I got a tech question for Shaggy. Okay. Is it not the machine, Jesspin? Okay, wait, wait, what's your first name? Dan. Dan, where are you from, Dan? I'm Wisconsin. All right, Dan, to shoot, you got a, a got leap, Jesspin question? Right. Yeah, I've got, it's got the AX, BX and CX relays and the, the problem with it is, it won't reset the, the reset motor just continues to spin, like on an old EM, you know. And if you go back to the player unit that controls the numbers and manually increment it all the way so that it resets the gameplay system. The gameplay is fine, but the player unit will not increment the last step in the reset sequence and I can't figure it out. On the player unit, when you, you know, you undo the screw and kind of bring it back and you can look at all, have you looked at all the switch stacks? I think there's a set of five, six, five or six switch stacks. Yeah, there's five or six and then there's one, one switch on there that's the, the final reset, you know, like at the sixth position or whatever. Exactly. Once it's gone all the way around rotation, that last switch closes and everything is peachy. Right. That's what it's, but the problem is the darn corner-walk increment. But it's interesting because if you put four players up, as soon as it hits the initial reset sequence, you know, play the game, switch the player units, we'll see the balls, it does everything normally. It's the very initial reset will not work. Did you look at the coin unit? You know, that's that funky plastic thing on there. No, no, no, the coin unit, the coin unit in that game is mounted on the bottom panel of the game and it's right next to the knocker unit in the chime box. Okay, now this one's different. This has, are you talking about, I'm thinking about the two coins, one play unit with the two coils on it and the plastic, is it makes it grow? It looks like a match unit almost. No, I'm not talking about that. No, okay. The coin unit on that, because this guy, this, uh, Jetspin's a four player, right? Yeah, it's a two player actually. Okay, oh, it's a two player, then it might not have a coin unit. Because the coin unit's a, maybe a four player thing. Ah, I can't remember. Yeah, sorry about that, it is two player, yeah. It's two player. I'm gonna look at the schematic, I got it right here. Norm, talk to this guy. So what's going on in Wisconsin right now? Norm, ask him about this game, try and help him. Help him. See, he's put it into the lake and you'll be done with it. Come on Norm, but, while I get the schematic out of here. He's not laughing. What other games do you have in your collection? Um, Harley Davidson, uh, well, Playball, Williams, or Gotlid Playball? Oh yeah, but it's like 38. 376, um, Rockaball, um, and, uh, 1961. Oh, um, Skillball. So on the player unit, you've got, um, one of the stacks in the player unit is responsible for resetting all the score reels. Right. And you might have two of those that are responsible for that. I can't remember. And then you've got two, two stacks, one for player, one for player two. And then you've got the, uh, the home and the reset stack. Um, and I would check all those switches and clean them and make sure you've got good, uh, tension on those. I would also check, of course, the AB, AX and BX relays too. Uh, and make sure that those are all properly adjusted. Those are really hard to adjust. And, uh, I have, I pulled them out of the game and put the board up on a, uh, wanted to work bench and looked at it and just, you tried not to bend them at all just because they are so touchy. Right. Um, but I still think it's got to be somewhere in there. What in the AX, BX? I'm thinking because the, the other thing it doesn't want to do is it doesn't want on the very, on the, uh, uh, if you, if you force the ball from, from the return over the ramp, there's a, uh, switch there that basically increments the ball. So it goes from ball one to ball two, ball three. It senses the ball travel once the kicker kicks it out into the shooting lane. Right. If you manually throw that ball over that lane, it, uh, it changes, it, I think it changes the play, the ball or the player. Are you talking about it, it kicks the ball from the out hole to the shooter lane? Okay. So let me ask you this. When you hit reset in the whole game, reset and the ball sitting in the out hole. And it, and everything's ready, but it never kicks the ball from the out hole to the shooter lane. No, actually, what's happening is it doesn't get that far. It, well, it, it starts to reset, um, it pulls in the relays and the, but in the backboard, but the player unit both moves. Are you saying the scores never reset to zero? That's correct. Okay. Well, that's, that's the first thing you have to solve at the, that, that means that you gotta look at the, um, yeah, they will reset if you increment the player unit, you know what I mean? It's just the player unit won't advance itself. So if I manually increment the player unit one click and there's a score up on the first player, it'll reset them all to zeroes. But then the player, player unit won't increment to go to the second player to reset that one unless you can manually increment it, you know, or manually move the lever. Then it'll reset that player and then if you hit it, I think it's three times more. It go, it sees that it's at the end position and the reset sequence is complete and then the game plays just fine. It kicks the ball out and it'll play the all five balls, the game's over and it'll game over sequence too. Did you say it's a, did you say it's jet spin? Yeah, it's jet spin. Jet spin is October 77. That's a four player game. Oh, you know what? I'm sorry, it must be super spin then, jet, it's sister. Yeah, the two, the two player I think is super spin, right? Yep, yep, yep, yep. I don't have a schematic for that one. Yeah, I was thinking jet spins four players. I know it's four players. Why is he saying it's two players? I was confused. It is super, yep. Okay, super spin. Good, good, good. Again, did you clean the bakelite discs, the moving in the stationary one on the player unit? Sure did. Okay, and it operates freely. Yeah, it works great. Okay, and when you increment that switch underneath the ball trough, the player unit will advance. Right, yeah, once everything was reset. Right, right. Well, there is a chance that when you reassemble the player unit that you have the moving bakelite disc off by one rivet on the stationary, you know, that it's misaligned. But I'm going to assume that when you did that, you did assemble the player unit correctly and at the risen of misalignment. Because if you're off by one rivet, I guess you could get a problem like this, but let's assume that you did that correctly. Did you look at Z1 and Z2? Yeah, I don't remember what those... You got to look at Z1 and Z2. They're in the head. Okay, they're real important. They're mainly only, you know, I can't remember. Z1 and Z2 is part of a four player design. I can't remember if you choose on a two player because I don't have a super spin schematic. I've only got jet spin. But basically, the Z1 and Z2 is what resets those score reels. Because the score reels aren't getting reset, that's really where you got to concentrate on. Okay. Alright, we're going to let you go. If I say you're on a run... Let us know what happened in semi-unemail. We'll do. Thank you. Thanks, Nar. Thanks, Sherry. Thanks, Nar. Thank you. Bye. What's the thing in that one, Norm? You know, it gets tough. When you're not, you don't have a game in front of you and you're trying to diagnose problems. Mostly when he tells me it's a wrong game. It makes it even harder. Look, I have the game and you got to be game psychic. Game psychic. You know, that's where I'll know. We all forget things. It's, you know... Here's a good one. Here's an email one we got. This guy's name is Thomas. He's in San Diego, California. He's got a Williams Grand Lizzard. It says, the left bottom flipper is very weak. The coil is good. That was the extent of his email. I assume he doesn't want the left bottom flipper to be weak anymore. Probably. Yeah, probably. So the first thing you check, of course, is the antistrokes switch. Antistrokes switch should be closed. Make sure it's nice and clean with ample pressure. On the two... Why don't you explain what the antistrokes switch? If this guy doesn't even tell you what a problem is, maybe you're going to have to explain that. The game psychic norm. Look at it. I don't... Anyways. Okay, so a flipper coil is two parts. You've got a low resistance high power side that's the initial kick. And then you've got a high resistance low power side, which is the hold. Alright, let's take this hold on. Hi, welcome to TopCaster. Hi, it's Rand Paulin California. I have a tech question on the shadow. Sure, far away. Okay, so I've got the shadow here. And there's a drop target on there. I'm not talking about the big wall target. Yes, I know what you mean. Right in front of an eject hole. Exactly. And if you look at that target, there's a solenoid that makes the target go up. And then there's a small coil, which is a magnet that makes the coil go down. Right, it's a release coil that drives so that they can control the drop target either going up or down. Exactly. And so that small coil that it burned up and it took the Tip 102 transistor with it. And I just replaced the transistor, I replaced the coil, and it put it all back together. But now I have a different problem. And it's really weird. If I go into test mode and I go into the solenoid test and I select drop target down, the magnet and the solenoid both fire at the same time. They're both energized at the same time. So it's like it's trying to drop the target down and put the target up both at the same time. So it's almost like something shorted out, but I can't see anything that shorted out. Maybe in this soldering of that transistor, he bought something. What do you think? I got to agree with Norm on this one. Did you re-solder the header pins by chance on the driver board when you did this? I did not. And this particular Tip 102 transistor is actually on the flip-tronic's board. Oh, okay. Okay, that's good that you didn't re-solder the header pins. A lot of people re-solder header pins on WPC boards. I tend not to do that because the quality of the boards is excellent. And I rarely see botched connectors. And I've had guys re-solder them and they do solder bridges and cause all kinds of problems. So you're saying that the coil that, or the transistor that drives this is on the flip-tronics board because they ran out of driver transistors and that game only has two flippers. So why not use a transistor on the flip-tronics board? Right. Okay, so on the... Did you look at the flip-tronics board anymore? I haven't pulled it back out. That's one area that is suspect. Yeah, what I would do is there's a bunch of 1n-4,000 and 4 diodes on there. You just use in your multimeter. I would test each one of those. There's also some resistors. Again, with your meter, I would test those. It only takes a minute. It's a pretty straightforward stuff. Also did you replace the pre-driver too? No. And I probably would do that. And I would also reset all the ribbon cables in the game too. Well, I have the ribbon cables off and put them back on when I... You know, when I had the flip-tronics board out, I have the ribbon cable off. Off the flip-tronics, but they're also on the... I also go to the CPU board and to the... The sound board in the Daimature Sport. Just pull them off a quarter inch and push them back on. You don't actually have to physically remove them all the way. Just do that for me. That's a real quick and easy thing. And, you know, I mean, it's probably not the problem, but I always tell people to do that anyways. You don't have to pull it off all the way. You just basically take it off an eighth of an inch and push it back on. And, you know, that kind of... I've seen that error, that type of problem before be fixed by something as minor as that. But anyways, back to the other issue. Yeah, I would say that there's some sort of issue with the flip-tronics. I would flip your shadow, flip-tronics into your creature, and just kind of see what happens. The only problem is that your creature is only two flippers also, so it may not use that transistor. But it would be some sort of information. And if you wanted to get ballsy, you could take the flip-tronics from the creature and put it into the shadow. But the question is, is why did this happen in the first place? And it happened after you did a repair. So that's got to be suspect. Yeah, like Norm was saying, maybe when you hook the coils up, maybe you hook the wires up wrong to the coils. That's always the possibility you should check into. But I'll assume you did that right. That the target may have been hanging up and not dropping down cleanly. And so when I had it all apart, I tried to work on that. I put a new coil sleeve in there, and I adjusted the, what do they call it, that release arm a little bit. Right. So that it doesn't get hung up. So you mean the thing was firing continually, and it just cooked itself? It wasn't like a repetitive firing. When it would cook, there was no sound effects whatsoever. There was just a burning smell. Okay, and you replaced the coil too, right? I did. I guess those are in reset all the ribbon cables. And from there, then I would just see what happens. The tip 102 for the small coil. That's on the flip-tronic sport. But I think the driver for the large solenoid is actually on the main driver board. Right, exactly. Yeah, so that was kind of throwing me off, you know, how could one be shorted to the other if they're on two different boards? Well, if it's a data line issue, i.e., a ribbon cable issue, that could certainly happen. Norm says that maybe you installed the ribbon cable off a pin, but you've got to really try to do that, but it's not impossible. I think that would screw up some other things too. Hmm, probably. Yeah. But it's worth looking at. You've got to, again, you know, we're trying to diagnose games we don't see. It's part psychic. Yeah, part psychic. And Norm is good at that. Like 2,500 miles away, fix my game. You know what I'm saying? We're trying. Wait, we just get the semi-neighbours back and let me know what you find out. All right, thanks guys. All right, I wish it could be of a greater help and give you something that I know was the right answer, but that's the best I can offer you. Yeah, no problem. I'll check it out. All right, take care. Maybe you can fly out to California and fix it. How much do you think that would cost them? Do have. We got a shirt to give away, don't we? Yeah, yeah. That's right. I forgot about this. We've got, yeah, thanks for just kind of putting the brakes on everything. You're welcome. No problem. But Norm, Norm knows mentioned we do have some pin game journal. I'll take the first shirt. Shirts to give away. And we'll take the first collar. Genously given. At pin game journal that come. I'm a little tired. So if you want a pin game journal shirt, give me a call and you can have a pin game journal shirt. A fabulous magazine. Yeah, it is a good magazine. You know, it's a good pinball magazine. All pinball, nothing but pinball. If you're in a pinball, that's the magazine to get. A lot of hard work goes into that. All right, welcome to Topcast. Joshua Clay. Yes, sir. Curb. Curb. How you doing? You want the shirt? You want the shirt? I was going to call a healthy guys out, but you're already ending your shirt. No, and that's done. Help us out. We always use the help. What's up? I'll take the shirt. Oh, okay. So curb gets the shirt. We're going to send that to curb. Okay. What size do you want? XL. I want to see me lately. Extra triple quadruutral large. What are the sizes? What are the sizes available? Small and extra small. I think you can put it on your dog. So what do you got for us, curb? I was going to call in to a phone or a tech tip since I didn't get you unrecorded. Okay, fire away. What's your, you doing our system 80 tech tip? Yeah. Okay, fire away. All right. This one is a haunted house soundboard. If you follow along with the test procedure that they have in the book, it's what sucks about haunted house with no speech chip. You don't call out the sound lines during the test. When you do a sound check in test mode, you ground the sound lines on the card edge of the board, and it'll, if it has a voice chip, it'll say 1 for 16 depending on the sound line. If you've got a sound line stuck internal to the board with a bad riot chip or whatever, it'll constantly repeat that sound line.