What's that sound? It's 4 Amusement Only, the EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast. Welcome back to 4 Amusement Only. This is Nicholas Baldridge. Well, it's been a while since I talked to you. It really feels like it's been a very long time. and a whole heck of a lot has been going on in my bingo project world. Firstly, I finished Coney Island, at least as finished as it will be at the moment, and then I moved on to Bright Lights. Bright Lights was the first bingo that Bally produced in the form that we know it today. they had experimented with other bingo type machines much much earlier but this is the first modern bingo and I was able to get that implemented as well that's a six card and then I moved on to 1951's Broadway of which only two are known to exist and Dennis Dodell was able to provide me with some pictures I was able to recreate the back glass and that was very very helpful and then I started work on United's Zingo now Zingo was actually the fourth game that United produced that was a bingo and I picked Zingo because it used a standard Bally layout, and therefore I'll be able to play it immediately as soon as I have a 25-hole playfield rigged up. But on top of that, Zyngo does not have any extra balls or any game portioning. And this means that I didn't have to implement United's version of Reflex, nor Mixer's. so that's done as well and now I've been working on two additional games the next is United's Leader which is the first game that United produced with extra balls the first game that Valley produced was Coney Island and my implementation of Coney Island uses portioning exactly as the machine uses and will seek and find an extra ball every so often, and of course it gets tighter with each one. Very cool. It's really nice to see the games working like that. Each of the games will accrue replays and play them off. They will tilt, and they'll perform other functions, but beyond that, the games themselves don't do a whole heck of a lot. They light up, of course, all the artwork's complete. But some of the switches are not fully bug tested. I guess that's the way to put it. Maybe even fully implemented, because I have no way to test them at the moment. So the way that it works right now, and this is another interesting thing, you can actually download the code yourself and then run it. but you'll have to use my custom version of PyPyRock game in order to actually display the images because I had to remove DMD support, basically. At any rate, you can download the software and run it, and you can input coins, you can press the start button, you know, you can do all that kind of stuff. you can press the yellow button to play for extra balls on Coney Island but the game doesn't know how many balls have been played I do have logic in place for the ball counter unit which I'll likely keep even for later games I've started to reconsider my position on how balls are counted and tracked but as there's no normally closed gate switch and things of that nature I can look in my debug logs and see that coils are being pulsed and so forth, but obviously it's not actually doing the thing, so I don't know if that's going to work or not. But I am continuing to move along with games. The other game that I'm working on at the moment is Bally's Spotlight, and that's a game that I have no experience with in the real world. In fact, out of these games that so far I've implemented, the only one that I've played is Coney Island. And so this is pretty exciting to me because these games are beautiful and quite different from each other, despite being either three or six cards or a single card. They're all fairly different and fairly unique. So I'm really looking forward to getting a cabinet here and then getting everything put together and assembled and seeing what happens. So Spotlight is incredibly complex. And if you go back and listen to my episode, you can actually win one of five different ways. there are separate odds which are tracked for horizontal wins, vertical wins, diagonal wins, four in rows, and five in rows. That's pretty impressive, and it uses the full complement of portioning for that. On top of that, it has extra balls, and it's got a corners feature. It's the first game with corners scoring. so the deal with this is that the way that the portioning works is a whole heck of a lot more complicated than it was for Coney Island so in this case what I'm doing is I'm going through unit by unit and documenting and putting it in my game definitions and yeah, that part's taken a little bit of time. Now thankfully the artwork is actually already complete. Thanks to Chris Dade who has done a tremendous amount of work scanning and touching up back glasses for ballet games. Many of these early games have been pretty easy on the artwork side. And also thanks to Ryan Claytor who's taught me techniques for lighting individual lamps. That has been the most helpful in getting these things up and running. Because until you can see the numbers lighting up as you press the keys, you really have no indication. You know, I was going based off of debug statements again, which were showing up on a little terminal that I was running, but that's not the same. I want that visceral reaction, you know. So that's been great, and the artwork has been proceeding very smoothly thanks to both of them. Now, word about my repository that's publicly accessible. For the games where I am actually doing the artwork, meaning I'm taking a source image and I am redoing vast swaths of it, color matching and correcting areas where paint has lifted or things of that nature, or repairing a section of the source photo where the flash had gone off or something of that nature, I will be distributing the artwork in my repository. And with that, you can re-export everything if you wanted to. And I'll also have the PNG images of the various lamps. But for games where Chris Tate has graciously supplied the source image, what I will be doing is not distributing those images. If you would like to build your own setup using my code, then I will put you in touch with Chris Dade to ask for permission to use his files and so those will not be uploaded with the other lamp images that I create but the lamp images will be there so you can see an odd yellow diffused lamp but you won't be able to see the back glass image and certainly I can pull the other artwork if needed but for games like Broadway 51 or even games like Leader and Zingo which who knows how many copies of those games actually exist out in the world, if you have one of those games, you could theoretically, you know, fix up my artwork a little more, and then use that to make a reproduction glass if you needed to. so there will be ancillary benefits throughout this whole process one of the other really fascinating things is that this process is teaching me a whole lot about how bally did their portioning also i've mentioned before about how bally did their search implementation. And I've talked about how there's not really a more efficient way to do that in code. And that is absolutely true. So the way my searching algorithm works, every time a ball lands in a hole, it will call the search function. Search function looks on the search disk all 50 positions, or in the case of bright lights all 100 positions and it will return the search relays which are closed at each position and as soon as the ball count is above 4 the game will score. So if you have 4 balls on the playfield or 4 balls shot then the game will allow you to win. In order to win, you do have to have three adjoining numbers. And the search implementation is done using a dictionary. So I have basically the number on the play field matched up to the search relay that it corresponds with. Those are returned and then sorted with another algorithm. and from there it will check to see how many sequential search relays are closed. And if there are three or more sequential, and it doesn't matter, of course, where, if you have numbers 2, 3, and 4 closed, or 3, 4, and 5 closed, or 1, 2, and 3 closed, it will score. But if you have 1, 3, and 5 closed, it will not. so that's been pretty interesting to see if I were to implement that in a modern system I don't know that I could make it more efficient because essentially as the disk is turning it's doing that dictionary lookup in real life too and that's how it does its scoring so I find that pretty fascinating Don Hooker was an absolute genius. And the way that these units were created and the effect that they all have on each other and the fact that so many of them, at least, are very well documented is astounding. I mean, I've talked for hundreds of episodes about how amazing these machines are. But once you actually get in and you start to program how they work. When you start thinking through as a designer, one of the fascinating things to me is that you look at a unit like the search disk and you can't really make improvements logically to it because the logic is so very sound to begin with. This implementation that came from the 1940s with the one-ball horse race games and then was brought over to the bingos. It's just, it's amazing. So, that's really fascinating. But I've got to say that Spotlight is a gigantic leap above any of the previous games that had come out. You know, if you look at Bright Lights and Broadway 51, they're very straightforward and simple. You win replays and that's it. There's no portioning. You look at Coney Island, and there's some basic portioning. You've got your extra balls, and the game just won't give them to you one per credit necessarily. But then you get into Spotlight, and there's this huge jump in complexity. This game has pick-a-play, and it was the first game to employ it, and it was the last game to employ it for many, many years. that's also fascinating to me the fact that Don Hooker had pretty much all of these innovations planned out so early in the game for Bally is really astounding. Now the implementation of them is actually a little bit different in Spotlight than it is in later games. They hadn't quite cracked the code of being able to search after a certain time in the game. Instead, the game forces a search after the fifth ball is shot. But the way they implemented it, in this particular game only, after you shoot your fifth ball, the game will actually start the search motor. Until such time, the search motor is inactive. and that's fascinating too because that search motor normally on an earlier game and even many of the later games is just continuously active and as soon as you land a ball in one of the holes you'll hear the search relays chatter. As it sweeps across all 50 positions you'll hear tick tick tick tick tick tick tick of the search relays going back and forth, but you won't hear that in Spotlight. In Spotlight, it'll only start that chatter after the fifth ball is shot. Now, another thing that's interesting is that they implemented a timer step-up switch directly on the search disk, and so for each revolution of the search disk, the timer will step one time up until the max of 40, at which point the game tilts itself. Now the behavior is not unusual. What's unusual is that they have that switch on the search disk and not on the control unit. So essentially, the search disk doesn't have an index position per se. Instead, what I assume and this is an assumption because there actually is no documentation on the search disk aside from an image in the manual but it doesn't tell you very much electrically about what's going on there must be a large swath of dead rivets meaning ones which are not connected to a playfield hole because on that 40th revolution when it hits that switch the game will stop dead and as soon as you start again that search disk is not active and so that means that while the search disk is in that stop position it can actually latch one of the search relays and hold it closed possibly burning it up that's not so good and so that seems like kind of a design flaw but I suspect there's something that I really don't understand about how that search mechanism works. And again, it's unique to this game as far as I know. The game after this will be Atlantic City, and they moved back to a three card and reduced much of the complexity. So the nice thing about implementing Spotlight first means that I'll have kind of a roadmap for these much more complex machines, ones which have four mixers and Reflex, I'll be able to copy over my template and basically document each game, which was the vision. It's just that I'm a bit deeper into it than I expected to be at this point, but that's okay. So switching back to Leader and the Extra Ball implementation, with Leader, there's no documentation available for how it does its Extra Ball locating, and stepping up. So what I'm going to have to do is review how United did their extra ball step up in a later game and then kind of fudge things a bit and set up leader to work that way as well So that pretty interesting The other really interesting thing about those United games that I'm working on is that neither of them have a replay register, whereas Bally was front and center about the replays you were winning, and of course they had a history with that at that point with the one-ball games. the replays are apparently displayed on the back glass using lighted scoring. So I've implemented a lighted scoring function, and it'll determine what the digits in the set are. So if you have 199, it'll split that into 199, and it knows that it needs to light 199 on the back glass. And so it can light up to 399, and that's it. That's as high as the register can go. I don't know if that's accurate, but I don't know who might have a copy of those games, so I'm not sure who to ask. That said, I've got a couple emails I'm going to make, and we'll see what people have to say. So as you can hear, things are progressing quite nicely. So on the hardware side, let's talk about that for a minute. I've been kind of hoarding boards and things. So I've got a couple of switch boards, a driver board, which I'll use to drive the motors and the coils. And I've got a computer, which can run it all. I still have yet to order the brains of the system, the P3 rock, but that'll be the next thing I order. And while I was puzzling through some of Spotlight's features, I actually went ahead and placed an order for some Raspberry Pis and some mini displays. Now, these displays are five inches diagonal, so they're not much bigger than a standard cell phone screen, but they're big enough and nice enough that I can mount them right on the apron. And so the idea is I've been making score and instruction card sets, splitting them into two. Now, many of the bingos actually used a third card, but where possible, I'm just rolling it into the score card. Or instruction card, rather, sorry, on the left-hand side. So, I've been making these images, and each Raspberry Pi has its own storage for scorecards and instruction cards, and again, those will be in my repository. I copy those directories over, and then as the menu selects the game, it will send a command over SSH to the Raspberry Pis and cause them to display the appropriate score and instruction card. Pretty fancy stuff. Now I didn't even get into the menu. I wrote a little menu system. It's really not fancy. But I have a left and right button implemented. And when you press those, it will page through the games. And then you press the yellow button to actually start one. I'm using yellow because I was testing something out with the red button I'm not sure if I'll keep it yellow or if I'll switch it to red but at any rate, once you're in the game, if you want to get back to the menu you hold both the left and right button and you push the yellow button this is not something that you would do in normal gameplay so it should be safe to do that now the menu works and that's very nice I have discovered a bug where if I enter and exit a game multiple times, the menu will crash so I have yet to go back in and refine that function, that feature, but I will at some point here soon and that's basically where I'm at, so that was a whole lot of stuff that happened, and that's probably why it feels like it's been a while since I've talked at length about the project. Now, if you're really interested in the day-to-day happenings, I do have a Pinside thread, but I also have my Facebook page. I've been posting a lot of stuff there. And there's some other details, and I'm posting pictures as I make my first fake five-in-a-line, and the replays are counting up. So, there's some good stuff there. now on to simulations Yope has been hard at work and he has produced a recreation of Double Up Double Up you've heard me talk about on numerous occasions but it's a 20 hole bingo mystic lines and it's got a score doubling and quadrupling feature which is unique to this game and one other. The recreation as usual is fantastic. And so if you're curious about Double Up, especially after you've heard me talk about it, I would highly suggest you go check that out. It plays very well indeed. So other EM updates. What else has been going on? I've done some work around town and worked on a friend's target alpha and that is mostly working now it needs some score reel cleaning but the game does function and it needs a switch cleaned on the motor it's not consistently sending the ball over but the appropriate relays are all being activated so that's pretty close to being done. And Robert Madel, who's been on the podcast a couple of times, is selling a Silver Sails up in Ohio that he's recently gone through and gotten fully working. Silver Sails is a beautiful game for those of you that are looking for a bingo. It's also a highly desirable title. And this one looks pretty darn good. And it's totally working, which is always a plus. So, if you'd like to contact Robert, let me know. He's also posted on the Forum Usement Only Facebook page, and you can get in touch with him there. And other than that, you know, I've really been digging into various podcasts, and I heard Nate Shivers' announcement on Coast to Coast, and I've had the honor of being a guest on Nate's show, and I certainly wish him all the best, and I've definitely enjoyed his podcast for the entire run. It's been great hearing James Willing's musings on bowlers on recent Spooky Pinball episodes. And Tommy and Taylor from This Flippin' Podcast continue to impress with very timely pinball interviews. And listening to the recap of the Louisville Arcade Expo from the Broken Token folks, in the latest episode, Whitney talks about traveling up to Washington State to visit with Todd McCullough, who was previously on the show as well, and Whitney has never expressed a deep affection for EM games, but he said that he had a hard time pulling himself away, which is excellent. And as I've mentioned over the course of the past year and some change. You know, you give these games a chance, and you'll find that they are very compelling. Many EM games are very well designed to take your money. And so they want to entice you. They want you to play them. And the designs are usually ingenious. They're very beautiful to look at from an artwork perspective, but the gameplay itself is also very, very enticing. And what's enticing about it, let's take an EM flipper game. It's the fact that you can get so close to achieving your goal and then lose it all. It's the same with a bingo. The fact that you can get two sets of two and then your fifth ball lands somewhere else entirely. It just makes you want to play again. It makes you want to shoot for that five and a line. And same with the M arcade games. You want to get the highest score possible So hearing that made me very glad Aside from that I wanted to thank the Pinheads Pinball Podcast for their congratulations on their latest episode. And I guess it's not quality, it's quantity for me. And Don and Jeff from the Pinball Podcast continue to put out an excellent show. Don, in fact, has tried out Yope's simulations, a couple of them anyway. I know he's tried Bounty and Key West. And I'm hoping to get him in front of a real live bingo here before too much longer. So, if you listen to me for whatever reason, and you don't listen to any of those other guys, I'll put out the plea once again. You know, give them a listen. The majority of them talk about modern games, with the exception of James Willing on the Spooky Pinball podcast. But pinball is a wonderful thing, and we're all involved in it. And everybody really does a great job of supporting each other. I think it's fantastic, this community. So definitely give everybody a listen. Aside from that, I've just been working away. I'm trying to complete as many games as possible before I get Playfields to wire up so I'm just seeing how far I can take it at the moment I have somewhere in the realm of 123 left to complete so I've got quite a ways to go the nice thing is that I'm starting to get into the era where things are more documented and that will certainly make life quite a bit easier. Also, source images for the back glasses are a little easier to come by with these later United games. Now, there's still going to be an absolute ton of work to implement those. Chris Date has done a phenomenal job with a large number of the Bally games, but the Uniteds at the moment are not done and so I'm going to have to ask people from the community to send me pictures and that kind of thing but for today's feature game I wanted to talk about Bally's 1964 2-in-1 now 2-in-1 was designed by Ted Zale and if you'll recall I talked a bit about some of Bally's innovations that came under Ted Zale' design watch. The 2-in-1 is a pretty fascinating two-player EM pinball machine. Now, the basic goal is that you're playing blackjack. And what you're trying to do is reach 21 with the various cards that you hit on the playfield. Now you add cards by hitting mushroom bumpers or by hitting rollovers at the top of the playfield. What's really interesting about this game, though, is aside from all the scoring and it's got three score reels and then a lighted fourth digit, is the fact that it keeps track of your card total separately using additional reels. And it does this for two different players. there's a large number of units involved but on top of that what's fascinating is that there's a hold button on the front of the cabinet and when you press this button the mushroom bumpers will no longer award you additional cards towards your hand instead they just give you points and if you had not pressed hold then they would award you both a card and points so that's a pretty neat way to control and your goal is to end your game with 21 but where it gets a little dicey is that the next ball that you shoot those lanes are still active even if the hold is active controlling the mushroom bumpers and so what you have to do is hit a rebound rubber ring on the right hand side of the upper arch area by precisely shooting that skill shot so that it hits the rebound before it goes down through the lanes. Otherwise, you're going to increase your card total and bust. That's a pretty fascinating little mechanic there, and I think it's pretty neat. There were only 1,060 of these units produced, which makes it relatively rare. so let's talk about appearance here well first of all this game uses the beautiful bally yellow score reels which I find incredibly attractive and it uses them in both player positions but also keeping track of your hand in the player position score counting it uses black digits and in the hand total it uses red now on the back glass there is a woman on the left who's sitting down and holding some flowers has nothing whatsoever to do with cards but there she is, and on the right hand side there's a guy and he is holding what appears to be some more flowers again, nothing to do with cards you've got the king on the left hand side, the lower left He's rather small, much smaller than the woman and the man representing the players. And on the right-hand side, you've got the jack. But in the center of the back glass, you have the queen of hearts. And she's holding both a queen card in her hand and an ace. So she has 21. Now, one of the interesting things about the back glass graphic is that the title of the game is 2-in-1. meaning it's a two-player game, so that's the big draw. But from a distance, what you'd see is 21, because the letters in N are very, very small. So all this back glass graphic is on a blue field, very attractive. The cabinet itself uses geometric shapes. On the head, you've got kind of the triangular stencil, which reminds me a lot of some Gottlieb games, actually, in a multiplayer head. And the cabinet has overlapping blue, white, red, and white semicircular arches. And in the last white portion of the stencil, there are blue circles right in the center. Very attractive game. the play field has the royal family from the deck of cards sitting down at a table playing, you guessed it, cards I think the artwork is simple but well done and this game looks like a whole heck of a lot of fun at the production number that it's at it's unlikely that I'll see one unless I happen to know a collector that has one but it sure does look interesting so if anyone's played one I'd certainly love to hear about it and that about does it for this episode thank you very much for listening my name again is Nicholas Baldridge and you can reach me with your memories of playing 2-in-1 or for any other reason at 4amusementonlypodcast at gmail.com or you can call me on the bingos line That's 724-BINGOS1, 724-246-4671. You can listen to us on iTunes, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Google Play Music, on Facebook at 4amusementonlypodcast. You can find us on Twitter at bingopodcast. Or you can listen to us on our website, which is 4amusementonly.libsyn.com. And final shameless plug for some video game-related stuff. There are plenty of very supportive video game podcasters out there as well. One such is the lovable Ferg from the Atari 2600 Game by Game podcast. And I myself am doing a video game-related podcast, and that is the Virtually Human Virtual Boy Game by Game podcast. We're on episode number three. So if any of that tickles your fancy, feel free to check it out. thank you very much for listening and I'll talk to you next time