Episode 442 - Multi-Races Playable, Robo-Frenzy Fixes, 1942 Keeney Towers

For Amusement Only EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·16m 20s·analyzed·Feb 28, 2019

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.020

TL;DR

Multi-Races playable, RoboFrenzy fixed, Multi-Bingo bug squashed ahead of TPF.

Summary

Nick Baldridge reports significant progress on his homebrew pinball projects: Multi-Races is now fully playable with functional mechanics but lacks artwork, RoboFrenzy had critical electrical issues resolved (fish paper wedged under trip relays), and Multi-Bingo fixed a longstanding ball-count bug before shipping to Texas Pinball Festival in March. The episode concludes with a detailed discussion of 1942 Keeney Towers, a flipperless bingo machine with beautiful art deco design.

Key Claims

Multi-Races is now fully functional and playable, with working ball mechanics, scoring, and reset sequences
high confidence · Nick Baldridge describing recent work on Multi-Races; he personally built and tested the machine
RoboFrenzy had two trip relay coils with fish paper wedged underneath, causing GI and 30-volt fuses to blow
high confidence · Nick Baldridge detailing the diagnosis and repair of RoboFrenzy's electrical short
Multi-Bingo has a rare ball-count bug that occurred ~3 times since 2016 involving the trough lift mechanism
high confidence · Nick Baldridge explaining the root cause and fix: trough switch #8 detection required 250ms delay to reliably detect all 8 balls
Multi-Bingo is being transported to Texas Pinball Festival March 22-24 in Frisco, Texas
high confidence · Nick Baldridge announcing the show appearance and playtesting schedule
A 1942 Keeney Towers machine was available locally for ~$120 a couple years ago but Nick did not purchase it and regrets the decision
high confidence · Nick Baldridge recounting a personal anecdote about missing out on acquiring the machine

Notable Quotes

“Multi-Races is now functional. Everything's working on it and a game can be played the game does in fact start it will drop a ball down into the trough, reset the shutter once lifted”
Nick Baldridge @ early in episode — Marks the playable milestone for Multi-Races homebrew project
“I found was that two of the trip relays on player two robots... had fish paper which had managed to get wedged underneath the relay, absorbing functionality.”
Nick Baldridge @ mid-episode — Identifies the root cause of RoboFrenzy's electrical failures
“250 milliseconds is about a quarter of a second. So the delay, while perceptible to me, might not be perceptible to anybody else.”
Nick Baldridge @ discussing Multi-Bingo fix — Explains the trade-off between bug elimination and imperceptible performance impact
“Towers is like the Keeney version of Genco Metro. It has two different sequences and you can win on points.”
Nick Baldridge @ game description section — Establishes the mechanical lineage and gameplay structure of 1942 Keeney Towers
“The price was insanely reasonable. It was like $120 or so. And eventually the ad got taken down and it appeared that no one had bought it. Well, one thing's for sure, I certainly didn't buy it, but I do regret it.”
Nick Baldridge @ closing anecdote — Personal reflection on a missed collecting opportunity and machine appreciation

Entities

Nick BaldridgepersonMulti-RacesgameRoboFrenzygameMulti-Bingogame1942 Keeney TowersgameTexas Pinball FestivaleventGenco MetrogameFor Amusement Only EM and Bingo Pinball Podcastorganization

Signals

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design_innovation: Multi-Races now feature functional ball drop, scoring mechanics, and replay logic; custom trough and reset systems working as designed
high · Nick describes a complete game cycle: ball drops into trough, resets, accepts coins, ball shoots and lands in correct hole for scoring
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product_concern: RoboFrenzy experienced cascading electrical failures (GI fuse and 30-volt fuse blowing) due to fish paper wedged under trip relay coils, causing coil lock
high · Nick identified and removed fish paper from two trip relay coils on player two robot; motors and reset sequence now functional
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code_update: Multi-Bingo trough handling logic completely rewritten to fix longstanding ball-count detection bug; implemented 250ms delay on trough switch #8 detection
high · Nick describes the bug as occurring ~3 times since 2016, finally reproduced and fixed by changing how lifter method waits for ball settlement
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event_signal: Multi-Bingo scheduled to exhibit at Texas Pinball Festival March 22-24, Frisco, Texas; active playtesting and streaming sessions ongoing
high · Nick states Multi-Bingo will travel to TPF, plans additional streaming and local playtesting sessions before the show
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gameplay_signal: Player two score relay tens digit increment issue caused by misaligned carryover switch; fixed by repositioning score relay switch
high · Nick debugged relay cycling between 0-9 by checking carryover switch alignment and adjusting score relay switch position

Topics

Homebrew machine development and troubleshootingprimaryElectrical diagnostics and repair in EM machinesprimaryCode debugging in custom pinball boardsprimaryPinball show preparation and playfield artworkprimaryVintage pinball machine design and mechanicssecondaryBall handling and trough systems in bingo machinessecondaryCollecting regrets and machine acquisitionmentioned

Sentiment

positive(0.85)— Nick expresses genuine excitement about progress on his three projects, satisfaction with solving complex technical problems, and enthusiasm for the upcoming show. The tone is upbeat and engaged throughout, with only mild regret expressed about the missed Keeney Towers acquisition, which is framed affectionately as a personal anecdote rather than a complaint.

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.049

What's that sound? It's 4 Amusement Only, the EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast. Welcome back to 4 Amusement Only. This is Nick Baldrige. Lots of progress has been made in the last two weeks. Multi-races is now functional. Everything's working on it and and a game can be played the game does in fact start it will drop a ball down into the trough, reset the shutter once lifted uh... more coins can be played and the ball can be shot and land in a particular hole and if it lands in the correct hole it will score the appropriate amount of replays uh... so that's extremely exciting uh... the only The downside is that I have a lot of art to do. At the moment it doesn't draw a back glass at all, so all this happens through a text-based console. But significant progress and of course switches are working and everything's functional. I don't have proximity sensors installed yet. I'm still mulling that over. I have to build some special brackets to protect them from the ball. If it's returned from a hole that is above one of those areas where the proximity sensor is to be installed, it could of course damage the sensor or knock it away from its intended area. So I have to be quite careful with that. Since that was done, I turned my attention to RoboFrenzy. And RoboFrenzy, where I last left it, had a short that was causing the GI fuse to blow and, as I found out, it was causing the 30 volt fuse to blow as well. So, looking in the machine, I wasn't able to see anything directly, but one thing that I noticed is that I heard a coil locking on. There are a lot of coils in RoboFrenzy, so finding the one that was locking on was a bit of a challenge. And what I ended up doing was of course turning the power off and on relatively quickly so that it didn't have enough time to heat up the fuse and blow it. And what I found was that two of the trip relays on player two robots, so these These are the relays that are used to actually build the larger robot. And they're mounted in the head, or not the head because it's one piece, but inside the body of the game up near the back glass area. So two of these coils had fish paper which had managed to get wedged underneath the relayAbsydiant funtionality of looming, To note. If you have questions about poetry write them in the comments nor would allow anyone else to answer them so slight questions Everything started working and the motors started turning It incrementing the timer unit as it supposed to do And everything appears to be working including the reset sequence So that was a really good feeling to set the reels to number one on each of the reels and then hold in the reset relays and watch the reels click all the way back to zero and stop. Pretty cool, pretty cool feeling. So aside from this, uh... some other minor fixes and tweaks uh... the player two score Relay was not incrementing the tens digit. Once uh... you would receive nine points it would just endlessly cycle uh... through one through nine or zero through nine and uh... wrap back around. I figured this was something simple but I just hadn't had a chance to take a look and the carryover switch, totally fine, everything looked good there. But the score Relay has a second switch that runs through that carryover switch and that Score Relay switch was slightly out of adjustment. So once that was moved into the right spot, boom, you know, everything started working there. So some pretty major progress has gone on in RoboFrenzy in the past couple weeks. Pretty major progress in multi-races as well. So let's talk about the multi-bingo. So the multi-bingo is going with me to Frisco, Texas in March, March 22nd through 24th for the Texas Pinball Festival. And I've been playtesting that as time is allowed. The other night I ran a little stream for about an hour and just looked for any weird behavior across several different games. I did manage to find or see an example of a bug that I'd seen about two other times since 2016 when I first started bringing it to shows and hadn't been able to squash it and hadn't really seen it since then. It's something that has been pretty rare but something which I'm going to be talking about the game, which has been in the back of my mind, you know, is probably still a bug because I hadn't seen it since then. But the game works a little differently than the EM games, as you might imagine. I mean, they're circuit boards for one thing, but the way the trough handling functions is quite a bit different. In your typical bingo pinball machine there are eight balls loaded in the trough. There are not eight trough switches, there are only a handful, say five or six. And these all perform slightly different functions. The game uses them to keep track of state and handle other things related to timing of the game. But one of the most important functions is trough switch number eight. And that's the eighth position, if that wasn't obvious. And when the final ball settles in the trough, it activates the lifter motor. The lifter motor lifts a ball up, it increments the timer unit, and the game begins. In the multibingo, the way that I had the lifter method working, and what it did is it scanned Micropt G Jeg fluorescent komen in Shuho Wearbula Maddonge deenno There no way for me to know that there are seven balls loaded but there is a way for me to know that eight balls have passed by So my lifter method looks for all the other trough switches to be closed or open as the case may be all the way up to the last one before number eight And then when it sees number eight close, it says, go ahead and lift a ball. Well, this causes problems because if there are not eight balls loaded in the machine, first of all, it gets extremely confused, as noted in the last play session that I mentioned, where one of the balls was actually inside the cabinet, so the lift or override button had to be pressed repeatedly in order to play any games. But it could also get confused and freak out about the ball count. Now I have written just tomes of information into each of the games in order to prevent an extra ball from being lifted or a ball being lifted when it shouldn't be in general. And Although this information is related only to the province key Islands and of the provinceekos gayagab 29体 Eldonite n Gall aw,預備 on the Gosh the assembly for an extra ball at the end of a key Hunafa Keyboard, In order to wait for trough switch number eight to be closed for about 250 milliseconds, that gives the ball time to travel past trough switch number eight if it's ball number seven, and it waits for ball number eight to settle in the trough before it begins lifting the first ball. There is a slight delay. It is perceptible, but not ridiculous. And it's And it's something that obviously removes this bug so it's necessary but I kinda wish that I could use a smaller delay. In experimentation I found that 250 milliseconds was the minimum that I could use in order to eliminate false positives. So 250 milliseconds is about a quarter of a second. So the delay, while perceptible to me, might not be perceptible to anybody else. It's just that I know how the game behaved beforehand and it doesn't quite behave that way now. I also know how the EM games behave and they're immediate, you know, once all eight balls are in the trough. So I know there's a difference, but I don't know that any player on earth would even really realize unless they listen I'm going to have to listen to this podcast that there is such a delay. But anyway, I'm very excited about that. That's a longstanding bug which I hadn't even logged because I wasn't able to reproduce it at all. And I managed to reproduce it and thought about it and the next day I went through and wrote that new method and applied it to all of the games in the multi bingo. So we're good to go. I really looking forward to TPF I should have at least one more streaming session before then and I definitely have some folks over locally to play the game before the show and see how it goes Tonight game is 1942 Keeney Towers Towers is like the Keeney version of Genco Metro It has two different sequences and you can win on points. The sequences are ABCD and then 1 through 6. ABCD are passive bumpers which are arrayed in a triangle formation. A at the top, B at the bottom left, C at the bottom middle, and D at the bottom right. You can also complete A through D by hitting various rollovers on the playfield. thousand called no one trou кон Now hitting those will award you some number of replays and unfortunately I'm not privy to the insides or score and Instruction cards so I'm not sure how many replays or if replays are multiplied based on the ABCD sequence. The back glass image is similar to Metro in that it shows a futuristic city futuristic for the time, very art deco-y. The there's a highway with multiple cars driving on it and an airplane flying uh... large building in background has the ten thousand points uh... beyond that there are four different silos each with uh... the letters A, B, C, and D two large broadcasting towers in the background have the two sequences one through six uh... one two three and then four five six below the highway is another building And at an angle, in perspective, there's a sign on top of that building that says towers. And your 1,000 to 9,000 points are arrayed on the right hand side in a skyscraper. I think the artwork is beautiful on this machine and I have an embarrassing story to tell about this one. There was one that came up for sale locally a couple years ago and I waffled on it for a very long time. The price was insanely reasonable. It was like $120 or so. And eventually the ad got taken down and it appeared that no one had bought it. Well, one thing's for sure, I certainly didn't buy it, but I do regret it because I think this game would be a lot of fun and it's certainly beautiful. It's a flipperless showpiece, I think, and has just these gorgeous green bumpers for the ABCD sequence, which are unusual. You don't see that color very frequently. Well, that's all for tonight. Thank you very much for joining me and letting me reminisce about the one that got away. My name again is Nicholas Baldridge. You can reach me at foramusementonlypodcast at gmail.com or you can call me on the bingos line. That's 724-BINGOS-1, 724-246-4671. You can listen to me on iTunes, Stitcher, Pocketcast, VRSS, on Facebook, on Twitter at bingopodcast. You can follow me on Instagram also at bingopodcast, or you For more information, please visit www.foramusementonly.libsyn.com.