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Circuits and Gaps

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·47m 33s·analyzed·Mar 26, 2017
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.032

TL;DR

EM machine troubleshooting and digital pinball season news from Blockade Podcast hosts.

Summary

Chris and Jared discuss troubleshooting an Eight Ball Deluxe restoration, focusing on power delivery issues to the MPU board and charring on the power modulator board. They explore differences between Bally and Williams EM machines, electrical diagnostics methodology, and soldering techniques. The episode concludes with digital pinball news: Swords of Fury officially released with texture updates, Farsight announcing a voting period for season 7 table selection (Paragon vs. Embryon), and confirmation of a month-long bug-fix hiatus from TPA releases.

Key Claims

  • Eight Ball Deluxe is getting insufficient voltage to the MPU board: 4V instead of 5V on one test point, 7V instead of 10V on another, and approximately 9V instead of 20V on a third

    high confidence · Chris measured actual voltages using a multimeter after guidance from Rob at Farsight; specific numbers provided with direct comparison to expected values

  • The power modulator board shows charring around high-amperage diodes (C5-C8) and the F5 fuse, which is typical for that component type but indicates heat stress

    high confidence · Chris observed charring after cleaning the board; Jared confirmed this is expected behavior for high-amperage diodes and discussed the physics of heat buildup

  • Bally and Williams machines have fundamentally different electrical and mechanical architectures, contrary to common assumption that they are similar

    high confidence · Chris compared his Eight Ball Deluxe (Bally) and Firepower (Williams), noting board placement differences, light styles, flipper mechanisms (inline vs. traditional), and solenoid driver configurations

  • Swords of Fury digital pinball has been officially released with texture and polygon quality updates

    high confidence · Chris states 'Swords of Fury has officially been released' and mentions seeing texture/poly updates before Android release

  • Farsight is taking a month off from TPA table releases to conduct a comprehensive bug-fix initiative

    high confidence · Newsletter announcement: 'there will not be a table released next month' and employees will conduct 'bug burn down' instead of releasing new content

  • Paragon and Embryon are both super-wide body pinball machines in the Farsight voting for season 7

    high confidence · Jared explicitly confirms 'These are both super wides aren't they? Yes they're both super wide'

Notable Quotes

  • “I have no idea what I'm looking at. It's like, oh look, it's a board. Oh look, it looks blackened.”

    Chris Frebus @ early in restoration discussion — Illustrates Chris's beginner status with electrical diagnostics on EM machines

  • “That's a 20 amp. Oh, ah, see that's why it's so black.”

    Jared Morgan / Chris Frebus exchange @ power modulator analysis — Explains the severity of heat damage: 20-amp fuse carrying heavy load causes significant charring

  • “Well, you know what probably is going to eventually happen is bit by bit I'll wind up replacing all the boards.”

    Chris Frebus @ restoration strategy discussion — Reveals long-term plan to incrementally replace boards rather than immediate full overhaul

  • “You can do that. The other approach you can do, too, is if you switch a game on that hasn't been switched on for a while and you try and power it up with stuff that's damaged on the boards, what can often happen is it will have a flow-on effect to other parts of the machine.”

    Jared Morgan @ diagnostic philosophy discussion — Explains the rationale for preventative board maintenance before powering on untested machines

  • “It's as easy as just doing that, but even I would have trouble with that. So I understand where you're coming from there. It's non-trivial to try and track how that electricity flows from one thing to another.”

    Jared Morgan @ electrical schematic discussion — Acknowledges difficulty of reading electrical schematics even for experienced restorers

  • “What I hope, hope, hope, is that Farsight is able to translate, and we always say this, but on these wide bodies, it's especially true, the speed of the ball. Because it's floaty as hell.”

    Chris Frebus @ digital pinball discussion — Identifies persistent challenge in digital pinball: accurately simulating slow, floaty ball physics on wide-body tables

  • “They need to have that pitch so flat, almost the thing just like in slow motion going down between the flippers. That's the attraction of these tables.”

Entities

Chris FrebuspersonJared MorganpersonRobpersonTank ManpersonEight Ball DeluxegameFirepowergameSwords of FurygameFarsight Studioscompany

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Farsight Studios implementing community voting on table selection for season 7 and taking month-long pause for bug-fix work, responding to years of community requests for quality focus

    high · Newsletter announced voting period between Paragon and Embryon for season 7. Jared: 'this is what everyone has been asking them to do for years right'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Contrasting diagnostic approaches in restoration community: preventative part replacement (capacitors, connectors) vs. targeted troubleshooting. Jared defends preventative approach as insurance policy for machines of known problematic component age

    medium · Discussion of Pinside recommendations for blanket capacitor/connector replacement vs. Chris's preference to isolate root cause first

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Rob from Farsight Studios providing direct technical support to community member Chris Frebus on Eight Ball Deluxe restoration, demonstrating engagement with homebrew/restoration community

    high · Rob contacted Chris with diagnostic guidance after podcast plea for help; provided specific voltage test points to check

  • ?

    product_strategy: Farsight Studios implementing month-long hiatus from TPA table releases to conduct comprehensive bug-fix and quality assurance work

    high · Official newsletter: 'there will not be a table released next month' due to 'bug burn down' initiative

  • ?

    product_strategy: Swords of Fury received texture and polygon quality updates before Android release, improving visual fidelity beyond initial beta version

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.143

0:00
This is a Blockade Podcast with your hosts, Chris and Jared. Making it up on the fly like we always do, you are listening to The Blanquette Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Frevis, a.k.a. Shut Your Trap. Joining me, as always, just on a different day, Jared Morgan.
0:42
Yes, I'm here, and I've come from a little mini staycation in the city. A staycation in the city. A staycation in the city, because those of you who know me know that I live a little way out of the main CBD precinct of Brisbane. So taking the kids in and giving them sort of like a bit of a city experience is actually quite an oldie for them. So there was a science fair in the city that we took them to and stayed a couple of nights there and had a bit of a laugh. And they, well, had a bit of a laugh as much as you can with two kids that for some reason loved to play up the whole weekend. So it was a bit annoying. name. Science!
1:30
That's right. Yeah, so it was a bit frustrating, but we got to see a bit of science. I don't know why it's been lately, and just like it's popped up in various different forms of media or whatever, but whenever somebody says science, then obviously there's all of a sudden the call out of science! And my son has heard this multiple times, and finally he goes, why does everybody do that? And I'm like, let me give you a little education. In goes the Tom's Dolly, up comes She Blinded Me with Science, and voila, wada-bing, there you go. Instant history lesson.
2:06
He's now educated. I don't think he was happy about the education, but he's educated all the same. He now knows. You can now have those in conversations with him every time science is mentioned, which means you're going to have to mention science a lot more so you can milk that meat. You do realize that. We also, well, he discovered, actually, I think I discovered it. It was like, here, I'm going to throw this on and see if you laugh. On Netflix, they have the Aquabats Super Show.

Jared Morgan @ wide-body physics discussion — Describes the essential appeal of wide-body machines: slow, deliberate ball movement requiring skill and body language

Paragon
game
Embryongame
Black Pyramidgame
Geniegame
Space Invadersgame
Blockade Pinball Podcastorganization
Aquabatsproduct

high · Chris: 'they did a textures and what do you call it? Not objects, but...polys update on it as well and make everything super sharp. So it's looking really good now. It's even better than it did before'

  • ?

    product_concern: Farsight's digital pinball wide-body table implementations struggle with accurate ball physics simulation; tables remain too fast despite slowdown attempts (Genie example)

    high · Chris: 'What I hope, hope, hope, is that Farsight is able to translate...the speed of the ball. Because it's floaty as hell.' Jared confirms 'Yeah so floaty.' Problem described as persistent across multiple releases

  • ?

    technology_signal: Electrical schematic reading is non-trivial barrier to entry for EM pinball restoration; even experienced restorers struggle with circuit path tracing despite standardized nomenclature across eras

    medium · Chris states schematics appear unintelligible. Jared acknowledges: 'It's non-trivial to try and track how that electricity flows from one thing to another. And that's why...it makes more sense to start with the power module board'

    • 2:36
    So the Aquabats is a ska punk band from here in Orange County, Huntington Beach. That's awesome. I do like the ska part. They came onto the scene about 98, I think. somewhere around that vicinity because there was also this huge all of a sudden Ska became popular in Southern California again. They got radio play and there was all sorts of bands that popped up and everything and benefited. So anyway.
    3:06
    Like Real Big Fish for example. Exactly. Also from Orange County. No doubt from Orange County. Not only that, they played the noontime show at my college when I was there. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, when they were like only had been around for two years, three years, and only had an EP.
    3:26
    So anyway, I threw it up there on Netflix, and we watched the first episode, and it's all sorts of stupid, but it's great stupid. It's like mocking a Power Ranger Saturday morning style Sid and Marty Croft show while being exactly that.
    3:53
    It's the parodying themselves, but imitating life. Right. And doing a little research, I found out that the lead singer for the Aquabats, he's also the guy that created Yo Gabba Gabba. Oh, seriously? Seriously. That makes a lot of sense, because I kind of wondered why I liked that show that much. As a father watching it with kids, I go, whenever I see Yo Gabba Gabba, come on, ABC Kids over here, I secretly go, yes, it's annoying as hell. But for some reason, I really enjoy watching it. You know, when you got Mark Mothersberg, who is one of the members of Devo, giving art lessons, you kind of go, there's some credibility here that I'm not quite sure of, and now I completely understand. Hang on, the guy from Devo was doing art for Yoga Begum. Yes, he did the art. Things are starting to drop into place now. Right, there's a little segment where he's like, I'm going to teach you how to draw, kids. That's Mark Mothersberg. Oh, right. From Devo. Yes. Right, that dude.
    4:59
    Now I understand. Who, by the way, also is the one responsible for the Rugrats music. Because he does, he composes for various things. I think he did, I think he did Pee Wee's Playhouse also. So I know he's involved in that whole scene anyway.
    5:21
    It's one of those things. So anyway, I showed him the Aquabats, and he wound up binging all the 12 episodes or whatever that were on the air. And then I had him in my car, and I was like, so let me put this on the radio for you. I'm not throwing little Aquabats. He's like, no. I'm like, it's not so bad, is it? And he goes, no, no, she's kind of catchy.
    5:41
    It's pretty cool. Skypark is pretty cool. Now that's the gateway drug to real big fish. Except for the language. I was going to say, we're going to have to wait a few years because, yeah, real big fish kind of, they go a little blue. Yeah, they do go a little blue. They're funny as though. So, yeah, that was our respective weekends, I guess, really. Yeah, something of that nature. But I imagine your weekend's probably been a lot sort of with your head down in the guts of a pinball machine. Well, yes, my head has been underneath the hood, so to speak, doing a lot of, I have no idea what I'm looking at.
    6:18
    It's like, oh look, it's a board. Oh look, it looks blackened. So yeah, we last time on the podcast put up a plea for anybody that wants to help me, please get in contact with me. And hey, you know who got in contact with me, Jared? Who got in contact with you, Chris? It would be Rob from Farsight. Our friend Rob. Oh, very nice. So he contacted me and was like, hey, there's a couple of test checkpoints that you want to put a voltage meter up to and see how it's doing. I was like, okay, sure. So borrow the neighbor's multimeter because I still haven't purchased one yet. Got one, yeah. Continue to flip on the multimeter and go, I don't know what any of these settings are, but I'm going to go to one until it beeps.
    7:04
    I want the continuity one. Yes, I want the continuity one, the one that beeps real good. And anyway, I held it up to the MPU board and tested voltage, and it's not getting enough power.
    7:19
    So, like, the one contact point, I was supposed to be getting 5 volts, and I was only getting 4. Another contact point, I was supposed to be getting 10, and I was getting 7. And then the one that I was supposed to be getting 20 on, I was getting, like, I don't even think I was getting 10 on that. It was like nine or something like that. So what that made me wonder, though, and this goes back to where the problem seemed to have emerged, was we were messing around with the fuses on the power modulator board.
    7:53
    Yeah, which you sent me photos of, which I'm looking right now. So I sent photos of, yeah, I took that out this weekend. And, you know, you've got to understand this stuff is also just covered in grime. It hasn't been cleaned probably since it was installed. so I took a brush to it and brushed off all the dirt and stuff and then that's when I noticed that there's some, it looks like some charring going on. Now Jared, do you know is charring normal?
    8:19
    They look toasty on a couple of spots. This board, because you've given me two photos one with just the light shining down on it and then one with the light shining behind it and the one with the light shining behind it shows that there's definitely charring around the large diodes on the bottom left of the board, which is really quite common. Those diodes are actually quite high amperage, and they do tend to heat up like an oven, basically.
    8:48
    C5 through C8, I believe, is what they're labeled as. Yes, yeah, that's what they look like to me, too. And, yeah, they will cook, those ones. And then the fuse, the F5 fuse, which is on the far left side, and I think it runs a ribbon down to the J5 plug, power plug. That also looks like it's been charred. Yeah, that's heated. It's not so much it's charred, it's just heated up really, really. Okay. Yeah, it carries a lot of load, that one. So that would be, as you can see, that one goes to J5, which is the input plug.
    9:27
    The J6 plug is a transformer, which is why you have all those diodes hanging off it because it's probably a power regulation. It's probably those four diodes would most likely be a bridge rectifier set up. So they would be controlling voltage into the board.
    9:43
    And then the input plug would be taking voltage probably from, I'm not sure where, but it would be also carrying quite a high load too because the F5 fuse is what, a 2.5 amp or something like that?
    9:59
    The F5, no, it's a 20 amp. ah see that's why it's so black um that's that's a very high amperage fuse so that's a lot of power fuse right but it's only got uh you know a ribbon in it per se right and then there's the but then i got a slow burn fuse and that thing's inside it's crazy it's got you know cloth in there and all sort of i don't know it's it was like oh yeah it's all about the that one's like a that's the f2 which goes for the high voltage area. So you want that one to be slow-bo because, you know, high voltage, you know, I really like how they've actually, like, sectioned off this board and the way they've described it using, like, ant lines and stuff. It's really good how they've described it for the age and the era of the machine. It's actually quite understandable even if you don't have a schematic, isn't it, really? Right. So what is the, on the board there's also a big wire loom with jumpers from four points on the board. Yes, that is going, that goes to a, I almost want to say it's a ground, I'm not sure, because that goes, screws in separate from the board into the metal plate that all of this is sitting atop of within the pinball machine itself. and it's got a plus and a minus. It's a little square box and it's got a plus and a minus on it. It's a little square box, is it? That's probably a bridge rectifier. So it's got four legs on it and then it has almost like a metal case on the top. It's just maybe about a half inch tall by one inch, one inch square little box with four plugs coming off the top of it. it either it could be a relay or it could be a bridge rectifier One of the two It doesn go to anywhere Like I said literally all it does is just screws into the metal plate on the bottom of the machine that this whole board sits upon to just separate from the board
    12:04
    It looks like they've tried to get a component that – so the problem with these older boards is that when you try and find components today, they've slightly redesigned the legs on all the components. So oftentimes you can't actually put them directly back into the board again because the leg alignment isn't quite right. So what this person's done here is they found a component that actually electrically is sound for the board, but doesn't meet the board layout. So they've just jumped at it and put it off the board so they can still use a component, but can't actually have it located on the board itself. I'll tell you what, after this podcast I will take a picture and tweet that out, I'm also going to tweet out right now what the pictures that Jared is looking at so that if you go to our Twitter feed at Blockade you'll be able to have a look because it's more fun to actually see things than to just hear us talk about them if I get crafty I may even put these embedded into the post that I put up on my blog because it's interesting to see I find it interesting to see boards I don't know how to read a circuit layout diagram but I've seen this type of charring before on boards and it's pretty typical but the thing that's jumped it out, I'd like to get more information about that because it might be a bridge rectifier or it might be a relay so yeah, that'll be interesting to have a look at anyhow, good work for getting the board out I hope you labelled all the plugs Oh, no, they're easy. That goes right back. It's already back in. I took it out long enough to clean it up and then put it right back in, and, yeah, I'm not going to mess around with that.
    13:50
    I'm going to also – I got the number for the guy that Mike told me to get in contact with, and hopefully he'll be able to come out this week, later in the week, and have a look for himself, see what's going on with the boards. if you do find that this board's actually pretty tight, which it is looking a little bit long in the tooth. There's been a lot of field repairs done to it. You may just want to invest the $80, whatever it is, and get a brand new board.
    14:19
    Well, you know what probably is going to eventually happen is bit by bit I'll wind up replacing all the boards. Yeah. Right now I want to replace whatever needs to be replaced to get it running. Operational. Right. Get it operational again, And then I can, because this is going to be, I'm not flipping this. It's going to be, you know, it's here. So it's more of a thing of, you know, as time goes by, you know, throughout the years, I can go ahead and do board replacements that will ensure the life longer. But right now my concern is finding out what the heck went wrong, getting the sound back up and running, and not wasting, basically I only got a limited amount of funds right now to do any of this. and if I see those funds, well, then I'm hosed until I have more funds. So I get what you're saying. It's one of those things where you kind of, I've got the thing. I just want to get the thing ticking over enough that I can play it. Exactly. Exactly. You know, cause you, you go on pin side and, and it's amazing. You know, you got people that, Oh, first thing I do without even checking anything, it's I replace all the connectors and then I go and I replace all the, the capacitors. Well, Hey, that's, that's great. but you're still not diagnosing it where any of the problems are.
    15:37
    You know, that's your, you're just going for the quick fix if you will. But what happens if you do all that and still nothing? Well, great. You eliminate is a troubleshooting thing, but I tend to like to find what, what is the thing that is causing the trouble.
    15:51
    And then perhaps if you work out that, yes, it is capacitors, then go cool. Now I know that the capacitors are dry. I'm going to replace all of them in one. Right. But I know that it's the capacitors that is most likely causing the issue. You can do that. The other approach you can do, too, is if you switch a game on that hasn't been switched on for a while and you try and power it up with stuff that's damaged on the boards, what can often happen is it will have a flow-on effect to other parts of the machine. So the people who say, look, yeah, I'm going to just, like, replace the plugs, get all the connections working, make sure the capacitors are fine, because I know that the age of this machine will mean that most of the capacitors are dry anyhow. So all they're doing is up front, they're just trying to make the machine as stable as possible so that if there is any other issues in the game, that they know that it's definitely not that and it's definitely not this. So it's more just an insurance policy because it's well documented that these machines of that age and that board set, these are the things that will always be a problem on them and will often be the cause of, I guess, edge cases in the machine when you try and diagnose things. So removing those problems first will often solve a lot of the problems that you're having in other areas of the boards. It's just one of those things. It's interesting, too.
    17:16
    Actually, the other table that I have is Firepower. And for as much as I always associated Bally and Williams together, they're two completely different beasts when it comes to the Bally one has boards all over the place, the Williams one doesn't the Williams doesn't have any boards on the bottom of the cabinet whereas the Bally one does and there's these little clear boxes I'm not sure, those might be the rectifier boxes or whatever that are clear boxes. I probably realize, um, there's a solenoid driver board. No, no, it's again, a little box. It's on the underside of the playfield. I don't know. There's all sorts of little parts and stuff that I'm like, that wasn't, none of this has been on the, the Williams table. And then just even, like I said, this one, uh, has, does not have the bayonet style lights. It's the, I think there are five, five fives or three, something like that. Yeah. Um, so it's just kind of interesting where you, what you, what I had thought would be virtually the same, um, is different. Even the flippers, these are what they call inline flippers. Um, as opposed to what the firepower has, which is what I think most flipper assemblies kind of tend to tend to look like for a while. I think inline flippers being like a rod with almost like a slider mechanism on it, uh, rather than like a, a pull and crank mechanism. Yeah. That was pretty common in a lot of bellies. I saw that style of solenoid actuator in things like Black Pyramid as well. Black Pyramid, its slingshots are actually like on a slider. So you know how traditionally slingshots have got almost like a crank with a lever attached to it that the solenoid pulls down and then the crank actuates. well this thing the solenoid and the the rubber actuator is all in one assembly so it just slides backwards and forwards um and as it slides the actuator pulls the rubber out and actually triggers the rubber so it's very weird how they they thought you know what we're going to go from this to something like you see on the modern pinball machines which clearly is because it was probably cheaper to produce and easy to maintain so it is interesting to see how they mechanisms have evolved over the years. Yeah.
    19:49
    So, you know, well, like I said, it's all a big education for me, and that's what I want to see. You know, the mechanical stuff I'm not afraid of. I'm not afraid of unscrewing and disassembling and cleaning and then reattaching. But this electrical stuff is, you know, I downloaded the manual, and I looked in the back of the electrical schematic, and I'm like, no it could be written in farsi for all i care there's no way i'm interpreting this is the problem well when i was listening to the uh the nick baldridge's podcast on ems he actually goes through a number of episodes where he will actually walk he says download this thing and and walk through with me how to diagnose his fault in a em machine and he actually walk through the schematic explaining along the way what each thing was because like electrical schematics are the same um no matter what era of pinball you're looking at or what era thing they all just use the same nomenclature in them so if you can understand one from the modern era you can understand one from the em era and so on and so forth um so there might be some lessons learned in there, but it's all about just following the path of the current. And I say that, it's as easy as just doing that, but even I would have trouble with that. So I understand where you're coming from there. It's non-trivial to try and track how that electricity flows from one thing to another. And that's why I figured, in my mind, it makes more sense to start with the power module ward and make sure that it's kicking out the power that it's supposed to, and then working your way up to the boards in the back box but yeah what do i know that does make the power module board is is pretty critical because everything happens on there like there's ceramic those big rectangular things yeah on the board big ceramic resistance but that's where most of the power is getting through your phone there's a fair bit of heat transfer underneath those so the board will be a little bit sort of discolored but what a lot of people do now with those diodes is they actually mount them up higher off the board so that they don't actually get they don't actually transfer so much heat um the danger with that though is because of the vibration in a pinball machine you'll often find that when you mount them off the board there's more vibration so they can snap easier just with the with the vibration and the action from the vibration yeah so it's it's so you can't really win with them they either snap or they burn the board so what are you going to do right to do um so anyway that's that's uh this week's adventure in chris's eight ball deluxe that he has no clue how to fix i'd love to be up there with you i would love to just go through it and just wife is constantly mocking him for breaking yet another pinball machine i'm like i didn't do anything she's like you looked at it yeah you looked at chris it's all your fault that's all right you're going to learn a lot from this machine but if you haven't already get some perf board get some old shitty components that you um yeah when i go out for the practice that's i'm definitely going to do it man because you can fix that board or at least get to the point where you're reflowing solder on all the connectors because you might find it's a dry joint i mean if there's no power getting to it it's probably a dry joint or a component failure, but if it's just not getting power at all, it's probably just a dry joint. If you know how to do that, you can fix it pretty easy.
    23:24
    Yeah, a buddy of mine who some people know him as Tankman because of his brilliance at World of Tanks.
    23:34
    People that I talk to, let's put it this way, I've messaged with before. But anyway, he's a good friend of mine. He been soldering on computer boards since he was a teen So he He be a good person to get in I told him he going to come give me some uh some good lessons And and of course his first thing is well, you got to make sure you get a good soldering, soldering iron. I'm like, yeah, no, I know. Yeah. You know, we're talking about immediately. He's rattling off these $80 soldering irons. I'm like, dude, I'll just borrow yours. If that's where you're going to send me, you don't need something like that. I got one from, There's this local place in Australia that's pretty well known called J-Car. And they're like the, I don't know, what probably used to be the Dix, well, Dixbeth is another Australian company, but like the Tandy or the Radio Shack sort of level. But they also sell things like kits and stuff like that. They're really like a component shop. They're a cool place. I could spend a lot of money there, basically. That's why I never go there. but they have this Japanese made iron, soldering iron that is pretty good. I've used it a couple of times just to fix things around the house and it heats up quick and it just does things really nicely. So you don't really want to buy like a soldering station when you're doing pinball repair but you want to buy something that's of decent enough quality. Like mid-range is all you really need. Don't buy like a $20 one, buy maybe a $30 or $40 one and you'll be fine. The last one that was gifted to me was a $20 one. It'll probably do the job for doing things like, you know, re-soldering wires onto playfield components. Well, as Tankman pointed out, he goes, you know what's really important? He goes, making sure you have something that holds the board in place and doesn't move. And I went, oh, yeah, you got a good point there. So apparently he's also made something of that nature for himself. A little jig. here's how crazy my buddy is he is really into tabletop gaming and so he is doing his own molds for all the various tanks and stuff for these war games and he's also creating his own terrain that he's planning on selling he's basically starting his own business so in his house he's got a laser CNC machine and his various presses and he just bought a larger CNC machine that can now cut through big pieces of wood and I was like hey you can CNC a playfield for me and he's now getting ready to buy a 3D printer so yeah he's that's the last thing he's actually buying being like a doing the sort of things he's doing, like a 3D print would kind of be the first thing I'd get when I'm trying to reproduce things like that. Right, right. Well, he knows how to take various parts, make negative molds, and then redo new molds, and then create his own out of it. He's been modeling for years and years and years and years.
    26:51
    That's pretty cool. He's going to give me some education, too. But the offer still stands, because I need people to personally come and look at this thing. If you find yourself in the Southern California area and you want to help, please give me a buzz. Come on down.
    27:07
    Hit me up on Twitter. Show your traps. Hit the podcast up with an email. Blah, blah, blockade at gmail.com.
    27:18
    That's it. That is it. Hey, why don't we move on to digital pinball. Digital pinball. Yeah. Because there's been some stuff Yeah. Swords of Fury has officially been released. Yeah. And I did give it another run, and hooray, the little mini play field now works like a charm. Yeah, it does. You can catch them all on the flipper up there and aim, which seems to be kind of important. It does when you're trying to get the goblins and such up there. Yes.
    27:50
    It's working real nice now. And I noticed that just before they released on Android, but they did a textures and what do you call it? Not objects, but, you know, polys update on it as well and make everything super sharp. So it's looking really good now. It's even better than it did before when beta, which was actually arguably pretty good then. But, yeah, it's pretty slick. It's a good way to end the season, I guess. Yeah. As such, they released a newsletter. and if you would like to vote on which table starts the next season, season 7, you can do that. I'm not sure quite when the voting ends. I think they're running for a couple of weeks.
    28:36
    It's on Facebook, I believe, is where they're doing out the Farsight's Facebook account. The two choices are picking between Paragon, which our friend Heretic would tell you it is your godly duty to vote for that, or Embryon which I you know what I've played both I've played Embryon more than I've played Paragon the issue I have with Paragon is it has the dreaded double flipper I hate double flippers oh the nested flippers yeah because it's a wide body these are both super wide aren't they yes they're both super wide so that's my wide yeah that's my issue with Paragon that being said Paragon has a pretty wackadoodle layout.
    29:22
    So that would be fun to mess around with. Embryon, I've played with a few times, but I kind of am not enamored with it. It's a beautiful looking table. I've seen it completely LED'd out, and it was phenomenal looking with those blues popping out. Just bursting. But it doesn't really have much going on for me that interested me, so I wound up voting for Paragon. Yeah, me too. I went for Paragon. I haven't played either of them, but I know what works well with those super wides. I mean, I played Space Invaders just recently at Netherworld, and I just remember just how much fun those super wides are to play. What I hope, hope, is that Farsight is able to translate, and we always say this, but on these wide bodies, it's especially true, the speed of the ball. because it's floaty as hell yeah so floaty yeah they had their chance with Genie they have managed to slow it down a little bit but Genie's still way way too fast these tables they're not fast tables at all they need to have that pitch so flat almost the thing just like in slow motion going down between the flippers that's the attraction of these tables like they flip slow and it's an actual effort to get the ball all the way at the top of the table. Yeah. You see, when you see people playing these, they throw a lot of body language into their flipping as if they're, as if they're helping. Yeah. Because the simple making contact with the, the flipper button and you know, that's doing all the work for you, but you wouldn't know it by these, you'd think it was an actual mechanical effect of how hard you push that button in is how hard the ball's going to fly. there is a um because of the way the mechanics of the flipper work on these old machines and the fact that the the voltage is driven directly through the cabinet switches to the machine the way you flip can sometimes have an effect on the flippers depending on how they're maintained so if you do a quick flip on some of these you'll find that the just through the way the machine actually works, you might find it delivers slightly more power through the flippers, whereas a solid-state machine, it's basically just a 5-volt contact that you're interacting with and it doesn't transfer any power. But sometimes rather than holding the flipper button in, if you just pulse the flipper button, sometimes you will get a little bit of extra power out of it. So it sometimes works. And this only really works for those machines that aren't super well-maintained. But if you've got good contact throughout both the cabinet switches and the end of stroke switches in one of these areas of the machine, you won't have that problem. But if they've got a bit of pitting on the contacts or anything else that means that the power isn't transferred well, you can sort of adjust your technique on the buttons and sometimes you can get a little bit of extra power out of them. Okay. Yeah. But thrusting doesn't help you. No. It makes you feel better about it. but it doesn't generally help the flipper work any better.
    32:43
    Now, the other piece of info that came with the newsletter is that there will not be a table released next month. So Farsight is taking a month off, you might say, from releasing a table on TPA, but the employees themselves are hardly going to be taking a month off as they are basically going to be doing a bug hunt. yeah yeah bug burn down and this is what everyone has been asking them to do for years right yeah like this is like take a month off we'll even pay you to take a month off people have been saying which you know is uh is up for debate as far as i'm concerned but they're actually they're at the point now where they have the resources and have the ability just to take a month and focus on the fixes well i think this this speaks for how the sales of tpa are yeah that they're still getting a lot of new users buying seasons. And when you have six seasons to purchase from,
    33:44
    that goes a long way to paying the bills, you might say. You're not having to constantly catch up. You're at that tipping point where now in month to month are just gravy. core income that's running on. So that's good. If they're able to do this more often, I'm going to be very curious to see what comes of this. There's been some speculation on the forum as to, oh, are they trying to implement the new physics that they've been talking about for Stern Pimble Arcade? Are they going to do just nothing bug hunting? Season 1 and 2 cleanup? Are they going to do a Season 1 and 2 cleanup? Yeah.
    34:29
    You know, that would be, God, that'd be wonderful, but there's no way. I don't think they could do that in a month. Not in a month. They might get to do some basic. It'd be fantastic if we saw, say, them take six tables from the first two seasons. Yeah. And just see up the graphics on those six tables. Yeah. Just do them incrementally. Like even if they did six tables every year or every season, you know, they would soon get through the backlog pretty quick. There's been talk about, oh, maybe they're going to finally do Black Knight and get the emulation on that running. That would be – that would make a lot of people go, what do I complain about now? because that's been like the biggest bugbear for a lot of long term people I hate fans out there like just not having this thing emulated with all the scripting bugs in it and well I won't even play it for that reason I literally will not play it because not only do I feel like it just got scripting errors or problems going on I think it looks ugly as hell and it just doesn't play right to me at all the whole play field is muddy and it was done at the time when they really didn't have good 3D scanners and stuff so everything doesn't look very realistic imagine if they actually just took that table and stripped it apart and did a full 3D remodel on it using the 3D scan that they have now. Amazing. It would look so good.
    36:13
    So anyway, yeah, it's anybody's guess as to what they're going to be hammering out up there during that month. But it's good that they finally are able to do that.
    36:27
    So I hope the community appreciates it and doesn't pull one of these after the month is over and these things get implemented. They go, really? That's all you guys did? Oh, you know. Yeah. Oh, there's going to be people that do that because there's already people that are doing it going. I think they should take two months off. It's like, oh, my God. I read one that was all. I would take a third less tables just if those tables were better and had better physics. It's like.
    36:56
    You don't understand. I love retconning, you know, something that's already been released. Yeah. But we've discussed this before. People, you know, often people that haven't been with the platform for a long time or haven't got a games or business management background don't understand that that's not something that can actually happen. It's the same thing that I said with regards to Stern Pinball Arcade. and as much as it may suck that uh they cut back on the devices that it's going to work on it's actually positive because that means they're going to be able to make the devices that it does work on work top notch once those are working well now you can add a few more devices to your plate you've already got a working system going now and you probably figured out a lot of things in the process and now you can do it to some other things it's much easier to tackle one system alone than eight at the same time. I mean, that's got to make your head spin. Yeah. There's so many different variants, particularly in Android. There's so many different variances between devices, so many different chipsets, graphic chipsets. Yeah. Getting things to work even on the same ecosystem is very difficult. It's, you know, you wouldn't think that going from DX9 to DX11 on the PC, there'd be really any issues with the game. and yet some of the stupidest bugs popped up because of that very thing.
    38:26
    So, again, that's why it's great. Hey, Stern Pimple, our app, there is no DX9 version. It's DX11 only. It's just one less thing to try and make sure that it works good on this too.
    38:38
    So I've got something to mention about that. I actually got, when I, I think somebody contacted me directly on Twitter and asked, oh, is there a way to scale back graphics on Stern Pimple Arcade on Android because I'm getting performance issues? And they said, oh, okay. I didn't notice that they actually put the device in there, and so I started to respond, oh, so yeah, what hardware are you using? And then I saw S4 in the tweet. I went, so hang on, you're using a Samsung Galaxy S4 to play Stern Pimple Arcade? So point one, point one, I'm surprised that that's even white listed. Yeah. Point two, you've got no hope of running that game on that hardware. Like in the beta, Pinwiz is a beta tester for Android, and he's reporting, he was reporting at one point, some performance issues on the S7, which is the latest release at the moment. Okay. So if there were some reported issues with S7, which incidentally have now been resolved, but if he was seeing performance issues on S7, then there's no chance in heck that the S4 is going to be able to stand up to the emulation demands that send people like, hey, no way. So this is what I was talking about in the past where, you know, whitelisting stuff and blacklisting devices needs to sort of happen, like you say, in a very, very controlled fashion. Like you should only be releasing the product for the actual bare metal hardware that you have in the studio. Yeah. So if you, for example, there was a point there where they had to blacklist the Shield tablet during beta because they found an issue that was preventing it from actually running properly at all. So for a lot of the beta in the last month, I was playing on my Pixel XL because the Shield tablet was completely blacklisted and wasn't receiving updates. But then they resolved it and it's back on the table again and it's working really, really well. So that's the right way of doing it. Yeah. Now, I think unless I've got an S4 in the building, which they probably would, you know, I would be going, yeah, pretty much any device from the last year, I'd be whitelisting. I'd be going through, you know, all the Android device lists and going, yeah, anything with these specs should be able to run this platform and only giving those a whitelist. And I'm pretty sure that the S4 would not be one of those devices.
    41:26
    But this is the problem, right? As a consumer, the thing is they might have actually had that S4 white, which is when they originally released the product back last year, and it just hasn't, like the people that already have it installed on that device may have access to it still.
    41:46
    But, you know, it's going to be interesting to see what happens when it's like, I think it is actually out properly now on Google Play again. But, yeah, as time goes on, it's going to be interesting to see what devices actually do get whitelisted on it. Yeah. Hmm.
    42:06
    Well, we shall see indeed. We will. But, yeah, the month off is going to be interesting. I think it's fair to say that if you want to help with this over the month, you should definitely join up for the beta on Steam. and all those people that are on the Android beta should also be as active as possible during the month because I reckon there's going to be a pile of beta releases in this month that we're going to have to get in and sort of have a look at.
    42:38
    Hopefully we'll get a long file too so we don't have to look at. Yeah, it would be helpful to actually get a known issues and a resolved issues. I think I know in beta, PinWiz is just basically pacing the list, showing what things have been fixed and what things aren't. But I think it almost might be better that, you know, we might do a more formalized version of that and really make it easy because it's going to be a churn fest this month as far as beta testing goes. Well, all right. I think that's our issues with pinball this week. Yeah. What else have we got on the plate? Well, the only other thing is that it was tournament at Netherworld for me. Oh, yeah. Since we last spoke. And it was, I didn't do as well as I did the first time around, but I still got top 10 out of 50. So that was pretty good, I thought.
    43:31
    The tables they had, they didn't. We have an Aerosmith on the floor now. So that's very interesting. an interesting mechanism that they used to shoot the ball from a saucer into the toy box.
    43:48
    If you think about Aerosmith and Batman 66, I'd like to say that the layout is kind of the same. So there's a big toy feature thing in the top right of the play field, and then there's ramps that sort of snake around it, very much like Batman 66, except without the crane, of course. but yeah the layout looks remarkably the same in in a lot of respects just from the positioning of the toys the I will say this that the Aerosmith code is far more complete than the Batman 66 code when it was on the floor but the Batman 66 code has just received a colossal update with art assets and and rules they've actually got a wizard mode in it now that they've put in the new code so So that's pretty cool. And we're getting to experience these things live, of course, at Netherworld because they've got both tables and they're very meticulous about updating the ROM code on it. So, yeah, it's fun. I think Aerosmith is quite fun, but they didn't really have the music up very loud, so you couldn't really hear it super well, which for some people will be a benefit because they hate Aerosmith as a band. Whenever you're playing a music table, that's such a key component. You've got to have it cranking, right? You do. You really do. And the speaker system in the new Stern, that ear of the table is really quite good. The default speakers, they're pretty punchy. So, yeah, it's quite fun. But, yeah, the key feature of that thing is where the ball, the source has two solenoids in it, one for just a soft kick out and one for the big cross-table kick. The thing goes from the right-hand side of the playfield to the left-hand side of the playfield in the air into the bloody box. It's pretty cool to see. I tried to capture it on video, but it just wasn't quite clear enough. Yeah. But it's very impressive when you see it in real life. So if you have one near you, go and check it out.
    45:57
    I like it. Yeah. I like the sound of it. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I have to see it for myself. All righty. Well, gang, we're going to wrap things up then here this week. Thank you all for listening. Make sure you tune in next week. I will try and update you on, hopefully I'll have some more news, not just me staring blankly at Able Deluxe.
    46:21
    And maybe we'll get a better clue as to what they are going to be doing in the beta, or not the beta, in this month off. Yeah. Stuff like that. so for Jared for myself thank you again we will talk to you again next week on Blockade Podcast see you later wizardamusement.com the west coast leader in classic pinball makers of custom pinball shooter rods and buyer specifications swap out your standard ball plunger with something themed to your specific table installs in less than five minutes with no custom tools even if you don't own a table Looks great as a pinball memento to admire. Prices start at $39, but mention Blockade Podcast and receive 10% off your order. WizardAmusement.com. Sales, restoration, customization.
    47:14
    Don't forget to leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that Blockade is delivered to. We can't approve unless you tell us how. Now stop listening and place a pinball.
    47:29
    you