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Episode 14 – An Evening With Scott C.

Slam Tilt Podcast·podcast_episode·analyzed·Oct 13, 2016
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

Scott C. recounts his 30-year pinball journey from casual player to serious collector and repair hobbyist.

Summary

Scott C., a classic pinball collector and custom software mod creator, shares his personal history with pinball spanning from the 1970s to the early 2000s. The episode covers his entry into pinball at a Massachusetts resort, his progression from arcade player to collector with 13+ machines in a college dorm room, his financing mistakes with new games, and his journey learning proper machine repair and maintenance after discovering online repair guides around 2001-2002.

Key Claims

  • Scott's first pinball experience was in the 1970s at a resort in Massachusetts, playing either Flickr or Hollywood by Chicago Coin

    medium confidence · Scott speaking to Ron and Bruce about childhood memories; he himself expresses uncertainty about which game it was

  • Scott accumulated 13 machines in a 10x10 room at his father's house in the late 1980s/early 1990s

    high confidence · Scott directly states this figure and describes the space constraints

  • A new in-box pinball game cost approximately $2,300 in the early 1990s

    high confidence · Scott recounts pricing when discussing purchasing Phantom of the Opera and Back to the Future

  • Black Knight was priced at $700 in 1990 from a retailer, later $600

    high confidence · Scott discusses purchasing from TNT Amusements in Southampton, Pennsylvania

  • Scott purchased his Black Knight machine on December 26, 1989 from TNT Amusements and still owns it

    high confidence · Scott explicitly states the date and current ownership status

  • Wildcat 125 was the preferred cleaning product for pinball machines in the late 1980s before Novus existed

    high confidence · Scott and Bruce both confirm this and note it was acidic and effective at lifting Mylar

  • Scott discovered online pinball repair guides around 2001-2002 on Marvin's website and ordered pinball repair videos

    high confidence · Scott describes his reentry into pinball enthusiasm through these resources

  • Scott created a term 'Scottified' that appears in Steve Bowden's pinball dictionary, referring to heavily modified games

    medium confidence · Scott claims this exists on Bowden's website; Bruce and Ron don't contradict this

  • In the mid-1990s, Scott stored machines across multiple friends' basements and experienced water damage during a 1998 hurricane

Notable Quotes

  • “Because of that, started to sneak off to the arcade all the time at my hometown mall, winning games and selling them for quarters, things like that. You had to be very creative when you only got like a dollar for an allowance.”

    Scott C. @ early in episode — Establishes Scott's early motivation and resourcefulness as a young pinball player

  • “So I actually went to the local antique shop, got a job dusting off all the antiques that were in the store for, I believe, $2 an hour under the table. And I think I made it to about $50 until I just said, you know, the hell with this.”

    Scott C. @ mid-early section — Humorous anecdote showing Scott's determination to acquire a Paragon machine at age 12 but abandoning the effort

  • “They could have cured me way back when, but they chose not to.”

    Scott C. @ discussing parents' refusal to buy Elvis machine — Scott jokingly suggests his parents could have prevented his pinball obsession by buying him an early machine

  • “I made the mistake of not charging people. So as soon as they found out it was free, it got so bad that we had to put a sign on our dorm door that said, pinball machines are broken or off, just so we could get some sleep.”

    Scott C. @ discussing college dorm room machines — Illustrates the extreme popularity of having free pinball machines available

  • “I believe there is a term named after me in the pinball dictionary on Steve Bowden's website. The game has been Scottified.”

    Scott C. @ mid-episode — Shows Scott's recognized influence on heavily modifying and customizing pinball machines

  • “Wildcat 125 give that man a cigar that's exactly what we used and it was like acid the best thing ever at lifting Mylar off a play field”

    Bruce (co-host) @ discussing cleaning products — Confirms industry-standard cleaning practices from the late 1980s

  • “So I arrived there with my truck, loaded up the machines, and said, see you later. And he's like, well, wait a minute, why are you taking the machines?”

Entities

Scott C.personRon HallettpersonBruce NightingalepersonTimpersonSterncompanyData EastcompanyTNT AmusementscompanyChicago CoincompanyTwo-Bit Scorecompany

Signals

  • ?

    historical_signal: Scott provides detailed first-hand account of pinball collecting trends, pricing, and infrastructure from 1989-2002, including distributor landscape (TNT Amusements, Bettson, US1 flea market)

    high · Specific dates, prices ($700 Black Knight in 1990, $2,300 new game in early 1990s), and business names mentioned with context

  • ?

    design_innovation: Scott mentions the term 'Scottified' exists in Steve Bowden's pinball dictionary, referring to heavily customized/modified games, suggesting notable influence on customization practices

    medium · Scott states: 'I believe there is a term named after me in the pinball dictionary on Steve Bowden's website. The game has been Scottified.'

  • ?

    operational_signal: Scott describes evolution of repair knowledge and practices from trial-and-error coil replacement (late 1980s) to proper diagnostics learned through online guides (2001-2002), with specific pain points documented

    high · Detailed account of incorrect repairs, discovery of Marvin's repair guides and video tapes, emphasis on 'it's never the coil'

  • ?

    community_signal: Scott credits discovery of online repair guides and pinball videos around 2001-2002 as catalyst for reviving his passion and improving maintenance knowledge

    high · Scott describes finding repair guides, watching videos, and renewed excitement about pinball after years of stored machines

  • ?

    venue_signal: References to specific arcade venues from 1980s-1990s: Spaceport in Quaker Bridge Mall (New Jersey), Borden's Home Amusements in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, US1 flea market (now a movie theater)

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.353

0:00
Coming to you from beautiful offstate New York, this is the Slam Tilt Podcast, the show about all things pinball. I'm Ron Hallett and welcome to episode 14. In this episode, we will feature an interview with Scott, who is a fellow pinhead who me and Bruce have known for a long time. We've mentioned him seemingly every other episode. So I figured I'd ask him, like, do you have any interest? And he said, sure. Cool. So unfortunately, we had some technical issues in this podcast. Mainly, Scott called in. Me and Bruce usually, we use Skype, and then we record the conversation. So Scott wanted to call in, and we hadn't done this before when we had our previous guest, Tim. He actually just Skyped in also.
1:07
So I wanted to do some thorough testing to make sure there were no issues with recording this. And I actually did a bunch of tests last week, no issues. and we actually did a brief five-minute test before we went live to make sure all three of us were recording. So, of course, after we were done recording the podcast, I realized that I was not on there. It recorded Scott, it recorded Bruce, but it did not record me. Very, very annoying, especially after testing it so many times, just so something like that would not happen. So all is not lost, though, as it was still a very excellent interview. And honestly, Scott does most of the talking with Bruce second and me a distant third. So I have edited this together. I tried to remove any extremely long pauses where maybe I'm asking a question and you can't hear me. So if Scott seems to answer questions that you didn't even hear said, it was probably me asking them. Again, I apologize to the listeners. I apologize to Scott for these technical difficulties, but I feel this is still definitely a podcast you should listen to, as Scott was very entertaining as always. So with no further ado, I give you Scott, preeminent classic stirring collector and creator of many custom pinball software mods. The first question I asked him was, how did you get into pinball? And that's what we'll start from. So that's why he kind of just seems to start. So here we go. Hey, guys. How are you doing? Excellent.
2:46

high confidence · Scott provides detailed account of the incident and recovery efforts

  • A case of 24 bottled waters can support a Twilight Zone machine

    high confidence · Scott states this as a practical fact from his hurricane recovery experience

    • Scott C. @ discussing storage conflict — Shows Scott's assertiveness when protecting his machines and interests

  • “Here I am in a hurricane driving to his house... I was just like, I've got to get my machine out of this water.”

    Scott C. @ hurricane story — Demonstrates Scott's dedication to preserving his machines despite dangerous conditions

  • “It's never the coil and it almost never is.”

    Scott C. @ discussing pinball repair education — Paraphrasing a key lesson from online repair guides that changed Scott's approach to machine maintenance

  • “Everybody wishes we could go back to those times, but unfortunately those are past. Now you're buying shit for $400 or $500.”

    Scott C. @ late in episode discussing repair costs — Reflects on the rising cost of pinball machine repairs and parts over time

    • Steve Bowdenperson
    Joe Kamenkaoperson
    Ballycompany
    Black Knightgame
    Black Knight 2000game
    Twilight Zonegame
    Phantom of the Operagame
    Back to the Futuregame
    Meteorgame
    Flash Gordongame
    Fathomgame
    Pharaohgame
    Robotrongame
    Roadshowgame
    Centaurgame
    Earthshakergame

    high · Scott mentions working at Spaceport, buying from Borden's, and notes US1 flea market closure

  • $

    market_signal: Documented pricing from early 1990s: new in-box games ~$2,300, Black Knight $700 (retailer)/later $600, used solid-state projects $50-$100, Meteor project $400

    high · Multiple specific prices mentioned by Scott with context

  • ?

    product_concern: Scott mentions breaking 'a shit ton of drop targets' on Meteor and recalls game as unreliable; notes mechanical parts were 'hammered'

    medium · Scott's recollection of Meteor's drop target durability problems

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Scott describes emergency machine rescue during 1998 hurricane, using bottled water cases as support to keep machines out of floodwater; notes importance of storage height and speed of response

    high · Detailed account of hurricane rescue, measurement of water levels, and use of bottled water casing as machine platform

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Scott mentions acquaintance eventually working for Joe Kamenkao in Las Vegas, indicating personal network connections in pinball industry

    low · Passing reference to friend's career path in industry

  • ?

    content_signal: Technical failure during recording: host Ron's audio not captured despite testing; hosts use Skype for remote guests; impact on final product editorial work required

    high · Ron's extended explanation of technical issues and editing process at episode start

    • Well, started a long time ago in the 70s. I think I'm about the same age as you guys, maybe a little older.
    2:55
    Went on a family vacation with my brother and my parents, and it turns out that it was kind of their second honeymoon. So my brother and I were given copious amounts of money and told, go amuse yourselves at the resort that we were at. somewhere up in Massachusetts.
    3:15
    My brother decided to keep most of the money, which he's probably pretty smart. He just played a single quarter in the bumper pool machine with some other kids that were there. They would catch the balls as they were going down so they could play all day on a quarter. I saw a row of pinball machines on the side and I said, I'm going to go play them. I'm trying to remember for years, I've been trying to remember what game it was. It was either Flickr or it might have been Hollywood by Chicago Coin. It had Laurel and Hardy down on the slingshots. I don't think it was Prospector, but I could be wrong. I'll never find out. But because of that, started to sneak off to the arcade all the time at my hometown mall,
    3:58
    winning games and selling them for quarters, things like that. You had to be very creative when you only got like a dollar for an allowance. I totally agree. So what was the farthest you ever drove your bike for pinball? Well, I lived in a really small town in central New Jersey, and it was basically a mile in every direction, and then you were basically in the boonies. So it was a mile.
    4:28
    Well, I actually got a job when I was in seventh grade because I used to go to Spaceport in Quaker Bridge Mall, and at one point they put signs up on the machines, It actually might have been extra valuable. I don't remember which. But they would put signs on the machine that would just have a price on the machine. It didn't say buy this machine for whatever price. It just had a price. So I'm like, I guess they're selling these machines. Didn't bother to ask anybody, of course. I think I was probably 12. And I saw, ooh, Paragon. And it said $400, which in 1983, that was a lot of money. So I actually went to the local antique shop, got a job dusting off all the antiques that were in the store for, I believe, $2 an hour under the table. And I think I made it to about $50 until I just said, you know, the hell with this. And then I bought all his Mad Magazines that he had in the antique store instead. So it could have been. I could have had a nice Paragon machine, you know, when I was 12. But I had no way to move it. There was nowhere in the house to put it.
    5:36
    Just didn't get it. I do remember the Sears catalog always had in the back of it had the Alive machine, you know, with Elvis or Emble Blink, Humperdink. Yeah, whoever the hell that's supposed to be on there. And, yeah, it was, what, $4.99, $5.99, something like that, $600. So I begged my parents for that machine every year at Christmastime. I said, Graham does not have to give me anything. The grandparents don't have to put any money in. Don't buy me any of those clothes and, you know, shit like that. Just buy me this machine. They could have cured me way back when, but they chose not to. Because if you got that machine, you would have been disappointed with pinball. Exactly.
    6:23
    I would rather play alive than party zone. But that's later in the show I understand the games that we hate. Yes, it is. So what was then your true first game you actually did buy? Well, I set my sights a little lower after they said, absolutely not, you're not getting that. That's too expensive. So I said, give me the Coleco Battle of the Gods. You know, that was $189 on sale at Christmas for $129. I wouldn't give you that one either. But the actual machine that I did end up buying later on, I'll back up a little bit. A buddy of mine got a Xenon, and then he got a Black Knight, and that was when I was a freshman in college, so that would have been 89.
    7:05
    And he said, oh, I got two machines now. You know, when are you going to buy one? So I'm like, huh. And then I was like, I really like Meteor. So I went to the local arcade, which we went to practically every night, Borden's Home Amusements in Morrisville, Pennsylvania. I think it's still there. You know, it's not like it was in its heyday. It's just the home pinball store was really high-priced games. But it was $400. So I went there. I bought my desk truck. Went there, bought the game. Didn't know anything about how to fix it or anything like that. You know, just thought everything was a coil. You know, oh, the flippers don't work. Oh, I'll just put a new coil in, stuff like that.
    7:48
    Actually worked really well. I took it to college with me. It was in my dorm room. And then I decided to buy two more. US1 flea market was in existence and unfortunately it's gone now and it's a movie theater I remember that they had an arcade in the back and it seems like they just had the prices on the machines I thought hey all machines are $400 because I go to the attendant and I'm like hey how much for that Flash Gordon machine back there and he's like $400 so I'm like oh cool I had a job in the cafeteria at the Rutgers went with the $400 and I was like hey now I got two machines in my dorm room And then a month later, go back, and I'm like, wow, you know, I've never played that game that's there in the back. The arcade wasn't really a working arcade there. It was more like storage for some operator, and they had some things that were working. So I get in there, and they have this gorgeous blue machine with mermaids on the back glass. Fathom. And I was like, wow, that game looks awesome. And I said, how much for that? $400.
    8:50
    People are now rolling over in their graves, these newbies. No, they're probably rolling over in their graves because they're very happy that they don't have to play Fathom. What? Ah!
    9:05
    But we'll get on to that later as to why I bought it and why I sold it, and then I re-bought one, and then I sold it again.
    9:15
    So anyway, three games in the dorm room. I should send you guys pictures. I have pictures of all this stuff, too. That'd be cool. It made the dorm room very popular, as you can imagine. I mean, sure, people could go down to the student center and play, you know, stuff like 8-Ball Deluxe, Pinbot. Tetris was very hot the year that I went there, so everybody was dumping their quarters into that.
    9:40
    But I made the mistake of not charging people. So as soon as they found out it was free, it got so bad that we had to put a sign on our dorm door that said, pinball machines are broken or off, just so we could get some sleep.
    9:56
    And I did actually sleep underneath the desk. I had to move the bed in the room so that it was half under the desk where you'd sit.
    10:07
    The other side of the room was perfectly clear. My roommate was like, no, I'm not putting any of that crap on my side. But, you know, middle of the night or something like that, he'd be like, hey, Scott, are you awake? And I'd be like, yeah. And he'd say, I play you for a buck, you know.
    10:22
    And a funny story, this guy, Bill, that lived on the floor, possibly the worst pinball player I've ever seen in my life. And he was trying. He actually played meatier and managed to get 10 points a ball for three balls. So the entire score on his game was 30 points. Wow. One slingshot and drain. That's it. Wow. Hit nothing at the top, none of the rollovers, none of the bumpers. Don't bother to flip with the top flipper. Don't come down through the spinner. Don't carry them off of one of the drop targets. One slingshot and drain. And there's a center pin in that game. So I actually still try to do it to this day to see if I can duplicate it, and I can't. It must have been just like Kismet. I wish I could remember if he matched on that game as well. That would have been rather funny. That would have been very funny.
    11:17
    So now you have three. Now we have three in a, I guess the dorm room was maybe 80 square feet. So, you know, my dad had loaned me the truck to move the game down there. And then he's like, oh, well, you're going to need the truck to take it back, right? And I'm like, well, you know, I have three now. And he's like, how do you have three? It's like, do they multiply? And I'm like, yeah, sort of. so that was before I knew about things like, you know, strapping games down or things like that, so I wasn't going to move it, you know, on their ass end like I would move today. You know, it was just, you know, fold the head down and, you know, not even tie it down or anything, just kind of throw it in the back of the truck, drive around. Oh.
    11:58
    Yeah, at least I took the legs off, you know, and the head was folded down and sort of, you know, we would carry it up and down the stairs. I lived on the sixth floor, too, so we did have an elevator, But I guess if I had to carry it up the stairs, I wouldn't have bought all three of them. But, yeah, I mean, it's pretty – the head's heavier on those anyway. But, yeah, the bodies are really light. You know, you just got to move them around. Only weighs, what, like 100 pounds, 120 pounds? Yeah, that's about it. Yeah, that's nothing. Yeah, nothing. But, yeah, so we get the three machines home and then decide to add some more. At the time, I had two rooms I was living in at my dad's house and managed to cram 13 machines in a 10 by 10 room. Nice. And the next room over had one machine. I had Pinbot in the next room over. But, you know, games like, what did I have? I actually bought a Black Knight, and then I bought a Black Knight 2000 off the distributor floor.
    13:07
    So if somebody out there has a true home use only Black Knight 2000, they probably just don't know it because nobody thought anything of it then. It wasn't, oh, I have a home use only game. It was none of that. And put it this way, at the time in the late 80s, the preferred thing to clean your machines with, Novus didn't exist. Wildcat 125 give that man a cigar that's exactly what we used and it was like acid the best thing ever at lifting Mylar off a play field and making it cloudy I do gotta say it looks very clear when you first do it but then as soon as you play it it gets hazy very quickly I'm looking at two bottles right now on my shelf still they haven't actually broken out the bottom yet And ooze all over the shelf? Nope, not at all. Not yet. So a step up from that was a Millwax. You know, that was kind of what was available.
    14:06
    Yeah, Millwax is horrible, of course, today. Although the last time I used it, it wasn't that bad. I was shopping somebody's game for them.
    14:14
    Fuck my good shit. Fuck that. Give me that Millwax up there in the corner. Yeah. It has the same problem, though. It looks fine for a while, and then you have to clean it up again. and it just gets all hazy and stuff like that. But don't forget, Bally preferred wild. That's right. It said recommended by Bally right on the bottle. It did. They were probably snorting it along with all the cocaine they did in the 80s. I guarantee it. Now, the funny thing is when you actually, you know, back in the 80s and 90s, chemicals used to have, like, descriptions of what would be in it. There is none. just as combustible mixture i wonder uh if it makes a nice flame it probably does you can take the petroleum distillate well you definitely can get a buzz off of it if you happen to sniff too much of it oh yeah okay so now you have 13 13 13 games and how that's right um 22 okay so we're going good. Yeah. And I mean, I didn't think anything of it. And they were so close together, you know, in a 10 by 10 room that I actually made a prop that you couldn't get the glass off because you could actually lean on the machine behind you and still reach the flipper buttons on the machine if you're any long arms or not. And so I made a little prop out of a four by four so that I could prop the front end of the machine up just so that the glass would clear so I could get the glass off. Well, you both have been to my old place, so you know that I don't. Yes. Well, I'm a lot better now in my new place. I can actually get the glass off of all the machines without using the prop. I still have the props, though. I made two of them, which is why I won't buy Bruce's little lifter thingy, because I already have it. Well, you're a big guy. You can lift everything. Well, that's true, too. So you have 13 machines in there. I'm trying to remember exactly what titles they were.
    16:16
    Let's see. I probably can look. But I know that I had, you know, Fathom, Flash Gordon, Pinbot, Earthshaker,
    16:25
    Whirlwind, and, you know, look at the time period that I got them in as well. This is 91, 92. I mean, those games were a year or two old. There's still a lot. You know, I remember playing all those in 90, 91, 92. So, yeah.
    16:41
    Highly desire. And, yeah, you can imagine they were pretty expensive, though, because they were viable pieces that were being routed.
    16:48
    And then I actually went crazy, and, you know, you stopped into the distributor, and I saw Phantom of the Opera from Data East. And I was just like, oh, my God, look at this. Oh, my God, the music. Look at what that organ did. Holy crap. And I was like, I wonder how much this is. You know, at this point, it's, you know, this is a lot of money. A new in-box game at that time was about $2,300. Yes. So, and I would recommend to everybody out there, do not finance the game. I went to TNT Amusements, and he was willing to finance through American General Finance. He's like, oh, I'm sure the interest rate was like 24%, something like that. But I was like, oh, I got to have that game. And then, you know, you get the game, and then you're like, you play it for a while. And then, you know, because it's the Daddy East, the sizzle wears off of it very quickly. And then you're like, wow, there's like nothing to do on this game. I'm a little bored of this. So a couple months later, same distributor. I think it was Bettson in North New Jersey. Stop in. New games there. Back to the future. So I'm like, oh, I've got to have this. I love the movies. Got to have this game in the house. Oh, my God, listen to that music. You know, that Brian Schmidt music that's in it. Yep. Got that. It was stereo.
    18:11
    Yep. And so I'm like, oh, I'm going to go buy another new in-box game. You know, at this point, I'd only made like one payment on the other thing, you know, with no money down. So, you know, go to Todd. I'm like, hey, Todd, can you order me this back to the future? And he's like, oh, you want to do the financing? I'm like, oh, sure. So apparently I was a little overextended. However, Todd had already ordered the game for me, and I'd basically taken delivery of it before he put in another application. So we eventually worked out a payment plan. But I do remember being, you know, at the time I wasn't the greatest player in the world.
    18:47
    Didn't believe in hooking tilts up. You know, oh, tilt Bob, I don't need that. It's a home game. What do I need a tilt for?
    18:55
    Set everything to super easy, you know, like, I mean, I didn't go so far as to say instead of a replay, give me an extra ball, because that's, you know, really low, I think. But, you know, really easy. You know, you go in and you set the options extra easy. And I was like, oh, I'm a hot shit pinball player, you know. Look at me, you know. No slope on the games. Played slow. You know, completely different than how you guys know me today. I would have loved to have known this, Scott, because later on in life, holy fuck it up.
    19:27
    I turned a little evil, you know. The dark side beckons you. Where do you think I got it from? My machines. It's the same way with me now. This is my Scott influence. That's right. I believe there is a term named after me in the pinball dictionary on Steve Bowden's website. The game has been Scottified.
    19:50
    Everybody can go there and look it up. But I had other games. I was very ahead of the curve. I had The Fathom before anybody knew about it. had a what's another game that everybody's really hot on now?
    20:05
    Usually it's stuff that came out that they've made playfields for subsequently. I had a Centaur way back when.
    20:14
    What else? A Pharaoh. I actually bought Pharaoh before I bought Black Knight. That was my introduction to TNT. I went there and I'm like, oh, I want the Black Knight. Your little flyer says that you have Black Knight in stock for $700. That's how much it was in 1990, even from a retailer.
    20:32
    And so I get there, and he's like, oh, well, we don't – he used to have a salesman work for him. The guy's name was Arnold. And believe me, this guy was a complete fucking idiot. He managed to break my friend's windshield because he was loading a nippet machine into his car, and he broke the windshield on the car.
    20:49
    And, you know, I go there to pick up the – well, first I get the farrow because he recommended it. I never played the game, never saw it.
    20:58
    I guess I saw it in the Silver Ball book, the Gary Flower book, but never played it. So, you know, I bought the game. It was only $400. So it's like, eh, it's $400, you know, cheap, right?
    21:11
    Get it home, and I'm like, eh, well, keep me in mind if you get a Black Knight. So, you know, six months later he called. He's like, hey, we have a Black Knight here, you know, because you're a repeat customer, and, you know, if you're interested in trading something in, we'll take it back. Or, you know, we'll sell it to you for $600. So I'm like, oh, cool, I got a black knight for $600. Go down to TNT in beautiful Southampton, Pennsylvania, and, you know, I'm playing the game. You start the game. No voice. I'm like, Arnold, where's the voice? And he's like, oh, it talks at the end of the game. I mean, this guy, he would just lie. And I'm like, listen, I know this game. I haven't played it since 1981, but, you know, it's supposed to talk. And then finally, you know, it's a simple adjustment. He just had the pot that had like a dead spot on it. So no big deal. So I get the Black Knight machine. But essentially, that's probably my oldest game. I bought that on December 26, 1989 from TNT, and I still have it, the same one.
    22:08
    I mean, it's got the CPR play field in it, but it's the same mechanics. Yep, we would just stop in the Mondial, you know, like, oh, my flipper's not working right. Let's stop in the Mondial. Don't buy any rebuild parts or anything like that. You know, we've seen the plunger, you know, when you take it out of the sleeve and say, huh, I wonder if that mushroom ring is supposed to be there. And we're like, ah, it's probably fine. And hammered coil stops, especially with the 50-volt flippers on, you know, the Davies machines and the Black Knight 2000. So we've got to get a new coil. At least the new coils came with a coil sleeve. Otherwise, we would have never replaced them either.
    22:47
    But everything was just a new coil. No idea, you know, how to tune things. Um, no idea on, um, you know, special posts, things like that. I mean, I never got so bad that I would take a drywall screw and put it in the play field or anything like that or spray WD-40 on stuff. I knew not to do that. Um, but everything else, electronics, oh, there's batteries in there. I mean, the AA batteries, yeah, we can replace those, but that's a battery, a rechargeable battery in there. What, what's that for? So basically what I'm saying is that I was an idiot. and you know fast forward a couple years my dad's second wife threw me out of the house because I kept buying machines the one that saw that broke the camel's back was an April deluxe limited edition along with a gyrus cabinet that just arrived at the house one day because I was storing it at a friend's house and then finally he got sick of it so he just brought it dropped it off and she flipped out and she she said you have to move out and I figured well I'm 24 I probably should move out. She didn't believe that the Orbiter One machine that was coming up the stairs was a speaker box either. I told her it was a large speaker.
    23:58
    And it's a very unique-looking game, so she might have believed it. But I guess when it said Stern on the side, she knew enough that that must be a pinball machine.
    24:07
    So I'm not really sure where I stored everything because I didn't put anything in self-storage. But I moved into a basement in a buddy's house, and I can only have three machines there and a video game. So the video game was Robotron, and the three machines were Roadshow, Pinbot, and Earthshaker. I'm sorry about Roadshow. I bought that about six months off of Route.
    24:35
    I think I stored all the other machines at friends' houses, and I had them at a friend of a friend's house. I had Black Knight and Twilight Zone were there, another one of Bruce's favorite games, I understand. but they called me one day and he's like he's like hey scott you know the the twilight zone machine and the black knight machine they aren't working so um i i sent out the boards for this place called two-bit score and you know it was 90 to fix the black knight machine and it was uh he said they said i needed a fliptronics board for the twilight zone machine so that was like 100 bucks And I'm like, oh, okay. And then he said, well, when are you going to drop the money off?
    25:20
    So I said, oh, okay. And keep in mind up to this point he hadn't told me they were broken. And I'm loaning him machines.
    25:29
    And Twilight Zone at the time was about a year off a route. So, you know, this is pretty early, you know, mid-90s here. So I said, oh, okay, you want the money, huh? So I arrived there with my truck, loaded up the machines, and said, see you later. And he's like, well, wait a minute, why are you taking the machines? And I said, why should I pay to fix machines? You didn't even consult me to see what I wanted to do. You just did it, and you've had control of these machines for like a year. So I'm just going to take them away, and I'm not paying you anything.
    26:02
    And it's kind of funny because that guy actually later on in life ended up working for Joe Kamenkao out in Las Vegas.
    26:11
    But, you know, kind of a weird coincidence. But at that point, still didn't have any room for it. Had boomerang back to be living with my mom in her apartment. In the basement, we did have room to store stuff. So I kind of put everything in storage. I moved back in there, put everything in storage. The other buddy that had probably about eight or nine of my games, he was okay. He didn't, like, send stuff out for repair without consulting or anything like that.
    26:37
    But then one day, I'm home because we had a hurricane. I think it was in 98. And I get a call. Yeah, I get a call on the phone from him. He's like, hey, Scott, what do you want me to do about all this water?
    26:51
    And I said, what do you mean water? And he's like, well, you know, the hurricane, how's your game? And I said, well, they're fine. My basement's dry. How's your basement? And he's like, well, there's water coming in. And I said, well, how high is it? Because I figure games are up on legs, right? You got two feet before you have to start worrying about it. You know, maybe you can have rusty legs and stuff like that, but I don't want the cabinets to get wet. He said, oh, my girlfriend doesn't like pinball machines. So I took all the games down and I put their store on their ass ends now. Oh, fuck. So here I am in a hurricane driving to his house. And, you know, we're in the basement. His, his, and it wasn't even his current girlfriend. That's what's really funny. It was his ex-girlfriend didn't like it, but he took them down and he just left them. So, you know, I've got my games Twilight Zone. My Black Knight was over there. All those games, the games that were in the other guy's house are now in his house.
    27:53
    So he used to go to the warehouse stores and he had a ton of bottled water in the basement, which was also ruined because it was on the floor. So I took the bottled water and did the old bed and nails thing, and I put the machines on top of the bottled water. And if anybody's wondering, a case of 24 bottled waters can hold a Twilight Zone machine. Wow.
    28:14
    But I actually deadlisted the Twilight Zone machine on top of it because he was really weak and he couldn't help. So I was just like, I've got to get my machine out of this water. So, you know, it had like maybe an inch of water on the floor when I got there. So it wasn't too bad, and I got there pretty quickly. But I'm glad that I was home because if I had been at work or something, you know, this is the age before common cell phones, it would have been, oh, yeah, there's a foot and a half of water that just happened to soak all the electronics, etc. Sorry.
    28:45
    So at this point, I'm like, I got to get this stuff out of here. So we move all the machines out of that basement into my mom's basement. And I have nothing set up, didn't set anything up, just mothballed them. They were just sitting there on their ass ends as I had them in like 95, 96, something like that. I think I still had about 12, 13 machines.
    29:10
    But then around 2001, find this nice repair guide. Maybe it was 2002. It's whenever I first appeared on our GP. So if you look for the earliest message on our GP for me that about when I found the repair guides the old clay repair guides at what the heck was that website Marvin's. Marvin. Marvin 3M something. Yeah, I remember it was. And so I was like, oh, wow. And I got very excited. You know, all those videos were out, those old pinball videos. I think they were out with, you know, one, two, and three at the time. So I ordered them on videotape. Yeah. that. I watched the shit out of him and I was like, I got really excited about pinball again. And I said, wow, you know, look at all the things I've been doing wrong all these years. You know, like one of the first things he says is it's never the coil and it almost never is. So learned how to cut my teeth on fixing things and projects at the time, you know, early solid state projects, 50, 60 bucks a piece, a hundred bucks a piece, you know, cosmetically nice, basically fix a little battery corrosion, catch yourself a game.
    30:23
    Everybody wishes we could go back to those times, but unfortunately those are past. Now you're buying shit for $400 or $500. Yep. And basically replacing all the boards and replacing the wiring, like on your Freedom Firewood. Yeah. Correct? Yep. Yeah. And a blackjack. Oh, great. I haven't started my blackjack yet. But I'm not looking forward to it because I actually am kind of subject to a carpal tunnel. And for me to crimp all those wires from my Knight Rider, every single wire had weird green corrosion about two or three inches into the wire. And the connectors all just fell out. They were so corroded. So replace all that stuff. And it was just – I got a nice crimping tool now, but I did that all with the Waldron, the thin one, you know, with the yellow handles. and that one really, really kills your hand. Yes. I've got a nice one, the crimp one now. It's beautiful. Chink, chink, chink, chink, and you just keep on going. Yep, absolutely.
    31:24
    Well, you know, I bought Meteor as my first game. So I didn't have it at this point. I traded it in to TNT, probably on the Pharaoh.
    31:33
    Didn't own the game anymore, and, you know, hadn't really thought too much of it for years. Used to break a shit ton of drop targets on it, And I was just like, I don't remember that game as being very reliable. You know, hence, you know, mechanical hammered parts. Of course it wasn't. But then I decided that I want to get another one. So a little deal popped up on RGP. It was StarTech Next Generation available, $1,600, and two meteors. Consider them projects, $400. So for a little over $2,000, three machines, right? So I'm like, oh, I remember playing Next Gen. I'll buy that. You know, what a great game to learn to repair on, right? Ugh.
    32:18
    We've all three of us have owned them. We all just go to your own. Ugh. Yeah. My freaking Opto boards on my Next Gen when I got it were butchered already, and they didn't make them, so I guess we had to fix them. Ugh.
    32:34
    Clive from Queen of Cauldron? Well, no. Well, not back then. Back then, Clive was barely, you know, think about it. When I got my next gen, yes, there was. Barely. I was on RGP in 97, 98. I actually look back. So what does that tell you? Fucking old. Yep. But, no, Clive might not have been around yet. Okay. Might not have been. Maybe, you know. And the repair guides didn't exist either. So it's like, yeah, you had to figure out what the hell was going on. Yeah, luckily I was close to Betson, the same Betson you're talking about. He was only like 30 minutes from me. In Munaki? Yes, he was, yep.
    33:16
    Right off of Route 3. Yep, I used to go down and see him and check him out and everything like that too. And then luckily where I was, I had Action Park next to me, and I got to know the operators that were running the games there, so they would actually give me some tips and that kind of stuff, and we would all – I'd learn more from them. and I'd actually work in the summer at Action Park, but when I was off, I was actually working on their games. So actually, that's where I learned a lot of my crap, too. See, I didn't even know that Action Park had arcade games. We went there as part of my dad's company, took everybody there for, you know, a day, a fun day. And I remember the day I was there, three people broke their legs on the Alpine slide, and I'm told that that was about average. That is about average. Yes, it was. They had about 25 arcade games in the Lodge, but if it was during the summer down in Motor World, they had a huge garage. It had to be like 50 feet wide by 150 feet long, and they had all filled with arcades, including driving games, sit-downs, Star Wars, everything. Good old classics. They even had a Dragon's Lair and a Space Age running back in 95, 96, 97. And it was actually running? Running. It wasn't Dragon's Lair 2? Nope, regular Dragon's Lair. That's where I got my teeth on that one, too. That is the most feared. The most dangerous park in the world. Traction Park, Accident Park, you name it, I worked there.
    34:45
    That's a good one. It was great. I loved it. And just think, people who are, you know, coming there for their well-earned spending money, there's a 16 and 17-year-old kid going, come on, get on the ride. Boom. They're going to get all banged up and get it and burn off their arm skin and everything. Oh, it was great. Good old times. That was awesome. Supposedly it's reopened now, but I would hate to see what their insurance bill is. Not the same. No Alpine slide there. No fun.
    35:14
    So getting back to the pinball, this is a pinball podcast. It is a pinball. Got the two meter machines. The Star Trek Next Gen was working pretty good, so I didn't really have to worry about that. But the buddy I went with to pick up the games, though, he wasn't really into pinball. He kind of looked at them and said, wait, these two machines are the same. Why are you buying two of the same game? And I said, well, you know, you make the best of one, and then, you know, you take the other one and do a show, or you're solid or something like that. so I also managed to pick up somewhere around there a new overstocked Meteor playfield which as you can imagine is pretty damn rare hadn't really done a playfield swap you know in the modern era at that time I had totally torn down my roadshow in Twilight Zone and then I totally turned down the Star Trek Next 10-2 and prepped for this but sometimes I lose interest in you know what's going on with what I'm working on so I'm like oh I took it all apart and I started to clean everything, and then I'm like, eh, I got 10 other games. I'll play those.
    36:21
    I think the Star Trek and the Twilight Zone and the Roadshow, it took me about a year to put them back together, and I hadn't lost any of the parts. And I had started on the Meteor Playfield slot by this point, and I moved twice, and it took four and a half years to actually finish it. So your Centaur Playfield, you've got a couple years to catch up on me, Everest. Yes. but I did finally get it all together but sometime along the line there I noticed that there was a situation where you'd get a really good spin and you'd be hitting some targets and then the ball would drain and then your bonus would count down forever or so I thought and I was like huh that's kind of weird and you can only notice this thing if you really have your game tuned up really well and I was doing some at this time also Pinman had come out so we could emulate these things and I was like I used to look at code back in the day on my old Atari computer so I'm like maybe I can look at these newer games newer games, 1979 and maybe I can do something with it to figure out maybe this is a bug that I can fix looked at the code in 2004. I actually still have the whole file structure is still on my hard drive and it has all the dates and everything. Started in 2004. I was looking at my notes and I was like, wow, I had no fucking idea what the hell I was doing. None at all.
    37:58
    About three years after I got the project machine, so again, sometime 2004, 2005, found this page on the internet, Oliver's projects. And he's got seven-digit versions of games, free play ROMs, all this other stuff. And I'm like, huh, I'm going to bug this guy and see if I can get him to fix this bug in Meteor. He is in Sweden, Oliver Kagey. He only distributes stuff as patches, kind of the Nintendo versus Galoob solution, where he doesn't distribute any copyrighted code. He only distributes patches to existing software. So then he couldn't get taken down. So he couldn't get – I mean, that came about because Wayne had the rights in Australia. Wayne had the rights for Williams, and he sent him a cease and desist and said, do not distribute Bally copyrighted code or we will take steps. So it was acceptable for everybody around for them to do it that way. but I bugged him, I told him about the bug in the game and he said, oh I'm not really interested in fixing that and then I was like, well, at this time I was still setting my games really easy and things like that, easy as hell to turn Meteor over when you have no tilt and you get an extra ball for everything, so I said to him, can you make me a 7 digit version of this game, and he's like, okay that's interesting to me. I will look into that. And he said, send me what you have discovered so far about the game, you know, like memory locations and crap like that. And I sent him this stuff and he just looked at it and said, the fucking two-year-old wrote this. You're an idiot. I mean, I'm paraphrasing a little bit, you know, cutting it down. That's what he meant when he came back to me. He was like, yeah, you're not really on the right track here. And if nothing else, I really like a challenge. So four years later, it actually took me four years for me to say, hey, I got another game that I want to do something with that I don't like the way it plays. And that game was Astern Orbiter One. And anybody that's played in Orbiter One knows that you have a minimum game time on the game. So most games set for three or five balls on your third ball, your fifth ball, whatever it's set to, if you haven't met the minimum game time that the operator set and I think it's 270 seconds at default, the game just sits there and keeps shooting you endless third balls. And that is boring as fuck to me. I mean the game's cool, but I don't want to just keep shooting the ball over and over again. So I say, I'm going to get back into this hacking stuff and I'm going to figure out how to make it so there's no minimum game time on this game. And again looking back at what I did then, totally amateurish, no idea what the whole system was doing, just kind of interrupting it in pin name. I was basically looking for a timer. Anybody that's used pin name with the cheat or even just regular name with the cheat function, you know, you can look for lives or values that change and things like that. I was tracing out all the software, you know, trying to figure out where is this timer? I'm just looking for a timer, you know. And finally I found it. And that code is actually up on the Internet Pinball database, you know, way back from when. And I look at it today and I'm just like, holy shit, no wonder Oliver said that to me. You know, and I thought I had come so far in four years, you know, reading books, playing around in the software, trying to figure out what it's doing. Just couldn't do it.
    41:42
    Since then I've gotten a little more sophisticated. totally disassembling everything, understanding what the code actually does, adding comments to it, and then recreating games, things like that. I'm the author of the Las Vegas software for classic play fields. Software's done if anybody has a Dolly Parton that wants to run the software. Software's completely done. There's no artwork or soundboard for the game. I should have known this last year. I had a Dolly Parton last year. well I'd sell you mine but then the bag would really be out that everybody would know it's not going to come out but uh it might still come out I'm told that it might still come out you know it's a bit if I push it forward by saying like hey I got it working with a soundboard you know they might move forward on the uh on the artwork package just like when they did right uh hammer the gods? Yeah.
    42:40
    And all these people bought vectors just because of that. Yeah, well, I mean, it's still a vector either way you look at it. Hey, now, don't take the pin-side attitude on that, you know, just because it's seemingly vaporware. Seemingly?
    42:56
    Seemingly? I will use the term seemingly. It might still come out. You don't know. Okay, John. Actually, that touches on an old, one of year old podcast where you were talking about Embryon and like, why isn't there more to do? Why isn't there a bonus multiplier during multi-ball? Well, there is, there's a set of ROMs out there that, you know, gives you 2X scoring during multi-ball. There's also enhanced rule set. I think Oliver has that up on his page as well. So you, so you guys that, you know, have these seeming turd games, you could take a, like a shit play field layout, like, like Dolly Parton's a shit play field layout. I'm not going to be the first person to blow smoke off somebody's ass and say, oh, Dolly Parton's a great game. You're going to love playing this. It's a turd. But that was the one they selected. And I kind of got not roped into the software, but, like, somebody in St. Louis said, hey, you do software. These guys are coming out with a kit. Why don't you write new software for them? I'm like, what? And I'm like, oh, okay.
    44:01
    There's not a lick of ballet code in it. It's actually based off of Stern hot hand code. I know you guys have probably seen my YouTube channel where I had the Catacomb rules explained, the tutorial video. But some of the other videos show some of the software hacks that I've done. Hot hand, I enhanced the attract mode because there's almost a dot matrix display in the center. So there's several classic video game homages in the attract mode for that game now. I don't even remember that, but I recently rejoined it because I wanted to reply to somebody's message where he said he wanted some stuff done to his Stern Lightning. And it kind of ties in nicely with a project that I have that's upcoming that maybe your listeners can help with. But remind me about that later, and we'll go over that. But so I joined to reply to the guy, and it said that you can't open forum posts older than six months because you're not an apprentice. And I'm like, oh, okay. I'll PM the guy. Go to PM the guy. It says, you just joined. You have to wait 24 hours or donate so that we prove that you're not a spam bot. And I said, well, I'll wait the 24 hours.
    45:12
    After 24 hours, go to look for the message. It's not there. I can't find it. So, oh, well, if you're on Pinsight, you're listening to this, and you wanted some mods done to your lightning ROMs, email me.
    45:25
    Because I'm not going back there. And I believe my handle there, I used slowchar, S-L-O-C-H-A-R, if you want to PM me through there.
    45:35
    Don't read Pinsight, though. I don't have time to, you know, go through forums and thousands and thousands and thousands of messages, and I don't like LEDs. Woo-hoo!
    45:46
    Sorry. How many ROMs do you think you've modified for older Sterns or Valleys? Well, yeah, I put free play on every single older Stern, both the MPU-100 and the MPU-200 games.
    46:05
    Some other, you know, light mods. The original impetus towards doing the modding, as you remember, is that I wanted to fix that bug in Meteor. So after several false starts, again, not understanding the full code base, finally go through and find out that, oh, I could duplicate it. Basically, if you go through collect all rockets while the spinner's going off, it's a multi-threaded operating system, so there's many threads running at once. And if you're overloading the machine like that with lots of scoring going on, They reused the place where they save the bonus multiplier. The memory location is the same memory location that the collect all rockets routine uses to add up its rockets. And then so when all the rockets go to zero, if it's collecting bonus at the same time, it actually makes your bonus zero X, which anybody with computers or have played Pac-Man to the end screen where it's screen 256, it rolls over. So the endless multiplier bug on Meteor is actually not an endless bug. It's 255X. It will count down. It will count down all the way if you let it sit. So as soon as I determined that, I said, huh, I can go ahead and move that memory location somewhere else. If I can find a memory location, it's free. And the way I did it is I took away some space from an audit. I said, who needs to know how many replaced two and three of one? I'll take that back, and that'll give me some memory back. Went ahead and moved it up there. Bug fixed. And that was, I believe, 2014.
    47:44
    So 10 years to fix this one bug. Recently, I'd say about a month and a half ago, got contacted by another RGP member, and he said, hey, you know, I have one stern machine. It's a stern meteor. I know you did some work with it. What's this bug that you fixed? So I described the bug that I fixed and all that stuff, and he's like, I've never noticed that in my machine. I can read EPROMs in. Let me read these EPROMs in. I'm going to send them to you. Maybe they're different than yours. And I said, oh, okay. So he sent them to me, and I looked, and I looked at the code differences, and I said, holy shit, somebody else solved this problem the same way I did. They used a different memory location.
    48:25
    And then after doing some more research, at this time as well, the pinball database always had a set of Meteor ROMs that said alternate set Meteor ROMs. And it turns out that that's what that guy had in his machine, and Stern fixed it back in 1980. Oh, cool.
    48:42
    I wouldn't give back the experience that I learned. No. If I had found that ROM set in 2004, 2005, I would have installed it and never went forward. Yep. Never. I would have just been like, it's not worth it. So instead, I learned everything about the obsolete architecture. I can write games in the MPU 200 operating system now, new games.
    49:10
    I added a couple things to Meteor, where if you sweep the target banks, which, as everybody that plays Meteor knows, that's a very fun thing to do. It'll give you a bonus, just like Flight 2000 does. You get an extra $10,000 for it. I think I'm going to up that to $25,000.
    49:27
    The only thing that I can't do is program new sounds. I'm trying to pull sounds out of other games and put them in there, like the big game does the reset sound on the target bank for $25,000. I would like that sound in Meteor. I think that would be a cool sound, but it's not currently working. That would be an excellent sound. I'd love to hear that in multiple games. It's a great sound to hear when you're like, oh, wow. I'm right with you on that. Yeah, just got a reek. Several years ago, there was the National Pinball League, which I believe is now defunct, run out of Allentown. Number 26 here. Yeah. I think I'm number three in it, or maybe I'm number four. I don't remember who was the second and first. But we were at Castle Video, you know, RIP, and we were playing the tri-state championships. I was the Pennsylvania champion because I had the most National Pinball League points, whatever the hell they are.
    50:21
    Actually, I don't even remember what the criteria was. So we were at Castle Video doing the Monthly Masters, which is similar to a scaled-down version of Pinberg.
    50:30
    And Brian's like, hey, let's play for the Tri-State Championship. Hey, that game's open. It was Bram Stroker's Dracula. It came down to the tiebreaker for all of us was on Dracula, though. And, of course, I had never played Dracula. So it was like, oh, great. And I believe he picked it or you picked it. Whoever lost the last game picked Dracula. So I'm like, okay. I don't know anything about Dracula, but I know that if you get to the third ball, you know, you can get – the ball will come out. You get a chance at an easier multi-ball. That I knew.
    51:09
    So we're playing the game, and I didn't know how the mystery hole got lit, but I hit it, and I got like 500,000 points. And I was like, oh, okay, no big deal. And we're playing, we're playing. And I end up with like 60,000 or 60,000, 60 million points.
    51:28
    Jim shot in the hole. He got 5 million points for his shot. I think I had to go first. That's why I got the shit mystery hole. And then Ron goes and he goes in the mystery hole and he gets 20 million points. Now, the final scores on the game, I had like 60 million. Jim had like $64 million, and Ron had like $74 million. So if he hadn't got that $20 million, he would have lost, and I would have won. I think I found some bitterness there, you know.
    52:00
    I call it collusion, because I think I was kicking your guy's ass on the first two games, although not enough to obviously win outright. I never looked at anything with WPC games, because there's all kinds of crazy shit that goes on with them and things like that. There's a website called pinhacks.com. It's very, very low traffic. You think RGP is low traffic now. At least there's like 10 messages a day on RGP, although there might be more. I have so many people in my kill file, I don't even know. But the pinhacks website, it's like one message a month.
    52:35
    So I posted over there, anybody know how to fix this? And then somebody's like, no, but this is the way the system works, and if you can figure out what values it's expecting, maybe we can do something from there. Somebody else chimed in and said there's a bug in Dracula I didn't even know about, and it's in Doctor Who as well, that if you tilt while the ball is draining, you don't get any bonus. That's, yeah, it's Futsenreuter's code. yeah he he loved to ignore the operating system routines and he would just kind of go off on his own way now you can be very successful with that um if your name is eugene jarvis um eugene jarvis is a master of anybody that's done any programming knows that you're not supposed to use go to or jump statements you're supposed to have like a nice program flow and use subroutines and things like that eugene jarvis said fuck that with firepower he just came out and he's like oh i want to do this, but there's no code in the operating system for it, so I'm going to put it over here. That's why Firepower is so big, because he added so much cool shit to it. Firepower is a great game. I know Ron has one. I don't know if Valley Bruce there has one. Probably not.
    53:46
    Believe me, we're not even getting to the shit games level yet, but I heard that last week when you were talking about Algar, and you probably just played it at York. That's why you were thinking about it. I was like, Algar? I like Algar. Actually, it's up at the Sanctum also, and there's a couple other places I've played. I like Al Gore. Well, you know. And our fans do, too. Do they? Yes.
    54:11
    Okay. So some people at Tin Hack said, listen, we're willing to look into it if you're willing to do the legwork and finding these insert points and things like that. And then they explained to me how the bank switching worked. I still have no fucking clue how it works. This is one area where I'm not really that interested in it. The only thing I'd be interested in changing would be something in, like, the Star Trek video mode where you don't get the extra ball ever, you know, that thing, mainly for tournament use. So that – because I think you should have extra balls on in a tournament. I'm digressing now.
    54:48
    So this other guy came along and said, listen, this is – some guy came up with some code that didn't work for the tilt bug. And I'm like, well, what's the tilt bug? and then explained to me what the tilt bug is. And then somebody else chimed in and said, hey, I tried to fix that tilt bug too. And they all posted their code. So everybody's posting their code as to what's going on. And then the original guy said, oh, these are the values in this table. This is where the table is. So I took all of that information and I figured out where to put it in Dracula so that it would always give you – originally I wanted to make it $5 million every time you went in the mystery hole. But it goes between a million or five million. There's actually a random thing that happens on it. And I think it's based on how well one of the other players is doing. So I made it $500,000 because it would just, it would always give it to you at $500,000. It's reasonable. You know, nobody can get screwed by the mystery.
    55:42
    And then the tilt bug thing worked too. So I had that in there. It was play tested at Papa, whatever year that was. And I think Ron has it in his machine. that is actually ironic and I no longer have a Dracula I sold it to Paul Dravik a couple months back to buy a sofa so I traded my Dracula for a nice sofa but I fixed the tilt bug in the Doctor Who as well so my Doctor Who you can shake it all you want you get a tilt warning, no big deal but that would be the newest game and probably the most widely used I guess I mean, the patch for it is floating around everywhere. Again, it's just a patch, so there's no Williams code in it. So it just gets applied against the L1 ROM.
    56:32
    Well, I always liked the – a lot of spinners on the Classic Sterns have a way to build values. And spinners and drop targets are kind of my two favorite play field features. So, you know, a lot of Classic Stern games have those cascading values up on the spinners, starting way back with Stars, going all the way through up through Dragon Fist, which was their last non-Orbiter 1 weird playfield, standard playfield game.
    56:58
    The better you're doing at the game, the more scoring potential there is for you to go to. And then, of course, there's drop targets. I added up the average number of drop targets on this turn game. It's like 10 or something like that. It's really high.
    57:12
    And they were cheap because nobody knew how to fix them, and there were no parts available. People didn't reproduce parts for stern. They still don't make the chiclet targets, which is Meteor and Below uses the non-hooded target style. Nobody makes them.
    57:28
    They are basically tombstones, but the difference between a stern drop target and a ballet drop target is that the stern rib is much longer. So you can modify a stern target to work in a ballet, but not vice versa. And it'd probably kill a bunch of people to know that, you know, way back when you could buy stern targets now, I bought a ton of them from US One Flea Market because it was the only place I knew that had them. It was a reproduction made in Holland. And I used to shave the rib off to use in my ballet machines. Nice. And boy, do I wish I had those targets back now. I no longer use new drop targets for sterns because they brick like a son of a bitch. They're not supposed to. I've spoken to Steve Young about it. He says there's no problem. And, you know, you can't argue with Steve Young because he's always right. And so I said, fine, I'm not buying any more new targets from you. I don't give a shit if they're hot stamped or whatever. So I have a very large stock of used classic Stern targets, of which Bruce is aware since I just gave him three of them. But, yeah, hopefully they work out in your nine ball. I hope so.
    58:28
    So I started to buy some more Stern games, you know, people would post. And they were cheap, you know, $300, $400.
    58:35
    I got a Starz for $125. that would be the one that was known as Upstars for people that had been at my house at that time when I had two stars Downstars is the one you sold to Steven right No actually Steve Keeler over at Rock Fantasy bought the Upstars because that was the lesser of the two playfields both of which were clear coated by the way just with the Verithane I did it myself in the garage I did both at the same time but he insisted on getting the Backglass from my better Backglass was the Downstairs one so I had the shit Backglass in my machine he has the better Backglass with the lesser play field. He had. He just sold it. Did you buy it? Nope, nope, nope. Mr. Levy did. Oh, Crazy Levy? Yep. Oh, cool, cool. So it's moving around. Yeah.
    59:30
    I think the play field in that one's actually better, too. Right now I have to replace the flipper, the left flipper on mine. It's got way too much travel, so there's something really fucked up in it right now. But that's an interesting aside, just, you know, with the software mods. It seems like I can't leave my games alone. Anything that's, you know, prior to, like, 1986 has some kind of software mod in it. I actually went to Starz, and people that have watched Ron's channel know that he has my ROM chip in there now. It blanks scores, shows the high score to date before the last ball, has a little better of a light show. I don't remember what I changed on the light show. But you know something, Ron? I actually went through that game, and I said, I can't leave the rules alone. I've got to change the rules on this game. So I played the game for about two weeks straight, you know, like 200, 300 games, you know how short games are on Starz.
    60:19
    And I said, you know something? There's nothing that needs to be changed in this rule set. This rule set is perfect. It is. And I changed nothing on it, which is a good thing because I had a Trident machine that Steve Keeler also ended up with. He bought a lot of my Stern games, you know, when I was divesting from them. That's really where I learned to program a game from scratch. I said, I'm going to throw out all these rules on Trident. I'm going to come up with something. And hearkening back to Fathom, which has that nice bonus countdown, one thing I do like about Fathom, it's got the dual bonus candy canes, and you've got the 55 at the top. And, you know, they do that, and if you add up all the numbers from 20 down to 10, it ends up 55. So I said, huh, I can do this. Maybe it's 19, I don't remember. But I can do this on Trident. And I said, I'm going to make you go up to 7x bonus. That's what all Stern games are known for. You get 7x bonus.
    61:17
    Along the way, I also fixed some other idiosyncrasies the game had. Like, for instance, the stand-ups on the right, they actually pause in the program as if they're resetting drop targets. And then since it thinks it's firing a solenoid, if you hit a pop bumper at the same time, it just kind of goes thud. And it's just horrible, which, by the way, happens right there. I have a problem with this whole episode. I hate to say. What's that? As soon as we release this, people are going to want to find freaking more sterns. Well, I've already had all the ones that I want. I'm not really chasing any now, but that's fine. It's all available. It's not – I'll tell anybody how to program it. They can learn it.
    62:02
    Oliver did point me in the right direction with some macro help, and I just spoke with him yesterday, and he said it's actually okay for me to release that macro stuff. So whoever came up with it originally has kind of let it lie or they said, oh, it's okay. I've got it all commented up if people want to modify it themselves. If it's something easy, I could probably do it for them and send it to them. I'm kind of known for that too. People will post and say, hey, I always thought it would be cool if this machine could do this. And then if I've just seen the message posted, I try to do it within like 10 minutes of the post and say, hey, look, you can do it this way. there have been a couple of small annoyances like a couple people posted that time warp has a bug where if the outhold double clutches when it's launching the ball or you go all the way down the background sound uh will disappear and um i fixed that and then they said oh we'd only change the code that's in the machine you know we'll just live with it so i'm like okay but i mean i have a time warp so heavily modified actually speaking of rule set changes um hey the last the last two thousand time warps that were run off the production line came with straight flippers. You can double check that by listening to this old pinball podcast with Barry Orsler where he goes over that exact fact and it plays so much better with straight flippers. Of course it does. Even Disco Fever doesn't play good with those stupid banana flippers.
    63:29
    And you have to hold on a little flipper shoe with rubber cement or it flies across the play field. It's just, I forget about those slippers. They're horrible.
    63:40
    So, Scott, how many machines do you have right now? 38. Very impressive. I've moved from Allentown, and I have a different location now outside of the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania suburban area. And they're all set up in the bay. Well, they're not all set up yet, but, you know, I've got projects. I have a machine stored out at Papa. Anybody that's gone out to Papa that wants to pick it up and deliver it to me. Do I count that as part of my collection? Of course. I mean, I do own it. It's been there for five years.
    64:11
    Target pool. No, no, not the one they have on the floor. This is like a repainted cabinet, you know, roached one. And I think the play field's been painted on it, too.
    64:20
    They got it in the back room for me. I'm hoping they're not using parts of it. But every time I talk to Mark out there, he's like, oh, no, it's still here.
    64:27
    I mean, I probably should – hold on. I'm going to look up my list of games. I don't even know. Okay, in order EMs, skill roll Not a pinball This is actually the tournament website, I'm just going to read it right off the tournament website Fast draw Kingpin, target pool It's funny, I got it on the game list, don't have it here yet Volley Mars track Okay, I'm going to skip the pre-DMD solid states since they're my favorite and I will read them last DMD games Attack for Mars, that would be my newest pinball machine Doctor Who, Star Trek Next Gen, Twilight Zone, Going Back, classic solid state games, Williams, Black Knight, Earthshaker, F-14 Tomcat with eight-digit scoring and enhanced rule set, Firepower with seven-digit scoring and enhanced rule set, Flash with enhanced rule set, seven-digit scoring. That's kind of bullshit. I haven't actually done that yet, but it'll be there. Before the next tournament, it's going to have seven-digit scoring and an enhanced rule set. Time Warp with an enhanced rule set and seven-digit scoring.
    65:33
    TriZone also has an enhanced rule set and seven-digit scoring. However, that's going to go back to stock because, again, I went overboard on it, and it sucks with the new rules. And you do not need seven-digit scoring on that game. No. Classic Gottliebs, because I know you guys love Gottliebs. A couple of them. Black Hole with seven-digit scoring. Stock otherwise. Countdown and Joker Poker. And Joker Poker is the only game I have set to five balls a game because the rule set makes sense. Yeah. All right. For Bally Bruce. Woo-hoo! Here's my Bally collection.
    66:07
    Atlantis with the tournament ROM in it. Blackjack with a slightly tweaked rule set. Bobby Orr Power Play, slightly tweaked rule set. 8-Ball, slightly tweaked rule set. 8-Ball Deluxe, bug-fist ROM and slightly tweaked rule set. Mata Hari with a slightly tweaked rule set. Is everybody seeing a pattern here? No, not at all yet. Keep it going. Keep the goodness going. Mystic with a seven-digit conversion, although God knows why. I know. And right now it's stock otherwise, but I'm actually looking into tweaking that rule set as well. Knight Rider with a very enhanced rule set. Paragon with a slightly tweaked rule set and seven-digit scoring. And then the Classic Sterns. These are the ones that I have left. Now, at one point, I did own every single MPU200 Classic Stern other than Iron Maiden. Q doesn't count because it's not a pinball. and Razor Lord is one prototype which may or may not exist. And Ali. Yeah.
    67:04
    So that was the whole collection. And then I had in MPU 100s, I had Trident, Dracula, and S.T.A.R.S., of course.
    67:16
    The ones that I have left are Big Game with a slightly enhanced rule set, Dragon Fist with a Bug Fist ROM, Flight 2000 with an enhanced rule set, Galaxy with a slightly tweaked rule set and seven-digit scoring. Hot Hand with a slightly enhanced rule set. Meteor with seven digits and a very enhanced rule set and a bug fix. Sea Witch, which is stock. Oh, my God, I haven't changed anything on Sea Witch yet. And Stargazer with a slightly enhanced rule set. And Stars with a slightly enhanced operating system, but the rules are exactly the same. So not too many, but, you know, I kept probably the cream of the crop. I really like Sea Witch out of that list. Stargazer, of course, is great.
    68:01
    Stargazer. Yeah, Dragon's Fist is an awesome game. Yes. Flight 2000, I'm actually, it's in the queue for a major software rewrite because anybody that's played the game, and this was actually the complaint the guy had about Lightning as well, and I did too when I owned Lightning. If you relock the balls, which is pretty easy to do on Lightning since it's just holes, your multiball's over. That sucks, especially since it's so hard to get. Yes. So, same thing with Flight 2000.
    68:29
    And by the way, that deal on the Medusa fell through, Bruce, so no Medusa for me. No! That's fine. I would not have had room for it. I am kind of at capacity now, so I'll have to start putting... I always find room. Ask Ron, I always find room. Yeah. And I have a Dolly Parton that's in the garage for Las Vegas. For some reason, I don't have it on the list here. because that's in storage. But no more games underneath other games. You guys missed out again. I had a big game underneath other games that I sold for $200. You missed it. You're going to kill me. Now we know. Now you know we are interested. So the next time you want to sell, you're just going to say, hey, let me call Bruce or Ron, and hopefully it's Bruce first, and we're going to go.
    69:17
    Oh, yeah, Quicksilver was definitely a fun game. But, you know, some things had to go. You know, it's like, you know, you got to cut him, you know, and it'll make Bruce happy to know that, you know, even though I'm classic stern nut, most of the games that went, they made room for those classic valleys. You know, I know you guys were, you guys were lauding Blackjack a couple weeks ago. Blackjack is an awesome game. It is a underrated awesome game that most people do not understand. And for the rules, actually, the funny thing is, when you look at the rules for that game, They were really based off an EM game. Yep. And to make it digital and make it work, the game just is great. Absolutely. I agree almost 100%, and this is the percent that I don't agree.
    70:08
    The randomness that – see, I'm big on not getting screwed over in a tournament since I got screwed over in a tournament. So a lot of the enhancements are so you don't get screwed over in a tournament. Now, the dealer hand and the player hand, of course, start out in blackjack. They're random. They're totally random. It's completely random. That's not fair because you can shoot up and drop into that dealer hole. Right off the bat. That's right. You have who we can. And 5,000 if you get left. That's right. So here is the tweak. The tweak is that the player hand will start out higher. and if you can plunge the saucer on the plunge, you'll get 50,000 bonus, and you know you win because your hand is higher. So that's fair for everybody. Everybody's hand is going to start out. And there's so many things on the game that you hit them like those stand-ups, and it changes your hand or changes the dealer hand. So you're not always going to have a higher hand than the dealer.
    71:07
    But the game, it just looks deceptively simple, and you're like, wow, this is a shit ton to play. I love that game. And that's what I'm about, is the game has to be fun to play, and then at this point I'm trying to add rules to the game to make it more fun. I think one of the things that would make it real fun for classic tournaments is if you could win an extra ball, but limit it to one extra ball per ball in play. So the other part of those, all those other games I listed that said slightly tweaked rule set, is you can win one extra ball, like say it's your first ball. You're on ball one, you can win one extra ball. The next ball, you're playing your extra ball. You cannot win another extra ball, which, of course, is a dip switch setting, but not a dynamic one. So, in other words, ball one, you can get one extra ball. Ball two, you can get one extra ball. Ball three, you can get one extra ball, but you can't get two. Yeah. So the games aren't going to go on forever, and it probably wouldn't be that hard to change it to just make one per game. I used to do custom ROM builds for people, but these people know who they are. They probably don't know why they don't get custom ROMs anymore. So, you know, breaking news, if they happen to listen to this podcast, the reason why you guys, and there's two of you, aren't getting custom ROMs anymore is because you never gave me feedback on them.
    72:32
    Luckily, I am not that person. You didn't even know that they existed, so now you know. Now I know. Now you know. yeah it's just make me look like a techno rube here but it's just a Google site on it's called Allentown Pinball so it's sites.google.com slash site slash Allentown Pinball slash and then that's I mean the actual software isn't there because I don't think Google lets you put it there but you can get a description of it and you can just email me and you know yeah it's probably been raised up And we can see the – I did run a tournament for a couple years that I thought both you guys had played in because I was going to say, huh, I wonder who finished higher. So this is why I looked. And apparently Bruce never played in it. Nope, I only played in the monthly. So that's all I got to play in. I believe that's where I met Bruce is the very first monthly Masters was at my house. And so that tournament, the monthly Masters, whatever year it was, I think it was 2008, 2009. No, that taught – Okay. That taught me how to set up the machines for a tournament because up until this point, remember, loose tilts or no tilts, extra balls and stuff. Now, Brian was running the tournament. He said, listen, we've got some guys coming that are pretty good at the pinball. You know, you might want to tighten the tilts up. And I'm like, I don't need to change anything. They're fine. They'll tilt eventually, you know, that kind of stuff. So after John McKeown walked the roadshow machine all over the basement floor without tilting it, and, I mean, he won the tournament because he's really good at nudging, especially when there's no tilt or a loose tilt. So I started to develop my strategy for tightening up the game. Now everyone is blaming Scott for this for me. I learned from Scott.
    74:25
    Tighten the tilts up as tight as they'll go. You invert the tilt bob. Have you ever noticed that in the parts catalog, the tilt bob is always shown with the small end towards the bottom above the ring? I mean, the reason for that is it makes it more sensitive. So you can actually set the tilt ridiculously tight, but it'll recover right away.
    74:46
    So you don't have to, you know, tilt through to the next player's ball or things like that. You polish the tilt bob with Brasso. You polish the tilt ring with Brasso. You make sure that the little switch capacitors, if they're originally used, like on a Bally, you make sure they're brand new and reinstalled so that the slightest hint will give you a tilt.
    75:06
    And then when people complain about how tight and unfair the tilt is, you just shrug your shoulders and say, it doesn't tilt for me, and you walk away.
    75:20
    I think I used that at Pinnapalooza. Now I have a question. I don't know if it's even possible, Scott. I was going to ask you this. Yes, it is possible. No. Wait, let me predict what you're going to ask. Okay. You want tilt warnings for all the early games. No, no, no. I was close. On sterns, you can't tilt through. That's true. Can it be possible on a valley? Yeah, it's already been done. Okay, I did not know that. That's why I was asking. Yeah, there's a whole set of tilt-through ROMs that are out there that you cannot tilt through. Nice. See? Even old-time. And it's coming on Williams. It's not there yet. But, you know, there's only so much that the people that are doing those can do. It was supposed to be used at some Papa stuff, but I don't think it ever got off the ground there. They just had too many games to update. So at some point, I know that Noah Davis was using them out in Seattle. Maybe this discussion will bring it up more, maybe, hopefully, too, because, you know, even I know about that. Yeah, the 10 or 11 listeners that are hearing this.
    76:33
    But, yeah, no, that's already been done. And it is possible as well to add tilt warnings, you know, like Centaur has. But I don't think tilt warnings would necessarily be a good thing. No, I like the tilt through now. The tilt through is very nice. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because I'm – no, no, no. But, I mean, the Sterns are so much nicer. Yep, they've been doing that since at least Starz. Yeah. And anybody that's noticed I haven't mentioned any earlier games in Starz, that's because they really suck. But if anybody has a Stern pinball for sale, the SS version, I would like to buy it. Cheap. Thanks. That's actually a good game. Like somebody – yeah, somebody brought one to the Allentown show, It was actually set up correctly because I had played a lot of them and they were dogs. And it was just like, you know, real slow, shallow slope. And I was just like, oh, my God, this game's boring. But then somebody brought one, and I don't know if the play field was cleared on it or what, but it was raised pretty high, and I was just playing it like, holy crap, this is a good game. I want this. Yeah. I mean, the artwork's nothing to, you know, write home about, but the game's fun. Now, here's the funny thing. We've been talking for almost an hour and a half about, And all these other podcasts out there are talking about the upcoming expo. Now, not for nothing, this is more exciting than the upcoming expo in some ways for me. Well, that's because you're not going. Well, besides that even. No, besides that. I went for two years. Okay. I mean, the first time I went, I had a – actually, no, I went for three years. The first time I went, I had to pick up the skill roll from Wisconsin. People that have ever looked for a skill role know that they seem to be in Texas and Wisconsin for some reason. So I had to go up there to get that.
    78:17
    The next year I had to go and pick up a hot hand at Williams-Phoenix. And then the third year I think I flew in, which was great because that ride really sucks. It does. And I didn't buy any games, but I could have bought a ringer, but I would have had no way to get it back east.
    78:37
    Oh, yeah, I went to all the seminars. To me, that's what made Expo Expo. And I was actually kind of pissed. The first year I played in the Expo Brawl, and then I was like, the Sharps were running it, and it was like, you guys have to play. You know, you're like in the fifth group. I was in group E or something like that. And he's like, oh, you have to play for the position in the group. And I missed a seminar I really wanted to see. I think it was on Kevin O'Connor's artwork, who I think is the best pinball artist. but he, Josh Sharp said, or maybe it was Zach, probably Josh, said, oh, no, you have to play for the position, otherwise you're going to be last. So I'm like, okay. So I played the game, and I missed the seminar, and then I came back over, and I'm like, okay, what do I get? And he said, here, and he gave me a handshake. I didn't get a plaque.
    79:28
    Holy shit, no way. Yeah, I didn't get a plaque. I didn't get a certificate. I didn't get jack shit. So it's like, hey, I missed that seminar that I really wanted to go see. So after that, I didn't really play in the tournaments, but I did kind of haunt the seminars because I felt that that was, you know, most interesting. I really enjoyed Larry DeMar's fireside chat when he had his little Pinball 2000 book there, and it had the code, and I wanted to look at the code, you know, to see how it had done because, you know, he was one of the early guys along with Eugene Jarvis that really revolutionized the way the code was written and what you could do with the pinball rather than just kind of do like an emulation of the EM games. I mean, we're talking about, you know, the Stern was the first one to market with their multi-threaded operating system, and that's in 1979 on a pinball machine.
    80:19
    And I just recently found out probably in the last two weeks, the guy that wrote Berserk wrote the operating system for Stern pinball machines as well. so I would call him an early software pioneer Alan McNeil is his name exactly that's the same board that's in the same chip anyway that's in the Stern pinball games it's also the same one that's in the speak and spell so if you ever need one of those Vortrex chips or is that the same one that's in the black hole machine I don't remember you know you get older and I used to do all my own board work and stuff like that I send it out now It's easier. It's just easier. I agree.
    80:58
    It's Barack and Elle on RGP, Andrew Spitzler out in Ohio. He does a good job. He's not too expensive.
    81:08
    The thing that I like with him, I don't know if he'll do it for other people, but he does it for me, is that when he posts boards, he usually charges $100 or $125 for an MPU board. And I just tell him, take your MPU board, take all the chips off of it, because I got the chips. Yeah. And I said, how much will you sell to me without the chips, you know, so I can save some money because I'm cheap.
    81:29
    No, not you, Scott. Well, look, wait a second. Now, Tim Balls, who is one of our friends, won two free games. Is that too much?
    81:41
    He got some games for free. Well, Ron did too, right, in his tournament. Or, I mean, in the – No, he paid $75. even I would pay $75 for a new Stern well the good thing is let's go over a little bit of news you know I know everyone's talking about the expo and that kind of stuff but guess what came out today new Ghostbusters code and everyone complains about video modes that is too great that's one part of the news and second what did you think of Alien
    82:17
    I am sitting in front of it. Is it on pinballnews.com? I can look at it right now. I think it is. Yeah, Martin's pretty good about getting the stuff up there, so let's take a look. He is. Plus, he's a big fan of Highway, so. Yeah.
    82:33
    No, he doesn't have anything up there yet. Wow, I'm surprised. Oh, that's too bad, because I think Alien or Aliens is a great theme for a pinball machine. Yeah, and it looks really good. I like the shots. It looks like it's going to have some flow to it. Now, is that the one that Nordman consulted for? Yes. Okay, so it was probably prototyped in Nordmanite foam or something like that. Probably.
    82:58
    No, that's what he used. He used foam. He builds everything in three days. Yes. You know, rather than just using SolidWorks or something like that. Yeah, I think Jim actually had one of those foam at one of the expos. Yep. The Zen Studios one looks pretty cool. I mean, I know that's video pinball, but that actually looks kind of cool. It's got the old upper left flipper there, a la Pat Lawler, to go into the sick bay. Huh, that actually looks pretty good. And actually, the play field kind of reminds me of Spooky's America's Most Haunted a little bit.
    83:34
    Not much. So, as I said before, the funny thing is everyone's talking about Expo. We've been talking about it for weeks, what, five weeks now, I think, six weeks? Wall-to-wall meet-and-greets, tournaments, and seminars. Playing, lots of playing.
    83:54
    Not as much. I don't really play too much when I go to shows. It's one thing when I help volunteer at a show. Like when I used to live in Allentown, I lived about three miles from the show location, so I used to always help out. And I used to play in the morning. They let you in there around 8 o'clock if you're working there, And that's when I would do all my playing before anybody was there. And then, you know, as soon as that place is packed, it's just too many people. It was too crowded. Yeah. Well, the tournament that – well, somebody must have played in the tournament because I always had a problem with the old location of not enough space. And then when you have 32 people for a tournament, we picked games out of – like I had it all set up, all the games were set up. but you were guaranteed to play one of the three machines that I put upstairs just for the tournament. I played Joker Poker, the Upstars, you know, so there was two stars. And I don't even remember what the third game was. There was another game up there. But that way at least 12 people would be out of the basement at any one time. And, you know, poor Steve Keeler, he played the Upstars in every single round. he just happened to be moving up and down the rankings and he fell in love with the game and then we ended up doing a trade because it was an extra one I call it a show mule which is just a game you store underneath other games and you pull it out once a year for a show and I mean it is a really good game I first played it at Papa and I was just like wow this is really great I mean I had always looked at it and said oh that game must suck but hey the guy that designed Meteor designed it it's got to be good right Yeah. You know, and, well, you know, I did read the thing that said, we need your stars, you know, to bring your stars to New York City. And I was like, I should bring mine there, even though I have no way to move it there. You know, because it's just the coolest thing ever. It's like, let's have, it sounds like a goof at first, but then it's like, no, it's actually kind of a cool idea. Lovey, yeah, he's really, he's into this. As serious as somebody can be with the nickname crazy, but.
    86:01
    He is crazy. That is true. but he it's just too far to haul and things like that, no pinball hauler if I had a pinball hauler, I actually thought I sold my truck and I bought a small car because I figured I don't need to buy any more games, I'm going to go crazy buying games and I don't want to anymore too much to keep up with and I think I've bought 12 games since I got rid of my truck in the last two years you borrow I have a friend up the street that he has a van, so he always lets me borrow his van. Or I have people deliver the games to me, that type of thing. The last couple games I got, which was Mars Trek and Another Flash, I had the guy deliver.
    86:46
    Well, I have a couple of suggestions because we have to do the favorite games and hate game. We're going for. Well, the first suggestion that I have to name Bruce's game room, because you guys are so into the out-hole wear on Playfield.
    87:08
    You already know where I'm going. I do. I think you should call it Bruce's Krusty Out-Hole. Oh, there you go. Because nobody likes a Krusty Out-Hole. Nobody likes a Krusty Out-Hole. I was actually with my wife when she actually heard Ron's suggestion for Xanadu. She turned to me, went, no. I'm sitting there smiling. She goes, no. I'm like, it'd be great. She's like, no. I think that's a great game of a name for it. And, you know, the movie's not that bad. And, come on, it has ELO music in it. How bad could it be? Thank you. See? So what is the game you like? then it's not one that I own. That's the key.
    87:54
    Or have. Oh, God, or have owned. I've owned over 200 different games. Welcome to the club. That's hard. That's very difficult. But you can hate the game. Yeah, but you can hate the game that you have owned or even have in your collection You can hate that way Oh I got plenty of hate ones But the game that I been chasing for a long time is Williams Hotline from the 60s Okay. It's one of their single-player games. It's a sequence game that has a ton of buttons on the play field that spell out hotline, which, as you can imagine, with EM technology, is pretty difficult. But I always thought it was really cool. It's got a lot of pop bumpers at the top. It looks like a boring game, but I find it a lot of fun. I find them in shows. People have them for sale. For some reason, when I offer them $200 for it, they say no. I don't understand. Is that the one with the fisherman trying to pull it? It is. Okay. I know the game. Yeah. It's a fun game. It's one of my favorites that, unfortunately, I've never owned, probably because I don't want to pony up the money. But, you know, just a really great game. Well, I've been trying to buy it for that price since about the year 2000. It still ain't happening. Yeah, people don't. I mean, the closest I came was, you know, $350. Somebody had one for $350, but it was really ratty, so I didn't really want to build a new cabinet for a $350 game, so I didn't do it. Okay, a game you hate. Oh.
    89:24
    Yeah, let's go. That's right. Let's give them three right now. Okay, well, first of all, I have a new category for your 25 levels of suck. Bring it on. This is going to be level 26. it's a frozen turd as in you'd rather be frozen in carbonite than play it number 26 is going to be added right now and that game despite Ron's best efforts to get me to like it well actually I'll go to the one that I really hate and that game is Party Zone I am the person that you described in podcast 2 or something, I will take a zero on any round that I am forced to play party zone in. Luckily, I'm retired from pinball tournament playing, so nobody can use that against me. But that game is just super suck. I never liked it when it was on location. I thought it was stupid.
    90:24
    And it just has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Games that I wouldn't put at that level as a frozen turd, but it will go one up to level 25 where I just hate it. And it's one of Ron's favorite games. And I think Bruce likes it too. Dirty Harry. I don't mind Dirty Harry. I had to grow into it. I had to grow into it. I used to be down in the 20s with that one. I watched Ron's two hour video on it and I was just like, there's got to be something happening here other than him shooting those two damn ramps. And I was skipping ahead, skipping ahead, skipping ahead. And then I watched like the last half hour and I'm like, Oh, man, it's still not good. I changed it, so now your number 26 is on there. Okay. Wow, look at that. What service. And then probably a third one that's bad is one that I mentioned earlier on, and that's Fathom.
    91:21
    I mean, things that obviously you don't like it either, or you're scoffing at my low ratings. I'm scoffing at you. I would say it's probably around on the, like, 19, 18 or 19 level. And I got to say, if you go on the basis of the artwork of the game, I think it's one of the best back glasses ever made. I actually paid $70 or $79 to buy the print from Pinball Life. I have it right next to me right here, so I have the back glass. Love the artwork. The gameplay, don't like the gameplay.
    91:54
    It's the worst ones, Ben, that one. I actually don't mind a multi-ball play on that. I like the top drop targets.
    92:03
    It's one of the Valley Kitchen Sink games where they throw everything at it, and it just doesn't flow as well for me. It has one of my most hated features with the reversed outlanes. I hate them. That's probably why I don't like Williams Indiana Jones, because it has a similar thing on the right. Yeah. I know it's – yeah, I did get rid of my Centaur. after I swapped the play field.
    92:29
    Of course, it was a Centaur too, so that's not as big a loss. Well, that's slightly different anyway, the Centaur. At least it's a normal out lane and you have the opportunity to save it. Yeah, like a Viking. Yeah, it's not a reversed out lane. The reversed out lane is like Comet has it. My girlfriend loves Comet. She wants me to buy one, and I'm like, but it has reversed out lanes. Skateball. What, Ballet Ball? Skateball. Oh, Skateball. So on one side it does. That's true. Yep.
    93:01
    That's true. As a ROM aside, I actually did a custom ROM for a tournament director that he asked me to go on Skateball, and he wanted to prevent people from shooting the – shatting the in lane and getting the bonus built up. So the name of that ROM set was the Screw Trent ROMs. That tells you who it was written for.
    93:22
    Nice. And I believe he did actually use them in the tournament, but then somebody figured out that all you have to do is cut the wire in half, and then you can't chat to it. It will just hit the wire form. So it removed the whole need to have such a ROM set. So it doesn't even exist anymore. You know, that was a one-off, and then I don't even have a copy of it.
    93:43
    But it was some crazy stuff because you had to monitor every single switch that was hit, and if it hit the right in lane twice in a row, it wouldn't allow it for the second time. You had to hit some other switch. So it made it a little harder. But I think tournament directors at this point just changed the wire form for that.
    94:03
    But Skateball, I actually don't mind. And I had forgotten that it had reversed out lanes. But it's a fun game.
    94:11
    You said I could name three, but, you know, if you... Go one more. Let's see. Got to go with something a little newer, I think.
    94:23
    And not the easy targets either. Well, I love Twilight Zone, so I know you hate it, but can't say that. I had one of our listeners commenting about that, which I was going to bring up after we have our hates and likes. I think it's a great game. So it's one of my top DMD games. But I'm going to go a little newer and probably pick a Stern game that's going to be a string game that I've actually seen, though. I haven't really been going out and seeing too many of the new games, open box parties and stuff like that. See what happens when you move away from people that buy new unboxings. You've got to drive too far to get to it.
    95:07
    I'd have to say World Poker Tour. Oh, my God. But it's... Oh, he has one? I did not know that. It's a great game. It's actually a pretty deep rule set. I'm surprised.
    95:25
    It's not on the order of a party zone, you know. It's like on a, I'd say 20, somewhere around there. Oh my God!
    95:34
    Again, probably because I got screwed on it in a tournament. Probably, that could bring up a 20. Holy fluck-a-la-roo! Yeah. Oh, my God. Another like, but it has to be one that I haven't owned.
    95:50
    Oh. I would say Sopranos or Lord of the Rings. Good. Very good. Since they're basically the same game. But I would say Lord of the Rings probably. I mean, talking about a deep Keith Johnson rule set, right? I mean, I don't think they get much deeper than Lord of the Rings. Maybe Simpsons. um no that's another one of the i'm ambivalent about simpsons you know it's uh i mean i never made it to the alien invasion or whatever but you know i don't like games that you play one game and it lasts 30 minutes that's that's the other reason i make the games really hard so that i don't get bored of them yes okay for me like i'm gonna go opposite of whatever you're I'm going Bally's, and I'm going old Bally's. Not too old, but old enough. Fireball 2. I like it. I like the little demon in the middle. I like the multi-ball. I liked it so much I sold it, but I did like it. Bad. Lady Luck. Oh, my God. What a turd. Bally's, another Bally. Yeah, it's a 1985. They made like 600 of them. It's pretty bad. It's really bad. It's very easy to turn over.
    97:10
    I think I did a divide by 10 ROM set for somebody for that, and it still didn't hold his interest. Yeah, it's really bad. Yeah. Yeah, it's got 10x playfield scoring. It doesn't have multi-ball, and it has reasonably annoying music. It's got like a transvestite on the back glass.
    97:31
    Not that we don't like transvestites here. Right, Ron? Hey, if they look good, that's fine. But, you know, on a pinball back glass, you know, you've got to question some of their artwork choices. Yeah. Yeah, Bally did not pick good winning back glasses back in 85, 86.
    97:53
    Not at all. So what level of suck are you talking on these? I'm talking right now 24, 25, right there. Ah. Nah.
    98:04
    It's that bad. The only thing it's good for is the board sets. That's all it would be good for. If there's only 100 left, that's too many. 100 too many. Plus, they were in that really high-quality cabinet. I mean, come on. Who didn't like that? The particle board, as soon as you try to move it, it's just breaking your hands. At least it wasn't one of the ones that was shaped like a banana. Oh, what? The Dungeons & Dragons slash... Yep. Yeah. So, Algar versus Scorpion. Ron, the fans don't agree with you again. Blame our guest also. He voted neither. That's right, and I have not changed my opinion since then. I will tell you one thing. I will play either one of them and enjoy it greatly rather than play Pokerino. True. Very true. And you can tell that I have really no taste anyway because I actually like Laser Ball.
    99:01
    Yeah, that's hard. That's hard to swallow. Being a transvestite, right? Yeah. Ugh. But I have to thank Brett and Jim. You know, Jim's one of our longtime listeners. He makes a lot of comments, and he agreed with me, and so did Brett. So thank you, guys. I hate to say it. Our fan base is really proving somebody here's got taste, and somebody here goes with I don't know what. What else are we talking about? Frank busted our chops this week also because we couldn't remember his last name. Yes. So I have to then give the sorry, Frank, I suck at last names apology.
    99:48
    And it seems like we might have a new listener in Albany for you. Tim seems like he's from Albany. He's new into pinball. and he was actually excited about seeing that there was a show from Upstate New York. And so you might have another member of the Albany Pinball Club.
    100:11
    So you started, Ron, you started to touch on some rankings there. So that figured that even though I am retired from tournaments, I figured I would look up my record versus you. Oh, I see.
    100:25
    Oh, boy. But I'm just kind of looking at the, see, I see Ron Howlett won. That would be your dad. I beat him six times, and we actually tied one time. Ooh. But then Ron Howlett, too. My record is eight and four against you, so I'm twice as good as you.
    100:47
    Yeah, but, of course, if you look at my current rank, it says current rank zero. Because you haven't played in one tournament, and that's why. In the last three years, yeah. How about against me? I can't find you. I have played so many freaking people. I have no tournament set, Bruce, that I have played in together, which I know this isn't accurate. It's not accurate because I know. Yeah, because we played at Castle Video. Yeah. We might have to have another tournament, Scott, at your place to actually prove. No, no, no. It's not going to be three. The last one, I believe, was 2009. So that was P-22. so adding on to that we're in 2016 it'll probably be in 2017 so that would be between 10 I mean it's not my fault you guys didn't show up for 3 through 9 nice a couple more things I wanted to touch on Derek K messaged us also with a video showing Litz with Twilight Zone and he said, why is there still no Twilight Zone love? Now, since we have somebody that loves Twilight Zone, that still owns one,
    102:05
    he can give us the goodness of how Twilight Zone is so good. Mode stacking. Okay. How many modes are in there?
    102:16
    Oh, 22. How many are in the core? What? There's like 22 modes. Yes. 22 modes. Is that right? Yes, it is. Unfortunately, yes. I wish that was on the top of my head. Here's the funny thing. That's what I told him. That's the one thing I told him in the comment. I said, Litz is great. Litz is one of the best wizard modes you can get to. It's not as good as Ransom in Black Knight 2000. No, of course not. Ransom was, you know, when you get the first wizard mode, that's the best ever. But the problem is getting to Litz. If you have a hard game like, say, if you set it up, Scott, What are the odds of somebody coming up to you or walking up to your game and within three games getting lifts?
    102:58
    Well, some pretty heavy hitter players like Steve Bowden and Sanjay Shah and Coy Morris have played it, and none of them have gotten lost in the zone on it. Exactly. So most people will not get lifts. No. Exactly. That's the problem I have with the game. Even though you stack the multiballs, some modes are great, but some modes are really dogs in that game. I like anything to do with the power field because I find it really fun to, you know, go out the top of the power field and get my door panel that way. That'll help you with that, of course, totally. But me, the Powerball is the most fun thing in the game. Yep, that's fun too. It's especially fun when you take it out of that game and put it in other games. No, no, no, that's the best thing. When you put it in an 8-ball, that's the best thing going. It's fun and meatier until the ball becomes airborne and it gets lodged on the plastic between the glass and the plastic.
    103:51
    Well, Scott, you're talking to somebody who is sick as you are in some ways. I put magnesium balls in a high speed. Oh, my. That was a corner to hell. I have a surprise for Mr. Ron next week. Besides opening up, hopefully we'll have to figure out a time and date when we're going to open up his premium Ghostbusters.
    104:13
    Next week, I have invited, I still am trying to get me and Mike Smith are trying to get on the same page for his interview for his place. He did open it up to us privately, and it looks pretty good. He's got a lot of games in there. I'm hoping that, you know, it's going to work out for him well. We're going to get him eventually on the show. But next week, I have invited Mr. Tim Balls back, our first returning guest, to talk about Expo. And he's not going to be there, but he says, I like Tim's opinion on everything, too, just like I like Scott's. So he'll be our first returning guest. We've had a lot of people asking about him. He said yes tonight, so next week we'll have Tim Balls on with us talking about what we've heard about in Expo. You're actually going to have to work. So, Ron, while you're at Expo, there's one thing that you need to do when you're at the Adam West meet and greet. What if you walk around Expo dressed as Robin? Oh, boy, that would be cool, actually.
    105:15
    Rat Robin costume. Yeah. Oh, excuse me. I'm sorry. That's rude of me. Get Robin costume out of closet.
    105:27
    It's right next to my Battlestar Galactica flight uniform. So our last part of our feature. Sure. But, no, I think a feature that should come back would be the ability to sweep drop targets. Like, there are drop targets on a lot of games, but they're just not sweepable. No. I like when you can, you know, sweep classic string games, all have that sweep. And I really like the spinner that kind of hangs out like a nine ball, but they have been putting that on games. So that's a good feature that they brought back. I just think it's really cool to see, you know, like, hey, there's a little flag we're hanging out here. You know, it goes through us. Hit me, hit me, hit me. Yep. Like I've seen on Iron Man, and doesn't Elvis have it as well?
    106:13
    Yes. Yep. I've played Elvis, I think, twice, and I seem to remember that it had it. But drop targets that actually drop, you know, nicely. No bricks, no big whatever Stern uses, like in the Itchy and Scratchy Hole on Simpsons, those huge targets. Don't like them.
    106:34
    I like, and it's been used recently, but I still like it, and I like to see it more often, a timed skill shot. So going all the way back from Medusa, where it would actually increase your spinner value, to like Lord of the Rings, where it actually, if you got the skill shot, you can do one of three shots. Or in Batman, you can do one of three shots. I like those. And it has to be in the shooter lane, right? Yes. No, I mean, the Medusa one is really, are you talking also like fire, you know, where you've got the thing going up and down? That could be, or even like taxi where you're actually, you have control for your skill shot, and some of them are timed. And the Medusa one, as you noted, first of all, it's really difficult to get all the Gorgons lit with it, and it can be potentially humongous in that game if you just whale the spinner. Oh, I know. That's what's so good about Medusa.
    107:34
    Repairs. Boys, what did you get for repairs? Me, nothing. They didn't even work on Centaur. Well, I am on vacation this week, so since I moved to the new house, everything worked, and I had to wire the house up because no house has enough power for pinball machines. Never does. Wired the house up pretty quickly, and I actually, I think I moved in in April. I was officially like in in June, and I had everything up and running by August of 2013. Had a party to make sure that all the circuits were going to stay up and not sag. And I didn't know you guys drove so far. So, you know, I invoted them.
    108:17
    Well, now I know Bruce is crazy. You know, I always suspected it, but now I know for sure. I mean, yeah, I drove into Canada once to get a nine ball machine, but that's the furthest I ever went.
    108:30
    But as far as repairs go, I just got my Mystic. It was actually the last machine to be set up here, so I guess I didn't have everything set up in August, but that was the last machine, and I had to replace the right flipper switch because it actually was welding itself together because it was so worn.
    108:50
    Failing that, I've been putting Envy Ram in all my machines, and I'm cleaning everything off in anticipation of parties and tournaments. Nice. I am going to be down there. The problem with tournaments at this point, it seems to be scheduling them. Yeah. It's hard to find one. Yeah, that the people that are in the area or slightly outside the area that might want to travel might say, huh, can I stay here in New Jersey and play at 8 on the break, or do I go to New York to play at Reciprocal or the Laundromat, or do I go to Scotts to play his games that have been locked in a vault, basically, for the last four years.
    109:26
    But Zach will be coming over tomorrow to work on Centaur. We're going to finish that up. Yep. And he already talked about Steve Bowden, so we're good with that one.
    109:36
    Centaur destroyed. Yes. It's ready to go into its slot. That's a couple more seconds. Here's a trivia question for you, Bruce, since you own the game Centaur. When does it say five-side award?
    109:52
    I don't even know. When does it say it? It's in a very obscure part of the game. When you press the sound test button on the squawking talk board. Oh, really? It's an unused quote in the game. I'll have to listen to it when I power it up tomorrow.
    110:10
    So, Ron, you got your work for next week. Well, at the show and everything. I want you to figure out a time to do that, too.
    110:19
    Don't forget, you're going as Robin. Yes, I know. So, Robin, Ron, Robin, we're close. Yeah, it's pretty close. You're the sidekick that didn't make it.
    110:32
    Don't worry. The next couple of shows are going to be fun for me. Next week I'm going to be in Atlanta again. And the week after I'm in Atlanta, so I have to do it from the hotel both weeks.
    110:41
    I get a week home, and then I'll be doing it at 2.30 in the morning. I'm not even going to do events because they're all the same events, except for Tudor taking away. So we're good on that.
    110:55
    You can listen to the last one for that one. Now, Scott, I hope you will come on again because I know I had a great time, and I like talking to you because you are one of the most down-to-earth people who are still in the hobby after 30 years. So you're as old as me.
    111:17
    I didn't even get into, you know, my favorite rant topics, which is against LEDs and pinball machines. Oh, we have plenty of time for you to come back again. Trust me. Pinside censorship.
    111:30
    Oh, I love it. I cannot wait for you to be back on again. All right. Well, I'm already asking you now.
    111:39
    I'm going to get a little. Every Ghostbusters machine should be replaced with a Stars machine. Sold. And what's her are you picking up? possibly a big game.
    111:52
    Nope, of course not. Well, he's a Stern lover. He's a Stern lover. Well, you'll be interested to know that the home-run version of Big Game has, you can collect the 5K on all three balls rather than just the second or third ball. Nice. It fixed, there's an error in the manual where they say, you know, flip the switch one way for background sound, and it's reversed. So that's been fixed. Other than that, that's kind of another one of those games that has a perfect rule set that I didn't feel the need to do anything with, although it is slated because there's two ways to get an extra ball in the game, and if you get both lit and collect one, the other one turns off, and I don't think that's fair, so I will probably eventually run through that and fix that one as well. Not a problem in my machines. I don't believe in extra balls. the only one so far that has required that has been flight 2000 and i know oliver's nine ball needed it as well um but uh when i rewrite them i'm probably going to crunch down the code significantly there's there's a lot of sloppiness in the interpreted code um this is this is like really tech but everybody that's still listening is really interested or already asleep but there's a lot of anytime you store value using the stern code it uses three bytes, which doesn't sound like much, but when you have a game where the maximum ROM space is 8K, three bytes is a lot. And if you're doing it, you know, 50 storages of three apiece, and you can write that as a loop in straight 6800 assembler, and it's like 10 bytes, that makes a huge difference. Well, I used to have an Atari 8-bit computer, and, you know, I was a very poor teenager, so I'd want free games, and so I had to defeat the copy protection in the games. So I learned enough 6502 assembly language to be able to do that, and it's ridiculous how easy it actually was to do that kind of stuff. We're talking on the terms of one byte changing, and then the game was cracked. but then I kind of let that go I got interested in other things cars, women making money at a job that kind of stuff so that kind of helped me out when I did finally get into it but really if I didn't have the push in the right direction with Oliver from Sweden or wherever he's from I always forget where he kind of said here's some stuff and he wrote an operating system for the old ballet game so I was able to study what he did, and I was like, oh, this makes sense. It's all commented up now. I can understand what's going on.
    114:32
    But that's basically where that came out of. Just, you know, it's all assembly language. You're looking at machine code, like hexadecimal and stuff.
    114:39
    You have to think in binary sometimes. It's not like C, you know, where you're writing, you know, higher-level code. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's mostly to debunk what people think is happening in software. Or, like, there's some guy that insisted that Valley Gold Ball doesn't flash seven times while it boots up. So I was nice enough to post the commented code for Valley Gold Ball, but it says, see, this is where it flashes the first time, the second time, the third time, the fourth time, et cetera, all the way up to seven. So he was basically just mistaken.
    115:09
    I'm not sure why his game didn't flash. Maybe one of them was running together or something like that. But a lot of people blame software for things that it doesn't do. So, like, there's people that say, oh, Nineball software is horrible. And it actually isn't. It's the Playfield hardware that's horrible.
    115:29
    It's the trough switches and the lock switches. The lock switches get divots in it. Flight 2000 has the same problem. Actually, any Stern game, I mean, Nineball doesn't have a ball walker, but any Stern game that has one of those ball walker mechanisms in it, eventually you will get divots where they stop, and there's nothing you can do about it. Maybe put a protector on the slot if there's room. But other than that, you're going to get divots in it, and it's just going to hang up there. And as soon as it loses track of where that ball is, you've got lots of problems.
    115:56
    Well, he has to get his drop target working first, I understand. Yes, I know. But I'm going to have Ron coming over, so that would be good help. Well, it's a simple twist. They are adjustable, unlike the ballet ones. So you can twist the rod, and the rod probably has an egg-dot hole in it. Additionally, if you find that you need it, I know this sounds like a hack, But put a thin piece of cardboard underneath it. It'll hold the target up a little bit. That'll help it out when it's resetting.
    116:22
    I like cheap and easy. Yeah, lazy, cheap, easy. It looks like a stupid operator trick, but, hey, if it works, who cares? I totally agree. And that concludes Episode 14 of the Slam Tilt Podcast. Really sorry about all the slicing and dicing I had to do with the editing there. At some points it is rather disjointed, but it's the best I could do with an entire missing track and I definitely will be getting different software to record because that was unacceptable. That cannot happen again. But for those of you who stuck around the full two hours, thank you for following us. Our Facebook page, you just search for Slam Tilt Podcast on Facebook. Our YouTube channel is also Slam Tilt Podcast. Just search for it on YouTube. and if you'd like to contact us by email, our email address is slamtiltpodcast at gmail.com. Thanks everyone for listening. See you at Expo.