Episode 3 - Magic Squares and Magic Screen

For Amusement Only EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·20m 21s·analyzed·Mar 16, 2015

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.026

TL;DR

Deep dive into Magic Squares and Magic Screen bingo mechanics, features, and restoration.

Summary

This episode provides a detailed technical and historical exploration of Magic Squares and Magic Screen bingo pinball games, explaining their mechanical features, gameplay mechanics, and evolution. The host discusses specific games like Nightclub, Bikini, Golden Gate, and Bounty, while diving deep into how Magic Screen positions work, scoring systems, super sections, and the legal workarounds (OK games) Bally introduced to combat gambling regulation. The episode concludes with maintenance and diagnostic guidance for collectors and operators.

Key Claims

Magic Pockets feature had reliability issues with balls popping out unexpectedly, leading to short production run
medium confidence · Host states 'I've been told that the feature didn't work very well and balls would pop out when they weren't supposed to. And so it was not a long-lived feature.'
Magic Screen games are the most challenging and fun bingo games in the host's opinion
high confidence · Host directly states 'In my opinion, these are the most challenging and most fun bingos.'
Bounty (1967) was the last Magic Screen game Bally produced
high confidence · Host states 'I have a bounty, which is the last Magic Screen game that was produced.'
Magic Screen games default to four positions (A, B, C, D) for the screen display
high confidence · Host explains 'The magic screen, by default, gives you four positions, A, B, C, or D.'
Super sections allowed players to score bonus replays by counting two balls as three in a special striped section
high confidence · Host details the mechanism: 'when you landed in this striped section with the super section lit on the back glass, it would allow you to put two in the section, and it would count as if there were three.'
Bally introduced 'OK games' (skill-based free games with guaranteed odds) as a legal response to gambling regulation of bingo machines
high confidence · Host explains 'at this point in bingo life, the law started getting wise to bingos and how they were used for gambling purposes. So, Bally decided that in order to combat this, they would have something called an OK game.'
Sea Island Magic Screen game added an extra position (H) to the screen compared to earlier Carnival Queen
high confidence · Host states 'Sea Island added an extra letter, H, to the magic screen' enabling positions for numbers 16, 13, 21, and 24, 16, 5.
Continuous steppers are very rare or non-existent in Magic Screen bingo machines
medium confidence · Host says 'I don't remember ever seeing a continuous stepper in a bingo, in a magic screen bingo.'

Notable Quotes

“Magic Squares were groups of four numbers, usually in the corners of the bingo card, labeled A, B, C, and D. When those features were lit, it allowed you to rotate those four numbers in a circle.”
Host @ ~04:00 — Clear technical explanation of a specific game feature unique to certain bingo machines
“Bikini is a magic screen game, which means that it's got multiple positions for the bingo card to be in. Once you light the feature for the magic screen, it also lights the time tree.”
Host @ ~05:30 — Establishes the relationship between Magic Screen positioning and time tree mechanics, foundational to gameplay
“In my opinion, these are the most challenging and most fun bingos. Now, again, I'm no expert. I have not played every game that exists.”
Host @ ~05:15 — Reveals host's personal ranking of bingo game types while acknowledging knowledge limits
“The beautiful thing about this is you could get three in that section and it would score as four or four and it would score as five.”
Host @ ~12:30 — Explains the mechanical advantage of super sections, core mechanic that increases replay potential
“So this was a big deal. And the way you knew that you had won was, first of all, you read the instruction cards on the apron. but also, if you looked at the back glass, tied to the green odds, there would be one letter in the game's name, which was lit up in red.”
Host @ ~19:00 — Describes the legal/regulatory workaround mechanism (OK games) with visual indicators for skill-based wins
“From the player perspective it sounds like the world is ending... Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.”
Host @ ~15:00 — Colorful description of the distinctive sound made when winning in Magic Screen game sections, recognizable feature
“It's one of those things where I tend to always play for it, even if I only put one nickel into it, and that's because it is so gratifying to land in that hole on your first shot.”

Entities

Jeffrey LawtonpersonPhil HooperpersonBallycompanyNightclubgameBikinigame Golden Gategame Carnival Queengame

Signals

?
historical_signal: Detailed technical evolution of Magic Screen games from Carnival Queen (first) through Sea Island (added H position) to Ballerina (removed H position), documenting feature additions and legal/design adjustments
high · Host traces specific feature progression: 'In Carnival Queen, it would only show in two different positions, F and G... Sea Island added an extra letter, H... Bally discontinued that with Ballerina.'
?
regulatory_signal: Bally introduced OK games (skill-based free games with guaranteed odds) as legal response to gambling regulation of bingo machines in late 1960s
high · 'at this point in bingo life, the law started getting wise to bingos and how they were used for gambling purposes. So, Bally decided that in order to combat this, they would have something called an OK game.'
?
design_innovation: Super sections in Magic Screen games used relay-based impersonation to count two balls as three, significantly reducing difficulty of high replay wins
high · Host explains: 'there was a special relay that would fire while it was searching that would pretend or impersonate a ball as if a ball was in one of the other spots of this section'
?
product_concern: Magic Pockets feature had poor reliability with balls popping out unexpectedly, leading to short production lifespan
medium · 'I've been told that the feature didn't work very well and balls would pop out when they weren't supposed to. And so it was not a long-lived feature.'
?
restoration_signal: Detailed diagnostic checklist for Magic Screen bingo machine restoration: verify stepper operation, check solenoid smoothness, test critical switches (odds steppers, timer stepper), examine trough switches, verify fuse values

Topics

Magic Pocket FeatureprimaryMagic Squares MechanicprimaryMagic Screen GamesprimarySuper Sections and ScoringprimaryOK Games and Legal WorkaroundsprimaryBingo Machine Restoration and MaintenanceprimarySkill ShotssecondaryCabinet Artwork in Bingo Machinessecondary

Sentiment

positive(0.82)— Host expresses genuine enthusiasm and appreciation for Magic Screen games and bingo machine mechanics, describes games as 'fun' and 'phenomenal,' praises artwork and Jeffrey Lawton's restoration work. Some neutral/technical discussion of mechanical issues but framed as interesting challenges rather than criticisms.

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.061

what's that sound it's for amusement only the em and bingo pinball podcast welcome back so where we left off we were talking about magic lines games and uh the wonderful sun valley that i played at the york show such a fun game and as usual jeffrey lawton had it running impeccably so moving on we have come to magic pockets which is a feature which i find fascinating i've never seen one in real life but the way that it works there are buttons on the foot rail and when you press them it moves all the balls in the first row so the numbers one through seven over to the right. So it shuffles the balls over. And then the last one, number seven, it'll pop out of the hole and allow it to come down the play field. That is really interesting. I've been told that the feature didn't work very well and balls would pop out when they weren't supposed to. And so it was not a long-lived feature. So moving on, we come to magic squares. Magic squares were groups of four numbers, usually in the corners of the bingo card, labeled A, B, C, and D. When those features were lit, it allowed you to rotate those four numbers in a circle. So if you pushed A, it would shift everything to the right. Ones on the top would move down, ones on the bottom would move up, and so forth. Again, this is locked to a time tree. So if you had A, B, C, and D lit, and then had after fifth lid. Again, you could win in multiple ways on the same game. Just wonderful. Now, I've only played one of these games, Nightclub, and this was a few years back at the York Show. And again, Jeffrey Lawton had brought it, and that was the one that I played the most that year. He had also brought a Magic Screen game, and I love Magic Screen games. However, this Magic Square game was incredibly fun. Again, you have the problem with the continuous rotation of the search disc, and so the fingers wear down. However, the gameplay is phenomenal. And that brings us to Magic Screen Games. In my opinion, these are the most challenging and most fun bingos. Now, again, I'm no expert. I have not played every game that exists. However, they're very, very fun. My first exposure to a Magic Screen Game was at my friend's in his back room, and in the back room, he had a beautifully restored magic screen game called Bikini, and he had a work-in-progress game that was fully functional called Golden Gate. Bikini is a magic screen game, which means that it's got multiple positions for the bingo card to be in. Once you light the feature for the magic screen, it also lights the time tree. The magic screen, by default, gives you four positions, A, B, C, or D. And what that means, there are four different columns that appear in place of the final four columns of the bingo card. So instead of having to get a straight line, three, four, or five in a row, it reveals sections which are odd shapes, like a backwards L, or an H, or a U. Unusual shapes. Now, the advantage of having the screen exposed is instead of having to get your shots lined up so that you have three, four, or five in a row, you can get three, four, or five anywhere in that section, and it will score the same as if you got three, four, or five in a row. These Magic Screen games were very popular, and they produced quite a few. Over time, they would continue to add features and tweak the formula to keep players' interest and also to provide more rewarding gameplay. They introduced something called a super section, and the super section was a special striped section that was either red or yellow. And when you landed in this striped section with the super section lit on the back glass, it would allow you to put two in the section, and it would count as if there were three. Now the way this worked on the inside, there was a special relay that would fire while it was searching that would pretend or impersonate a ball as if a ball was in one of the other spots of this section. The beautiful thing about this is you could get three in that section and it would score as four or four and it would score as five. Now as you can imagine, it's a lot easier to get four in a section that is oddly shaped than it is to get four in a row. Beyond the time tree, there was also the extra ball game, where you could bet your replays or nickels against the machine to try and win an extra ball. So if you have eight chances to get two three or four in one of these super sections your odds are fairly high Now if you a terrible player like I am then that just means that you probably won get it So let me walk you through a typical Magic Screen Bingo game and explain what happens. So first of all, you get your nickel and you drop it in. That'll reset the machine, start a new game. You can put in additional nickels to increase your odds or try to earn features like the magic screen. Once you're satisfied with the level of odds and the features lit, then it comes time to start the game. So you shoot your first ball. You nudge the table. You try to get 16. At least that's my strategy. 16 is always in the middle of the bingo card, and it's the hardest shot in the game to make. So if you can start off with 16, you can build out diagonally, horizontally, or vertically from there to try to get some kind of fantastic hit put together. So let's say we land in 16, and we have the magic screen lid up to D. Now we push the left button on the foot rail, and that'll reveal multiple sections. Now, pushing left four times will put that 16 into a green section that is shaped like the letter H. That's a pretty easy section to win in just because of its size. It's a bit larger than some of the other sections. So starting with 16, we launch our second ball. Our second ball lands in what would be the yellow and white striped section. Well, that's no good. We've got one in the green and one in the yellow. So we watch and we notice our time tree is locked to before fourth. We have one more ball before we have to pick a final position for this magic screen. Now we shoot our third ball, and it lands diagonally on the card between the ball that landed in the yellow and white section and 16, which is in the center of the card. So we realize that winning in the section is less likely than the winner that we already have diagonally in the green by moving it back to the normal bingo card. So the time tree has not locked out yet, and we move it back to the standard bingo card. Now our fourth ball is loaded up in the shooter lane, and we shoot it. It does not matter where it lands. We've already won three in a row. Now if it lands diagonally under and to the right of 16, that's fantastic. That's four in a row. Now our fifth ball loads up. At this point, we can collect our replays, or we can play our fifth ball. It doesn't really matter. The machine is smart enough to know how many replays you've collected. So if you happen to get a fifth in a row, it will only collect the difference between four in a row and five in a row. So we shoot our fifth ball, and it matters not where it lands. We push the R button on the foot rail. We hear that lovely, lovely sound at the beginning of the podcast. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. the machine counting up the replays up until it's decided that we've received enough. Now, if your machine is adjusted appropriately, it will always score correctly. The way that the scoring mechanism works on a Magic Screen game with the R button is that there is a coil mounted with a little lock plate under the search disk. In those older games, as I mentioned, the search disk is always turning. So in the older games, it would have already picked up. all the replays that you could possibly receive by the time you shot your fifth ball. But in a Magic Screen game where you push the letter R to collect your replays, things work a little differently. It engages the coil which pulls in the plate and allows the search disc to turn. When the search disc turns, it will detect through various fingers on the disc which balls are actually in holes on the playfield. Once it determines that there are three in a row, and it does this by energizing relays as the disc turns. So there's a 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 relay, and if it detects 2 in a row, it will energize 1 and 2, and as it continues to spin, if it detects that there are 3 in a row, it will energize 1, 2, and 3. Now at that point, it will start energizing the search index coil. The search index coil will pull in and it'll start spinning the replay adding circuits and incrementing on the replay counter, as well as stepping the replay stepper associated with the color in which you received your win. Once that stepper has reached the number of replays, which you should be awarded, the search index coil will disengage. The search coil, where it pulled in the armature at the beginning of the process, will disengage, and the search disk will stop. Now if you win in a section instead of on the plain bingo card it also energizes a few different steppers and makes additional noises From the player perspective it sounds like the world is ending So first time I heard this I was a bit concerned because it goes Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. If you listen closely to the first episode, that's the noise that you hear, because I had a winner in the green section, that H, that I was describing earlier. Another amazing feature of these Magic Screen games was the blue section. Now, the blue section is only three numbers, and it first appeared in Carnival Queen, which was the first Magic Screen game, and continued through the rest of the series. Now, the blue section always scored a special amount of replays. So regardless of your odds that you had selected at the beginning of the game, if you had three in the blue, it would always score either 300 or 600 depending on the game. There was another special feature called two in the blue, and only one of those would light at a time. Now when you got two in the blue, it would score as if there were three, and usually it would also give you extra replays. In these early Magic Screen games, like Sea Island, there was an additional position that the blue would show up in. So in Carnival Queen, it would only show in two different positions, F and G. So on the 6th and 7th positions, the 6th and 7th movements of that screen, you would see this blue section. And you would be able to put balls in 13, 17, 20, or 16, 13, and 21 to collect your 3 in the blue. Now, Sea Island added an extra letter, H, to the magic screen. So if you had that lit, you could move it over to 16, 13, 21, and then 24, 16, and 5. Now this was pretty interesting because it allowed high replay wins. Bally discontinued that with Ballerina. Now at this point in bingo life, the law started getting wise to bingos and how they were used for gambling purposes. So, Bally decided that in order to combat this, they would have something called an OK game. Now, the OK game, instead of winning replays, was a skill-based win, where if you landed in a particular section, it would give you a free game with guaranteed odds and features. In this way, it wasn't a totally random chance. You were able to get the game to give you a free game that you actually played. You didn't just get it paid off. So this was a big deal. And the way you knew that you had won was, first of all, you read the instruction cards on the apron. but also, if you looked at the back glass, tied to the green odds, there would be one letter in the game's name, which was lit up in red. So as the green odds increased, the letter would move as well. Now looking at the apron cards, you would look down and see, oh, this letter means that if I win my red letter game, I'm going to get guaranteed odds of 600 in the red, 300 in the green, etc. And it would also give you guaranteed features, such as magic screen lit to position F, or the super section lit, or something of that nature. Now, when you win a red letter game, it's a little different than winning normally. You hold down the R button instead of pushing it. So if you push it, it's going to look and search, figure out which balls are locked in which pockets, and then score accordingly. Now, if you have a red letter win, then you hold down the R button until all the balls drop out, and then it will start ticking up your odds, stepping those steppers, until they've reached the point where they're supposed to for that particular letter. One other interesting feature I mentioned before the super sections. some games allowed for both super sections to be lit at once. So there's a red super section with white stripes and a yellow super section with white stripes. Now if they're both lit, then that means two scores is three. It's a lot easier, as you can imagine, to shoot for either than it is for one or the other. One last feature of the Magic Screen games, I have a bounty, which is the last Magic Screen game that was produced. On this game, there's a special feature not present in any other bingo called a skill shot. And what the skill shot is, is that when you push a white button on the front, instead of increasing your normal odds or playing for features, it will guarantee at least one step with each press of a special odds counter only for the skill shot. Before you shoot your first ball, if you push the gold button on the foot rail, it will light one or two numbers You have to land in that particular hole with your first shot If you do you win all the replays that you built up on the skill shot If you don then you've forfeited all that money that you've put in trying to build up your skill shot. It's one of those things where I tend to always play for it, even if I only put one nickel into it, and that's because it is so gratifying to land in that hole on your first shot. It's amazing. Now, before we move on to other games, different eras, or talk about technical issues with bingos, I just wanted to discuss the artwork. Now, the cabinet artwork is a lot more detailed and complex than most flipper pinball games at the time. Bounty was produced in 1967, and there are many colors. The stencil is very complex. It's more than just a few geometric shapes. There's a ship with multiple masts, birds, palm trees, islands, the sea, a sailboat, etc. And that's just on the cabinet. Now, the back glass and play field are also very detailed, and the artwork is just gorgeous. And every bingo I've ever seen, I've been highly impressed with the artwork. So, moving on to technical issues. What can go wrong? Right now, our conversation is about Magic Screen games and 25-hole games in general. So, basically, if you were to pick up a Mingo today, there's a few things that you need to do and verify before you try to play a game. The first thing is to ensure that all steppers step up and down crisply and smoothly with each step. So, you open up the back, you push the solenoids one at a time, the step up, and you step down from each position. Now, all the steppers will reset with the reset solenoid press. So you don't have to worry about continuous steppers, really, because they don't tend to exist in this game. Or step down solenoids where it steps down one piece at a time. So if John Youssi a stepper behaving that way, you need to ask yourself, is this really the correct behavior? So looking at the label for the stepper, or if the label's missing, its neighbor, because there's usually a duplicate unit beside the one that you're looking at, try to verify if that is also a continuous stepper. I'm thinking right now in my head, and I don't remember ever seeing a continuous stepper in a bingo, in a magic screen bingo. Now, there are coin steppers and so forth that would be continuous, but that's about it. So, very few things that you have to worry about. They all tend to act just about the same way. The other thing is to ensure any solenoid moves smoothly. You don't want a lot of friction or bumpiness or worn spots that prevent the movement of the solenoids. It's very important that every solenoid functions properly. Otherwise, the game will do something that you don't expect. Beyond that, there are many, many, many switches in a bingo. It's very daunting to look at it. There are a few that you need to verify their function completely before playing a game. Most of those are the default positions on the red, yellow, and green odds steppers, and also the timer stepper. Now, the timer stepper is very important because it helps to control the time tree and also many of the features in the game. Because, as I mentioned, the magic screen, let's say it's lit to position D, you can't actually move the magic screen until the timer has stepped up to position 2. So, after you shoot your first ball, you're able to move the screen, but not before. It's very important. Now, if your timer isn't functioning, then there are switches inside the cabinet that actually control that that are tied to the ball lift. But we'll get into that another time. You also have to examine your trough switches, but those can be very tricky. And lastly, you want to check your fuse values and ensure that everything is set up appropriately. Often it's not, or fuses are blown or missing. Join us next time where we'll be talking about the Futurity Game As well as 20-hole bingos or the later bingos That came about in the late 60s and early 70s Thanks very much, talk to you later You can reach me at 4amusementonlypodcast at gmail.com