What's that sound? It's For Amusement Only, the EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast. Welcome back to For Amusement Only. This is Nicholas Baldridge. It's been a while. Feels like I haven't talked to you in a couple weeks, and I guess that's what it's been. so in the intervening time between our last episode and today I wanted to fill you in on my ambitious bingo emulation project and talk a little bit about feedback talk over a featured game and then give you a little snippet of something cool that I've found in the past couple weeks or talk about a repair or something. And I've got a little bit of both for you this episode. So, to get started, my bingo project, I am currently working on artwork. And what I am doing is taking the back glass for Coney Island, an image that I have found, and I am converting that, cleaning it up, and then I am taking it and trying to apply multiple layers to make it so that it will have a lighted effect. Now, in my code, I've implemented a lamp class, and this lamp class will turn on and off the various feature lamps as they are supposed to get current from the units. now I didn't really get into a lot of details about how my emulator works yet and the way everything is supposed to function but let's let's do that now so in my bingo emulator the deal is it's going to be using a physical cabinet and I've already mentioned that it'll have swappable playfields and essentially the reason for this is so that you can get the sights the sounds the smells and the feels of playing a real bingo pinball machine. Now, the drawbacks to this are that I have to figure out a way to make the game sense which type of play field is installed so that it will present you with the right types of games that can be played, and so that it will know, for example, to fire the coils to empty the balls from the first row on, say, a gaiety or a gaitime playfield if you're playing any of those games, or if you're playing any of the other 25-hole games that can be emulated using a gaiety or a gaitime playfield. so what I'm doing, I've developed a series of classes each one will be a type of unit in the game so for example a relay or a stepper mixers are their own special class and the reflex now the reflex is essentially a stepper but instead of stepping smoothly one up and one down or one up and reset what it does is it will step one portion up and then a fraction back down. And so it needs its own special class in order to step up and down appropriately. And for each game, and within each game, I can set a specific step-up, step-down ratio. And to start with, I've got a two-to-one ratio. So for every credit that you win, the reflex will step two times, and for every credit that you play off or put into the machine, it will step down one time. And then what I've done is I've gone to the schematic, and I've electrically mapped how everything in the game works as far as portioning goes. And this involves mapping out the mixers, at least on the schematic, and then making educated guesses in the example of, say, Coney Island, where the mixers have not been mapped out. Now, Phil Hooper has done a fantastic job of making sure that the mixer documentation and reflex documentation is up on his site, bingo.cdyn.com, but there are some that are not yet documented. And in those cases, I don't have access to every single game. I do know people with Coney Islands, and I could ask them to take their game apart, but that's kind of a big ask. So rather than doing that, what I'm doing is making educated guesses. And if it turns out that I am wrong, for example, if the mixer has fewer portions connected than it seems like it should, then I will go back and edit that later on. One of the beautiful things about the code base that I'm writing is that it's going to be open source. So you'll be able to pull down the repository, view it, change it, and upload it to your own repository, send back the changes to me, and I'll merge them in, whatever the case may be. Now, I have no illusions that there's going to be a bunch of people doing this. Mostly this project is for my own education. So one of the things that's been a mystery to me up until this point, I know that the reflex and the mixers have an effect on the portioning of each game and for each feature of the game. So your odds step up or your features step up, your extra balls step up, etc. So the thing is, though, that I don't know exactly how much of an influence that has. For the mixers and the reflex, there are ways that the game will automatically award you your feature, your odds, or your extra ball. And it depends on the position of the mixer and the reflex. And that much I knew, but for each game, I don't know how much of an effect the mixer and the reflex have beyond that. So I'm really interested to map out each game and figure out exactly how much of an effect it has during gameplay. one of the neat things is I'll be able in real time to be able to see the position of the mixers and the reflex and figure out the portioning this is intriguing to me and we'll see if I learn the things that I hope to learn by the end of this but at the moment here's what I've got going I've got Kony Island basically programmed so it will detect coin switch or the replay button, the red button, and we'll start a game. You can push it up to three times and it'll increment the selection unit, which will give you up to your first three cards. There's only three on Coney Island. At that point, pushing the red button or dropping in a coin will do nothing. And depending on the cabinet hardware that I have. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to program in the rejection coil. I probably will, since it's not a big deal. But at that point, the game will start. The first ball will lift, and it'll lift with the first coin. It doesn't wait for all three cards to be lit. You can do a single card at a time if you choose. But at any rate, it will allow you to shoot those first five balls the first ball that leaves the gate will shut the shutter and it will lift the next ball and so on when four out of five of the balls have landed in holes it will start the search sequence and the search sequence is written and what it will do is it will go through and find your three, four, or five in a row on any of the three cards which are lit, as indicated by the position of the selection unit, and then score. So if this wasn't super technical enough, it's about to get even more technical. The search disk, when I went to program that, I found that one of the best ways to do it was actually the way that Bally did it. And I was really anticipating that I was going to be able to find an easy shortcut for this. but the thing is that there are so many different combinations of winners that the way that it has to work as far as timing goes requires that you kind of have to search in a circular motion, if that makes sense. Circular motion is a matter of timing as the disc rotates each position it going to hit upon a different set of winners And because you can have multiple winners for each set of five balls that you play basically the game has to increment through all the various combinations, rather than just having the system tell the game, yeah, you got a winner. In order to get an authentic experience, it's got to have that delay of searching through. And so for each rotation of the search disk, which takes just a matter of a few seconds, the thing is that it's hitting upon somewhere in the realm of 40 to 50 different combinations of winners. and you have to think that you can have a different winner horizontally, vertically, or diagonally on any of the three cards, then you have to factor in the fact that certain combinations are not going to be considered winners if your selection unit is not at step number three. So all this gets really complicated really fast, and really the best way that I could think to do it is really just to completely emulate the way that Valley did it. So where I'm at is basically this. The game will boot. It will show the back glass. It will show the individual reels, which are needed for the replay register. I've done the graphics for all of that, and in fact the replay register cover. So I have multiple layers of sprites. I'm doing this in 2D. The first sprite is the back glass itself, and then I've got a sprite for the replay register cover, and then three individual sprites for the reels to indicate the number of replays that you've won. So the tricky part is making those reels move in a realistic fashion, And the way that they are rendered, they're essentially transparent strips. And the strips will move up and down, and they're hidden from your view based on the opacity of the back glass image. So what I have done is I've set up a function that runs on kind of a hard timer, and it will increment that at certain intervals, so it just moves the number up. It's not super fancy. I am not a graphics guy, so this is all, you know, kind of uncharted water. I haven't messed with graphics in, well, a good long while as far as programming goes. You know, I've done websites and those kinds of things, but those are relatively simple in comparison. So this is all, you know, kind of slow. this is the slow part for me, is doing the back glass and tweaking it so that it looks correct, and then making it so that you can distinguish which numbers you've actually hit versus which numbers are unlit. And so I mentioned earlier that I've got a class that will light the various lamps that are controlled, for example, the bingo card lamps, essentially doing artwork. Now, what came in the mail today is actually my computer that's going to run the actual bingo. And what I settled on was an Intel NUC, and that's got an embedded chipset that will output high-definition video over HDMI or VGA. So it's in kind of a ruggedized case, and I'll be able to mount it inside of the bingo cabinet without fear of it overheating or the like, even if I were to have it on for 24 hours a day. So that's kind of exciting, and the way I envision this working is that the computer will be inside the cabinet. there will be an LCD monitor in the head as well as some kind of weight or balance in the head to help you get the feel for a real bingo I haven't yet decided on what that's going to be. There will also need to be the transformer that's typically in the head will likely also have to be in there there will certainly be enough room for it I just have to figure out exactly how this is going to function And then what I'm going to do is move the Jones plugs, specifically the ones that handle fuses and the transformer, down into the cabinet. This will make it so that you have to reach down to unplug the Jones plugs. But what's going to be nice is that everything with your playfield swap will be accessible fairly easily. so more on the hardware stuff later when I actually get to the hardware part for right now we're in software land so bear with me and it's going to be super technical but that's all for this week's big bingo update so today's featured machine is 1962's Valiant by Williams and Valiant has quite a bit going on. It's a two-player machine, and it's actually got two swinging targets. For those of you that are unfamiliar with swinging targets in Williams games, there's essentially a stand-up target, like a face target that you might see in any game, but it's motorized, and it will wiggle back and forth. And it does this in a constant motion, so it's not surprising, you know, the angle that it takes. It's always moving when the game has started. So right from the plunge up at the top, you've got three passive bumpers. The two on the left and right are worth five points, and the one at the top is worth ten. There are two kick-out holes directly below as you come to the first set of flippers. Those kick-out holes will score the hole value, and more on that later. And then at the top, there is one of those swinging targets. The swinging target at the top will score 10 points if you hit the rebound rubber behind it, or increase the hole value if you actually smack the target dead on. Now, the pop bumpers score, I believe, a single point when hit, but there is a way to light them. There's a rollover button at the top of the playfield that turns the bumpers on, which means that they'll score 10 points a hit instead of just one. Now, there are two pop bumpers, and they're to the left and right and below that swinging target mechanism that's up at the top of the playfield. Then on the left and right-hand side, you have a rollover which scores 30 points, or will score 100 points when lit. and as you travel down, you will see the second swinging target. That also will score 10 points if you hit the rebound rubber or increase the hole value if you hit the target dead on. And to the left and right of that swinging target, there are two kick-out holes. Each one will score the hole value. And then to the left and right of the rollover lanes on the side, there's a single-point rollover. and every time you hit it, you get a point. Now in between the flippers, between the slingshots and that swinging target, there is a rollover button that will turn your bumpers back off. So if you manage to hit the ball in such a way that it careens past the kick-out hole to score the hole value and gets back up to that upper play field, if you manage to hit the off bumpers button, which is incredibly likely, with its positioning, then unfortunately, you've got to hit that rollover button at the top in between the pop bumpers in order to light them again. That looks like it would be pretty frustrating. Now, I've never played a Valiant, but that is interesting. Now, the whole value goes in one of five positions. 30 points, 60 points, 90 points, 120 points, or 150 points. If you manage to get your whole value up to 150, the key to this game appears to be continuing to collect. So you can increase your bonus essentially up to 150, and then you can score it over and over and over again. On the left and right side, there's an out lane. There's no in lane on this game, and it will score 30 points when you roll over it or 100 points when lit. One of the most important features of this game is that it has four flippers There are two flippers in the normal position and then two up in that upper playfield area Now it appears that the only way to beat this game is on score And this game has four scoring positions for each player, so it scores into the thousands. But, like many of the games from its era, they didn't have a fourth score reel in the thousands position. Instead, they just illuminated a number on the back glass. So the highest you can score on this game is 1999. And the reason I think this is because there's no special wording anywhere on the playfield, which is pretty unusual for a game of this era. So there's no clear picture of the instruction cards on the IPDB, and I have no idea if there is a way to earn special or not through goals. It looks like it's all based on increasing your whole value and getting the highest score. So, aside from this, the game has a double match feature. And you can earn up to 10 replays if both of you happen to land, you and player 2, happen to land on the same number which is hit upon by the match unit at the game's end. Hearing the double match go off is pretty exciting. There's nothing quite like hearing that. It's pretty neat, and it draws you back, certainly, to play more on any game that has that feature. So the theme for Valiant is a medieval joust. On the back glass you have two jousting opponents charging at each other. In the background you have a crowd watching with a big tent in the background with the king and the queen. On the playfield, you have a very simple pattern, but it's very effective in the shape of a diamond. There's a knight on the left and a knight on the right. And up at the top, you have some lions rampant, holding some pennants, some flags. In the center of the game, you have a shield with a suit of armor holding it that says whole values. The pop bumpers have this really cool red and black encircling effect outside of the wooden area directly surrounding the skirt of the pop bumper. and then the plastics have what appears to be a portion of a coat of arms on the slingshot plastics and up at the top you have what appears to be a portion of a castle or a tower. Now again, I've never played a Valiant. I am a sucker for medieval themes. My father studied medieval literature in college and so really anything with a medieval theme draws me in pretty well. So, moving on to the third portion of our show, let's talk about some products out there that can help you in your EM world, or if you're like me, getting started in a custom pinball project. Pinball Life at pinballlife.com has put out an 8-ball trough assembly. this uses physical switches instead of optos and then has a coil at the end that will kick the ball up and into play if I were building a bingo from scratch I would probably use this product I would just need to know a little bit about the dimensions because of course a bingo pinball is 1 1 8 inch instead of 1 1 16 like a standard pinball. So as long as it can fit eight 1 1⁄8-inch balls, this is perfect. Each switch is a physical switch, just like on the Bally design for the trough, and it's much simpler. Instead of having a triple-ganged or quadruple-ganged switch like on the Bally design, instead it's just a single microswitch. So, very simple. Now, the next thing I wanted to talk about was just some repairs that I've done here in the past two weeks. Boy, it feels like forever, by the way. But I have spent some time, and I've been working on my own games. There are a few people here locally that I've been planning to have over for quite some time, and I have just not been able to do it with the schedule of work and the podcast and family life and all that good stuff. So I'm working on my games and trying to get them back to as good a shape as possible. I don't like having people over when a game is down or something is in progress. It just doesn't feel good. So Ava's finished her Turf King restoration. we are working on the very final cosmetic pieces of that and so I expect in the next episode that we'll be hearing from her but in the interim what I've been doing is working on ticker tape now ticker tape is a six card bingo and you've heard me talk for several episodes when I was doing this daily about the search on ticker tape and the problems that it would have It would not latch in on cards 4, 5, or 6 appropriately. Well, the reason is that the wiper fingers on the search disc arms had been tweaked and tweaked and tweaked and had worn down from the dirt on the search disc, and they were pitted in such a way that it was just not going to happen. Some of them were more pitted than others, and it caused the game to kind of freak out. And what the operator had done previously was adjust those switches forward in such a way that it would catch. But the problem with that is that it introduces a weak point in the finger. That's problem one. And problem two is that it didn't always work. And so you would have a winning combination, but the game wouldn't see it. And there are few things more frustrating than not being paid the replays that you're due on a bingo. So what I ended up doing was taking a parts search disk that I picked up when I was out in Ohio. And it was for a different game, I think a Spottum. and unfortunately it's not a direct replacement so I couldn't take the search disk wiper and just plug it in to the Tigger Tape one. Tigger Tape has many more switches because there are many more combinations and it's got to detect things like corners or the super line. So what I ended up doing is clipping each of the fingers off and then taking silver solder and soldering them onto my existing search disc wiper fingers after clipping off the ends of those. And what this has done is made it ultra-reliable. Now, you've heard me talk about silver solder and this kind of repair before. When you're repairing a switch like this, it's important to use silver solder instead of the regular lead or lead-free solder, and that is because the tensile strength for silver solder is much greater than that for leaded solder or lead-free. So what this means is that as the disc rotates, or as the wipers rotate on the disc, I should say, the wiper fingers will not fly off and short out, you know, something, or wreak havoc, in other words. Instead, they will hold on very tightly. In fact, with silver solder, you can pull pretty heavily upon the repaired area, and it will not separate. This is not true for leaded or lead-free solder. So, if you attempt this repair with leaded or lead-free, it may function. But, over time, what's going to happen is that solder joint's going to break down, and eventually the pieces will fly apart. so the nice thing is that it is repaired and it works it works just as well as any other 70s six card meaning that occasionally you have to push the c button a second time for it to find and latch in But it always does and I pretty grateful that that worked Otherwise I don know what I would do because those discs are not available. I'd have to find a parts game from the 1970s. And those are a bit harder to come by. So, that's the big EM news, and I hope you've enjoyed listening to this longer format show. Next time, we'll probably be talking with Ava, and I'm going to say it's going to be all about the Turf King. Turf King is done, and it is super duper fun. When it's 100%, it's really quite an awesome game. So, you'll be hearing all about that, and we'll be talking about some other things next time. But before I go, I wanted to get into some corrections. So I had a listener email me and ask me why I said emulation instead of simulation. And that's because I use the wrong words sometimes. It really is a simulation rather than an emulation. And especially in the case of Joop's software, which, by the way, that's another correction. I completely butchered Joop's name. It is not Joop, as I said. It's actually Joop. So I want to thank Joop for all of his help with artwork. He has really talked with me quite a bit about what needs to be done in my software, so I'm quite thankful for his help. And also, he has released in the past day or so the Bingo Game Room software. And what this does, it's fantastic. If you download this software, it'll go out to the Internet and download whichever machines and updates for them that you don't currently have. It'll take care of installing them automatically, and you get this really beautiful menu to select between the games. I am highly, highly impressed by the quality of his software, and I really love it. And I love it enough that I've been playing a ton of Doubleheader. Doubleheader is the bingo, the only bingo, that is actually two games in one. There's a Magic Squares game and then a straight bingo game with a lot of spotted numbers. and I've been playing it enough that I actually rolled it. I got over 1,000 credits. So that was very exciting and I loved the Bingo Game Room software. So I highly recommend that everybody run out and grab that, especially if you listened to my last episode and downloaded a machine or two. Go ahead and get that. It gives you a very nice menu. If you're on a Mac, if you install it into your apps folder, your applications folder, then there are no additional prompts, you know, it just does its thing and it does it properly if you're on Windows or if you install into another area then your system may tell you hey, this is from an unknown publisher but his software is fantastic, you know, I talked it up a bunch last episode, I'll continue to talk it up, because it's Pretty great. And on tap next, he's actually got Double Up. So this will be the first 20-hole game in the traditional Mystic Lines format. He's got Magic Ring up on his site, and that is great fun as well. So go check out and support Yote Software. But back to emulation versus simulation. And emulation is the word that I chose for my program because I am emulating the back glass. I am also emulating all of the units inside the game. I'm emulating the flow of current from unit to unit, relay to relay, switch to switch. And in some cases, I'm actually reading physical switches. I'm going to be reading the tilt bob. I'm going to be reading the trough switches. there's really no way around that if you're going to have this hybrid physical and computerized system. So as far as simulation goes, what Yope's doing is a simulation, at least in my mind. Aside from that, in other news in my life here, I am starting a new podcast, and this is a really short-run podcast, but for those of you who are fans of Nintendo's Virtual Boy, the very, very short-lived console that was made in the 1990s, I am doing a game-by-game format podcast on that system. Now, the reason I say short format is there were only 14 games released in North America, so I'll be talking about all of those. And I plan to record the first episode tonight. That show is going to be called Virtually Human, and it's available at virtuallyhuman.libsyn.com But, um, yeah. If you're interested in video games, or you just want to hear me talk some more, you're free to do that. Um, one last thing before I go. I was really remiss, uh, last episode in thanking everybody who helped make my show possible over the past year. So I wanted to take the time and thank everybody. First of all, all of my guests, the interviews are the portions where I learned the greatest amount, and I think there's a lot of valuable content out there, and I've really enjoyed getting to know everybody and the discussions that we've had on and off the air. Next, I wanted to thank anybody who took the time to call into the bingos line or submit a question or memory via email. next anyone who sent me an email with questions on fixing a game schematic issues, ideas for a show beautiful game photos or just to say hi, I really really appreciate the effort that it takes to do that and the time that you've taken away from your life to contribute next I wanted to thank my great podcast artist and now good friend Ryan Claytor who believed in me before there was a show he has been a great help in bouncing ideas off of getting excited about various aspects of the show. It's been really great getting to know him. And for those of you who don't know, Ryan designed the illustration for my show, and of course the t-shirts, but he is also a very skilled illustrator, and has done many wonderful pinball illustrations. Go check those out at elephanteater.com. I wanted to thank anybody who came out to the York Show this year to experience the wonderful bingo row. I'm excited to tell you that we're going to be doing it again this year, but it may be even bigger and better than last year. On top of that, I want to thank all the other pinball podcasts who have been so very supportive, and the other video game podcasts and everybody in the podcasting community who has been just absolutely incredibly supportive. Thank you all very much. Next, I'd like to thank anyone who invited me to come play games in their excellent collections. There's something incredibly special and very meaningful about somebody allowing you into their home to play the games that they have meticulously restored or cared for or brought back to life. It's very, very humbling. And I'd also like to thank my family for putting up with me. And last but certainly not least, anyone who listened to the show for any length of time, I very much appreciate your time and hope you enjoyed the first 365 episodes, and we'll continue to enjoy the show as time goes on, despite being super duper technical now. So that's all for tonight. Thank you very much for listening. I know it's been an interesting transition and this has been an interesting show, but I want to thank you for listening. My name again is Nicholas Baldridge. You can reach me at 4amusementonlypodcast at gmail.com or you can call me on the bingos line. That's 724-BINGOS1. 724-246-4671. You can listen to us on iTunes, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, via RSS, on Facebook, on Twitter, at Bingo Podcast. You can follow me on Instagram, also at Bingo Podcast, or you can listen to us on our website, which is foramusementonly.libsyn.com. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll talk to you next time.