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Episode 378 - Troubleshooting a multi-bingo, importance of the ball gate switch and Bally Hole-In-One

For Amusement Only EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·18m 33s·analyzed·Sep 8, 2016
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.023

TL;DR

MultiBingo dev update: 38 games ready for York show; ball gate troubleshooting and Hole-In-One feature.

Summary

Nick Baldridge discusses development progress on his MultiBingo homebrew machine, featuring 38+ games ahead of the York show. He troubleshoots critical technical issues including ball gate switch calibration and ball lift logic for end-of-play scenarios, then features Bally's rare and unproduced Hole-In-One golf-themed six-card bingo game.

Key Claims

  • 37 MultiBingo games are complete and ready for the York show, with game 38 expected by end of week

    high confidence · Nick Baldridge, host, opening segment of Episode 378

  • Showboat is the only six-card bingo produced by United

    high confidence · Nick Baldridge, discussing bug in Showboat replay reset function

  • Mississippi Showboat was produced in 1981 and only one example is known to exist in the entire world

    high confidence · Nick Baldridge, describing Mississippi Showboat's rarity and challenges in reproduction

  • Ball gate switches in bingo machines are crucial for tracking balls played and timing out features

    high confidence · Nick Baldridge, explaining importance of ball gate switch after misadjustment caused ball return bugs

  • Hole-In-One is the only golf-themed bingo ever produced or contemplated by Bally

    high confidence · Nick Baldridge, featuring game segment on Hole-In-One

  • Apollo Ball is a Bally six-card that has never been found or spoken of and is sought for implementation

    medium confidence · Nick Baldridge, appeal for information about Bally Apollo Ball

  • The MultiBingo will include almost all six-card bingos that Bally either produced or not, plus United six-card and early games

    high confidence · Nick Baldridge, describing game selection for MultiBingo

Notable Quotes

  • “37 are complete and ready for the York show. 38 should be ready here by the end of this week. I have something in the range of 20 days left with which to work on the game. 20 evenings, I should say. So things are getting a little animated over here.”

    Nick Baldridge @ opening — Shows urgency and timeline pressure for York show with detailed production status

  • “Showboat is the only six card that United produced. It's a beautiful game, but when you push the replay reset button on every other game it throws it into tilt simulates turning off and on and then removes all the credits on the replay register unfortunately on Showboat only for no apparent reason which uses the exact same code as the other games.”

    Nick Baldridge @ ~3 minutes — Describes puzzling bug specific to one game despite identical code logic

  • “Mississippi Show Boat was the last game that Bally had on test, or that they made samples of, I'm not sure which. It was produced in 1981, and there's only one example known to exist in the entire world. The photos that exist of it on IPDB are very, very blurry.”

    Nick Baldridge @ ~5 minutes — Establishes Mississippi Showboat's extreme rarity and reproduction challenges

  • “The ball gate is a switch itself unlike on many flipper games where the ball gate is simply a flap that allows the ball to pass through but will not allow it to pass back the original way. The gates in bingos actually contain a switch, and that switch is crucial for helping the game keep track of how many balls have been played.”

    Nick Baldridge @ ~18 minutes — Technical explanation of why ball gate switch misadjustment caused cascading ball lift bugs

  • “I don't actually have a limit switch wired in to the lifter motor, and this is how the bingos function. They actually look at the position of that switch as well as the position of the trough switches. Because I skimped on that one switch my life has become much more difficult.”

    Nick Baldridge @ ~28 minutes — Reflects on design decision trade-off and its consequences for end-of-game ball lift logic

  • “Hole-In-One is the only golf-themed bingo that ever was produced or contemplated. There's one game that is on the Bally production list that has never been found or spoken of, and that is Apollo Ball.”

Entities

Nick BaldridgepersonMultiBingoproductYork showeventShowboatgameMississippi ShowboatgameHole-In-OnegameApollo BallgameBallycompanyUnitedcompany

Signals

  • ?

    product_launch: MultiBingo set for public debut at York show with 38+ games complete; final polish and bug fixes underway

    high · 37 games complete and ready, game 38 expected by end of week; 20 days to York show

  • ?

    design_innovation: MultiBingo achieves universal multi-bingo behavior replication across 38+ distinct game rule sets with shared eight-ball trough; complex ball lift logic handles both standard five-ball and eight-ball-with-extra-balls scenarios

    high · Detailed technical discussion of ball gate, trough switches, and conditional lift logic required to unify disparate game behaviors

  • ?

    product_concern: Two outstanding bugs remain: Showboat replay reset function fails to clear credits, and Mississippi Showboat sixth-ball lift feature inconsistently activates; both issues difficult to reproduce and debug

    high · Nick Baldridge explicitly identifies these as outstanding bugs with similar themes in game names; spent significant debugging effort tracing root causes

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Nick Baldridge chose to omit lifter limit switch (standard on original bingos), creating downstream complexity in ball lift logic; tradeoff between hardware simplicity and software complexity acknowledged

    high · Detailed explanation of decision to skip limit switch and resulting need for alternative ball position detection logic

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Mississippi Showboat (1981, one known example) and Hole-In-One require reconstruction from extremely limited source material (blurry photos, single backglass image); Nick Baldridge created original rule sets based on available artifacts

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.056

0:00
what's that sound it's for amusement only the em and bingo pinball podcast welcome back to for amusement only this is nick baldridge we're getting closer and closer to the york show and uh things are heating up over here i'm working on game number 38 right now if you can believe that. 37 are complete and ready for the York show. 38 should be ready here by the end of this week. I have something in the range of 20 days left with which to work on the game. 20 evenings, I should say. So things are getting a little animated over here. There's lots of playtesting going on. My daughters are joining in, and things are going well. I've found some bugs and managed to squish almost all of them. The outstanding bug that I have is with replay reset on Showboat. Showboat is the only six card that United produced. It's a beautiful game, but when you push the replay reset button on every other game it throws it into tilt simulates turning off and on and then removes all the credits on the replay register unfortunately on Showboat only for no apparent reason which uses the exact same code as the other games when you push replay reset it will cycle as if you turned it off and back on and will not reduce any credits. It doesn't matter how many times you hit it.
1:46
So, that needs a little tweak. But aside from that, the only other bug that I'm running into right now is with Mississippi Showboat. Mississippi Showboat was the last game that Bally had on test, or that they made samples of, I'm not sure which. It was produced in 1981, and there's only one example known to exist in the entire world. The photos that exist of it on IPDB are very, very blurry.
2:17
We're taken from a far enough distance away that reproducing it is very difficult. I managed to get a somewhat workable copy of the back glass by adjusting those photos as well as I could. One of the photos of the back glass, the entire image was doubled like it had ghosted.

Nick Baldridge @ ~40 minutes — Positions Hole-In-One as unique in genre and appeals for help locating Apollo Ball

  • “I'm not just replicating a single bingo I'm replicating the behavior of all bingos And so having a ball trough which contains eight balls is great. For a five ball game, I have a lot of buffer there.”

    Nick Baldridge @ ~24 minutes — Explains design complexity of creating universal multi-game platform

    • For Amusement Only EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast
    organization

    high · Detailed description of blurry IPDB photos, ghosted backglass image, and lack of any documentation requiring interpretive reconstruction

  • ?

    community_signal: Nick Baldridge seeking community information about Apollo Ball (undocumented Bally six-card); public appeal for help locating or documenting unknown game

    high · Direct appeal to listeners: 'If anybody has any information about Valley Apollo Ball, which is supposedly a six card, please contact me'

  • ?

    event_signal: Nick Baldridge will display MultiBingo at York show Thursday (setup), Friday, and Saturday; offering limited t-shirt giveaways for making four-in-a-line on any bingo in bingo row

    high · Explicit schedule statement and promotion of limited t-shirt contest

  • ?

    historical_signal: Establishes Showboat as only United-produced six-card bingo; Mississippi Showboat (1981) as last Bally sample; Hole-In-One as only golf-themed bingo ever made; Apollo Ball as completely undocumented Bally title

    high · Multiple explicit claims about uniqueness and rarity of these games within their categories

    • 2:41
    like on old negatives where you have a second image on top of it. So the work was very tedious to get it to function, but it does in the multi-bingo. The issue that I have with it is the special feature of the game.
    2:55
    So Mississippi Show Boat is a six card, just like Dixieland, but with an added feature. When you push the C button to collect your credits at the end of gameplay, instead of immediately scoring, it will instead lift a sixth ball. The sixth ball is guaranteed if you put in more than 12 credits, or 12 nickels, or 12 quarters, or however the machine is set, 12 coins. So the 12th coin and up to 17 will allow you to use that sixth ball to score on individual cards. for each additional coin that's input that 6th ball will score on the next card so your 12th coin for example you get your 6th ball and it scores on card number 1 only the next nickel will allow it to score on card number 2 and card number 1 and so on so the issue I have is that the 6th ball just doesn't lift sometimes it doesn't do it all the time and I think it's tied to how many coins have been input.
    4:05
    But I'm not certain yet. So the multi-bingo will have, as I mentioned, at least 38 games. Maybe one or two more if I can swing it, but I'm not going to count my chickens before they hatch here. We're getting a little too close to the show for comfort. but those 38 games comprise almost all of the six cards that Bally either produced or not and the United six card as well as some early games including Palm Beach Frolics which is a six card with advancing odds Bally Beauty Beach Club
    4:52
    and games like Circus and Stars from United. so there's going to be a good sampling of multi-coin bingos as well as fixed coin bingos which is pretty great I'm really excited to see what people think at the moment what I'm doing is working on fit and finish you know polish type stuff for example I hadn't produced all the instruction cards that were needed for every game this is a time-consuming and tedious task for some of the games. I'm trying to make United and Bally Scorn instruction cards look totally different, even in situations where I don't have a good source image. So I'm going to make a United template and kind of work off of that. So let's talk about a problem that I've run into in development and testing that I thought was related to code but wasn't, and this will highlight some of the difficulty in producing this game. I had some issues with the ball return logic. On a bingo, there are 25 trap holes and then a 26th hole in the playfield, which actually drops the ball right back into the trough, at which point the bingo will lift it back to you and you get to put that ball back into play. This is crucial for bingo gameplay because if you miss the hole for which you're aiming, and all the other holes, which will help you make your inline win, you want to bring the ball all the way back down to the trough so that you can shoot it again. This requires a great deal of skill and finesse, especially if you have to do it multiple times because you just can't make the shot that you need. Well, I found something that was incredibly frustrating. if you shot the fifth ball, which is the last ball in most games,
    6:53
    this is before you put it into extra ball mode, even for those extra ball games that I have implemented, if you shoot the fifth ball and manage to wind it all the way down the play field to the ball return, it wouldn't lift it back to you.
    7:07
    Now the ball override switch, which I have implemented, and which comes standard on bingos, would allow you to lift the ball again.
    7:18
    So my code worked to a point, but it wouldn't automatically return the ball to you, and this only happened on the last ball in play.
    7:30
    So I went through and dug into the portion of code which should have controlled it, and I got to the point where it should have been lifting it, but it wasn't.
    7:47
    And I could debug and print all day various lines where it should have been executing, and each of them functioned up until the very last conditional, which was, if the shooter lane is active, don't lift a ball. so for some reason it thought the shooter lane was active or so I thought but actually it was failing on the line directly above that which was the ball gate now the ball gate is a switch itself unlike on many flipper games where the ball gate is simply a flap that allows the ball to pass through but will not allow it to pass back the original way, so it's a one-way gate.
    8:34
    The gates in bingos actually contain a switch, and that switch is crucial for helping the game keep track of how many balls have been played, and especially for games with features that time out. As the ball passes through the gate, it will activate the lift or start relay, and it will trip, any trip relays, which are associated with those features that I mentioned. So, for example, if you have a selector feature or you have the magic screen feature or mystic lines or any of the moving numbers features or special advantage features like the selector those all time out with a trip through the ball gate Well that switch came misadjusted after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of games that I tested So it took me an embarrassingly long time to find that. But once I did, it corrected all of my lifter problems except for the fifth ball, ball return. In order to fix that, I had to add an extra conditional in my ball lift logic.
    9:49
    And this basically checked the ball count, and if the ball count was four, and trough switch number eight was hit, it would lift another ball. so basically it would just reactivate the lifter relay if that sounded like a bunch of gibberish well it kind of was but that's kind of what I'm dealing with there's a lot that goes into every single action that happens on the bingos and with this project which admittedly is very ambitious I'm not just replicating a single bingo I'm replicating the behavior of all bingos And so having a ball trough which contains eight balls is great. For a five ball game, I have a lot of buffer there. If it accidentally lifts a sixth ball for whatever reason, then I am aware of that typically.
    10:46
    On top of that, I still have other balls in the trough with which to gauge the position of the remaining balls. So, if I have a ball return on, say, ball number 4,
    10:59
    then the game knows that it hasn't lifted 5 yet, and everything proceeds as normal. But it's only when I run through all 5 balls that it's a problem.
    11:12
    Now, conversely, let's look at 8-ball games, games with 3 extra balls. This uses every ball in the trough. Now, one of the key tenets of my lifter logic is that it needs to know that it's completed the cycle when the lifter is back in the home position with a ball on trough switch number one. I don't actually have a limit switch wired in to the lifter motor, and this is how the bingos function. They actually look at the position of that switch as well as the position of the trough switches. because I skimped on that one switch my life has become much more difficult because when that 8th ball lifts there's nothing that's going to hit that first trough switch it's not a normally closed switch now, a couple things I could do I could flip the switch around and make it normally closed and when a ball lands on it, it's normally open that's one idea, and it would probably work except when it didn't and then it would be really frustrating. But let's think about this logically. What else could I do? The ball has lifted, the eighth ball. The relay is engaged saying, hey, keep lifting another ball.
    12:30
    But I know that the ball is on the shooter lane. So at that point, I can kill the lifter relay because there's nothing else for it to lift. It doesn't have to return back to the home position. And yes, that last lift, the noise ends about halfway through what it normally would have. But I'm not wearing out that lifter motor, and I'm not holding that relay closed for way too long of a time. So there's a nice tradeoff there. If that ball lands back in the ball return, then it has to know to lift it again. Now, unfortunately, with the ball lift logic that I have by default, it checks the position of trough switch number one. Well, I just said the lifter would time out before it returned back to the home position. When it does this, there is actually a piece of metal that is in the way of the balls in the ball trough and trough switch number one. There's no way for it to physically get to trough switch number one. So the game doesn't know that there's a ball waiting to be lifted. This is unfortunate. So I had to add yet another path if the eighth ball is returned, which would cause the lifter to activate until it loaded that ball back in the shooter lane This works All is well So that where I at basically is fixing bugs like that. All the bugs that are outstanding have been fixed, except the two I mentioned at the top of the show with Mississippi Showboat and Showboat. Both have Showboat in the name. Maybe that's got something to do with it. but this game is fantastic, and I cannot wait to show it off. I have a feeling that at least it won't be hated, so there's that. If you do plan on coming by, let me know if you have time, and I'll be on the lookout for you, and just let me know which day you'll be there. I'll be there Thursday for setup, Friday and Saturday. Remember that I'll be giving away t-shirts for anybody who can make a four and a line on any of the bingos in bingo row, not just the multi bingo. So pick your favorite and go to town. Now shirts will be available on a limited basis only. Unfortunately, I won't have the luxury of having unlimited shirts. So I'm going to do my best to limit the number that are given out on each day, Friday and Saturday, so that I'm certain that I have enough for each day. For my featured game today, I thought I'd talk about one of the games that I implemented in the MultiBingo. This is a special game that was never fully produced. Apparently some samples were made, and one back glass photo that was taken on an angle and with a bright flash exists. But that's all we know.
    15:46
    I've heard that there's at least one that's out there in the world, but I've never seen it. No paperwork exists, and so I was a bit in the dark when creating this game. But what I've done is create my own bingo rule set. The game is hole-in-one, and it's a Bally 6 card.
    16:07
    And from the back glass, there's a single-digit credit meter, just like the credit wheel on any EM flipper game.
    16:19
    There's six cards, and then there is a golfer rating on the left. there's good, excellent, and superior.
    16:30
    So the rule set that I created is any 3 in a line will win you a single replay, 4 in a line gets you 2 replays, and 5 in a line gets you 3 replays. On top of that, your maximum win will light either good for 3 in a line, excellent for 4 in a line, or superior for 5 in a line. Now I mentioned Hole-in-One is a golf theme, and it's the only golf-themed bingo that ever was produced or contemplated.
    17:04
    There's one game that is on the Bally production list that has never been found or spoken of, and that is Apollo Ball. If anybody has any information about Valley Apollo Ball, which is supposedly a six card, please contact me and let me know. I would like to implement it, but I don't know a thing about it.
    17:29
    So there's a lot to be done, obviously. But hole-in-one is fantastically challenging to get a superior rating. And of course your rating resets with each game. So getting that five in a line gets you more than just replays. It also gets you accolades.
    17:52
    There are not many games that do that, at least in the Bally series. Well, that's all for tonight. Thank you very much for listening. My name again is Nick 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 4amusementonly.libsyn.com Thank you very much for listening, and I'll talk to you next time.