Mastodawn

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 4d ago

I need to find the thread where I bought this thing but I think it might've been two servers ago. Very long story made very short: I got a Firepower for $250
* Although the backglass survived, its head was destroyed so thoroughly that I ended up fabricating a new one from scratch
* The boards have gnarly battery damage
* The playfield art was roached beyond even the most optimistic hope of repair (and I've restored playfields with a LOOOOOOT of mouse piss soaked in) so I got a still-fucked-but-less playfield and restored that instead

Anyway I started the underside today. All that stuff has to come off and get put on the new playfield

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 4d ago

The sheer Volume of wire in this thing

Fun fact: if you took all the wire out of an 80's-era pinball machine and laid each piece end to end in one straight line, I'd be really mad at you

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 4d ago

Alright, it is done, all the stuff is off the playfield leaving only the GI braid behind

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 4d ago

If the new playfield already had its GI braid in position we could just schwuff all that stuff over to the new playfield and start screwing/soldering it down, but I gotta transfer the braid too. So for now everything's in a big pile inside the cabinet

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

GI stands for General Illumination, meaning the bulbs that stay lit all the time so you can see what you're doing as opposed to the bulbs that flash to tell you what you've done and what you should be doing next. But Gastro-Intestinal is funnier. Anyway tomorrow I'll swap out its GI tract

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 4d ago

Pinball machines are designed to be very very easy to fix and swap parts out etc but Williams absolutely did not expect anyone to swap out The Actual Bit Of Plywood In The Middle Of The Electronics Sandwich

Like it's reasonable to have feelings like, oh, why oh why did they staple the GI braid in like that, but honestly they figured this thing would get hammered hard enough that you'd replace every bulb and rubber a few times, rebuild the flippers, do some board work maybe and then this'd end up in a skip having earned its weight in quarters, they absolutely did not expect Some Guy to be tearing it down this deep *checks watch* forty six years after they'd made the damn thing

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 4d ago

Lots and lots of wire.

See Williams used a matrix for the lamps as well as the switches. So you have eight transistors on one end to let the electricity in and eight more on the other end to let it out again, to turn on one lamp you go "Turn on the transistors on row 2 and column 3" and you could control 64 lamps with 16 transistors. Bally just had one transistor per lamp

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 4d ago

A playfield swap/restoration is the second hardest thing you can do with a pinball machine aside from trying to restore a flaked backglass (you have to match the colour AND the transparency and good luck with that)

I saw a reddit thread about a lady who bought a Bally machine, I think it was a Xenon or a Space Invaders or smth like that, anyway all the paint was ground off my the ball and her feller thought he'd do something nice to surprise her and he got one of those made-brand-new reproduction playfields with the automotive clearcoat, they're like seven hundred bucks. Anyway he took all the stuff off the old playfield and then realised how deep in over his head he was and left it in buckets for ten years

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 4d ago

That's how I got my Skylab, someone went "Right I'm gonna restore this playfield" and took everything off and put it in buckets and then donated it to PAPA

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 4d ago

I got the Skylab I wanna say seven years ago and it's been 90% finished for about five years

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 4d ago

Anyway it's not gonna be like the reddit thread or the Skylab, I'm gonna finish the playfield swap TOMORROW

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 4d ago

It's gonna be really embarrassing if my next post on this is five years from now

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 3d ago

This new playfield didn't have its GI braid laid out the same way as the old one. I've drawn out where it'll go...

(pictures show old PF with GI braid and a couple bulbs, and the new PF pencil-marked with roughly where it'll go)

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 3d ago

It remembers its shape

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 3d ago

Right, GI braid in place

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 3d ago

I'm gonna replace these, but not yet, I wanna do one order and get everything I need. So for now I'm just giving them a quick clean.

The new ones are bright white

Ari [APz] Sovijärvi 3d ago

@ifixcoinops Many years ago I had one of these fracture in pieces. Naturally I didn't have an extra at hand, no 3D printers or anything, so I painstakingly first glued it together and then filled the other side with epoxy to hold it together. I intended to get a spare when I order something later.

This picture reminded me that the epoxied part is still there, apparently doing fine.

I really just need to model this at some point.

@ifixcoinops pet the cat

Greem (Graeme. Not Graham!)4d ago

@ifixcoinops *starts clock running*

Bob Smy Uncle 4d ago

@ifixcoinops What's the next step? How much time to do it, and which supplies are needed first?

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 4d ago

@Cheff transfer the GI braid, maybe an hour, no supplies, it's just gonna be a fiddly pain in the arse

Piers Cawley 4d ago

@ifixcoinops @Cheff more or less of a pain in the arse than Ms. Pacman?

@ifixcoinops Watching this space.

arclight 3d ago

@ifixcoinops At that rate you could be building a nuclear plant. We're great at making that last 10% the second 90% of the project...

@ifixcoinops I picked up a Space Shuttle in similar condition. Cabinet was empty and all the parts were in milk crates in the cabinet, playfield stripped and backbox stripped. I did a whole restoration on it, repainted the cabinet (no vinyls, rattle can and stencils) and redid the entire machine. There wasn’t a single wire or screw that I didn’t have a hand on. I loved it.

🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑4d ago

@jgeorge @ifixcoinops
Make sure you don't use it when the o-rings are cold. Wouldn't want it to explode on launch.

Blackadderall 4d ago

@ifixcoinops I know this is the exact thing that will happen with my Centaur with a roached, then badly painted black, then mylar protector installed over that. Being a brain genious, I simply bought the $700 playfield, and then did not make even the merest twitch in the direction of a slight move to install it. #winning

Blackadderall 4d ago

@ifixcoinops i also lost the keys to the game

George B 4d ago

Do modern ones just stick a small computer in there and do it all in software or do some still do it the fun way?

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 4d ago

@gbargoud do what all in software

George B 4d ago

Pick which lights and stuff to activate at which times

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 4d ago

@gbargoud oh this is a solid-state game, it was all done in software in 1980 too. I do have some purely electromechanical ones though, those're cool, no lamp matrix in them, just a buncha relays and selector units like big spinning copper spiders tapdancing over rivets

@gbargoud As @ifixcoinops said, since the solid state era games did already (almost) all interaction between in software just like modern games.

What has changed is that modern games use message busses serial message busses to replace the mess of wires with a central CPU board and several satellite boards interconnected by data connections. Stern for instance uses Ethernet cables (but afaik a different protocol underneath).

@gbargoud @ifixcoinops What‘s curious to me is that for how long wiring harnesses survived in new games.

My 1993 Jurassic Park still has them and all electronics are way less integrated than you would imagine from mid 90s technology. I got curious myself and did some research and just learnt that Stern transitioned to messaging busses only in 2015.

https://www.designworldonline.com/advanced-networks-make-pinball-games-pop/

Advanced networks make pinball games pop!

by Paul Mandeltort, Director, Parts and Accessories, Stern Pinball, Inc. Traditional pinball machines are using industrial sensor buses to bring body

Design World

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops 3d ago

@boink @gbargoud the inside of a pinball machine body is a pretty harsh environment for electronics, full of conductive dust and big big coils and vibration and suchlike, it's kinda a challenging engineering task to design a messaging bus system that can live in the body rather than in the head. I bet Stern were a bit nervous about the early Spike games given that Jersey Jack had tried the whole daisy-chained-RGBLED thing just before then and it had massive reliability problems, though to give them credit I haven't seen NEARLY as many node board failures as I'd expected tbqh

@ifixcoinops @gbargoud It still puzzles me how long it took. We’re putting similar stuff in satellites (g-forces, radiation) and cars (vibrations, dirt) for a while now so I assumed that hardened electronics were no biggie at the time.

Eventually it comes down to price per unit, but assembly of the wiring harnesses can’t be cheap either… or was this a typical outsourcing task?

Good point anyway :-)

@ifixcoinops Back when copper was cheap and transistors were expensive?

Malcolm Herbert 4d ago

@ifixcoinops thankyou for clarifying - I was about to ask ... :)