Expo review

Since I'm still working on my layout (and don't want to show a partial update), I'll go ahead and talk about Expo a little.

So there's 2 parts of Chicago Expo.  There's the Expo that's at the Westin in Wheeling, and then there's the extended party at Terry's at pinball life on friday from noon-6.  So being that I live literally 4 miles from Pinball Life, I often find myself there buying parts (or lately, buying 3d prints from Scott Danesi for some LCD mods I've been doing for some small side income).  So this was the 2nd year in a row that I brought a pinball to a show, both being Pinexplosion.  I've heard nothing but bad stories about what a hassle it was bringing a game to expo, or hassle getting wristband refunds from Pacak.  Terry: I drive 4 miles down the road, drop off my pin on a friday weeks before the show at my convenience (not driving 20 miles on a Wednesday night).  First year was nice, I brought elivra, it sold so I didn't have to drag it back.  This year I brought Freddy, nobody was interested (at least not at the price I was asking), so it's coming back.  I'm putting off picking it up because upstairs is packed with 3 pins in the front room (AMH, my newly picked up space station, and the blue october project).  My goal is to wait until October 30th, bring freddy home and stick that and space station in the garage so trick or treaters can play it during the day on Halloween as they come by.  I've seen other people on pinside do it, and being in Chicago it's not normally warm enough to do that.  Well this year seems like it's going to be a mild winter in the midwest (high temps in the low 60s), so even if I have to put a heater out there, the pins will be on.  I'm going to have to get a step stool so the small kids can reach the buttons and see the playfield.  I haven't had time to decorate this year, but hopefully I can at least get some purple or red lighting backlighting the pins, and hide some of the garage with cotton spiderwebs.  Like many others, I don't want to see pinball die, and if I can create an impression on a kid to want to play them later in life, I've done my job.

Pinexplosion was even more packed this year, not surprising since there is no price of admission, there's free food and beer/soda, and 50 pins on freeplay (plus deals on parts).  Expo, well.. I mean, freeplay area.. yea that was pretty bare this year.  I know Expo isn't mean as a show about playing pinballs, but seeing how there really wasn't any announcements this year (Stern game of thrones was announced early, Hobbit still isn't shipping, Lawlor's title isn't announced until next Spring, Spooky is still 3 weeks from revealing rob zombie), Pinball circus is still in development.  So unless you're interested in going to seminars, what does Expo really offer for $25/day?  One thing I like seeing lately at Expo are the homebrew projects.  I come to find that there's actually 2 Buffy the vampire slayer machines (rethemed swords of fury with new software).  At first I was sort of upset that two of this great game were sacrificed for this project, but after playing them I can appreciate it.  I mean the code is great (sound cues where to shoot), great graphics, the upper left playfield is transparent so you can see underneath.  Nightmare before christmas had great flow, though talking to the owner he did say he had ball detection issues not from hardware but some bug in the latest mission pinball framework (that was being worked on up until the moment of the show).  I actually saw Ben heck and Charlie walk over to this machine and talk to the owner for about 10-15 minutes early saturday morning.  He had the playfield lifted up, and it was as if Ben was just curious how a hobbyist chose to wire it up (lights, boards, etc), and generally what the latest FAST hardware looked like.  Peanuts pinball (which Aaron is working on) had a half populated playfield (with art) which is impressive considering about the only thing done on it the week before was flippers and a ball trough (he did a livestream).  For a while he had the playfield lifted up.  During the stream you could see that he just had the playfield out sitting on some sort of frame he welded up.  At the show you realize this is not a temporary frame, but rather a frame that stays with the playfield, and it rests on rails in the bottom.

This is actually quite genius in a couple ways:
1. It gives you a nice platform for the playfield to sit on, sort of a built in rotisserie (both for building it, and future servicing).
2. In reality, it doesn't need the hooks to attach to the lockdown bar, it could just rest at the bottom if you had something to lock it in place.  Then the only thing you'd really have to lock is the glass in place.

The other crazy part about these 3 projects (muppets was barely started) is that the father of Aaron built all these cabinets.. like not kit form, but actually built them from bare plywood.  I realize there are companies like churchill that do this everyday, but it's more amazing for a home builder to do it with minimal tools.

So one thing I'm starting to realize, gottliebs have really good flow (and some pretty neat innovations).  Freddy plays pretty good, and not a single entry ramp (which is odd for 1994).  Waterworld also has entry no ramps (but it does have return ramps, including one that pivots), and has a neat boat that spins 180 degrees to enable ball lock, and also dumps the balls after they've all been locked.  It also has this nice flowing side loopback on the right.  Nothing innovative there (games like skateball had it), but nice that they implemented it.  You look at "lights camera action", and they implemented a somewhat large chunk of playfield that spins and completely changes that layout in that section (almost increasing the playfield size in a way).  That's the sort of flow I'm aiming for, the ramps are just icing on the top (and need to be lastly implimented).  The main gameplay is on the main playfield.

stand up target cherry switch - 3rd entry

Ok, so I started with a cherry roller switch for the ball troft drain, then I made brackets to mount cherry switches for the flipper buttons.  Now I just made my first cherry switch standup target:

It's a simple 1/8" x 1-1/2" aluminum angle bracket that I cut down to size, added some holes to mount the switch, and added 2 holes for mounting the bracket to the underside of the playfield.  There's really no side force, it's all inline force from the ball hitting it so I didn't feel like I needed the screws off to the side.  I had to drill a hole in the metal contact on the switch in order to mount the target face, but it wasn't terribly hard.  I made the face from polycarbonate (I may make them in the future from PETG, polycarb even in 1/16" thickness is not fun to cut), but this should hold up well.  I'm considering leaving it clear because I think rather than adding an insert in front of the target (which always wear bad), to simply backlight the target when hit (have a bulb socket mounted underneath it).  This should be much cleaner.

The aluminum channel is from mcmaster, I think I paid maybe $10 for a 2 foot long piece (only need 2" per bracket).  The switch is from allelectronics, and it handles up to 15A for just $2 each in quantities of 10 or more:
http://www.allelectronics.com/make-a-store/item/sms-196/spdt-snap-action-switch-w/lever/1.html

I've got 4 brackets total made so far, most likely going to use these for the keyboard first.  I've made pretty good progress on my layout, but I want to get further along before I do a playfield update.  In fact it's flowing so good, I think I had about a 5 minute ball time before I drained, and it didn't get stuck on anything.

Layout tweaks with photoshop

Ok so I nearly gave up on the curved shooter lane.  I really wasn't liking how inconsistent it was shooting into the upper left.  I'm talking my target was probably a good 8" span which isn't going to work for a skillshot.  Now if I working for a "pinball company", I would probably be told "stop noodling, give up on that feature and move on".  If I were a independent pinball builder, I would probably noodle until I ran out of money.  Fortunately for me, I have almost no overhead other than my time and some building materials.  The playfield sits in a pinball cabinet which sits in an unoccupied space of my house.

So while I was making some minor tweaks to my AMH, I noticed how different the wall guides are on it.  The center bar progress lane has a vertical wall, which is mounted by the typical bent screw brackets on the bottom.  For the most part this wall is defined by the screw locations, but it can still be bent and tweaked a little.  I'm tweaking it because I REALLY don't like how horribly it drains, and as I get it bent towards the left it's been getting better, but still not consistent.  I'd say it's about Stern - ACDC bell shot SDTM consistent now.  You may ask "Why would you modify the layout?  Perhaps that was Charlie's intent, to make that area a drain monster".  Yea well for one thing, if you watch Nate Shiver's livestream he did, his almost never drains.  And even if it did, I'd still want it to be a little more forgiving since it's my game and I can do what I want.  So then I was fixing another area (the space in front of my hellevator seems to get stuck on a rare occasion), so I attached an extra piece of metal flap to the underneath of the ramp so it ensures the ball never gets stuck in that area again.  I can see what the problem is, the intent is there.  He has a piece of metal that allows the ball to roll down, but the problem is that it's not flush with the rubber post at the end, so if the ball lands just right it'll just stick there.  Another thing I noticed, he's using a horizontal wall in this space, not a vertical one.  Not like I haven't seen designers use this technique (you see it on more SEGA's and modern Sterns), but since I"m mostly a classic Williams guy I mostly see the typical vertical walls brought over from EM days.

So why do I bring all this up?  Well, there's something to be said about horizontal guides vs vertical ones.  It comes down to forces, and resistance to them.  It's like the difference between bonking someone over the head with the flat edge of a knife, and the sharp end.  The sharp end isn't going to flex out of the way.  I know, this is all basic physics, why am I acting so dumb?  Often times design can get blocked by what you know, and it over influences your judgement.  So anyway, I went ahead and fabricated a chunk of steel horizontally in the shape I think I needed, adjusted it a couple times, and just held it about half an inch off the playfield in front of the shooter lane (I have spacers and screws coming from McMaster tomorrow, but I really wanted to prove it out tonight).  Know what, it works.. Shot is pretty darn consistent (so long as my plunge is reasonably the same, which is just slightly shy of full power).  If I go full blast, it might skip over, or power into the VUK.  I could leave it that way and force players to not just go full force, or I could always put a weaker spring in.  So that's the other thing I've noticed, the ball barely got up into the corner before, now it's flying up there with ease.  Again going back to physics, the less ball contacts surfaces, the less friction (probably helps that there's no loss from flexing of metal either now that it has a hard stop).

So now that I'm confident I can get the skillshot I originally intended, I took a photo I had in my phone of the playfield (still shows a ramp that just brought the ball above the record and up to the piano with no skillshot involved), and drew over it with a separate layer in case I needed to make changes.  So most of the shots are the same from before.  I'm making the keyboard in the upper right flat (not a hill).  The flat captured ball on freddy seems to work fine, and it'll help slow the ball down more than if a ramp sends the captured ball flying back at the playfield ball.  Also since this is now flat, I can make the left side of it part of the plunger skillshot (hitting targets shaped as the keyboard keys).  This also gives the mid right flipper another shot.  Bounce it off the rubber between the posts to ricochet a shot into the keyboard.  I'm also opening up the VUK tube on the backside (so only 2 walls will remain).  Seems like having an opening in only one side made it very difficult to aim, and I can use posts and rubbers to contain the ball.  I'm going to have to tweak (or possibly make yet another upper playfield) to make the exit violin neck ramp work.  I can't have an exit ramp overlap the shot into the VUK because it'll block it.  So it's going to need to change angle from 45 degrees at the VUK, to something like 30 degrees so the ramp ends up tilting out of the way.  About the only section I'm not crazy about is the dead space in the triangular area  (between the back alleyway and the VUK).  Since I have another 8 channels from the 2nd board from Hugh (at least one will be needed for the lower playfield if not 2), I can always still throw on a pop bumper or two.  It might work well having it near rubber walls.  It'll be sort of like what Charlie did on his (Pinball zombies from beyond the grave) layout.

getting back on track

Ok so it's been a crazy couple of months.  I bought a freddy about 6 weeks ago, shopped it out, built a custom topper, and designed an LCD mod that runs off raspberry pi (movie clips play on a TV in the corner).  Then a couple weeks later, I find a deal on a street fighter.  Shopped THAT out, also currently building an LCD mod (SF2 cabinet 3d printed, runs off 5v in the backbox).  So THEN, my AMH finally finishes being built, and that's been played to death (it's currently upstairs).  Well just last night, I finally cleaned up my blue october area.  I had tools and parts lying all over the ground underneath and in front, sandpaper and various parts sitting on the playfield.  I brought some plastic bins that weren't being used up from the basement, and put nearly everything away, and now my area is clear again to continue working.  Last time I left off, I was veering away from the curved shooter lane and building a ramp to go over the record player area.  I still want to somehow implement a skillshot.

Blues Brothers pinball

No, I'm not ditching my project.. I'm just throwing ideas at the wall since Jimmy stated on a recent podcast (gameroom junkies) that one of his dream themes is the Blues Brothers movie.  Now I have to preface that this movie is near and dear to me (and ironically my wife is one of the VERY few people that hates it).  Not sure why, perhaps she thinks it's an insult to musicals?  Anyway, this is one of the few movies me and my dad really bonded with when I was a kid.  Being filmed in Chicago, obviously the historical factor alone is enough to like it.  In fact, sometimes I'll watch it just for nostalgic purposes (Oh look at how the highways looked back then).  In particular, the scene right before they get pulled over (SCMODS), just cruising on the highway listening to Sam & Dave - soothe me brings me back to when my dad would bring me to work with him downtown Chicago (3am), and he'd be listening to oldies and it was very dark outside.

Anyway, so I've thought about this the past few days, and I think the best approach would be Stern's jukebox concept, while pulling certain elements from the movie into the playfield.  If you look at Metallica, most things are based on album art rather than songs.  AC/DC, the bell is from hells bells (but also album art), and the canon is most certainly album art.

First and formost, targets should be heavily used (and re-used) in the game.

They can be used to collect items (beginning jail scene where the clerk is listing his items.. One timex digital watch, broken.  One un-used prophylactic.. one soiled.  boots, black.  belt, black.  one black suit jacket, one pair of black suit pants, one hat... BLACK.  One pair of sunglasses, 23 dollars and seven cents.. Sign here).

Targets can be used to spell "jake", and "elwood".

Targets can be used to collect band members (Murph and the magic tones, GI turns to red for the lounge, Mr fabulous plays classical music while the lighting flickers like candles.  Blue Lou and Matt Guitar Murphy Aretha Franklin sings and trivia video mode starts to gain those band members).

During Jukebox song selection, the quote "oh we got both kinds, country and western!" should play from bob's country bunker.

Orange Whip - I'm thinking a glowing orange drink with a slice of orange, sort of like lebowski's white russian.

Bridge jump scene (car's got a lot of pickup) - This should be similiar to the jump ramp on America's most haunted, but have it actually actuate and tilt up like in the movie.  There would be a wall in the middle, and the ramps would have to move up enough to clear it (so you'd have to time your shot.. Too soon, and the ball hits the wall.  Too late, and the ball doesn't make it up the bridge ramp).

Lastly, the car chase scenes are what made this movie memorable.  There's the mall chase scene at the former Dixie square mall in Harvey (new oldsmobiles are in early this year), and then the ending when they flee from the concert, and drive all the way to downtown chicago (driving down route 43, then to I-90, past McCormick place, through lower wacker drive, then under the EL-train).  I'm thinking 2 directions for this concept:
1. Simply have a dodge monaco toy.. Maybe have it as a scoop that ejects balls.  One thing is for sure, that engine sound NEEDS to be included, and a nice subwoofer speaker.  The sound of that engine is so low and gutteral.  Seriously, go back and watch it, I bet you'll find yourself imitating the sound.  Perhaps there could be some sort of multiball where there's specific colored balls that represent the cops chasing them (red and blue), and you have to manage to not drain your ball until all the "cop balls" drain first.
2. This gets a bit more elaborate.  There would be a mini section of the playfield (perhaps just an upper playfield), but it would be specific to car chase scenes.  I'd want to do an LCD screen for the back and side showing speed, and perhaps somehow do projection mapping on the playfield (the bluesmobile would be between the flippers), and the video would show turns, and you'd have to flip the ball to that side of the playfield (standup target, perhaps a spinner lane?).  You keep going as long as you keep making your shots.  As soon as you miss, the scene ends.

Last idea: If you're playing a multiplayer game, while the ball sits in the shooter lane, a clip of jake and elwood standing in the elevator at Daley Plaza tax assessor, and plays with muzak in the background until the next player shoots the ball.

ramp FAIL

So the glue definitely made it stiffer.  Then the 1/2" walls started to curl and bend over every time I hit it with a ball.  So then I beefed it up with 1" tall steel walls, and that made the opening just a little too tight (ball would either get stuck, or bounce back at the flipper).  After bending the opening back, it started to tear a little bit.  I tossed the ball at the ramp in frustration.

So what did I learn from this?
1. If you've got an aggressive shot where the ball has to make a sharp turn, make SURE your walls are high enough
2. Even stiff walls that are very thin need reinforcing (or just make it out of thicker cardboard to begin with, perhaps a double thin layer
3. I really don't think I can reliably have a side loop shot, PERIOD!  Even if you can occasionally hit it just right (which I did get maybe 3 out of 10 shots), while it might be rewarding it's going to be very frustrating and NOT fun, and the ramp is probably going to get beat to hell during all the missed shots.  So I think my solution (since early prototypes worked great this way) is to implement this ramp so it can be shot up and down, not side to side.  If you watch people play Gottlieb Gold wings, even that ramp is somewhat hard to make, and it's as vertical as can be (and has tons of guides to keep it on track).

So that's my next goal, figure out where I'm sticking this ramp (after I rebuild it one more time).

If it plays crappy in cardboard, it'll play crappy in metal

So.. I've been told this by Mr Popadiuk.. Ben Heck repeats it because I'm pretty sure Dennis Nordman says the same thing (both taught by legends that built pinball before they did).  So I didn't take this advice, though I had my reason.  It felt like cardboard just wasn't stiff enough, and I was losing power when the ball used it's energy flexing the cardboard (hence why the ball wasn't getting through the loop everytime).  Well, after painfully building it in metal with walls on both sides, it worked only marginally better.  I'm realizing that a 4" diameter is just too large for the ball speed, plus the exit isn't nearly tight enough so the exit can sometimes aim well at the VUK, other times not so much.  So, I've re-made the loop (YET AGAIN) out of cardboard (YET AGAIN), but this time going with a much tighter 3" diameter loop.  I've made the entrance nice and wide (easy to aim) with a chamfer to direct the ball into the path, and then the exit is nice and tight (just slight clearance) to make sure the ball goes to the same path everytime.  It seems to be working a lot better just from tossing the ball into it, but to really stiffen it up I've gone ahead and brushed on elmer's wood glue all over it.  My thinking is that I'll be mimicking the same process as Papier-mâché (which creates a nice hard surface when applied to soft newspaper).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papier-m%C3%A2ch%C3%A9

Ideally I wanted to use epoxy (and maybe my final ramp will), but this is a good test (plus epoxy resin isn't cheap).  We'll see how it looks in the morning after it's cured.

TOO big of a loop :-(

 Wet ramp: