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:

cardboard --> METAL!!!!

take two steps forward, two steps back.. opposites attract, something with a dancing cartoon cat?  The 90's were blurr.

Anyway, so sorry for the delay in the project.  So I've been hemming and hawing, go forward and just deal with crappy shots?  Something changed my mind, a gottlieb freddy - nightmare on elm street.  It has REALLY good flow, and a very simliar setup to my project in that there's a flipper in the middle right, and a captive ball in the upper right.  The only exception is that they put it all the way against the right side which makes for a nice sort of floating ball after it hits the captive ball and transfers the energy.  This makes it much easier to hit the ball where you need to without having to cradle it.  It also means being able to hit the captive ball easily with the left flipper, giving it another shot to aim for (so it's not such a heavy right flipper game).

So there's flow, and then there's my mantra of (cardboard just isn't representative like metal is)

 
So I've taken the top playfield off again to concentrate on the main playfield.  I've discovered whacking the back left wall has caused a crack and seperated it from the rest of the backing.  I may have to nix the wall altogether and just extend the posts and rubber, then add some sort of wall behind that.  I've also decided rather than making the left orbit not flat, but rather a ramp that brings the ball up on top of the organ captive ball ramp, and dumping the ball into the loop-da-loop shot (unless you soft plunge, then it'll end up in a cluster of pop bumpers).  Making the left loop orbit shot higher up on the playfield has opened up more space on the left more shots too!

 

The loop-da-loop ramp is getting better, but it still needs some work (and a longer side wall).

 

Back from VFW pinball

Had an awesome weekend.  Above and beyond the 9 hours me and my wife spent at Clay's (which was amazing), we also visited Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical museum, and an arcade called "the arcade".  Clay's was simply amazing, and I did shake his hand and thank him for everything he's done.  Ok, so he's got 200 pinballs, and when I say that I mean all 200 working.  Everything from early woodrails, to solid state, to modern DMD.  Rare titles, common titles.  He's got 2 bowlers, a shooting gallery EM, a pitch and bat.  Williams, gottlieb, Stern, data east, zaccaria, a couple oddball spanish pins.  Even when pins went down, he had a staff of well over a dozen techs jumping on issues to keep them running.  Because of the limited ticket sales, it kept the crowd to a minimum.  Marvin's had absolutely horribly taken care of pins, and I posted a message on pinside to Mipinball to let them know.  I was immediately tagged as a troll, but it soon turned back my way when another local admitted the pins were getting pretty bad, and the router admitted he needed to get in there after I posted photos of how bad they were.  "the arcade" was pretty neat, reminded me a lot of "Flynn's arcade" in tron.  Lower level, and then a balcony with more games instead of an office, and lots of ceiling fans.  The only thing missing was some good music playing and some neon.

So what did I learn from all of this?  Well actually 2 things:
1. Sometimes pinball is about slight of hand (magic if you will).  Being that there were many titles with lower playfields, I really thought about my design.  Now since I haven't actually looked underneath the playfield of any pinball title with a lower level, I can't be sure how it works.  Though I'm pretty sure on old gottliebs like haunted house and black hole they really did drop the ball from the upper playfield to the lower one, then sent it back up via a VUK.  What I'm getting at is that I'm thinking I don't really need to do this (since I have one ball).  I mean I'm not dealing with silver and white powerballs like twilight zone, why would I bother transferring the ball and deal with hangups, and spend the time on building subway systems?  So what I'm going to do is create the illusion that the ball went from the ball trough down to the lower level, then back up to the trough.  When the ball drains, the switch will let the system know it drained, and it will activate a VUK scoop in the lower playfield to pop the ball waiting down there into play.  When it drains, it sits in the VUK (activating the next switch to tell the trough solenoid to pop the ball sitting in the trough into the shooter lane).  From a player's perspective, they have no idea what's going on under the curtain.  From my perspective, I keep things simple.
2. My shooter lane isn't consistent, but it can be.  I played a few titles with a similar shooter lane as mine.  Some worked 1/4 of the time, like 4 million BC:
http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=935

Now maybe this was meant to work, but the shooter lane spring wasn't as strong as it's supposed to be?  So then I played a Williams early solid state (can't remember the title, but it was around the time of Flash with a similar layout).  Much like flash, it was as if the ball was told where to go because hard or light shots, the ball always wanted to follow the path it was supposed to

In order to make my layout flow well, this is the last thing I really have to improve, so I'm going to take a cue from williams and try to get my walls closer to this layout to ensure the ball travels around the orbit.

I started working on a cardboard boat for the lower playfield to sort of lay things out but it's too early to post photos just yet.  I might post a video later this week.

Good layout update - 5.8.15

Beyond getting my loop-da-loop ramp working decently, I had to redo the left side and move the incoming VUK entrance to the right.  I still think the wall needs some work (perhaps open up the VUK on the back too) so you have a better chance of hitting it.  I also had to deal with killing any dead zones early (equivalent of having plastics) so that the ball won't get stuck somewhere.  So far the ball hasn't gotten stuck any where (at least nothing I couldn't lightly shake the machine to get loose) which isn't bad for cardboard walls.
















































Here's a video showing the latest gameplay:

what a productive day!

Ok, so it all started with getting a good loop-da-loop ramp made.  I shrunk the diameter from 5" down to 4" (I may not be able to fit the violin neck through anymore).  I still built it from cardboard, but this time I just used thin manilla folder cardboard (easier to form and curve).  But because it's flimsy, I ended up stiffening it by adding ribbing.  Ribbing on the sides, ribbing down the middle, support walls (closing off dead areas).  It works, FINALLY it works (most of the time).  Out with the old, in with the new:

I was so excited that I  rebuilt the VUK, but now have the entrance hole on the right side instead of the back (going from the back at a weird left angle was just too hard to shoot for, especially with a loop right just behind it).  I just continued to fix other walls, and then started really shooting for everything, and I stumbled upon a pretty nice flow (with multiple options for getting to the upper playfield).  Plunging will either go into the orbit shot, or a soft plunge will hit a bank of targets on the left.  You can bounce of the back wall separation (pops to go behind there) to get to the VUK from the lower right flipper, you can shoot directly through the loop-da-loop ramp from the middle right flipper into the VUK, or choose to go up the loop-da-loop ramp for a 2-shot comb.  The middle right flipper will also still shoot up the piano captive ball ramp.  There's also a shot from the lower right flipper into a left side lane target.  The lower left flipper still goes into the spinning record (not shown yet), and if you shoot for the loop-da-loop, you get a neat effect where the ball goes halfway up and pops back onto the playfield (sometimes causing a left outlane drain, that'll teach you to shoot the loop ramp wrong!)  I'm going to get a balcony wall installed on the right side of the upper playfield, clean up a few more walls, and I should be able to shoot a new video showing the current gameplay.