Busy weekend

After a long long time I dedicated almost a whole weekend to the Whitewater again. It all started with my friend finally getting the DMD controller back in order. It's been out since these events. It's been all my fault really. I am almost ashamed to tell, but I put the wrong transistor on the Q6 position. I gotta be more careful the next time.

Anyway, here's the result (taken with the phone):


The working display gave me a true rush, so spent almost entire weekend working on the machine. I did the following.

First, I cleaned, repaired and reinstalled the Disaster drop ramp. I also installed the ramp protector and new lock target in front of it. I could not find the originals, but the green ones from TZ look much better than the orange ones.


Then, I replaced the Hot Foot targets with the new ones, both yellow.
Before:


After:


Then I disassembled the entire upper playfield, cleaned it thoroughly, fixed what was needed and re fitted it to the machine


I know Bigfoots are not supposed to be very neat animals, but mine is. He's ready for a hot date with the Bigfoot lady now.




I also cleaned and re fitted the Spine chiller ramp and installed a protector for it also.
Before cleaning:


...and after cleaning


Lock targets before


and after, with protectors


and this is where I stand at the moment.


I am determined, that I'll get it in the playing condition next weekend. I just hope I'll find the time to go home.

I will report.

Star trek on it's knees

I had an interesting episode with my Star trek the other week.

I was playing a game, when suddenly it started to behave a bit strange. It was popping the balls out during a regular gameplay, it lost the track of number of balls in play an was being all weird in general. A couple of minutes later a coworker came into room and started complaining about something burning. By that time I was already done with my (weird) game and i noticed that the machine was unable to put the balls into proper places. I also smelled something funny so i turned the machine off quickly. I took the backglass down and to my surprise, it was full of smoke!

After panicking a bit I pulled myself together and dug into the problem. It turned out that one of the diverter coils underneath the playfield simply melted.





What followed in the next couple of days was a classic procedure of:

• traveling home
  
• picking up the needed tools
• finding the replacement coil
• forgetting to pick up some fuses (F103 got burned when the coil failed)
  
• looking for a place to buy the proper fuses in Ljubljana
• etc....
  

Anyway, today I was ready to test the thing and it was also over in a second. The moment I turned on the machine the new coil fired and the next second the F103 fuse failed again.
I am now in the process of investigating, what could be wrong. Pinrepair has a whole paragraph dedicated to this exact problem with the Star trek exclusively, thus I have more than enough info on my hand. At a first glance it seems that some problems with the wiring took down some transistor on the auxiliary driver board, but I haven't found the time to check one or the other yet. I will report on the progress.

Home for the hollidays

Indeed, I had an opportunity to spent an entire week near to my Whitewater. I wasn't dealing with it for the whole time, but I definitely made same progress. What I did was the following:

• Finished the cleaning of the upper part of bottom playfield
• Replace the rubbers with the new ones
• Replaced all the broken flashers
  
• Cleaned all the bottom pathways and places where the ball is moving underneath the playfield
• Cleaned all the lamps and replaced the broken ones.
  
• Cleaned the lamp PCB s.
• Cleaned the entire bottom of the lower playfield
• Fixed the broken bounce back target
  
• Started fixing the disaster drop ramp
• Even took some before and after pics. Here they are:

#1



#2



#3



#4



This concludes at least a couple of chapters of the cleaning story. I wasn't naming the blogs properly, but I'll try to sum it up here:

Chapter one - stripping down the playfield
Chapter two - cleaning the upper part of the lower playfield
Chapter three - cleaning the bottom part of the lower playfield (here you are)
Chapter four - cleaning the upper playfield (not yet started)
Chapter five - cleaning and re fitting the ramps (not yet started)
Chapter six - cleaning the cabinet (not yet started)
Chapter seven - I bet something will show up (not yet started)

This is how I plan the things will take place, but we'll see what the time brings.

Oh, and happy new year to all.

With a little help from my friends

It's been a busy November. So busy, that I don't think I played a single game of pinball in the previous month.

But finally, this weekend I found some time to get back to my White water. A couple a friends jumped in and together we finished the first part of cleaning. We cleaned bottom playfield and all the basic parts that I left on the machine. Here's how the action looked like:


And a couple of hours later, the result was playfield, all clean and shiny. Here are some pictures:













This concludes the first chapter of the celaning story. I will continue with the ramps, and all the bits that I will be putting back to the machine. I hope that I will be able to find some time to continue before the end of the year, but it looks pretty grim for now.

Cleaning, chapter one - stripping down the playfield

Finally, I got to the job I managed to postpone for months. Although the display still isn't working, I decided that it's time to get my hands dirty and begin with hideous task of cleaning the Whitewaters playfield. And boy did I get my hands dirty. It seems that this one is even dirtier then the Star Trek was.
Here are some pics that I took, so that I'll be able to put the thing back together.

Filthy upper playfield


Filthy stripped bottom playfield


Filthy right side


Filth


Filthy ramps


More filthy ramps


Removed filthy upper playfield


Filthy whirlpool lamps


Filth


More filth


Even more filth


Filthy secret passage


Filthy removed parts


Entire playfield, filthy

R.I.P. Pinball ?

On this very day, exactly 10 years ago, Williams abruptly terminated it's pinball division. As it was the only remaining mayor player in the pinball business at the time, this move actually meant that over 90 percent of pinball market suddenly ceased to exist.


Many people declared this day as "The day that pinball died?"

Do I agree with them?
Unfortunately I must say that I do.

Although that new machines still get made by STERN, with every new pinball announced I keep asking myself: "Where's the progress?". Every new machine could as well be built in 1995 and no one could tell a difference. We all know what happened with the technology in the last 10 years an nothing of that reflects in any of the new pinball machines. Here's some stuff that could be well used in new pinball machines, but it's not:

• LCD displays; the only step forward here in the last 20 years was pinball 2000 platform. Instead of hi res graphics that could work as both, backglass and display , there is a 128x32 4 color dmd.
  Tiny, gsm like displays could even be integrated into playfield itself, instead of archaic lamps.
  
• Connectivity; new machines could easily be connected to the internet where global scoreboards could be published.
  Machines could notify operators about earnings or problems with machine via gsm or email.
  Operators could mark machines with location data, that would be published online, so the players could easily found the desired machines.
  Entire online community could be built around machines, where players could communicate with operators or each others.
  
• Lasers; just remember with happened to the pc mice in a last couple of years. I'm sure laser motion sensors would be quite useful in pinballs
• Moore's law; Imagine the cpu/memory capacity could be put in machines these days. What sort of games or self diagnostic tools could be built with that.
• New materials; I'm not sure about this one, but i bet, that there's tons of new stuff that could be used
  

So. I guess Now I just have to wait until some STERN guy stumbles upon this blog and convince his boss to invest into Pinball 3000.

Until then I'll just play with with we got, although it's build on 15 years old technology.

The DMD, Part V

I tested the DMD board today. It was over in i second. I turned the machine on and the R5 resistor exploded.

I'm running seriously low on ideas now.