Road Show continues today into a full integration test.

Here's Ted, being controlled by the real game in coil test mode.

A curious "feature" was discovered today that I had not observed before; these tiny coils are not driven with constant current, but some kind of a software-controlled attempt at PWM at a very low cycle. I'll have to detect this in software and compensate.

Other than that the prototype PCB will probably go into design with #KiCad as the mechanical side is starting to look good. Final versions of the eyes and eyelids will also go into production and I'll have to get color-matched paints. Curiously, Red and Ted both have different skin tones.

Whew, the end of seven Tuesdays in a row helping my dear bride run #pinball tournaments. There's just helping her run a tournament this Saturday and we can just enjoy Pinball At The Zoo.

First trial run when all the components are in place. The program listens to the four inputs the pin operates the real heads with and simulates centering the eyes and behavior of the eyelids with their latch+release mechanism.

To-do: automatic eye blinking that's better what the pin can do and the small eye movement when the eyes are idle. Probably adjustment for the eye movement speed too, right now it goes as fast as the servos can do.

Road Show's (and Funhouse's) original head mechanism is an interesting beast. Here's a fully intact spare unit I have.

The eyelids have 3 positions; I call them "surprised", "bored" and "closed".

The game starts with closed state. To get the eyes open, the eyelid raise solenoid pulls. The eyelids stay in the surprised position for as long as the coil is energized, then drop onto a latch that keeps them in bored state. Subsequent eyelid raise solenoid pulls toggles between surprised and bored state.

Eyelid close solenoid trips the latch and the eyelids are pulled to closed state by a spring.

This design enables the game to be in the most usual states (bored & closed) without frying the coils.

The eyes only move sideways and are centered by a spring. 2 solenoids pull them either side and they just move to their maximum sideways state with a loud snap.

The servo mod you might have seen me building uses the original control signals, but move the eyes and eyelids a bit more graciously.

Have you ever seen pins on a cruise ship? For as long as I remember, the huge cruise ships in the Nordic area used to have really good arcades onboard. Always the latest vids and pins and naturally a full selection of gambling machines.

A lot of people go, "wait, isn't it impossible to play with the ship rocking and stuff?" and the answer is no, the ships are so big and well stabilised the sea is really not an issue, but the games were still bolted onto the deck!

But with often rowdy audience, the games had some noticeable mods done to them. The coin door had a beefy steel plate with more reinforcements inside.

They also had a credit board they used on simpler games to set the game price. I guess they just had those in every game.

The playfield usually plastic upper trim was now stainless steel and the bottom speaker had a protector on it too.

They had a keyed power switch so they could be turned off if the ship docked somewhere the operator couldn't legally do business in.

Printed myself a 68xx #reference guide and put it in a binder. It'll be nice having a paper reference while I'm working on the Time Machine #Pinball #disassembly effort.

I've really been enjoying having a color #printer of my very own, and I'm especially happy about the fact that I haven't even put a visible dent in the ink tank fill indicators from the first fillup. The #EcoTank was pricey, but not having to be skimpy on ink usage is worth it.

Now that Road Show's head mod appears to be mechanically ready for testing, I'm turning my attention into the electronics side. This mod is Arduino driven, but it won't just turn the eyes randomly, we take cues from the game what we're supposed to do.

The game controls the eyes with 4 coils; 2 for eye direction and 2 for eyelids. We tap into the control of those coils to extract what the machine wants and when nothing's going on, we can make some subtle eye movement to make the characters look more alive. Like they needed any extra creepiness.

This is the very first attempt of reading the wanted state, we monitor the transistor controls with Arduino's GPIO. There's a lot to be done yet, but at least I got all 4 coil controls out of the game.

Next I need to write the code to do the eye control and simulating the eyelid positions.

Here's the first test run of both servos at the same time, with the eyelid servo emulating the 3 positions the original mechanism can do.

Well, since I was last working on my Time Machine #Pinball reverse engineering project, #Ghidra updates have blown away whatever I did to install mc6800 processor support, and of course I didn't document what I did. Time to pick up the pieces so I can actually get into the meat of the project.

Ideally this time I'll set it up so it isn't overridden when the #flatpak is updated.

Williams' Pinball 2000 platform (1998-1999) is a curious beast. Unlike virtually anything else, its playfield is intended to be easily separated from the cabinet. The original design idea was that you could have a spare playfield, which you repair and clean at the privacy of your company's service depot, then load the clean playfields into a van and swap them out on location. I recall the sales pitch was that you can completely replace the playfield under 5 minutes.

The cabinets were supposed to have generic art, so you could not just swap the playfield for a similar one, you could put another game's playfield in and then just reflash the software and change the backglass to reflect the game change. This'd save from moving the cabinets around needlessly.

Here's how it looks when the playfield is put back into the game, it was out for repairs when the lock diverter's rivets failed. It also got cleaned.

Made a minor makefile tweak to ignore an error, and now I can build #PinMAME for my #linux machines. This should allow me to test the changes I make to my Time Machine ROM without having to burn EPROMS every time.

Might take a detour and build distribution packages, but time would be better spent implementing code so I can shoot shots without manually "playing" the whole switch matrix.

Another fun table - Jokerz

So here's the issue with RFM: This is the diverter that either lets the ball pass the center shot or redirects it to the lock. I made note of the metallic sound it started to make and investigated earlier, noting the diverter was dragging onto the playfield. Fortunately there was a sheet of mylar there.

Drilling out the old ones and making new ones took just minutes. Getting the damn thing out of the machine took like an hour, thanks to some very strategically placed stuff around its mechanism under the playfield.

Revenge from Mars has to come apart. The ball lock diverter's rivets failed and the diverter won't come out without removing the first part of right ramp and the area that catches the ball after the jump ramp.

Edit: it's also going to get a good wash while I'm at it!

Noticed Full Tilt! Pinball on GOG Dreamlist at 181 votes. Deserves to be preserved, includes Space Cadet (from the Windows demo) as well as two other tables. Originally made by Cinematronics, LLC and published by Maxis (owned by EA now).

https://www.gog.com/dreamlist/game/full-tilt-pinball-1995

So what's different about this modded L-6? It's no longer linear! Instead of having to play the same modes over and over again in east-to-west order, there's now a setting to make them completely random. There's also a setting of how many modes have to be completed to reach the wizard mode.

For those wondering, this is the Soren ROM from Pinside. I made a note of it back in the days but now that I wanted to try it out, all traces of it had disappeared from the net, save some broken links. Fortunately I found someone who had it and could make me this ROM dump.

Had a charity #pinball tournament tonight in honor of a league member who died a few weeks back and my dear bride won first place!

Also people donated over a thousand dollars and with someone making a matching donation this is a hecking crazy amount to be donating to his family's request of donation.

This is what's been missing from your life. #pinball #arcade #bluetooth