I love creative toppers from 80s and 90s. This one from Strange Science (Bally, 1986) was one of the most memorable ones from a darkly lit arcade of a local amusement park.
Digging through old Youtube videos, I found this one of my first cat, Bastet. She grew up with pinball machines around her and never missed a chance to investigate an open machine or removed playfield.
I hit the local all you can eat pizza place with @quester, they have this every 10th meal for free pass we collect together.
Quester walks away after giving the pass and the cashier offers it to me saying "give this to your .... umm ... uh ... friend....", visibly confused. I assume it was their first meeting with a non-binary person.
The confusion was just so priceless. I can only assume the historians will say "They were very good roommates" about us....
Time to take a stab at this thing. The LM338k regulator has finally failed on this WhiteStar platform driver board. I wish there was a switching PSU replacement for it like there is for the LM323K used in WPC games.
The regulator is at the upper left corner with a huge heat sink. It runs quite hot!
@root42 From what I own, only one platform uses it and it has one of them. It produces 5v, 5A in these games and drives everything from the CPU to external devices that run on 5 volts.
Apollo 13 has a lot going on. One feature the players rarely get to see is the magnetic moon that captures balls. A lot of owners, yours truly included, have noticed no matter how special balls you use in the game, you'll end up with 13 fridge magnets very soon if the moon is in use. Here you can see it temporarily activated for cleaning. It has no major effect for gameplay, the balls just get returned to inlane instead of plungerlane. #pinball#apollo13#arcade
@davespice There are balls for this purpose, but this machine appears to use such a powerful magnet that even those will become magnetized in a lot shorter period than in other games.
I can only assume they used way too powerful magnet there, possibly to ensure they'd grab the ball that's screaming past the moon. This pinball platform can do PWM, but it only appeared in later revisions so this one will always drive the magnet at full blast.
What appears to be an impossible trick is one of the coolest practical effects in pinball. A huge magnet is driven along a reversible screw. It's powerful enough to move the ball through the playfield. #pinball#90spinball#tech#magnet
Bram Stoker's Dracula's "magical" levitating ball never gets old for me! Over 30 since this game's release, it still blows new players' minds. #pinball#90spinball#magnet#arcade
Back in the days the manufacturers were throwing a lot of shit at the wall, seeing what sticks. Some ideas we weird, some were wacky, some we just accept as one of those "but that's how pinball has always been!". Here's Chicago Coin's Big Flipper and its "Jumbo flippers". They're about twice as large as normal flipper you know today. Technically they were moved from the middle, not from the shaft like normal flippers. And yes, these were definitely in the that's weird category. #pinball#arcade
The linkage between the eyelids and their servo was surprisingly challenging to make, but now all that remains is the part that connects to the servo itself. #pinrepair
Time to raise the playfield and take a look. My initial reaction is amusement - I have never seen a low mileage EM game like this. After probing around, I have a hunch that this thing might fire up with very minimal work. #pinball#empinball#pinrepair#arcade