@apzpins@mstdn.games
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

apzpins

@apzpins@mstdn.games

A pinball addict. I tend to enjoy working on pins as much as playing them! Owner of Hopeakuula Arcade, apzpins on Twitch and YouTube. Also: cats! 🇫🇮

This account is all about casual and tournament playing, streaming, restoring, repairing and owning pinball. Other casual nostalgia and retro stuff might also sneak in. Feel free to ask me stuff.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

apzpins, to random
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

People are often surprised that we keep on replacing balls in our pins. They do wear and lose that smooth, shiny surface. Here's a used and a fresh one side by side.

apzpins,
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

@root42 they have a hard chromium coating. When they're in this shape, it has worn so badly they can't be polished without exposing steel spots.

The playfield is the most expensive single part in the game and scratchy balls will begin to displace the wax and start sanding the clearcoat away. So it's an important thing to replace them periodically and inspect them for damage during playfield cleaning and rewaxing.

apzpins, to InitialD
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

Twilight Zone's power ball is so damn pretty as new! A worn out one on the right and a standard steel ball on the left.

For those who haven't played it, the game features this special, lighter than normal ceramic ball. It's noticeably faster than a steel ball.

root42, to random
@root42@chaos.social avatar

The Amiga 500 power supply is extremely simple. I don’t even see a regulator IC in the usual sense. I wonder if the small transistors actually are a 7812 variant…?
But those are still on the primary side…?
Also no way to adjust the output voltage. My PSU is running a bit high at 5.2V. Probably due to 230V input instead of 220V.

apzpins,
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

@root42 That cap on the lower right corner looks pretty ripe.

apzpins,
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

@root42 Haven't looked what an Amiga needs, but I'd guess a more modern PSU wouldn't probably hurt. At least the original C64 PSU is basically a time bomb, waiting to unleash horrors to the 5 volt line.

root42, to random
@root42@chaos.social avatar

Today was a productive day!

apzpins,
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

@root42 We also got solar panels for the arcade building like a month back. It's going to be interesting to see how they work when the weather starts heating up a bit. Right now we're peaking at 8 to 12 kW during midday, the system has 16 kWp.

Past week:

apzpins,
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

@root42 It's going to be interesting to see what the production is when we hit the time when the sun doesn't go down at all during summer time.

craiggrannell, to retrogaming
@craiggrannell@mastodon.social avatar

“You can load your own ROMs? That’s piracy!” now appears to be the default take on emulators and the App Store.

And, yes, it may well be. But places do also sell ROMs for old systems, or provide them as a digital backup/alternative when you purchase a cartridge or disk. It’s not 100% yo-ho-ho.

Also, the other growing consensus – Apple will only allow emulators where you can add games via IAP – makes no sense to me because that’s existed for YEARS in the App Store anyway.

apzpins,
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

@craiggrannell ROM images have always been a really weird topic. It gets even weirder, if they are for hardware that you own. For pinball, one company bought rights for Gottlieb IP, so they're the sole proprietor for the 80s and 90s games software, you can only legally get updates if you buy ROMs burned by them, even when before you could get the image, burn it yourself and stick that onto a game you own.

I don't personally feel that bad hoisting the Jolly Roger in this case.

apzpins,
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

@craiggrannell It's very hard to get laws like this right, as stuff evolves fast and the law makers often have overly simplified explanations to deal with. It doesn't help that copyright owner lobbyists are throwing in completely bogus stuff to just get rid of anything that scares them.

Around here it was technically illegal to rip music from a CD, but also to listen to it directly by reading it as raw. It however would've been okay to make the drive play the CD in audio mode.

sundogplanets, to random
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

Good morning from cute floof-land

Looking down on over a dozen super fluffy chicks all clustered together: black, yellow, orange, and stripey yellow/black. They are on clean straw, with an improvised waterer made out of old plastic containers.

apzpins,
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

@sundogplanets I've always wondered, do the color of the chicks reflect how they look as adults?

apzpins, to InitialD
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

Jaws launch party and many smaller tournaments tomorrow. Been a ride doing many larger overhauls for this one.

Four smaller clips of camera panning inside an arcade with over 30 pinball machines. The games are ordered by their era into 4 rows, featuring 80s, 90s, 00s and 10s-20s games. The place has colorful LED lighting, currently showing red-purple-cyan shading.

apzpins, to Weather
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

Here's Kouvola, Finland for you right now. How does the spring look like where you are?

View from an old industrial building's backyard. It's bleek and snowing.

apzpins,
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@vga256 We're barely hitting 0C during nicer days and it'll look like this all night. I'm ready for summer already, been one of those car battery buster winters here.

apzpins, to random
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

Ah, that moment when "sexy_ladies_4_u_13794" follows me and wants to send me a private message. I'm sure they're just itching to talk about pinball in private!

vga256, to retrocomputing
@vga256@dialup.cafe avatar

we usually post our retrocomputing successes here, but failures are usually more useful.

two years ago i bought two dead OLPC XO-1 (one laptop per child) machines from ebay.

as predicted, they were bricked due to a terrible firmware/clock bug in which, if the clock battery died, rendered the machine totally un-POST-able.

the solution is to connect to a serial pinout on the motherboard using a very tiny micro molex 4-pin female connector, and connect that to your PC (via a USB-to-TTL FT232BL in my case), and reset the clock.

With the right molex connector, this is a 5 minute job at most.

I decided that rather than ordering a specific $6 molex connector for this one job, that i'd rather just solder temporary bodge wires to the 0.1mm pins...

... which I failed to do, several times over a two year period, each time taking me 2 hours of retries due to the infinitely tiny space i was working in with a comparatively massive soldering iron tip...

in the end, not only did i manage to burn/melt the connector housing, the bodge wires were so brittle that they fell off once i connected them to the USB-TTL device. 😩

at 11am i yelled "oh fuck you!" at the board, walked over to my PC, and ordered a $6 pre-wired molex connector from aliexpress 😆

the sad part was that it wasn't even about the money. it was because I thought waiting 2 weeks for a connector in the mail was madness.

apzpins,
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

@vga256 Just as a general note, OLPC is the very epitome of a project, where the goal is extremely commendable, but the project execution is just curious to say the least, no matter what aspect you look at it.

apzpins,
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

@vga256 I didn't want to insult anyone, but my 20+ years in the field have taught me that there's a certain hubris when it comes to people coming up with technical solutions to problems, that are far deeper than "Children don't have computers that can be hand-cranked for power".

I donated to the project back in the days because I fully supported the idea. But reading about the execution afterwards made me do a hole in the desk with my forehead. In multiple places.

davespice, to retrocomputing
@davespice@mas.to avatar

Have been working on a Williams Bally Dirty Harry from 1995 over the past few months. It had a weak flipper on one side and a few ball poppers not working. A variety of issues, the flipper problem was sparking in the coil. So a new coil solved it. For the ball poppers one had a disconnected wire, resoldered it and done. The other needed new opto-switches (the TX LED had sheared off due to vibrations over the years). Everything in the back box is sound from what I can tell

A video of the Dirty Harry pinball machine being played, the play field glass has been removed

apzpins,
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

@davespice I've always loved Dirty Harry, it's a damn fun tournament game!

apzpins,
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

@davespice BK2K is another gem! It really pushed the envelope for what System 11 sound card can do for background music.

jeze, (edited ) to tech

Today in tech history:

March 29th, 1995: Netscape Communications Corporation goes public. Netscape Navigator was a dominant web browser in the early days of the internet. Its IPO was a landmark event, fueling the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.

apzpins,
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

@jeze I always loved the loading icon. It kept getting more and more elaborate as the version number increased. The one seen here was one of the latter versions.

apzpins, to tech
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

ESD is a nasty thing. I saw this board getting zapped when it was picked up. All the chips you see socketed here are the result of me going through the ESD's path, replacing chips one by one.

I had never taken a dive on a chip level of how this thing operates, so when I finally got a dead one, I finally got a reason to examine it more closely.

apzpins,
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

This is a WPC platform display board. Unlike other platforms, this does not have a dedicated CPU.

Instead the main CPU spoon feeds its RAM, which contains 16 128x32 pixel images on it. Page flipping happens locally, so it can do it real fast, unlike pushing the data on it, which noticeably slows down the game.

The board can not do different shades of pixels with hardware, but virtually every WPC game seems to have 4 shades. So how does that work, then?

Monsterlady, to random
@Monsterlady@masto.ai avatar

It's like the original Steam Deck hasn't even been out for long, and Valve has already made an OLED version. But why would I get that when I already blew $500+ on the original with 512GB?

It isn't perfect, but I still love it. I just hope it still updates.

apzpins,
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

@Monsterlady I wouldn't splurge on an OLED upgrade if that was the only thing changed.

The new model however appears to also be a spec bump, but if everything you do on it runs fine, there's no point in upgrading.

apzpins,
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

@Monsterlady I don't see a reason for them to retire the older models an time soon. After all, it's a consuming device and it's existence directly contributes to sales. It could even be sold at loss or at least with very thin marginal like traditional gaming consoles.

apzpins, to Electronics
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

I try to keep every board of every platform I have as a spare. If something breaks, I'll throw in the spare and repair the damaged one as spare for the next issue.

apzpins, to animals
@apzpins@mstdn.games avatar

Someone's enjoying being carried around!

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