Yeah. I've been enjoying the HD DMDs that are making the rounds now. So far I've played Fish Tales and Simpsons Pinball Party with them, but ColorDMD's doing more, including my own Dr Who. I've bitched about it before, but Portland really needs a place like TNT. There's more pins here than anywhere else in the world, and it makes me sad to see so many great pins maintained by folks who just repair on site at the bars. It's like having an auto mechanic come to your house to fix your car vs. taking it in. I'm writing this while playing an incredibly fucked Medieval Madness with no drawbridge censor. :(

Turtlrs in Timr was actually the first TMNT arcade I played, so I always thought it was the original for years, and"The Arcade Game" forNES was just a shitty knock off. After plying the original one at the arcade I'd say that it's better overall tho.

they still make this stuff?

Yeah. Stern's pretty much ruined it though; with the exception of the excellent Lord of the Rings (and pins prior to it like Sopranos) it's pretty much all been movie, TV or band tie-ins, which just aren't much fun. Lately all it's been is Walking Dead or Wrestlemania. Jersey Jack is the only other company making their own, but so far it's pretty much just a couple of Wizard of Oz machines I've seen about town. It's nothing like it used to be.

IMO one of Stern's best is Ripley's Believe it or Not! I think Stern's biggest failing is scrimping on the artwork, fucking Soprano's playfield looks like it was designed in Photoshop in about an hour, Elvis is even worse. Stern is also the remnants of what was once Sega pinball, which was once Data East, they still use some inferior parts that are holdovers from the Data East days.

I'm pretty sure I played Haunted House once, although I'm not actually a pinball player so they might just be blurring together. Wasn't one of the Addams Family games from the early 90s really similar?

I'm sure if TNT runs a route, they are doing plenty of on site repair. I would guess Haunted House is being restored specifically for home sale here. Pinball's are problematic machines, they are going to break down often, and need constant maintenance to keep from going tits up.

IZ I'm guessing your real problem is a lack of tech's who know or care enough to actually fix stuff on the route. Unless you are at the top of the heap you don't stand to make much money in that business, so people with a lot of know how tend to go into business for themselves. Where I am at now I'm the only guy under 45 who will even touch a pinball, they aren't seen as being very important, and they are complex, so your average shitheel is better off not touching it anyway!

OZ Haunted House and The Addam's family have a lot of thematic similarities, however AF didn't have a cool playfield under the playfield like that.

Yeah Ripley's is amazing. Pat Lawlor is one of the exceptions to the Stern rule, as he also did Addam's Family, which was Bally, and is also sort of the Shawshank Redemption of pinball: nobody knows why it's always considered the best. So it's not like other manufacturers weren't also doing tie-ins, but Stern's just incredibly good (bad) at churning out what are basically pallette swaps with a few new action figures inside and very little else affecting the gameply. While I'd like to see more Pinbots, Whodunnits, Haunted Houses and Medieval Madnesses, some of my favorite are still tie-ins like Elvira, No Fear and Dirty Harry.

That's cool, I didn't know that Stern and Data East had a connection. Those actually gave you a bonus for death saving. There are some places here with really well-shopped machines, like Ground Control and C-Bar, even The Know (not sure why I'm naming names but in case y'all are ever out this way) but those are more destinations for me. I'm going to a barcade to not talk to anybody and just kill an hour on my lunch break, vs. going to a regular bar, talk to people, and play a wonky-as-fuck Medieval Madness. 5 years ago it was so much better. There were two services in particular who could basically shop a pin on site to the point of brand new, but they moved up to Seattle. And what used to be a very serious pinball gang (crazyflipperfingers) hasn't even updated their website for 2 years.

Oh. I checked and they updated it like 2 days ago, initiating a new member. I used to be a member but shit happened and I started my own. But pinball seemed to be a lot bigger to a lot more people just 5 years ago, and a gang like CFF was as difficult to get into as the Freemasons. No idea what happened. Oh well..

I've never figured out death saving. I've hurt my wrist and hand plenty of times trying though!

I usually use my feet, but only on my own machines with the tilt censor disabled. It's a bit of a myth that it damages it as bad as people claim, since but it's not cool, especially when it's someone elses'. Like if it was my own car I wouldn't care about parking on the curb, but I wouldn't do it with yours'..

The best was when I was playing in a tournament and someone deathsaved his ball (it was allowed) and it also deathsaved mine because he hit it so hard at the same time.

Yeah, any time I've tried it I've been yelled at. So do you just donkey kick the front of the machine, or i guess you would probably have to knee the shit out of it, since you have to hold the flipper down?

So do people retrofit with LCD panels when the CRT's go now? I know from dealing with Atari ST that finding anything multisync compatible made after maybe 1992 is difficult to impossible, but I don't know much at all about arcade machines.

Yes, pretty much everything except for light gun games, which you have to buy aftermarket IR gun kits for if you take the tube out. It is sad to have to put lcd panels into classics, but it is just more reliable at this point. Lcds are also easier to repair for the most part.

I feel your pain as far as the classic computer thing goes. My commodore brand monitor died about a decade ago, had such a nice picture! Now I'm stuck using the RF adapter. :(

I have a Commodore and an Amiga that both work (and those Amigas are widely held to be the best commercial multisync monitor ever made), but I don't actually use them because for the Commodore I'm content with a little 7" LCD since I only use it for the MSSIAH sequencer, and I don't have an Amiga. I need to make an adapter for my Atari ST so I can use MaxYMiser, using it with a VGA adapter only lets me use high def monochrome mode, and the mid def color mode that you need for MaxYMiser is so blurry that you can't read it when you use the normal composite out. But wiring all of those little leads to all those little pins is one of my least favorite things.

If you live in driving distance of Rhode Island find me on the PoeTV facebook group and I will give you my Commodore monitor. Not going to ship it, though.

Also I think it's fairly easy to make an S-video adapter for the Commodore, you should look in to doing that.

You know a buddy of mine did actually give me one of those s-video cables now that I think of it.

I have an unrelated question for you OZ. When you're using your Mssiah cart do you ever have problems with it locking up? I have one that I've used on 2 different c64's (one a breadbox, one a c64c), and any time I'd try and put together a phrase that was as longer than a few measures the thing would lock up, the first time this happened it took out my old breadbox c64!

The most fun I've had with the Mssiah is the sampler thing, but I haven't really figured out how to import samples from my pc. It seemed to involve making a special cable that connects to the serial port.

Nope, I had a Prophet64 before that, too, and never a problem. MAybe your power supply is going, I'd get that checked out - apparently when they fail they have a tendency to take the commodore with them, but people have been making new ones by taking two appropriate modern switching power supplies (one for each of the different voltages the original supply provided) and wiring them up t a DIN connector, I'm going to do that myself pretty soon just to be on the safe side. There's a pretty decent amount of info about it that's easy to google, it really does look like a matter of getting two DC adapters with the right specs and doing a little soldering.

OH, I tried shorting the filter input to ground and it really does get rid of almost all the noise (except in the mssiah drummer module, that's always going to be noisy I guess, I forget why but there's a reason). I just took a female to female RCA coupler, soldered the tip and sleeve together on one end, and plugged it in to the filter input lead on the a/v cable that came with my 64c. Works great, and completely reversible obviously.

Now I just need to start using it again, it's been a while since I had it out regularly.

Yeah, the white brick power supplies are the only ones to be trusted as I understand it, but even those are getting to be 40 years old now. I always thought it was odd that my mssiah cart would lock up like that, my work around has just been keeping the phrases separate instead of combining them into one long one. I haven't played with mine in a long while, mostly I find using a joystick for an input to be tedious, I tried using my mouse, but that had some messed up problems as well.

One other really nice thing about that cart is that you can plug it into any commie and get a lowdown on what revision sid chip it has along with some other info.


Here is a fun commodore fuck up story, I once bought a cable off of ebay which was advertised as being a video cable for the commodore. I used it, and it worked only the output was black and white. I borrowed some cables from a friend and it also would only output in black and white. It turns out the cable I got was actually for a Sega Master System(it used the same 7 pin din connector), and something about how it was wired blew up something, which disabled color output on this c64. Luckily I have a friend who is a bigger commodork than me, and he traded me a good working C64c, and was eventually able to repair the one he got from me.

Huh, I've heard over and over that the white brick power supplies are some of the least reliable, shoddiest power supplies ever made and even if it still worksit's in your best interest to make a new one rather than recapping the old one, because when they fail they usually end up sending a big AC spike into the computer and ruining it.

The only counterargument I know of is that the random number generator is apparently seeded from line noise taken from the power supply (line noise that a decent supply would have filtered out) so theoretically changing the supply could affect the random number generator and possibly the sound of the noise channel on the SID, but I've never heard of anyone actually noticing that, only people speculating about it.

Well, I've not really done much research on it, and might have just taken a friend at his word on the white psu. Another possibility is that the other c64 psu's were just such shite that the white ones look good by comparison? I know I've had bad luck with the black plastic shell psu's.

BTW did you do the mod where you add a second sid chip, to double the voices or whatever? I haven't personally, but I do have a mod kit a friend made up for me, that basically replaces several caps in the audio circuit, I haven't installed it, (along with the jiffydos chips he gave me) but I guess it improves the sound quality or something.

NEVER! I will forever spend my laundry money on pinball and convince myself that these skills will some day get me laid, crusty clothes and all!