Whirlwind Progress!

Woo-hoo! Our Whirlwind is not a complete piece of junk! I swapped the CPU boards with our [working] Police Force, then the ROMs, and finally the power supply and… viola!, a mostly-working Whirlwind! Auf Deutsch.
Next steps are probably to get English ROMs and repair the CPU and power supply boards (the main [...]

A Very Large Shipment

There’s really not any eloquent way to say this: we bought four pinball machines last week:

1990 Williams Whirlwind, 1980 Bally Flash Gordon, 1979 Williams Gorgar, and a 1979 Williams Time Warp (not shown).
I’m a little, oh, bashful about it because 1) I’m a newbie and adding 3 somewhat classic machines to our collection so quickly [...]

Rubber Ring Replacement

Jessica and I spent a few hours this weekend installing the new ramp protectors we bought from Cliffy. Well, really it should have taken about 10 minutes, but then we decided to replace a few rubber rings while we were at it. And clean the plastic. And, oh, that area’s pretty dirty! [...]

Tilt Exposé

Vince (and my Dad) both asked about the tilt sensor. Here ’tis:

Remarkably simple: when the free-moving bell/cone hits the ring, the game detects a tilt (it acts as a switch, completing the circuit). Its sensitivity (which seems to be set pretty liberally in this case) can be adjusted by moving the bell up and [...]

7,518,410

Woo-hooooo! A new #1 on our Police Force. The 4M jackpot helped a bit. Interestingly/dissapointingly, depending on how you look at it, I wasn’t even trying. This, after spending the weekend trying to hit the jackpot skill shot before Jessica’s brother Jeff came over, and after a week or two of [...]

Peksy Weasel

This morning I confirmed what I had been suspecting after a weekend of play: the weasel is acting up again. At 7am I had the top glass off and was fiddling with those drop targets. It’s as if the LM339 has gone bad already, but I find that hard to believe as I [...]

Weasel Work, Ramp Cleaning, etc.

My shipment from Pinball Life was waiting for me at the office, er, two weeks ago. We went in on that Saturday and picked it up, then jetted up to Fry’s to get a soldering gun. They ended up having a fairly nice little kit for $25, and then we managed to buy [...]

New New High Score!

This weekend I scored 7,311,??0 on our Police Force, taking 1st place on the scoreboard. (Woo-hoo!) Jessica and Jeff are still on it. Very exciting.
We put new rubber rings on the flippers. They seemed to be drastically improving my game at first, but then last night we played several games and [...]