Pinball Origins

Months prior to getting these machines me and my father had started to talk about pinball, it all started with the quote "Round and round we go", my father used to randomly quote that throughout my childhood, never explained what it was from or anything, I don't think he thought about that too much, I didn't think too much of it until that moment he said it not so long ago, I finally asked him "what movie is that from?" assuming its from a movie or even a TV show, he replied "that is a quote from a pinball machine I used to play at the "Galaxy arcade" called the Cyclone, it said that when you spin the mystery wheel on the backboard". After talking about the features and game play for awhile, we downloaded the future pinball version of it and played it for a few games before deciding ultimately that we wanted to buy a "collector quality" Cyclone, that was going to be our only machine at that time, however, a week later we visited a friend of my father and while we were talking in his barn I noticed a old pinball machine tucked away by a wall, I asked if I could play it, he told us it hadn't worked in 10 years, we asked if he would consider selling it and that's where I bought my first pinball machine, a Bally Mata Hari, for $150, once I got it home I looked it over intently, I then went and bought a manual for it online and while I did I had the thought to surf craigslist for some machines, I found an ad posted only 20 minutes ago for a Data East Time Machine, it was described as not working for 6-7 years (which was false, as it had chips dated to 2011 on the labels) and didn't do anything but turn on, we went and looked at it and were pleased, this machine was in such great shape, if it was on location it wasn't there for very long at all, we quickly loaded it in our truck for the price of $700 and set it up in the garage next to the Mata Hari, bought a manual, and while we waited, looked over the machines to fix them, the Mata Hari had power board problems, some power transistors had blown and needed to be replaced, as well as a small transistor on the CPU board, that machine was working within a few days, the time machine took a little longer, someone "tried" to put a new display on the display board but didn't clip any of the leads, shorting out the display and probably other things on the board, ultimately I just bought a rottendog LED display board and replaced the original, the power transistor that drives the laser kicker coil and the coil itself also needed to be replaced, after replacing everything and powering up the machine, we got a ton of gibberish on the displays, we messed with this for another 4 days before we figured out the cause, the cause being the previous owners plugged in two ribbon cables backwards, once we flipped them around the machine turned on and played just fine, after repairing these machines I craved more, and bought more, once I had 10 machines all at once in my lair, all of which me and my father had fixed one way or another, eventually we got our Cyclone, we still enjoy it, but find ourselves playing our Fish Tales (which we got just 2 days after Cyclone) more, they are even right next to each other, and now I have an order in for a MMRLE..... it could not have been a more perfect time to get into the hobby for me, months after discovering MM and favoring it above the rest I had the chance to get, basically, a NIB MM for 8k, of course I took it! I am very happy to be an active part of the pinball community and hope to get even more titles in the future, I also hope to possibly make a few friends here, I figured this to be the place for "pinheads" like myself, after thinking about it I finally gave into making this account, and now here I am!