Another update from a guy that never sleeps, job well done.

Cool...will machines in the queue get v20? Kayte indicated last week they were assembling my playfield...Im expecting to receive final invoice first of next week.

Nice Altered Beast reference!

Awesome, thank you!

Nice, Ben! Is there some new lighting effects too? It seems different somehow.

Nice! Wow, you must have been working on Memorial Day to finish this up!

Thanks for adding this one in. Also, thanks for splitting up the multiball audio tracks!

Awesome to hear this news!

love that game!

Ben, this is just awesome. The Ball Save timer features for the right scoop and post-video mode will do a lot to help make the game more rewarding and easier to play. Excellent player-friendly additions!

download (1).jpg

Thanks for the update.

Thanks for the update.

Has there been any changes to ball trough logic since v18?

Great job there Ben.

You know, it still amazes me how much Ben continues to get done given how he is. If you've ever met Ben, you *KNOW* what I'm talking about. He personality is so ADD it's amazing he can focus on getting anything done.

But, whatever he's doing it's obviously working for him. More great stuff for a great game. I'm just waiting for my turn in the production line...

Jaz

When I was little, I got altered beast at the pawn shop, no case, only cartridge. So at MGC this year I found a case for a $1 and was going to get it. The table owner, said I'll give that to you if you can name each best you turn into....I FREAKING forgot the tiger.....

That's not true in the slightest. Over the course of several hours he is perfectly capable of focusing on making sure he orders another beer.

You know what? You're right. I didn't give him enough credit. He is the most focused when he's in the bar.

What kind of a-hole would disable that? LOL

Thank you for making the scores show up on the buttons...that was much needed. Need some more playtime on one of these...wish there was 2000 not 200.

It erased all mine.

It reset all my default coils, so BEFORE you update write down all your custom settings. If you haven't done custom settings you should, otherwise you could damage the playfield from too much strength. (My opinion).

Yep, here too. Sucks because I had them dialed in. I also had to adjust my volume down after updating because I was getting distortion(never did before the update).

And I can't imagine playing with the default coil settings... they are WAY too strong!

Please share your custom settings

I will once I go through the trouble of dialing them in - frankly I was irritated at myself for not writing them down before I updated so I left the shop and didn't go back.

So the best game ever is now the, uh, best game ever?

Thanks Ben for the update and also working over the Holiday! It's really appreciated by all.

I can't wait to get my AMH in several weeks... looking for to the update.

Giving the option to remove players who have not played a ball yet is a Heck of an idea!!

I see what you did there

It real is one of those ideas that you have to wonder why it was never done before. I like how Ben may not always see the problem but he often finds a better solution than everyone!

"Its not a bug, its a feature!"

Ben -
What's next if windows won't recognize the pinheck board? Wants a device driver?

I finally got windows to find the pinheck board, w/o needing a device manager driver update.
Took deleting the device 3 times, as windows identified it wrongly as "other". Try #4, windows finally recognized the board correctly as a serial port device type and assigned port=com7. The rest of the install went fine per the instructions on the BH/AMH webpage.

I'm liking v20, thank you. It seems now though, more than before, there are times when the spook again light flashes when it shouldn't. In one game, with no mode going on, for the entire ball the spook light would flash in some sort of sequence with the small circle inserts at the bottom for multiball, photoace, etc. After that game I couldn't replicate it, but did notice that the photo ace light didn't seem in the right sequence - and that happens more often.

A couple guesses on why I see the light more often than I think I should- should it be called at all during void ballSaveScoop() since it's supposed to be "silent"? What about during void allLamp() and void allLamp ()? T These are used a lot and by calling spookcheck it reverts to blinking the light.
(/warning, not a programmer.)

One very minor issue - during ball search, the pops actually score. Probably not worth stressing over though, IMO.

Ben,

Sorry to now bump three AMH threads (and then back to work, yay ), but were the strange features with the modes that I identified to Charlie addressed? At first I thought they were hardware, so I sent them there and he confirmed it was software.

A recap if you don't have it...

If you start Hospital mode (and there is another one I forget) where you have a locked ball, if you lose the ball, restart the mode, and then lose the ball again, upon the next ball being served, the game will immediately send a second ball into play after you plunge the first. It is not in multiball mode, and when one ball drains, the game will do the bonus and make the other ball drain.

Also, I suggested that you warn the player on a restart that if you don't make it, you drain your ball. I am cool with that working like that, but it would be nice to know when it's coming.

Finally on this one, I think (hope?) this is a bug, but if I start Hospital, don't complete it, time out the restart purposely (because I know I'm not good enough to do the six shots to start it), when I requalify it after hitting the shots, if I fail it, it acts now like the restart and forces the locked ball to be drained. To me, while I get what you're going for with the risk / reward of restarting the mode, I hope that this isn't your actual goal here, as if you kind of suck at hitting those six shots (as I do), there is no way to play defensively to maximize the chance you can pull it off.

A couple times I have had it where the minion targets lower and the game tells me to hit them, although I can't isolate what is triggering this. It hadn't happened to me in like a month, and then it happened yesterday. I know it said something like 'All Minion Now Worth Double for Rest of Ball' and I immediately started a mode after it (I think Theater Ghost?), and it lowered the minion bank and hits inside the target area stopped registering.

My game has software V.19 on it according to boot up.

Just for the record, I believe I fully understand what goatdan is saying, but this has never happened to me on my game (running v19). Thankfully.

Maybe Ben understands what you're saying above, but I'm genuinely confused (sorry) when you say "when I requalify it after hitting the shots, if I fail it . . ." If you "requalify after hitting the shots," that means you haven't failed the mode and you've got a multiball, right? Or if by "hitting the shots" you mean that you've relocked ball 1 and gotten ball 2, then I agree with the strategy that it should be harder the "second time around"--so to speak--just as it is with some of the other modes. Also, as to maximizing your chances of beating the Doctor Ghost, I suggest that once ball 1 is behind the door and with ball 2 in play, try calling the hellevator and starting that multiball if you can--then you can use that multiball to complete the Doctor Ghost. It takes a while to get good at combining the two but I think it's a great way to beat the Doc.

Anyway, just my thoughts in case they're helpful.

I remember someone else mentioning a problem with the ball logic related the hospital mode, but I still can't figure out exactly what is being said. I haven't noticed any issues and I'm confused about how you fail the hospital mode aside from draining your ball.

You might try upgrading first then seeing if you can replicate. v19 was never released to everyone so may it had its own issues.

I'll explain again, hopefully clearer. This week has been psycho. Hell, Rob Zombie was in town last night and I missed it, and I didn't even care because this week is so crazy. Anyway, that doesn't have anything to do with pinball, so anyway on topic...

If I qualify Doc and then shoot it, door closes and the mode starts and the game shoots in another ball. If you drain that ball, the game will kick out the ball from the saucer, flip the left flipper to warn you it's coming, and the game plays on. If after this occurs, if you shoot the ball back into the saucer behind the door quickly, it restarts the mode. Another ball is served, and everything is normal... but, if you drain that new ball that is in play while you are trying to start Doc multiball, the game will kick out the ball in the saucer and you will not be allowed to save it.

From what I understand, this is NOT a bug, it's a feature of Ben wanting to do a risk / reward for trying it again. I'm fine with that. My one suggestion is to make that risk / reward known by a DMD message or something, as it was quite shocking the first time it happened to me.

The bug comes in where after the kick out and drain occurs, the next ball (so long as the above didn't happen on your last ball) served when you plunge it into play, the game will immediately auto-plunge a second ball into play.

Charlie was able to replicate, so I would assume it needs some sort of update. If it wasn't referenced only because of V19 not being "public", that's fine, I just want to know that it was fixed.

The second error is that I, since I suck at starting Doc multi, took to the strategy of avoiding the restart of the Doc mode so that I could backhand the door and re-qualify it without it being a restart. I assumed that if you do that, I would still have the chance when I started it to lose the ball in play but then keep the ball that was in the saucer waiting to be freed. Unfortunately, the game acts like a restart, and auto-drains the ball that was behind the door. I assume that this isn't supposed to work that way, as I feel like it's rather unfair to force drain off a non-completed mode like that every time after the first. If that is the way it is meant to be, I just want to know, as then there is never a want to time-out the Doc restart.

Upon the second time starting it, the same double ball serve issue happens as after the restart if it wasn't ball three.

There is a second mode that does the same thing, maybe the Bar ghost, where it holds a ball and has the same sort of issues.

I agree, I've asked several times for clarification on trough issues and whether they've been fixed from v18 to v20 - I know there are more changes that have been made that didn't make the change log. Would be nice to know.

I wouldn't want to change it either. I also don't mind not having a message, but not important.

Thanks for the details goatdan. The restart isn't specifically tied to the doctor ghost. You only get one mode restart per player, per game. The restart is just a little more obvious for doctor and bar ghost. That's why after you use your restart, you aren't getting any more. I don't think it's so much about risk/reward as it is just a 2nd chance. Just like multiball restarts in other games, you can't keep restarting the multiball every time it ends. You only get one 2nd chance.

I haven't experienced the issues with 2 balls being kicked out after you drain. Can you elaborate on on when this is happening? I'd like to test this out. I think you are saying that when the last ball is being kicked out from behind the door (the one you can't save because your ball is over) and drains, your next ball will launch 2 balls into play...

Yes, that was me, after TPF, and I was summarily dismissed for my trouble. Whatever, I will not ever play Hospital mode on an AMH again until I get some non-tournament time with it because not it's clear I'm not the only one that found the behavior "weird" to say the least. I just didn't shoot hospital on purpose, and I had one fantastic game on it, and one tourney win game on it as a result.

My V20 observations/questions. (I started with V19)

1. Question - completing GLIR during a mode will not light photo hunt after mode ends. Need to complete GLIR while no mode is running to light photo hunt. By design?

2. Question - were coil strength tweaks made to this version? (I started with V19). A level of 8 (default) would not kick ball into shooter lane. Had to put it to 9 (max) to get it to make it into the lane. Also the default on the drain kicker (kicks it to trough) was too strong. It would hit the ball in the trough and bounce back to the drain repeatedly. Lowering the level to 4 seemed to do the trick.

3. Question - were magnet strength tweaks made? V19 captured it all the time when beating a minion ghost. V20 will only capture it half the time.

4. Observation/Issue - strange happenings with the end of ball bonus. Can't find a consistent way to replicate but have had the following 2 issues:
a) all bonuses show zero, even though a bonus should have been awarded (I did have 2 minion battles completed and should have had at least 2mil)
b) total bonus not displayed correctly. Bonus count for each bonus shows, but the total is not the total of all added together. For example, I had area progress at 100k, photos at 2m, ghosts at 3m, and total showed 3m. I can't say what was added to the actual score but the total was incorrect.

5. Observation/Issue - 3 bank target went up during a minion battle with 1 hit remaining. No other mode was started. I could not finish the mode and it was taunting the hell out of me to make 1 more hit. Had to start another mode and end it, then it came back to normal.

6. Observation/Issue - I have noticed the hellavator going up and down during game play. Not all the way up nor all the way down, just somewhat travels between the up and down positions but never gets to the full up or down positions. Kind of like it is taunting you to hit it and either your ball will bounce up over it or into it. It returns to normal after drain or a ball is hit into it.

Sorry to pile on but hope some of this helps. I will do some more testing, probably setting it to 5 balls and maybe taking some video so it can be shown as well. Might even try to go back to V19 to verify if these are new with V20. Enjoying the game a ton though.

You weren't 'dismissed', you were just frustrated that people didn't understand what you were talking about. Honestly, I personally never thought these rules were strange or confusing, so I thought the issue was something different. I even took the glass off and tried testing out what I *thought* you were saying in an effort to get on the same page.

I still don't understand what you are talking about, but I'm trying. There is no timer during the hospital mode that disables the flippers when it counts down. There is a timer running after you hit the shield, but this is just how much time you have to hit the door before the ghost looks back over. I can't find any way to fail the mode aside from draining the ball in play. I never see a time where the flippers just die and you lose both your ball in play and the ball locked behind the door... I'm really not even sure you and goatdan are talking about the same thing here.

I'm not even going into this again. It will completely derail this thread, and if I couldn't make my point clear the first time...what's changed now? Nothing.

Yeah, that was me mentioning it. The fail, lock again, but fail the second time, would put immediate ball save on at the shooter lane switch and put 2 balls in play. First ball to drain, drained both balls. Did it 4 times with the glass off - it was a bug in v19.

Fixed in v20.

Aaaahh, ok. That might explain it. I never had v19 as that was only available on machines shipped from Spooky with it installed. I went from v18 straight to v20.

I have noticed that sometimes when you start photo hunt. That the shot that is supposed to be hit does not light up. Doesn't happen all the time but I have seen.

I have also had the hellavator start going up and down for no reason during play.

I've had the same thing, running v 19. After I get the first photo it always corrects itself (i.e., the second shot and beyond strobe properly), but I've had the first shot simply not be strobing several times.

Good to know that it's a known bug, Ben. Thanks. Luckily it affects gameplay minimally and seems to be self-correcting once you find the shot.