There's a specific shot you have to make - I BELIEVE it's shooting up through the pop bumpers around the outer loop to Thing, and then up the ramp from the upper right flipper.

I could be misremembering though, it's admittedly been a while since I've played a TAF..!

It's classic Pat Lawlor. He loves a clean shot through the pop bumper maze. There's usually a reward for doing this. A slight mistake leads to being pushed around by the pop bumpers. Whirlwind has this. Funhouse has this. The Addams Family has this. Twilight Zone has this.

You know you have done this correctly when lamp 15 (Stars ="Lite Star") comes on. Shoot the left ramp and it will advance "T-H-I-N-G-*-*". Each star awards an additional 5,000,000 points when you collect "T-H-I-N-G" - if I recall correctly. Been a while since I've played my machine.

Yup, 5 million per star. Same shot through the pops gives you increase to bonus multiplier, if you started from the right inlane. Best thing to do is shoot the bear kick ramp, which brings you to the right inlane, flip through the pop bumpers, hit the left ramp, which will drop the ball down to the Thing flipper, where you can then shoot into the swamp.

You get the bonus multiplier, the Thing star, the points for the 4-way combo, and the 5x swamp payoff, all in the same sequence.

Stern Rush has a similar sequence, except if you do it right, you can just keep going around and round. Spinner, inner loop, left ramp, divert to right flipper, through the pops, left ramp, divert to left flipper, back to the spinner again. You have to work harder for the bonus X, because it takes more and more spins of the spinner to activate the award for bonus X at the inner loop, but otherwise it has a similar effect with the combos and setting up later payouts.

I wonder if Borg was consciously emulating Lawlor.

FWIW, while my calipers' jaws aren't long enough to get a precise measurement on my game (since it's not stripped the way yours is), your measurement of 4.3" is pretty close to my estimated distance. I mean, it would surprise me if your playfield had been off anyway, but the span between those screws on my game is way closer to the dimension on your playfield than on the ramp part you have.

You said this is a new part, so I'd just take it up with the manufacturer you got it from. They should be selling parts that fit, and if there's some technical reason their part is claimed to be manufactured correctly but still doesn't just drop right in the way you'd expect it to, the onus is on them to provide detailed instructions about how you're expected to install it. Of course, if they agree the part wasn't manufactured correctly or suffered some damage later, like heat damage when the ramp was under some strain that squashed it a bit, they should be replacing it with a non-broken part.

Yeah I think I’ll send them an email at least. Just wanted to make 100% sure it wasn’t my playfield first. Thanks for checking!

Have weldments, Thing motor, and used plastics for sale if anyone can use them.

Parts - For Sale

Various TAF weldments lot for sale Archived

Used, fair condition - “Selling lot of these used TAF weldments. Some will need repairs and other are fine but may need cleaned up. 100 OBO”

2022-10-19

Reading, PA

dmacy

100 (OBO)

Archived after: 30 days

Viewed: 291 times

Status: Didn't sell to Pinsider

My bear target snapped. Can you replace just the plastic piece?

20221109_185653 (resized).jpg

Yes. You will need to get the plastic and rivet it.

Hello people !! I'm inside!! from Argentina I will be with you!!

many things to improve .. but the road must be enjoyed!

greetings to all

Alex !!!

20221101_153159 (resized).jpg

Awesome, congratulations!!

It would be much easier to just replace the target. They are only about $7. Plus the rest of your target looks like it has seen better days.

Agreed. I was just answering the question.

He'll need the decal too. They don't come with them.

LTG : )

Yep guess I'll order a new set. Marco has just the target and the metal piece holding it looks like I could get that for 3 bucks and hopefully it just screws into place.

https://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/23-6534-9

Don't forget the foam!

https://www.pinballlife.com/williamsbally-oblong-stand-up-targets.html

And if you want to do what I do for customers, I use these:

https://www.pinballlife.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=BK3

Pretty easy. Just need to drill out the rivets and screw this together. It will be reinforced and anti sway:

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/another-taf-playfield-swap-and-overall-refresh-#post-6825603

Yes, they do. I have tried all of them and they are lousy.

I wanted to make a better copy of the original sounds. In a perfect world, I could run PinMAME on my computer and record them. But I am having issues with that. So I got a USB-C input for my iPad and recorded hardwired to the iPad Air. Now I have to spend hours editing.

Perhaps one of the more Interesting options is to use the available AI voice software to learn Raul Julia’s voice and recreate his lines for the pinball machine.

I see many hours of my life being spent on this project.

Is there anything wrong with original sound?
May be that is why there are no " good" files as mentioned . Why fix what ain't broke ?

I have pinsound and it's way better than the original sound for this game. But, the files could use some work.

The original sounds would be good if they were not so compressed and distorted. Williams had to do that with the (affordable) tech in the day due to the size of the EPROMs and the relatively crappy sound board they had in WPC89. Even the later DCS sound was not great. [An aside: The DE/Sega sound was superior and in stereo but likely far more expensive to make. Stern went back to a mono and lower quality sound when they took over Sega.]

If upgrading to better speakers, especially tweeters in WPC89, the sound, distortion and hash, from the original board is even more jarring. Therefore, the only reasonable speaker upgrade to make with the original WPC89 soundboard is the woofer / cabinet speaker - not the backbox speakers.

Just compare the sound and music in the movie vs. the pin and you get an idea of what is missing.

My initial impression is that the original sounds from the pin available for download sound like they were recorded with a microphone. I could be wrong - it could just be that the original sounds are terrible.

The Pinsound files available are held back by the quality of the original sounds used in those files. Even with some soundtrack music included, the effect is poor.

In contrast, I just did a Pinsound board in my LOTR and the work that the people did on the sound files are astounding. I also did Tommy and that has the added benefit of the songs coming from The Who vs. the Broadway play.

Has anyone any experience with AI generated voices?

Hmm maybe I should get pinsound for lotr. I was kinda disappointed after TAF.

The problem is always, low quality highly compressed, original files.

Thers only so much you can do with them as they are a bit noisy when put into an amplified system.

I have cleaned them up extensively on my Doctor Who, but they are nowhere near anything that could be done with todays recoring processes.

Selling my TAF Gold. Located near Pittsburgh.

https://pinside.com/pinball/market/classifieds/ad/146178

Installed my Leds in my Addams and they are incredible. Looks like a neon effect. A must have for this game.

Agree, they look phenomenal. I was playing it again last night, and I also really like the look of their ghosting. It’s a faint colored glow behind the dark bulb - looks super good!

Thanks guys! Glad I could help. Good fit for the theme.

Anyone have a source for the motors for the bookcase gearbox and thing gear box assemblies?

I don't need the whole assembly just the motor?

If I knew the RPMs and amps I could probably find one.

Thanks Hammer for the response ...
Funny , you guys are so above my tech level. Many things I did not realize influence the quality of sound.

yeah i need this also.

Check with pinball resource. They have alot of motors for different games. Pretty sure they have them.

How did you get a copy of the original sounds?

I have tried to get PinMAME to run and have been unsuccessful. If I had, I could have made a audio recording on my desktop and used that.

So, for TAF, I hooked up the original board through a speaker pad, to a D/A USB-C converter, into my iPad Air and recorded them using Garage Band. I have not reviewed them for quality, but I know they cannot be any better than the original ones.

The pinsound orchestrations are pretty good approximations of whats on the ROM, they were pulled off the game ROM.

Original recordings before compression and before encoding are probably impossible to get.

However you can strip the audio from a blu-ray film and get very good output.

The film has a lot of the call-outs you want.

I case this helps point you Pinsound guys in the right direction, I had to go down this rabbit hole with my MSF. Using Tantrum's guide helped me dump the sounds from the ROMs obtained from ipdb.org. Based on my experience and research, it appears no original sound set for the Pinsound boards are correct. I ended up making my own custom set for MSF using their original set as a baseline and adding some missing clips, and replacing some incorrect clips.

After having replaced my fried TAF sound board with a Pinsound, I'm running into the same challenges. I just haven't had the time or inclination to go down the rabbit hole again. The first time I played a game of TAF and hit multiball with the Pinsound board installed, I was immediately deflated upon hearing it wasn't done correctly.

Link to my Pinsound post with some details of my challenges and issues found (with no help):
https://www.pinsound-community.org/index.php?/topic/1507-how-can-i-recreate-a-stock-sound-package-for-pinsound/

Tantrum's guide used to help me with dumping the sounds and changing the Pinsound sound package:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/tantrums-guide-to-pinsound

Any idea how they were “pulled off the game ROM”?

By that, I mean how did they get the sounds encoded (as?) on the ROM to WAV files?

Thanks. I guess I will find out when I read your links.

I know what you mean about “the rabbit hole”. These types of projects can be time sucks.

I suggested to PinSound that they might want to set up a way to pay the people who do this work. The PinSound cards are useless without the sound files. Pin2DMD people who colorize the displays usually are able to have an underground system to receive some reimbursement. Rewarding people who create these sound files might encourage the work. Not sure how it would be affected by copyright vs. fair use issues, but I bet it would be a mess.

I have been wading through the posts of Tantrum's guide. All I have found so far about extracting the original ROMs is a dead link to Pinsound:
https://www.pinsound.org/sounds-rom-file-extraction

I see your post. "I've gotten as far as putting the sound ROMs through M1/BridgeM1 and I have all of the audio extracted. "

How did you do that? I don't know what you mean by the "M1/BridgeM1"?

It is not clear to me how the Pinsound card takes the original data sound triggers used by the WPC cards, but it appears as all of that is contained in the "psrec" file - which I assume Pinsound creates? Is that correct? Other than trying to decode the data line as it triggers the original sounds, I don't know of another way.

I have the Pinsound Studio Pro installed on my Mac using Windows 7 and VMWare Fusion. It appears stuck on the registration process - which I hope unlocks the editing and emulation capability because, as is, PinSound Studio Pro seems pretty limited.

Pinsound studio is not an editor.

Use audacity for this.

I don't recall ever finding anything of use on the Pinsound site in regards to audio extraction. Tantrums guide and that thread either gave me what I needed or pointed me in the right direction. Simplification is that you want to get both M1 (command-line utility) and BridgeM1 (frontend for M1), download the ROMs from IPDB.org, then run it through BridgeM1 to dump all the audio clips. If you do a Google search, you should easily be able to find downloads and guides out there. To get you started, try here:
https://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Number=377419

What exactly is your goal? Looking back it appears you just question the quality of the sound. So once you find some simple guides on BridgeM1 and can dump the sound, you can then compare the quality of them versus your game and see if you want to clean them up or do something else, maybe make your own sound package.

Pinsound Studio will be helpful in regards to finding the ID of the sound clip (i.e. mapping of specific sound clip to a certain event). So if you find a particular clip that is not correct or not as good of quality, you can just drop in a replacement sound file for that event. You could probably do this simply by extracting and looking through the folder structure of the sound package, but Pinsound Studio might make it easier for you.

Good luck.

Sound Rom Question:

I want to burn new sound roms. There are two rom chips on the sound board. U15 and U18 but there's only one sound rom for download on IPDB (Revision L-1 or P-2)

What is the difference between L-1 and P-2?

What game?

The P- is usually for prototype ROMS.

Imma go out on a limb and say TAF considering where this was posted.

The fact there's only one means that the other dosen't change. So, only burn the one, L-1, and plug it into the socket it's labeled for. (U15 or U18). The other chip, don't touch.

lol, doh!

Anyone watching Netflix series “Wednesday”

Yes! Great show! We watched the whole thing!

I’m up to episode 3 , so far so good , I will binge on it next week

Yeah, it’s a great show. We have just binged the first 5 episodes. Really enjoying it.

Slightly bend the diverter arm to slow the ball down a bit.

Yes, we have . We could not stop watching it. Show is fantastic. Hopefully they make a pinball machine!