Richmond, VA
Quoted from baldtwit:1] after the first few machines, why does the shutter not close when shooting the first ball if you reset the game with a ball in the runway?
Free ball otherwise! Gonna have to test that on pre-Palm Springs machines...
Quoted from baldtwit:2] in the inside corners of the cabinets are metal braces...or are they?
I don't recall them having metal braces. There are metal leg plates to which the legs bolt. But those are for practical reasons and not ones of cheating. Games I've seen with metal plates around the leg area are pretty transparent about it - put it on the outside!
Quoted from Pinball_Muggle:3] how did the design of the search relay bank change...and why?
I'm gonna go out on a limb here... cause I don't really know. I paged through some of the older manuals and schematics, and one thing I didn't see was a resistor on the search relays. The oldest games don't have the search relays documented in the manual, so it's a bit hard to tell. My assumption is that they needed to add the resistor when they started filling up the search disc with winning combinations. Otherwise it would too quickly lose the hit before moving to the next wiper.
Now my curiosity is piqued.
Quoted from Pinball_Muggle:4] on some early machines, the replay counter and replay register used different step-up coils. Did they change that just to reduce the number of unique coils?
To expand on what PM said - using a different coil would have different electrical and mechanical properties. The older games had very large replay counter steppers. I am guessing it was a reliability move, but also would prevent a reduction of available current to grant additional replays. It takes more current to drive a larger coil, leaving less for the rest of the game. If something just barely bled away current, it could make it so that the unit was 'stepping', but there wasn't enough power for a full stroke. Wire under the glass? No idea.
Quoted from Pinball_Muggle:5] and cheating from the other side....2-in-blue or 3-in-blue for a fixed 300/600 payout didn't enable very often, yet some operators disabled it. Were they just cheapskates, or can those machines be played to a larger player advantage, and if so, how?
Vertical wins (espcially 4 in a row) can win in multiple colors if before 5th or after 5th lights. I think all of the blue section games with fixed payouts were also OK games, so I figure that played a part in it.
Quoted from Pinball_Muggle:6) there's a few things you can do to the angle of the game, pushing the head against a wall, and blowing cigarette ash into the top of the playfield ... anyone do other things?
I play too straight to know myself (and I've never seen a game on location), but I am also fascinated by player stories. One of my interviews talked about shoring up the front of the game, lessening the incline.
