When looking for a "Trashed Out Project Pin" you need to stay away from Pinside, Craigslist, and especially eBay ( for the most part ). Most of these sources are only going to have Players Versions available and they wont be the most economical financially. I currently have 29 Classic Ballys in my collection and all I buy is Trashed-Out Projects so that I can get them Cheap and Restore them myself. Purchasing a trashed out game is fairly easy if you look in the right places. I contact the "old school operators" that have warehouses of old trashed out games that are more than happy to get rid of the Project Junk that they have been sitting on for the past 25 years....You can get these games Cheap "IF" you look in the right places.... But Pinside, Craigslist, and eBay are Not the right places....

My Vector is in really good condition. There is very little wear on the playfield and the backglass is perfect. I'd like to see good videos of the integration before making a move.

However, I'd be all over that sound card in a second. Sell me a sound card. (Better yet, send me something for review and I'll do a video of it I have a half-dozen -35s I'd love to put it in. I have a Centaur II that will have to re-theme because it's missing a backglass, cabinet is damaged and the playfield is worn to the wood. If there are any boards that I can use for that re-theme, I'd be all over them.

Trust me I know, I learned to repair pinball machines from the the operators in this area and crawling around the warehouses for many years. But we have been depleted around here for a long time. The few that hold on think a trashed POS is worth gold. Garage finds are the few and far between ways to luck out but with cold Winters, damp Springs and the wildlife who want to live in them it is luck and word of mouth.

LOL, there is no Sound Card yet, the HotG project is what's driving the Development of the Sound Card....

I didn't know haley joel osment was a Foo Fighter. Second from left..

Yeah, there are No Warehouses like that around here either. I stopped looking Locally a long time ago. The Project Vector I bought for $150 I found in Connecticut and had to ship it into Phoenix....But worth it.

Or hanging Chodes. Although it would have to be a considerable chode to hang. Sorry, any opportunity to use the word "chode" I take. It is under-used and too funny not to use.

You should probably count those votes as NO then.

Led Zeppelin is the best band in the world, and a great theme for pinball.

But there is no way I can look at those inserts above the flippers every time I play:

HAMM
_____E__ODZ
______RG

I can't believe that mess is acceptable to anyone.

The sound card itself has a much bigger market than HotG. I'd focus on that.

But if you all are looking for pre-orders to kick the project into gear, I think that business model is getting pretty stressed.

There's no doubt if you make that sound card, it will sell tons.

I don't think you understand the true meaning of the word "Re-Theme".....Moving the inserts was Never a consideration for many reasons.

HotG is a Re-Theme NOT a Re-Design

That makes it even funnier. I'm in CT.

I wonder if there is something in the legal system where I can get extradition papers and get it brought back

Kewl, So your offering to "Fund the Development" of the Sound Card...Sweet, now we don't have to.....Please let us know when you are ready to release it.....

I think you may be over-estimating the value of that market. It would not be overly difficult to make a plug and play compatible card for a number of different era games that allow you to replace the stock sounds, but I thought the point was to keep it original in most of these older games, unless there is a game with hideous sound that could seriously benefit from a redo.

If there were a large market for that, I'm sure someone would have made this already. But in a lot of cases, you can just change the samples on the original ROMs, and it is way cheaper. I can only think of a handful of games that would benefit, and options already exist to cure them of the ugly.

How did you find this operator in another state if not via Pinside, Craigslist or eBay? Are there avenues to as yet untapped operator hoards I haven't heard about? Having cleared out a few operators in my time, there really aren't any left. At least, not in the numbers you'd need to find 100 Vectors.

This hobby is pretty dry on the barn finds these days.

Don't want to be "that guy" ... But a $150 pin plus $500 freight across the country is actually a $650 pin.

(Or whatever the freight cost ...)

rd.

I bet that's why they won't fix the crazy insert issue.

Then they would have 2 separate cut files; one for Vector and a separate corrected one for HOTG

That was "part" the "original plan", to CNC all the HotG Boards and then continue cutting some "25-30 extras" for a future run of Repro Vector Playfields, which was pretty much the original driving force behind doing HotG as a "straight Re-Theme" instead of a Re-Design. However, HotG took on a whole new life of its own with the addition of the New Display, New Sound Card, Etc. AND the Center Insert on Vector above the playfield window is Off-Center ( due to the artwork ) so that 1 Insert was moved 'slightly' to be more symmetrical with the new artwork ( the movement is within the parameters of Not having to make adjustments to the Wiring Harness ). Then, Mike contacted me, after the artwork was completed, and wanted me to change the Bally Style Arrow Inserts to a Newer Style due to uber-high costs involved with the purchase of the old arrow style inserts ( $2.50/Ea vrs $0.37/Ea ). At $2.50 ea. times 16 Inserts, times 150 playfields, the cost would have been $6,000 just for the Bally Style Inserts ( that does Not include all the other Inserts for the playfield ).....with the New Style Arrow Inserts at $0.37 ea the cost is $ 888.00 ( a Savings of $ 5,112.00 that is passed along to the Customer ). With the addition of the New Style Arrow Inserts doing an extended run of the CNC Wood Cutting became impossible without it costing us a shit ton of money, and for a title like Vector we figured we would only be able to sell a very short run of them, so it became cost prohibitive to do it.....

P.S. Shit-Ton is a Industry Term

yep, Without knowing all the Facts > You Are THAT GUY.......

I already had 2 other Pins sitting at a friends house in PA, and he met up with the seller at the Allentown Show and picked it for me for free and took it home. Then he palleted all 3 pins separately and I had NAVL Ship all 3 of them for 1 fee of $ 630 ( $ 210.00 / EA. )
So I'm really only into this pin for $ 360.00

NEVER Assume that you know the entire story.......

So this is a win-win. Vector lovers can get a new PF, vector haters and Zep fans can re-theme it. Nice to have options.

I keep getting confused with the game name and vector art in this thread cause I live in the world of illustration.

Then it's a $360 pin.

I wasn't even going to post, as I knew I'd get my head bitten off.

rd.

Principal_Richard_Vernon.jpg

I have been collecting Pins for 28 years now, in that time frame I have made a lot of connections/friends/sources for find my games...
When I started collecting Pins there was no such thing as Buying Pins on Pinside, Craigslist or eBay, we did it the Hard Way and actually had to Search things out via other channels, and it was a Long Draw-Out Process but alos made Collecting Fun....Nowadays "collecting" isn't really fun anymore as there is no longer such a thing as "the search"...You can simply be a keyboard commando in your underware and find a pin with little to no effort ( as compared to "the search" years ago ).....

Yes, Tons.....I also just picked up 2 other games from a buddy of mine in San Diego that bought out an old operator ( he bought 27 Pins and 14 Video games all in 1 purchase ).....

No, it's $150 Pin ( + Shipping )...Had I been "local" to the seller I would have paid the $150 price of the Pin.....

Ah, so, you need the buddy network to make this happen. That leaves out the newbies.

It can happen quickly through here. I've bought a number of pins and sold a number of them here as well, I've only owned games for 3 years. I've met a lot of good people. Good people help each other out. It just takes time to accumulate a network, and you have to start somewhere. But like Stu said, anyone that has been doing this for years knows ops and I'd venture to guess most retired ops aren't spending their time on the internet and pinside.

No, but Spending $6,000 just for the Bally Arrow Inserts IS a Big Deal (Bally Vector Playfield). And then we would still have to create new vector artwork for Vector. Creating a new Cut File for Vector is most likely about 40-50 Hours for Mike, and for a meesly 20-30 "extra" playfields for vector is just doesn't pay for itself for all that work.....Then there is the Added Costs of a New Set of Films ( $1,200 ) and the added costs of Screens, + an entirely New Run separate from HotG....it all adds up quickly folks......

a "few"?....Creating new vector artwork for Vector is a shit-ton more than a few....There's that industry word again, and what did you say it meant? Oh Yeah "NO"....

PPS sent us the List of Films for Playfields, Plastics, And Backglasses that were considered useable, Vector was not on the list.....

Wow, people are snarky around here. Why even make a post publicly if you are going to reel at anyone making alternate suggestions? Way to piss off potential customers.

I would love to change the samples on original ROMs. Please let me know how that can be done. I've got a ROM burner but I haven't found the details - and it's certainly a lot more involved than a simple plug-in board that read off an SD card. Your average pinball collector isn't going to burn his own roms.

A plug-and-play board would be a non-destructive mod to a game. I think a lot of people would find that appealing. I think just about any pinball owner has a game (or a more) where they could augment/improve/replace the existing sound and make it better. A plug-and-play board could also create a new secondary market of sound-file-swapping.

But, I guess I'm out of line deviating from the basic sales pitch of the thread? Sorry. I keep forgetting I'm on Pinside. Sometimes it's nice to have a cool conversation about "what ifs". I keep forgetting where I am and how that's frowned upon.

Don't most classic Bally games have like 36 sounds?

I remember that there are 5 lines, so a single or combo of ABCD or E lines triggers a sound.

Why not just demux those 5 lines into a 36 switches and use a pair of the Sparkfun MP3 triggers? They each have 18 switched inputs - seems like a perfect solution.

And then, they started sending two 4 bit nibbles to the sound board so in theory, it could support 256 sound calls.

But its not that easy as most MP3 players can only do one sound at a time and may not respond until the previous sound finishes and sometimes don't start up right away since the MP3 file needs to start streaming data to the decoder buffer.........

Unfortunately, MP3 players are not well suited to sound efx. But they are great for displays and haunted houses.

Stu, as alt. art for this, you should make two of these, but double necked style guitars on the PF:

http://www.carverdoug.com/guitars/wangcaster.2.html

I have many years of experience in commercial screen printing and never in that time have I heard of films costing that much. I used to print playfield-sized films on an Epson 7600 for about $2 in film and ink. Burning a screen was, literally, pennies in emulsion.

Do you mean to draw the films from scratch in Illustrator? Because I could see the hours in that costing a fortune.

LOL, yeah anyone with a large format inkjet printer can do that...We Don't. We use an Imagesetter for Real Film Separations which gives us the Best possible Dot for reproduction. InkJet printers, no matter how good they are, are still InkJet, which means a nozzle "spitting" ink onto a surface which does Not give you a perfect Dot for reproduction. InkJet printers are great for printing on paper, and in some cases for creating film, but Not film that needs to be used for recreating Artwork on this level. And most Playfield Film Sets are 12 Colors, so 12 sheets of film roughly 2' x 4', printed as Separations. I have been working in this industry professionally using Imagesetters for 23 years and as a professional I can tell you that there is no InkJet printer that will produce the films on the level that we require. And getting CMYK + Spot(s) Color Separations on this level has to be done on an Imagesetter, anything less than that would look like crap & we refuse to put out crap.......

You are going to Finance this 'second' run right!

saving now for the dual wangcaster PF. Also, I'm gonna need Jimmy Page riding a unicorn that shoots laser beams from its eyes out of the PF and temporarily blinds the player.

Those are called Super Bright LEDs and people seem to over-use them all of the time. I went to one friend's house to play IM and brought sunglasses. Left a funny tan on my face.

I could get laser-straight 4pt type on that "crappy" Epson and my buddies using the 9600s or the 18000 series machines 8 years newer could do even better. At a certain point you're fighting against the screen mesh resolution. What mesh count are we talking about here, 400?

Sure, an imagesetter is nice but $1,200 for films? C'mon. We're talking about reproducing films that were cut by hand or used letraset and halftone sheets 40 years ago.

$1,200 for films! Insanity.

I have to agree I doubt anyone would ever notice. You're face is not an inch away from the PF when you're playing a game. It is akin to the 4K tv arguments here. The average playing distance would probably negate any benefits of the higher resolution. Look at the crap Stern put out 13 years ago. That doesn't stop people from buying LotR.

I'm a screen printing fan and love the art involved with how they were produced pre-computers too.

Can I buy a back glass??

Ok. Y'all remember that if I say something that ticks people off too.

Stu,

$6000 for Bally Arrow inserts? How many inserts are you talking about here?

Send me a sample and i'll draw it up and get you a quote...

Bob

Bob,

Thanks for the offer but the decision has already been made & the final artwork has already been prepped....besides, using the new arrow styles helps to bring this project from 1982 into the new millennium, along with the addition of the alphanumeric display & the new sound board....