That's right. I don't think he even comes here any more.

You'll probably need to contact him through his facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/Homepin.Factory/

Can you get onto Garry Stern for me too please? I need a right sling rubber for my Deadpool and he's not answering.

How much warranty are you guys getting with your machines Damn.

wiredoug

are you doing repairs or warranty for lo m8

You get it sorted?

Any word on the toppers for these machines or was HomePin lying about this as well?

Was thinking the same thing,so i put a post up on the FB Game Owners Group about a month ago.

I got nothing but silence...

Figured I'd put this here as I couldn't find much info about the HomePin AFM strobe board replacement before buying one. Unless this is a magic one-off, don't; the resistor in the picture was making that magic smell, so I opened up the machine to find it hot and smoking and nearly burnt my machine down after just a couple strobe multiballs. Reading the stripes it's a 51 Ohm resistor where the factory spec calls for that one to be 120 (there's lots of circuit design changes here; that may not be the problem.) or it could just be the type (factory board has a ceramic 120 Ohm) but this was a very, very bad experience.

IMG_20200808_121939 (resized).jpg

I’d try to remove it from circuit and measure it with a multimeter

its meant to be 51R (never mind the stripes its actually printed on the board)

if you want mike to look at the issue email [email protected].

putting it here just invites comment from the peanut gallery .. mike was chased away long ago

i had a quick look at the circuit.. if you put it on and ran it hot ( eg triggered multiball with the glass off and kept it flashing or something? this would happen..

I see there have been zero updates on the Homepin facebook page since July 24th.

yeah, so...?
no news is good news

They are in Taiwan now, right? Shouldn’t be hard to send out a weekly update or even monthly if they cared about communicating. Maybe they don’t want to. Have any distributors cared enough to reach out and see if they are even working on a game? Maybe they are just making replacement boards for WMS stuff these days.

Probably quietly making a killing selling more games than Stern does every year into the Chinese market. I mean, it's possible.

Of course not. But maybe business is good and there's no need to communicate with western markets anymore.

those bridges were burned, blown up, hit by a boat, swept away in a flood, destroyed by the Kraken, a long time ago

I wish you guys would just let this damn thread die!! I know I can drain it....but really.....who cares about this bigot anymore.

VOTE HAGGIS!!!

homepin de-activated himself here left or was banned from other forums so he will rely heavily on distributors which sure he burned a few of those in the past

agree with jardine - let the thread die and don't worry what he is doing

Say what you will about Mike and his approach to making games.
I admire his dedication to making repro parts.
Most recently classic Bally transformers and drivers.

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agree he does good work on the repro gear and I think that market is better suited for him

+1.

Are these available yet or still being tested, and any sort of price range yet.

the power unit (transformer complete with the bracket and board) will be available soon from the usual places ( pbl and pspa etc)..at a guess a matter of some weeks but with christmas it will go into the new year.

Local transformer price is more attractive than risking a dud off usa ebay but im not putting it here. not sure on the solenoid board price but it will be similar to the the other repro ones i would imagine.

Thanks Doug, I will keep my eyes open when they are available.

Just Curious Doug, would you know if is there any possibility of the classic Stern transformers being redone at any stage, 16B-6 more so, and the 16B-3, there would probably be a really good market for them with all the scratch builds that are now happening.

Isn’t there a need for Gottlieb system 1 transformers? Seems like that would be a good one to reproduce.

yes its basically the same transformer spec and this is made to the larger size so this one first then looking at a loom / plate for stern and later bally. Small steps but yes it will come.

yes being small it would be a good suggestion indeed.. probably a( 50/60) dual winding version in the interests of mass compatibility.

so would 230V wedgehead transformers. So many things but not all at once.

Just curious if Homepin will manufacture a new pin/title in the near future?

Email and ask would be you best bet for a reliable answer I'd wager.

Very curious to see that Chinese zombie game. Not curious to buy just curious to see wth it might be.

Me too, I like to see what other manufactures come up with.

Well, since the factory moved to Taiwan, the production facilities must be rebuilt in their new location. The only pictures I've seen have been of circuit boards and small parts being made. No pictures of machines being made at the Taiwan factory.

Mike has sold up completely in Australia, his house and everything and moved completely to Taiwan. From the looks of it he might be renouncing his Australian citizenship. He blamed his wife's passing for the delays on production but it didn't seem to take him long to get over it and shake up with someone in another country. he even posted and bragged about his new girlfriend online at one stage.
I suspect we will never see our toppers.
Highway Entertainment should be ashamed for the trouble they caused the Australia customers and selling the machines the per-order customers had already paid Mike for and them going on forums and giving false information about how much they helped the pre-order customers. As a pre-order customer, Highway just made everything harder and then posted false information saying they helped us. From what I can tell they only helped people they knew.

You wanna know what was really weird about him. Not long after his wife died, her profile wanted to be accepted to my pinball group on Facebook!!

Him using his dead wife's account to try and join was so.....well....weird!!?!Something I'll never forgot and kinda summed him up for me.

Sounds like a complete piece of trash. Hopefully he disappears from pinball forever.

when he started his factory he moved over to China to get set up and get the buisness running while his wife was still in Aus battling cancer for a few years already before the move. Yes she visited but still not the same as standing by and supporting your wife - shows his priorities.

as for renouncing - hope he does so he can't call his company or products Australian

I should have added he has closed his Australian company completely. Homepin is no longer an Australian company and is now 100% Taiwanese. Homepin can no longer claim to be an Australian company in any way.
The more I read about Mike and his own comments that he posted the more I regret ever being a pre-order customer. He was only after money and a reputation. He failed at both!
In all his emails to me he blamed his wife's passing for any delays and made it sounds like a sudden thing that happened. Knowing that this was ongoing before he even moved to China shows he only cares about himself!

Hey everybody. I have not been following any Homepin threads lately, but wanted to chime in here for a second to react to the last few posts.

I can understand how some of you might be frustrated and/or angry with Homepin, his business dealings, his demeanor on social media (including here on Pinside). But I would like to remind you that we do not allow personal attacks on Pinside as per our community rules.

Look, speculation is part of any forum and as long as things are not stated as fact, that's generally okay. And sure, Mike probably deserves some of the scrutiny he's getting for how long this thing has dragged on. But personal attacks of this caliber are not cool. Making things so personal, bringing his deceased wife into this ... is just not cool.

Again, I have not followed much of this whole Homepin thing, but I really don't like seeing this and would kindly like to ask you all to keep those personal attacks off of Pinside (or any public forum).

Thanks.

Thanks Robin and I agree. I am not trying to make this personal, I have emails from Mike/Homepin (as a company, not personal) from 2014-2020 that fully back up my comments and the facts I posted. I just did a quick count and I have at least 5 emails from 2018-2020 sent from Homepin blaming the passing for the extremely long delays and poor end product.

I would also like to warn people of HomePin not honoring warranties on the Thunderbirds machine. I know of one machine that was sent and stopped working straight away and have the email from Homepin telling the owner to go sort it themselves and to pay a local electrician to fix it and then he might send parts at the person costs if Homepin feels like the person deserves them or not!

We asked Homepin when will we get the toppers and the response we got was "when they are made" and he refuses to say when this is. This is something we paid him over 6 years ago for. When we asked him when will they be made he wrote back saying that it is rude to ask and if we keep asking questions he will not send us anything at all!

Thats one side of the story at best. I have read the entire ticket (both sides) on that issue first hand and neither is nice.

It was reported as stopped working 6 months after it was delivered? the gentleman who owns it was so fired up with starting a fight over toppers that when he got in touch he sidelined the entire tech support request and they both turned into a fight instead.

Neither of them handled it well but two hotheads fighting over an issue that isnt the actual fault isnt a warranty issue its just two people who need to calm down.

im 99% sure the toppers will come eventually. its a better outcome than then going broke would have been. at least you got the game already. I hope you get your topper too. ( or your friend does if you really arent him).

homepin warranty for direct sales is replacement parts where they're determined to be required only. thats always been the case. no labour.

personally i suggest you reach out to Simon or Russel or your preferred other local tech for labour and tell them to ask Homepin for parts.

I dont work for any of these people. Im just being constructive. I dont care who you like or dont like, this will get the game fixed.

Please explain how Highway Entertainment let you down, as your comments are a bit rich. If you are the Adelaide guy who called our office to YELL at our staff for not getting your machine on time, or not getting your topper, wanting compensation, and that we (Highway) were responsible for all, then it’s a twisted situation on your side.

We are also not sure if you are the same Adelaide Homepin customer that we needed to call the Police to stop you calling our office - 20 calls a day is a bit overboard, especially when you are swearing at our staff.

We are further not sure if you are the guy from Adelaide making the fake profiles online saying how bad Highway Entertainment is for stealing money from Homepin customers, etc.

Highway never sold you the machine, never was involved in any deals with regards to your machine, etc… What we did was try our best to tidy up as many of the pre-order sales as possible by offering (for free) solutions to get machines from China to Australia and delivered to your homes. Whatever our costs were, we gave the same costs to you, we never charged any handling fees/etc.

During the course of shipments we handled MANY Homepin customers. But then, it started getting messy, “why did a customer in Canberra get his machine before me”. Few of the Homepin customers could not understand that we needed to ship full containers to different states to get the freight costs down – we explained well, that if you are not happy with what we were doing that you were welcomed to arrange your own transport directly via Homepin. In the end we needed to walk away from the balance group who were not reasonable (some of which later approached us, and we helped get their machines to Australia).

In very simple terms, if Highway did not get involved to fund the project so that Homepin could have economies of scale for mass production of machines, you would have never received your machine. We funded productions, and, we helped Homepin direct customers sell their machines for the full price they paid (that is, we found buyers to purchase your machine for the same price you paid with no commission to Highway) and did a lot more behind the scenes.

We really tried our best.

On a side note, the entire world is sold out of the Thunderbirds Pinball machine. Beside all the negative comments here, there is still demand for this machine.

btw are you still selling these or are they now out of production?

Please God let them be out of production.

I've been on the list of "frustrated/angry with his business dealings" since he released his low-quality copycat of my daughterboard. When I contacted him about it, he freely admitted he copied my product and would like to license it. That conversation lasted a few weeks before he fell silent on the thread. My experience seems to fit a pattern of kicking the can down the road rather than owning and resolving the messes one creates - his words aren't worth the electrons used to transmit them.

-Rob
-visit https://www.kahr.us to get my daughterboard that helps fix WPC pinball resets or my Pinball 2000 H+V Video Sync Combiner kit

Its funny .. if you fix the story with the details you omitted it doesnt sound anything like as bad

not "freely admitted" but ..."he told the reasons why he also made a reset board in a different market"

not "fell silent" but "mike gave up trying to reason with me on a realistic licensing fee"

and you dont omit the willingness to engage in cooperation and conversation further (remember this bit you left out?) .. "If you feel we could co-operate on projects in the future please don't hesitate to contact me"

its the same story.. but a whole new spin.. he tried to work with you..

his might be a "low-quality copycat" if you like (dont know, never seen either of them in person) ....but your board is also a hack job so half assed techs dont have to do their work properly.. please dont encourage them. there are too many backyard repair guide readers who think they're pinball techs already.

Make them fix it properly.

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