Anyone that's dealt with the williams system 3 games (Contact, Disco Fever, Hot Tip, Lucky 7, World Cup) and one system 4 (Phoenix) knows what a pain it is to set options for the game - the cumbersome approach of setting each option with a dip switch and entering it in.
There's an alternate way to do it if you have the means to burn a new gamerom - the default options for the game are all laid out in the first section of the gamerom. Using the hex editor built into your eprom burner software, you can edit each of the options there, burn the gamerom, and force a reload of the default options (usually by pulling the batteries... nvram would have to use the memory clear of one of pincoder test roms).
While the game would fail the built in checksum test if you hit the test button, it won't affect the operation of the game at all. (Williams games only perform a checksum test when you hit the test button, on regular bootup they do not.)
For example, here is a hexdump of Hottip's options:
0000 74 24 01 24 03 30 03 30 01 28 03 22 01 10 >09 14
0010 20 ff 20 00 02 03 00 00 00 01 01 01 00 02 01 03
0020 03 00 15 00 00< 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
And the options page from the manual is below - read down the default column you can see the default options start at offset $E (marked at > on the hexdump). You can edit the values to whatever options you want, burn the rom, and not have to worry about using the dips to set them. The end of the settable options is denoted by the <, which is the default HSTD.
If you want the checksum to match, you could set the hstd to another value since you'll probably beat it right away anyway. For instance, if you want to set the game to max credits 25, you'd change offset 0012 from $20 to $25, then reduce offset 0022 from $15 to $10 - this way the checksum test would still pass. Or if you set the default # of balls to 5, offset 001F would change from 03 to 05, reduce offset 0022 from $15 to $13. This balancing out of the values is strictly only necessary if you want the checksum to pass. There's not a lot of math going up or down a couple values, but if you go from one decade to another you'd have to enter it as hex - that's not really allowed, so you would try and use the other digits of the hstd instead.
Just a variant on how to set these, might be helpful is you have a board with bad dips or if you're burning a new rom anyway. I'd like to have been in on the planning meeting where they thought using the dips in this fashion was a good idea.
hottip options (resized).png