So I recently had a friend ask me to do a full shop on his Gottlieb Funland. At the same time, I just picked up a FACES. Both of these games are likely entrants in the Pinvasion Classics tournament to be held at Southern Fried Gameroom Expo in June in Atlanta but FACES has a nasty rule that doesn't make it the best for tourneys. When you get Faces lit you can score extra balls. It got me to thinking I'd like to add in a mod that at the least allowed me to switch out the EB for tourney situations. Looking at the schematics it's a simple cut the EB relay power and switch it. But it got me to thinking I'd actually like to mod the game to advance bonus and score 10,000 extra points when the EB is lit, that way collecting faces still has value to the player. I haven't gotten to this mod just yet as it will require rerouting a few things on the EB relay to a multipole switch stack but the Funland had a different request.
My friend with the Funland wanted it to score 500 points (like the spinner at max) whenever a special was scored. Frankly, I wish many of these games gave points instead of specials as in home use or tourneys, specials are worthless and once you say, complete the sequence in a game like Atlantis, the special is worthless, at least it could score points right?
So the 500 point thing is a no go as it requires a disc unit to be at the right place and several other switches to be just so. However, upticking the 1000 point drum is easy, so I wired in a simple switch, labeled it and voila. Can be shut off so game scores only special or special plus 1000 points. If the number to score a special is 5 or 6 you can actually get 2000 points if you get the shot just up and into rollover and it then rolls back down! Makes the game even better than it was before because the special really rewards.
This is something cool about EMs. Mods like this are relatively simple or at least doable whereas such a mod on a SS game would require knowing serious programming skills and special equipment in most cases. If anyone would like specs on this mod I can provide:
2017-03-18 12.36.45 (resized).jpg2017-03-18 12.36.52 (resized).jpg