I picked up a SS Hot Tip with no boards, and thought it'd be fun to hack together a few adapter cables and hook the existing electronics into the custom controller I'm building. Obviously it'd then be very easy to just reproduce the existing ruleset, but I could also make any changes I wanted, or even something completely different (although you're still sorta-constrained by the words on the playfield, unless you just say 'ignore this' or I put a sticker over it).

Here's a full picture of the playfield for reference:

image-A5_(resized).jpg

Coming up with a completely different ruleset for a game you already know is really challenging! Anyone got any cool ideas?

Personally I like to stuff the most complex thing I can in while also trying to make use of as much of the playfield as possible, and on older games the most obvious way to me is to add bonus collect. Thus, my first change would be to 'rename' the left kickout from extra ball to collect bonus.
Once that's done, those 1,2,3 lights around the top of the bonus start to look like multipliers... So I'll make the captive ball on the left advance the bonus multiplier, starting at zero (so you need to shoot the captive ball at least once to collect).
Of course, that makes the double bonus light a bit superfluous... I guess you could either have a separate 2x to apply, for a max of 6x collect, or you could also rename 'double bonus' to 'hold bonus'.
As for the spinner and drops, I'm not sure if much more can be done with them. The drops aren't in a position where you can really use specific targets for sharp shooting, it's more just 'knock them all down'. You do need a way to turn those 100 and 1000 point lights on though. The easy way is just to advance it each time you clear a bank, but I think it could be more interesting to have the number of targets down on each side determine the value on the other side...
All that's left is the kickout at the top, though sadly I can't think of much you can do here without 'renaming' every one of the five choices, and I've already renamed two things....

What can you guys think of?

Definitely going to at least have all the lights blinking on and off or spinning in a circle or something.

With newer hardware you can easily do flashing or faded/PWM lighting for everything, which also often opens up more gameplay options as far as what you can signify to the player

Oooh, hurry ups....

Interesting, I completely forgot about multiball! Sadly, I don't want to make any changes to the machine like that, I'm making sure with my changes that not even any wiring is being done, everything just plain into existing connectors.

Interestingly, besides from that noise maker (I love that it has that so much), it also had a buzzer for something. Of course, using my own boards I'm not limited to the number of solenoids they had either.

A lot of system 11 games could benefit from a rules rewrite or modification, it's too bad that there aren't any easy to use replacement boards for them.

I'd love to do some smaller rom adjustments like that, it's too bad there's so little info on modifying the roms

So does the buzzer just buzz directly from the tilt, or is there anything else that sets it off, do you know? I haven't been able to find any videos of the original game where the buzzer goes off.

I've heard the EM version is preferred? No idea why though.

In dev news, yesterday I verified that my switch matrix scanning circuit works, got a few solenoids firing, then discovered that the display board is 5V, and my CPU is 3V. Looking into either using a different model 5V CPU or buying some buffer chips with a low 'input high' level. Pain either way though, if it had worked off 3V signals I could have just crossed a few connections on my existing LED matrix driver, now I'll need to design a whole new PCB

Counts up higher? Do you mean that it lights 10k and cycles through the lower numbers again?

Looking closely at the playfields, I note that on the EM version the spinner and bonus are 10x the score of the SS. Weird.

Ah, interesting. I'm fascinated by these random changes they made.

On my side, I've successfully gotten the displays driven from one of my boards:

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PCBs for that and the lamp matrix are in production, so soon I can finally have all the boards needed to test the code, which I've finished writing (480 lines of code so far to recreate the original ruleset)

After a long wait crossing the Pacific Ocean, the lamp matrix and solenoid driver boards have arrived and are ready for assembly IMG_20160211_153148_(resized).jpg

Hoo boy, this thread has gone without an update for a while...

So, starting back from my last post: I assembled the pictured boards, and discovered some major design flaws with my solenoid control board (as in, when I plug them in the CPU starts smoking). So I redesigned those, and put them in the queue for my next PCB order. And then had a flash of inspiration and redesigned them again. Still haven't ordered them. While working on them and the light matrix boards, I realized I'm a complete idiot. What does a light matrix need? 8 PNP transistors for the columns and 8 NPN transistors for the rows. What does a solenoid driver board control? 16 Solenoids, via 16 transistors. No reason to design a whole second board, a generalized 16 transistor board could handle both cases easily.

I also got the display board produced and assembled, and while I was bored one week wrote the entirety of the code to handle both the original rule set and my redesigned ruleset, and let you switch between them by holding the start button in attract mode. Then I stumbled across a working system 6 boardset, so I stuck that in Hot Tip, and it worked! Well, darn, I've spent all this time making half of an entire replacement boardset and code for the game, and now the game plays just fine. Not the best rules, but it's still pretty fun! Actually playing the game also made me realize that the left kickout hole is really hard to hit on purpose, which makes me question my ruleset centered around shooting the hole to collect your bonus. (It also kicks down the middle half the time, grr) Luckily, I also picked up a Laser Ball without boards, and Laser Ball seems to be another game with, if not broken rules, than at least really boring ones (or at least I assume, since it seems to be really unpopular). So, I figured, my replacement boardset would work just as well in Laser Ball as in Hot Tip (and so would the original Williams boards), so I planned to go back to building the boards, design a ruleset for Laser Ball as well, and then decide which of the custom rulesets I liked more to determine which game got the custom boards and which got the original.

While I was designing some custom Laser Ball rules, and also working on numerous other projects, and starting to get parts and ideas together for a custom build I've been wanting to do, I stumbled on another system 6 boardset, mostly working,and stuck that set in Laser Ball. Crap, now I've got two mostly working games, half a set of custom boards, and two rulesets I've designed for them! What am I going to do now?

While I was fixing some problems on Laser Ball's boards, I noticed that they had the memory addresses for all the chips labeled on the schematics, but didn't pay much attention. Weeks later, driving home from league night, my mind got to wandering: "it's not like those boards are that complicated", I thought to myself. "I understand what all the chips do, and how all the IOs work... And if you know how all the IOs work, how hard can it be to write the logic to control the IOs? And if that's not hard, then it can't really be that hard to just teach myself 6800 ASM, backwards engineer all the boards, and write my own custom OS and game code from scratch!"

Night time zacaj driving down the highway alone gets some really stupid ideas.... But a week later I'd taught myself assembly, backwards engineered the hardware, and written code to manage all the solenoids, lights, displays, and switches (at least, in pinmame). I was on a roll! Within a month I could easily have a playable base game implemented on the original hardware; this could be great!

And then I bought a disassembled flood damaged PotC last month and all that other fun stuff went on the backburner I'm super good with managing my time and projects, yes I am.

As for the captive ball, Nico, it's not the biggest shot ever, but it's worth more than it looks. A good lit spinner is worth what, 10-20k? A lit captive ball, besides being much easier to light, awards (iirc) 3000 points right away, plus 3000 bonus, which is often doubled to 6000. So the captive ball might be worth 9k, and it's worth that much way more often than I manage to get the spinner lit. And lighting the spinner turns on the invisible outlane magnets too. It's no Algar, but it's not like you avoid shooting it. Also it's really satisfying to hit... If I were coding the game I would have made it worth, say, 5k unlit, and 25k lit with double bonus, for a bit of rebalancing. Or maybe even have it temporarily light the spinner? But it's not quite as broken as some people make it out to be, personally.

You'd figure that too but when I look at the boards available I go "those are so expensive!" and then spend months designing my own cheaper ones

I feel like you'd need to be a bit more forgiving than that! Or maybe, first set of drops lights double bonus, second set lights spinner (pretty hard to get to), but a normal captive ball hit would light the spinner for one hit, and a lit captive ball would give you two hits, and the right inlane would give you a hit, and the left inlane would light the captive ball for one hit. There's a lot of room to play around with as far as lighting and turning off the spinner goes, once you get past 'do this, and then the spinner is lit forever'. Dracula has a cool rule where the spinner lights at only certain bonus values, works out pretty well

I feel the game is much more balanced once you disable the bonus from the spinner

Progress!

Anyone want to give it a test? I've only got 2 Hot Tips to try it on, but it's working pretty well on those

Displays shouldn't matter.

I've written a brand new rom for it from scratch, so it runs on any hardware the normal roms will.

New OS with fancy features like switch debouncing, not showing 0s in front of the score, multitasking, etc
New ruleset built around building up and collecting bonus
New attract mode and other quick light animations

Right now the gameplay is nearly done, but it's missing things like high scores, adjustments, audits, tests, etc. Not sure if I'll add all of that, but I at least want to get the high scores and maybe a few adjustments for difficulty in there

I would have taken a gameplay video but I can't hold my phone and play at the same time