First of all: good job with all these updates and new features!

I updated to 2.21 yesterday and observed some unusual behaviour. Maybe somebody can comment on this and maybe some of these can actually be controlled by some of the new settings?

1. Alien Abduction - there still was a UFO active, stealing a car. Nonetheless, the skip ramp activated and I could end the mission which of course awarded no saucer light. I am pretty sure that on 1.5 the mission could not be ended before all UFOs either escaped or were destroyed

2. Martian Happy Hour - mission completed by hitting ball catcher, but the ball dropped back on the playfield and drained through the middle. No new ball was automatically issued after the video sequence ended (as was the case in 1.5, to continue the same one that just drained). The pin finally started a ball search and released another ball

3. This new ball should have been the continuation of the drained one, therefor Super Skillshot should not be active now. However, I could do a Super Skillshot when shooting the ball (I failed to check if the pin had wrongly increased the number of played balls -issued a new ball rather than replacing the drained one- or stayed on the current count)

They came with 2.0 afaik...

Thanks for correcting me here!

I just took the glass off in order to simulate the issues I had described in my earlier post. I could not repeat point 1, maybe just a freak accident or some weird combination of shots that I simply didn‘t reproduce, wouldn‘t worry about it at that time.

However, I can confirm points 2 and 3. With ball 1 I killed all martians, then manually activated the ball catcher and let the ball drain through the middle. The pin did not recognize the drained ball, went into a ball search and released ball 2 (hence the activated super skillshot, as you already suggested). I can provoke this behaviour every time. This seems to happen for all modes, not only Happy Hour.

All ball trough switches and the shooter lane switch work fine in switch test when running a ball over them (tested several times with fast and slow balls) and the pin does not throw any other errors.

I previously had 1.5 installed, in the situation I just described the pin was in a kind of „ball save“ mode (w/o the „Shoot Again“ light) and gave you back the ball which just drained. I did not find any comments anywhere that this behaviour changed with any of the updates.

A friend of mine tested this on his RfM which also runs the latest V2.21 and he confirms what I observed (see below). Would you consider looking into that for a potential future update?

If it doesn’t work on the serial port in the coin door, try connecting it directly to the PC. If needs to communicate to Port 1, if plugging in directly to the computer it is possible that the cable on the motherboard is not plugged into COM1. In that case, simply plug it into the correct port (Pin needs to be switched off for that!).

Great news re. the bugfix!

1) I would prefer it to carry over
2) What Zitt said (preferrably the option to temporarily pause it for multiball)

On a more general topic: would it be possible to have all the new features you implemented like behaviour of flippers, Hurry-Up carrying over, Ant&Spider, no. of balls during multiball etc. as individual options in the menu so that everybody can set each of those to their personal liking?

Power Drain sounds interesting, looking forward to give that one a go!

Would you consider to make your feature improvements individually selectable in the menu (would that even be possible?)?

@Applejuice: just put of curiosity - did you also do something to the internal workings, e.g. coil power etc.? Before the update, on my machine it was pure luck if the ball made it all the way up to the bumpers or even all around for the super skillshot. After the update, I noticed no more problems in regards to this w/o having done anything else apart from the update. Nice side effect!

Also, on the pin side of the connection, check what I wrote in post #3844 (please note that the COM1 stuff below refers to the computer in the pin):

Remove the socket from the board and use a battery to verify that socket and lamp work. If they do, you can skip to 2 below (although also doing 1 wouldnˋt hurt)

1. Try cleaning the metal contacts in the wedge base sockets and carefully bend them a little tighter together. Also, bend the 2 contacts on the side of the socket a little upwards and clean them as well.
2. However, you will likely need to reflow the curved solder patches of these sockets on the board (remove board for that). Over the years, the 2 socket side contacts dig into the solder, thus causing bad/no connection.

The service port is simply an extension of the PCs serial port. Just plug one end of your 9-pin cable into the RfM PC, the other one into your computer and you should be fine. If the updater does not find your pin, open the PC and ensure that the port you are plugged into is indeed connected to COM1 on the motherboard. If not, simply change the plug on the motherboard.

The ballstop tends to get magnetized and hangs, as you are experiencing. Either swap for a new part or simply put some adhesive tape at the bottom end of the plunger, that‘s what did the trick on my RfM. The latter is also an easy way to determine if magnetism is indeed the problem. Additionally, it would do no harm to dismantle and clean the ballstop unit.

Please note: „...open the PC and ensure that the port you are plugged into is indeed connected to COM1 on the motherboard...“ refers to the RfM PC.

Go into switch test and test the switch in the shooter land and the ball trough optos.

@Applejuice:
Looking forward to the release

Note to self: a few days of not checking here for the update did the trick, remember that for the future!

@applejuice: Good job, thanks a lot! Will update asap, but am quite busy at the moment.

+1

I would strongly recommend to not use the computer w/o havng replaced the CPU fan! At the same time you could check / replace the fan in the computer power supply (or replace the power supply).

Could be a cold solder joint on the chassis, reflowing the chassis could help.

Wise choice