fair enough

noted

Great news that there will be something for starting all the modes

As guessing going to be pretty hard to get all modes lit solid

That's what good players do....learn the 'system'. Most good players are able to nullify the outlanes anyway with nudging. The outlanes come into play on fast unexpected drain to the outlane where nudging is nullified, and that would take having CHOP staged, and the right lane unlit in anticipation of a quick drain. I don't think it is as easily gamed as you're suggesting. I've put about 100 games on mine, and score above 20mil per game, am a decent player, and I just don't see it as an issue.

It does not take top tier for this level of manipulation. The ramp is highly achievable and gives a letter. Ramp is also available from both flippers. I have 20-30 plays in Tpf/ sfge, and I was already doing it and I'm merely a little better than 'casual'. Good player can hit the ramp 3 times in a row, get three letters and then get back to their game (with outlanes essentially eliminated)

Fawzma's idea about turning them off is good. Then when I get three, and I have a ball returning down the ramp wireform I have to decide whether I want to activate CHOP or go down to two letters.

again- i'm solid, but not a pro by any means and I was gaming it multiple times per game in my very limited time with it.

Wow this is unprecedented and very cool to have an open dialogue with the programmer of a new release. I know this dialogue takes up some of your time fawzmagames but I can't tell you how much us fans/buyers appreciate your openness to sharing your work with us.

In the end I think it will make the game so much better & more enjoyable to us that are along for the ride. Huge thanks to you from all of us!

I hear you, but I don't think you understood what I was saying. Even if you have three staged, you would either have to be quick to select the outlane on a quick outlane drain for the fourth, or just not bother on a slow drain where most decent players are used to nudging the ball out. So I don't see it being that much of a game changer for a pro player who expertly nudges. Maybe for us intermediate players it's a bonus, but we can get all the help we can get. Unless you are routinely raping the game for 100mil+ I don't think it's that much of an advantage, and as Fawzma suggested, turn it off as most pro tourney's do anyway.

Guys please don't make the game even HARDER before I get mine. Jeez...

fwiw, I like this config the best. Keep CHOP working as it is, but add a setting to identify max number of times it can be triggered per ball. If set to 0, then effectively it disables the feature ala tournament mode, choose 1, 2 or 3 times per ball and it is what you'd expect it to be. Or choose unlimited, which is effectively how it works now. BUT in conjunction with this setting, disable CHOP during multi-balls, as it is too easy to trigger a saved ball.

This assumes you only wish to control frequency of CHOP, and not the amount of time the ball save is active. For that it would probably be better to program a separate control setting. A CHOP Value of 0 means no ball save time - this is your tournament setting. A value of 1 could be a 4 second ball save each time triggered, which is what it does now. Select 2 and that might mean be 4,3,2 and 1 sec ball saves for each progression. If only one aspect is intended to be controlled, between frequency and time, I prefer the frequency approach, as it is easier to understand and explain.

Mmmmm nice, keefer's infamous 'bitch' mode from lotr returns.. cool The other idea was done in centaur. You could progress from 'normal' to 'centaur' to 'bitch' to 'bitch+centaur' after each successful save... 1st is easy, second not too bad, 3rd wtf??, 4th $@%#$%^$!

please add a timer to the mode selection. I realized that a game will sit indefinately if you shoot the mode select left orbit but them just dont choose.

Noticed a location player leave the game to go piss and get a beer while the game sat passively waiting.

i thought about that, but I also added a feature where you can hold the start button to force the game to end.

No other player is going to go hit a start button to end someone elses game IME. If the game just selects a mode after 10 seconds then that is the way to keep play moving.

he's right. I have noobs over all the time and I don't always have time to be around them on my small handful of games, if someone else doesn't come up and pick a mode then they will come find me and ask me- or more likely they'll just walk away to a diff game- or they'll just go catch a Pokemon

God help us all ...

rd

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Kerry is such a bad boy....Mostly for giving me tinnitus. I'll never forget that show!!

Actually, I don't think this is true. I was expecting a ball save after multiball numerous times, knowing full well that I had a C-H-O-P "in the bag" so to speak. However, after draining last ball I had no ball save. After it happened a few times I realized that I needed to be more strategic with the feature.

One other really unique feature that I never got to myself, but watched David play, was getting "infected". Everything turns red, and you have to hit certain switches if you try to start the same mode twice....very cool idea! And you can select in options which, if any modes you want this to be used on.

***** I may be mistaken, but I heard if you don't "cure" yourself your game will end. So if this is true I guess that means you could get infected and the game could end on ball 1....wow this is a scary pin!!******

Not sure what you're saying here. I know for certain that CHOP activates ball save DURING multiball. Let's say you start multiball and get down to 4 balls. 4th ball drains, but makes CHOP or CHOP activated prior by another ball. The game spits out another ball and you maintain your 4 balls. As you lose balls without CHOP then your multiball drops to that level. It doesn't go back up. Have no idea what you mean by "after draining last ball I had no ball save".

haha the ball ends not the game, might have to add that in though

Nice collection you have there.

Anyone know what numbers they are around?

Mid 70s

My suggestion to David and charlie this past weekend is for a few CHOP options. One is already mentioned earlier - borrow the "hard" setting of KEEP in LOTR, on/off. The other was less reward for 2+ times getting CHOP, maybe be completely off after the 3rd time its collected (settings for this of course). Good players will exploit this easily - I've consistently had games in the 50 mil range, and a couple 100 mil + which would not have been possible with a crippled CHOP setting.

What's really awesome is Fawzma and Charlie are listening - you may not get everything you ask for, but you are being heard. I talked to both of them about suggestions, code work in progress and some of the ideas (some work, some just don't) - and a lot of them I've seen mentioned in this thread.

I asked specifically this at the open house, and yes, a failed infection can mean game over at ball 1. Only superbeast has infection default to "on" for the 2nd time through per factory settings. You can turn on infection for any/all modes via settings!

Thanks. Yes this is unprecedented awesomeness. it's a Charlie/Fawzma/Heck game with tweaks that are crowd-funded!

Here's another. I still need to hide the wire, but my Swap Box is on the wall. It looks great all lit up. Thanks.

My translite was 27"x20", so make sure to measure before you cut. Since mine was exactly the same size as the glass I had cut, I didn't have to cut. It still wants to ripple a little bit, so I might end up trimming it ever so slightly.

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UGH, I screwed up in putting in the new code I guess and now the DMD just says "RAM0"

Any ideas?

Format the SD card BEFORE copying the new data to it.

Also, make sure the data cable from the cpu to the display is plugged in on the display. On mine the cable is too short to have the display panel lay flat so I have to unplug it. I forgot to plug it back in and it showed "ram0".

Don't use a Mac to format your SD cards, beginning to think this is part of the problem lately.

As Ben says, format. Don't delete the files and think it will work, it won't.

RAM0 means 2 things, DMD cable not plugged in, or the AV code/eeprom is screwed up. Chances are its the later, and in that case you need to swap EEPROMS om the PROP with one we end up sending you.

People are able to brick their games when updating the code to the point that chips need to be swapped out to fix it?

Id say this is a better situation than swapping out entire boards.

I would submit that following instructions is important because if they are specific enough to say don't format with a Mac, it's likely there for a reason. Not directing that at you ZT because I have no idea how chips die from code (because I literally have no idea), but details matter.

When I updated my Ghostbusters to 1.05 I re-read the instructions sticker that is right next to the board several times because I was fairly nervous doing that for the first time. Is there space in a Spooky head for a similar sticker?

For speed (and cost) sake our system assumes a "flat" file system. We copy files to the SD card via FAT32, but pinHeck accesses it mostly like sector-based memory.

When you delete files you're not actually deleting them, just removing the pointers. (this is why "erased file recovery" programs are possible) But they're still on the disk, which means new data writes around them (fragmentation)

Formatting (even just "quick") actually removes files. When you copy the files onto a fresh SD card, they're all "put in a straight line" by default.

The intern who's hear on Thursdays has a Mac, I'll do a test SD format before he leaves.

Glad I chose a later build for mine. Keep up the good work. Sounds like its coming along great. Lots of attention to details.

Will RZSI be at Pinburgh next week?
I can't wait!

Definitely a good idea so I tried it thanks. Unfortunately, did not work but worth a try.

DMD data cable was not the problem for me either.

I had the same problem, talked with David, and got it fixed with new EPROM code directly written to the EPROM (i.e. couldnt use the update steps when the EPROM had garbage).

So, you have a confused A/V Eprom like I had. Most likely it wasn't formatted FAT32, see Ben's note above.

Even with a correctly formatted, clean SD card, a partial file or two files with the same name - caused for me by an interrupted download which never completed properly - will end with the same corrupted EPROM chip for A/V leaving you at ROM 0.
David explained that the update process read the first RZ0_V008 file and doesn't check file extention - reading the partial file will write garbage directly on the EPROM, and that chip is now hopelessly confused.

Only solution was overwriting the Eprom chip directly from a laptop with a special cable attached directly to the PinHeck board (some risk involved & not an easy path - special cable, carefully follow steps, etc)
Best solution is a newly written Eprom from Spooky.

My understanding is that the update process is becoming more fool-proof in the near future.

It would be nice to have a program that could verify the contents of the SD card after the files have been copied over but I'm sure it would be more complicated than simply comparing checksums. I knew files could get fragmented on non-volatile memory the same as they do on a hard drive but I doubt I'd have anticipated that issue either. Glad you guys are getting the kinks out!

I'm not a pc hardware expert by any stretch but doing a sector for sector copy of data that was copied using fat32 which doesn't insure sector for sector writing seems problematic. Got to be a better way.

Anyone know what number games they are on?

For my own knowledge, why wouldn't a checksum do the trick?

A checksum confirms what the data is. Sounds like pinheck is also specific on *where* the data is.

i update my machines (stern and JJP) from my android phone. i have an adapter that goes from my phone to a female usb port. do we have any ideas if i can use my phone as the vessel for code transfer to the sd card (with a sd usb reader/writer of course). i do not carry a laptop with my (and when i do it is a mac), not do i have windows computers at home (mac/linux household). i service more than just my collection of machines and would like to know if i need to send order pre programmed cards from Spooky instead of being able to do it myself.

Thanks for all your hard work Team Spooky

That would still work. Pinheck would also read the chucksum from a specific location. If you write the data or checksum anywhere else, it'll fail the check.

couple things..

anyone else blow any fuses yet? 10 games in or so I blew out all the left side solenoids.

also, on V7 so its probably moot. the game locked up during 1000 corpses.. flippers went dead, and it just flashed 538 or however many corpses I had and stayed like that well beyond a reasonable time. Had to reboot.. it was the next game that blew the fuse shortly into gameplay.

one gripe.. got a ball stuck in the wires by the rollover area going halfway around the left orbit.. That fact that there are wires that the ball can get stuck in is a bit crazy design wise. I might go in cut the plastics so the wires can be out of the way of the ball.

game is super fun otherwise.

Game #59 arrived today!