No

I know on LOTRs if you open the coin door with a drain, even mutiball, it will relaunch the ball. It’s the only way I could possibly get to Valinor. Would only relaunch when the coin door was closed. I see the point of a pause. Great game/ball. “Dinner’s on the table.”

Nope. Physical Pinball Meets Real World. Deal. With. It.
I drained a ball today cause my dog was eating my shoe. OH. WELL.

If so I’d say only if the game is on free play.

Honestly if you need to “do something” do it in between balls.

Can’t pause an online multiplayer game

It’s called coin door ball save and it’s a feature in Stern settings. Disables all high voltage when coin door is open. If a ball is in play when opened, it will put one in the shooter lane and auto launch when the door is shut.

Multimorphic games already have one.

Leave your key in. When you go in a scoop. Open the coin door. Paused, like Maui says, you're welcome!

Option 1 : lock a ball
Option 2 : Tell your wife to open the door
Option 3 : Tell your kids to open the door
Option 4 : Don't bother opening the door, if someone shows up unannounced it's not worth dropping a good ball
Option 5 : If friends show up at the door they should know you play pinball and can wait a little til you're done. Or praise your high score if they waited a lot.

A few lines of code could add a pause to any game. As an example, hold down the right flipper and press start will fake tilt the game - the ball will drain and a new ball will eject into the plunger lane without penalty. Then you just launch when you're ready to resume, exactly where you left off.

Can also work for any multiball - let all the balls drain, grab a beer, come back and relaunch all the balls. Alternatively, a line of code could hold up both flippers automatically so you can walk away from the machine for a short while. As a safety, they'll disengage if you take too long.

As others have said....it's already there in Stern games. The coin-door ball save is a setting in the menu. Open the coin-door and the game is "paused". Close the coin door and the game will serve a ball up and the game is back to where you left it. Pretty simple.

TZ has dual wind flipper coils. New Stern's don't. While the code would be easy, not a good idea on modern Stern's with single wind coils. Would eventually cause excessive heat.

Part of the beauty of pinball is that it's such a great escape from reality. I live in Cal and was playing a GB a few years ago when an earthquake happened. It was a small quake, didn't even get a tilt warning, so I kept playing. You don't want to pause pinball. Real life pauses for pinball. Not the other way around.

As an extension, you could save a game for later. I get it, might be a little too video game like for some, but we’re already internet connected with badges to collect, so…… I bet Multimorphic can?!?

No, a pause misses the whole point of playing pinball. If an interruption causes the loss of ball, start another game. It's just a home game, not like it's for $15000 like last night.

Yes

Now that I think about this more......I consider the coin door ball save a "pause" feature, but I guess they could have something I would consider more of a "save state" feature.

This could be the coin door ball save feature, but then have an option to suspend the game and possibly even save its state in a memory bank to load later to finish or even to load to try over and over again.

I'm quite sure that COULD be done, but I'm not so sure it SHOULD be done. I like the coin door ball save in a pinch, but I'm not really sure anything more would be a good thing.

UPDATE: I just saw cooked71 post.......it was pretty much what I was thinking, and he got it out sooner. I think the save states would really video gamify things and again....I'm not sure if that would be good or not.

You never have had to rock a piss in the middle of a long ball? I’m all for this.

As I alluded to earlier, Coin Door Ball Save isn't just for pausing, it can basically act as a never-ending ball save if you do it before the ball in play hits the trough switch. I personally do it when I hear my dog barking at something outside. I can then go check on him and resume with no issues.

However, if you have a curious cat... ALWAYS CHECK YOUR GAME BEFORE CLOSING THE DOOR AND TURNING BACK ON THE HIGH VOLTAGE!

(Pic stolen from the Cats thread)

Dont lock me in (resized).jpg

Nope, the coils are "down volted" after a short period of time. Data East pioneered this with their flipper boards.

The voltage is never decreased. It's pulsed less often, but still gets 50+ volts DC. Try taping one of your Stern or Data East flipper buttons closed and see how long it takes for the transistor to fail. Search here for Q15 or Q16 and see how many hits you get.

On Data East they are downvolted to 8v.

Screenshot from 2023-01-18 17-07-21 (resized).png

Advanced? So many user experience solutions missed. Worse than answering the phone is when you got to an arcade that's free play and some little kid adds 4 players and leaves after pulling the plunger, and then repeats on several machines. Stern solved this with left flipper + start button, but I didn't know this for 4 years that I've been into pinball. Should be a reset button OR this hack should be listed on the display if a player has not plunged the ball after 60 seconds. "Hit Start and Left Flipper to reset game". Thanks Stern!

I'm adding this feature to my upcoming games either in the form of the drain you are suggesting or another cool idea that I have. I can't imagine the feature being used all that often though. How many times / how many long games have you played where distractions occured?

You're right. Another Doh! moment. Looks like Apollo 13 was the last game to use that board. I've replaced fuses on customer's games, but never repaired or replaced that board. Back on topic, while Stern node board support multiple voltages, I don't suspect they're switching flipper power. It could be a very simple setting. 'Home Play' setting would enable free play and flipper pause by pushing start button while cradling. I don't suspect they'll do it as it may let smoke out of node boards.

PinMonk (the guy who sells cooling fans for flipper coils), has run tests holding Stern flippers for 30 minutes and said there was no real increase in heating. I don't think smoke is going to happen.

With or without a fan blowing on them? Stern SAM games were known for blowing flipper transistors. There are countless posts here over the years with people asking if they cradled too long or cradled too much causing the transistor to fail. I don't hear of that happening on Spike games. Seems like they've tightened up the timing and circuitry. I'd still prefer they go back to dual wind flipper coils, which they briefly did at the start of Spike.

Spike, with no cooling he said hardly any difference.

Considering I watched an interview with Gomez that was posted a month ago how opto spinners are taken into condieration for game costs (30 cent IR LED's), I can't imagine they are going to pay an extra 30 cents for the additional 2 mosfets.