Coming soon.... 7 digit scoring for Ali (with the bell ding mod)
Also a /10 version.

The 7 digit scoring one would take 7 digit displays (see: https://www.pinball4you.ch/okaegi/pro_soft.html for wiring, repeated below)

1) replace the four player 6-digit displays with 7-digit displays (we test it with orignal bally displays..)
2) Add an additional wire fom A4 (mpu) J1 Pin 7 to every player display pin 12 (for bally displays, don't connect the credit display !).
If you use 7-digit stern displays connect J1 pin 7 to every player display pin 11.

Posted at http://tsqmadness.com/slochar/ZIP/

ALI7-V03.ZIP - real seven digit displays required (will still work with 6 installed, you just won't see the 7th digit)

Incorporates the bell mod where the knocker fires once at the start of the ball, and three times at the end. You can add a real bell to the game to simulate boxing.

Please see the readme file for details on adding the real 7 digit displays, basically, one wire added to the display harness.

questions/concerns post here.

please post here as well if you put this in your machine and it works! I know this sounds funny, but I don't own an Ali so can only test in pinmame. The software boots and the displays are correct in my 7 digit modded Galaxy, so it should work fine in Ali, but no one knows this for sure until they try it out.

There was a lot of deprecated code from the factory concerning the dip 8 that the manual warns you to "keep off" (factory code, would not have mattered if it was on or not, the attract mode lamp thread turns it off electronically.... although if you started a game right after bootup, you would get the deprecated code running everywhere. Unknown what it does/what its intention was)

I was curious as to what happens what the ball gets popped out of the lock, Pretty sure the stock software handles that great. I didn't really change any of that for the mod but would like to know it is still resilient.

What a difference between 9 ball and flight 2000's ball handling, all the multiball games after those 2 are rock solid in the way their multiballs work. You don't get screwed if you relock a ball right as another is draining, and they're just really solid. The trough design with the vertical switches is a great design.

9 ball's was too convoluted, and flight 2000 was trying to be too clever. I haven't delved as deeply into the other ball walker games like iron maiden to see if they have the same issues as flight.

Stick with stock as I think you'd have trouble getting a fat plastic tip plunger.

Yes, was just curious. I didn't think it would mess it up necessarily since that part of the code wasn't touched but good to have confirmation.

I didn't have the knowledge when I owned the game last to mod it, but 100% why I sold it was because of the relocking issue. I thought the game was cool otherwise. I used to have a spare BG and populated PF for it too, I've no idea what became of either, probably sold the BG to someone that needed it, but the PF? Dunno!

... and I see that Ali also has the annoying thing like meteor does after you play a game, it uses whatever lamps are currently lit to shift into the attract mode, making it look weird. So I have some stuff to look at for v04, and possibly a code audit to see why things are firing when they shouldn't.

It's odd that the freeplay worked though. I could probably drop the rom into seawitch to look for gross errors since I don't have an ali here. (One of 2-3 mpu 200's I haven't owned at some point....)

EDIT:
So because I hadn't done a stern game from scratch in a long time, I forgot there's a couple hardcoded things in the code regarding the default sounds. I'll correct those as random results will ensue otherwise. I'll assume that when I did the alpha bell mod I didn't change the footprint of anything too much so it didn't break it there, at least not that anyone said (that was just rom u1 which isn't where the error is)

The clue was that the sound didn't work on the scoring and since I don't test with sound in pinmame, I never noticed.

Gathering thoughts on Catacomb for possible update.

No ball relock during multiball (like the lightning update).

When you lock a ball during regular play, play the bagatelle for <some # of times/timed> (similar to the end of ball)

Eliminate end of ball bagatelle as it sows confusion, and (possibly) rightfully rips people off if they complete the line needed for release or extra ball.

Make the multiball start hinge off something other than what it does. Multiball is rare in catacomb iirc. Possibly make all multiballs 2 balls instead of 3? You can't skillfully shoot the locks on this game unfortunately.

A lot of the other stuff in the game is done right - the completion of the drop banks, etc.

Of course would add the spinner counter etc. like other mods since they're fun.

There is not a lot of room available in the roms but I'd see what I can do. Would need alpha/beta testers as I no longer own a catacomb.

I got 171 spins on galaxy and starting thinking about making that one able to record > 200! Never thought that would be possible.

I don't remember any of the ins and outs of QS at this point as it's pretty old (relative to how many hacks I've done since). I thought that the limit was 227 but if it's 127 it's 127. I'll see.

One issue with each of these games as I progress through them is that I've used slightly differing strategies in space savings measures, many of which would not be suited for other titles. QS is VERY full IIRC.

The hstd thing I can double check when looking at the spinners, I don't think anyone else has reported it, but maybe they didn't notice.

Just looked at the routines for this, nothing changed from stock here (surprisingly). Can you watch the scores that this happens with vs. what the hstd was? Does it do it AND replace the hstd? Is it triple matching? The match routine was rewritten maybe a bug there instead of the hstd routine.

There's zero free bytes in the rom right now, so unless I come up with something yet again, some things might be locked in.

EDIT, looked at the spinner mess..... ugh..... early attempt by me to be able to try different things, for different versions, and keep all of them. Messy. I also note that I never got the goofy sound data 100% so that has to 'stick' where it is. Unfortunately I think the best way forward on this one is to start over and re-add all the features with more efficiency. I double checked Galaxy and the spinner counter there only works until 200 spins, ditto with the new seawitch one I just posted. It's not unprecedented that I have to rip all out and start anew, this wouldn't be the first second or tenth time there, and it wouldn't be as hard as you'd think since I have the recreated source to make that part faster.

I don't think >200 spins could be something that would be added but in recreation I'll check. Won't be quick.... hopefully you can get more info on the hstd snafu. For sure this time I think I'll add some of the options to the adjustment menu instead of dips, but won't know until I get the recreation going.

That's the Arduino code. This thread is the original code tweaks.

It is very possible that some sounds end up different since I still don't have Pfutz's sound engine completely understood (he did things very differently than other programmers). I think I ended up ensuring that the sound effects are all in the same location as originally vs. being able to compile them anywhere (my preference).

The 3 bank reset has a sweep on it is it possible you got the sweep for the reset? (Maybe it pays the sweep all the time when it shouldn't?)

I will have access to a quicksilver in late september and hopefully will be able to investigate the behaviors you are describing. I do not know if I will have time to actually fix anything here though as I do not have the time I used to be able to devote to this type of thing available any longer. A quick peek at the old QS codebase reveals that it's one of those ones that is what I would call fragile..... change one thing and it might break another. Unfortunately with the resources of the original mpu200, that's the way it has to be to integrate all the changes.

Also because of the fragility it makes it difficult to go back into it if I've not been 'living in it' for a while. Sometimes on these projects when I go back in I actually go back in and re-write it better with newer tricks etc.

I actually don't see where the limitation of 127 is in the code, but I'm suspicious because that's exactly the size 7 bits hold, so some routine involved with counting or storing spins must have that limitation for a reason. I've no idea what that reason might be.

Like I said though I will look at Quicksilver and see if I can duplicate some of this stuff. Would still have to have a deep think as to why it's happening. I would assume that the QS I'll have access to the owner doesn't have any of the crazy options 'set' on it, or just doesn't notice when things are amiss especially with awarding of matches etc.

could possibly be added to the codebase but what would be the reasoning for it? Lightning currently doesn't have a ball count check when you hit the credit button unlike flight 2000's - which must see 3 either in the trough or in the virtual registers in the ball walker. So that would have to be added as well, or you could just start a game with the 2 balls that are ejecting in play.

It's not like it's difficult to lock the balls in lightning - the release is the hard part. Is it because starting a game with balls locked you didn't get the score for those 2 locks?

When you go down that rabbit hole.... say your ball ends with balls locked. Next player doesn't get the score for those balls locked either, but can certainly take advantage of it. You can't go 100% fairness unless you eject locked balls at the end of every player's ball (like Black Hole does for the upper playfield lock). This got discussed somewhere in the flight 2000 mod thread - that game, since it has a pass-through lock, makes each player 'earn' their locks.

There are about 25 bytes currently free in the rom, 4 in lowrom and the remaining in upperrom, any change might require more bytes than this.

One of the reasons I got into modding the roms is for tournament play evenness. (After losing a match because one player on Dracula got the 20 million mystery, and I got 500k.)

The easy solution to the lightning ball lock is to make the lock saucers worth nothing when locked - just lock the ball.

This one I don't see as a big deal though, the person that would is the person that loses by a minuscule amount that would be covered by the lock scores. There's a certain amount of 'hey, that's pinball' involved here too.

There is a certain small vocal group of people that do NOT want ANYTHING changed in old software in the tournament set - these are the people that take advantage of the bugs/loopholes in the original code. (Think dropping the ball in the Johnny Mnomonic glove into the load VUK instead of moving it to the matrix..... over, and over, and over for I think a million each time, on a game that billions don't win games)

ok, here are the results of the testing I did over the weekend at a friend's house I was visiting:

He didn't use the 50k sweep thing so we turned it on, and indeed, has to be the first drop or you always have to sweep to get it. Suspect somehow the flag for sweeping is not getting reset properly and will look into it (I managed to find the archived source code for the current 07D revision and will move to rev8 when fixed to differentiate)

Could not duplicate the match bug. Played 4 player game, had one of the players specifically have the same match as the hstd and the other players didn't. Only matched for the one player.

Couldn't duplicate the hstd bug, nor tell what the sound for the 3 bank 'should' be (were not able to swap roms back to stock).

He has a different issue very sporadically, where there's no game over sound at bootup.. This might have something to do with sound register ram and what the game was doing when it was turned off. (Stern games store the sound registers in nvram and earlier games Meteor, Galaxy, and Ali have issue with sounds at bootup in their first ball if they aren't cleared.)

I will check to see if the QS software is doing something screwy like earlier mpu200 games with the hstd award as they had a bug there as well, but the hstd had to be less than the first replay level, then it would set the hstd at the replay level.

Re: the spinner counter storage, It looks like I split the spinner left/right storage somehow which requires it being the way it is. What that way is I'm not entirely sure but I might be able to rewrite it to another way, but there's likely a limit on rom space to add more 'stuff'.

I'm hopeful that the sweep thing can be solved relatively easily. I suspect I only reset the flag sweep uses at ball launch vs. on bank reset, which normally, I'd leave the bank reset routines as stock, but I must have separated it out (if I added the 'switch saver' type stuff I normally do now to it, that's likely it right there)

Joydivision can you possibly put stock roms back in and demonstrate the sounds you hear on the 3 bank reset vs. the 07d roms? The owner of the game didn't think there was a difference, but he tested the new roms a long time ago, put the game in storage, and only recent has had it back out.

We also did not notice anything about the inlane spinner sound being different, so if you can film that as well for comparison.

and I just noticed in the changelog that the sweep bug was 'fixed' in 7c and tested but I guess that test was not correct, so back to the drawing board on that one

I have a beta test ready for the sweep and spinner storage if you PM me an email to send it to

Added quicksilver v08 to http://tsqmadness.com/slochar/ZIP/ based on Joydivision 's successful testing

removed 8, added v81, bug in match handling when match was zero and less than 4 players playing
same location