Yes. Every 30 years.

Why can’t you people
Just admit pops are fine as they are? It’s really worth having a light socket that flickers on and off permanently because it will be easier to take the assembly apart once every few decades?

Innovating for innovations sake is how you end up with garbage like RAZA.

If pinsiders ran Stern, they would be out of business in a year.

You dont think the various pinball builders have not explored this before?

“Ok guys! We’ve successfully bought Stern!

Now…start innovating and redesigning/over engineering every part of the pinball machine, move the power switch back where it should, add 8 coils to every game, and license every single song from every single movie or album for the games we are making!”

“And….slash prices!!! The BOM on these things can’t be more than 2000 bucks!!!”

Personally I never said they weren't fine the way they are. I think they are if you keep the cup clean and lubed and dial them in which is no big deal. It's just fun and interesting talking about possible improvements, good or bad. As far as my EBD I've had it for about 30 years and never had any connection issue caused by the unpluggable socket wires. In fact I replaced a skirt about a year ago and forgot the damn things unplugged and unsoldered them for no reason.

Which is part of a pop bumper rebuild which should be done on any game older than 25-30 years.

And take the Allied Leisure version for example, with the separate skirt stem that is pushed up and down by the tilting of the skirt. Okay, so great, it eliminates the cup. But now you got an extra moving part that slides up and down in a channel, another thing that might get dirty/gummed up/worn out. And okay so you get rid of the pressure put on the stem by the cup. But now either the switch has to be adjusted up against the stem enough to keep it reliably raised up, or the stem has to have its own spring inside there to keep it up against the skirt. Plus there will be additional friction at the point where the skirt is pivoting on the top end of the stem. Looks like an improvement but in the long run it may not be.

Wish there was a pic of one of those suckers totally disassembled.

Or do it like an Arari Analog Joystick like the ones used on I Robot or Food Fight: Two hall sensors and a magnet on the peg. No problem with optos getting dirty, no physical contact with the peg and the Hall sensors.

Ultimately I agree with don't fix what isn't broken. Keep it simple stupid.

But I do think having a pop that can detect what direction it is hit from could be used in interesting ways depending on the playfield and rules.

Not a pop, but this was a Wayne Neyens idea of a directional detecting bumper

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Dang, how did he fit all those switches between the bumper and the number inserts?

Oh, okay looks like the switches were on separate vertical switch mounts.

Still think there is a way to have both. Everything should be in memory at this point so its all instant when you turn it on.

Holy cral try a Spooky, you'll be beginning for GB quick start up!

So exactly how long DOES it take for a Ghostbusters to boot up? Is it because it's performing a ton of diagnostic stuff first, or simply the program and graphics loading?

I wonder if people complained about that 40 years ago. At power up, Eight Ball Deluxe takes 10 seconds to go thru the diagnostic checks, Black Hole takes 5 seconds, but Black Knight is ready to play almost instantaneously.

True, but that's a bug, not a feature. BK boots up instantly because it's doing zero self-testing which isn't a good thing.

That's not a 'bug', it's just the way Williams decided to design their system. I didn't say it was a good idea.

I think the spike games take so long to boot cause the CPU is making sure all node boards are online and responding.

lots of phrases come to mind outside of the "if it an't broke" already mentioned.

KISS (keep it simple stupid)
cheap is king
Tribal Knowledge
IF JPOP did it different; we know not to do it that way

The flipper mech hasn't changed a lot in several decades; it doesn't mean it needs to be re-invented.

I wanna hate on this comment; a lot.
But; you know --- he has a point.

Atari at one point used rotary solenoids for their flippers. Huge space savers that could've been the replacement for the usual setup, but I'm thinking they were never really as strong and their part cost was probably too high comparatively. I'm sure ones could be made these days that are plenty strong, though they're probably still too expensive for a manufacturing run of a few thousand. A company would have to commit to using them solely for their flipper mechs for the next few years to really make that part cost drop to a significantly better price point.

https://www.pinwiki.com/wiki/index.php/Atari_Repair#Rotary_Solenoid

If Atari was sending out regular style flipper mechs to replace the rotaries, then I'm assuming the rotaries had an abnormally high failure rate. That sucks.

The best pop bumpers are the ones on Junk Yard and The Shadow.