How did you blow up ACNC?

BUMP for being the last post on the previous thread. Good luck!

I don’t understand the reasoning for this? Just put it on the inside bottom of the cabinet instead? Just why create possible problems that have yet to be seen since no one that I know of ever put an MPU and driver board attached to the underside of the playfield.

Given that the committed to making custom shorter flipper bushings for R&M, which requires a mold, which is expensive, it's pretty clear they're sticking with the thinner playfields. They're not spending that kind of time and money for a single-use product.

Pretty much every P-ROC based game has driver boards on the play field, including R&M. So…

Watch out!

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Why would you have your boards installed on the inside bottom of the cabinet? All of the wiring leading to the playfield would have to have extra slack to accommodate lifting the playfield. Also imagine something dropping inside of the cabinet and falling onto the board ie loose parts or a ball dropping when you forget to clear the trough before lifting the playfield. That is a recipe for disaster!

That makes sense.

I posted earlier that the thinner pf would mean the topside posts were sitting higher, but I'm stupid and that's not true Really it only effects stuff mounted from below like the roll-over switches. Anyway, we can all agree Spooky pins have some of the best playfields in the industry!

Soon after getting it home I hooked up the topper. I plugged it in to the power board 1 pin off…the 5v was hooked to the 12v (power board connectors were kinda hard to see with where it was mounted in the cab). When I turned the machine on all coils fired and fried the system. It took awhile for Luke, Spooky, and me to figure out what happened. Spooky covered me by sending every board in the head. Once all was replaced, it works perfect. They felt bad for not having more clear instructions, and I felt bad because it was really my fault. I spent a lot of time on the phone with Luke (mainly after hours), and Spooky didn’t charge me a thing to get my new machine back up and running. I liked Spooky before, but was a customer for life after that experience…great company and great people.

Oh, and it took out the topper as well…they gave me a new one free of charge.

Oh, the magnet is too strong since it's thinner, then? That's interesting. Didn't think the magnets in reeds were that strong. o_o

Ok I did not know that. Thank you

Not sure. I haven't looked at it yet to see what the cause is. Hadn't actually considered it might be the magnet strength.

I suppose a very slow rolling ball could get snagged by the magnet, especially if the switch is located at a flat horizontal location...I haven't installed mine yet on my R&M

I think this is at least part of the reason the MRS needs to be installed with the magnet at the top, as advised by Matt.

If it is at the bottom of the switch slot, the bump that is the end of the slot makes it more likely that the magnet will be able to capture it.

Mine have never held a ball, I guess partly helped by having a playfield protector installed (adds 0.7mm). But also magnets are all at the top of the slot.

I have 3; spinner, right orbit, and switchback.

These new games are not going to be as easy as RaM to get topside access to these orbit switch locations (and ball guides). I don't get why the orbit lane isn't narrower at the switch, or optos used?. It is going to be interesting to see how it pans out this time around. I get a feeling MRS will be more popular with this game than for RaM, just because the fix may be easier than pulling all the playfields off...

I couldn't quite tell if there was any angle to it when installing it, but they are at the top of the slot. In this case the only one I've seen it happen on the far right one. My pf is at ~6.9 so it isn't flat...also the ball isn't getting stuck at the top of the slot, it's at the bottom. Again though I haven't taken the time to dig into it as a little bump and it comes off.

Dumb question.....why do you need access to the top side to work on a switch that's mounted to the underside of the playfield? Are you guys adjusting the wires for the switch lever from the top? I usually either adjust from the bottom side, or at most drop it off the playfield then adjust it...

Jack Danger sending positive vibes while driving in his car...possible HW play stream?
https://fb.watch/v/7gZBbPdFB/

Well, Bug and Luke implied that it would be easy to take the upper PFs off and put them back on. I think they specifically said that was one of their priorities, based on the difficulty of assembly/disassembly of previous upper pfs.

He mentioned Monday during his stream that he wouldn’t be doing a Livestream of Halloween until the team got back from Pinfest. Who knows?

So what’s the difference when it’s in the backbox? You still need extra slack on the wires. It’s the same thing but less wires because it’s in the cabinet. Your argument makes no sense. My point is if they wanted the boards in the cabinet just put them on the cabinet vs on the playfield. And I already was told and corrected that RM has the boards on the bottom of the playfield. But glad you felt the need to chime in. Thanks

No problem. I am here to point out any other dumb ideas.

Correct - we alter the design for playfields of varying thickness - in other words it doesn't matter - we custom fit as needed...

Matt
M&M Creations

Im really hoping its just the angle that makes the gap seem so wide. Surely, they would not go into production if the switch doesnt register every shot.

There’s been many games with boards on the bottom of the cabinet, but they always have covers over them so that nothing falls on a board and shorts stuff out. It’s not ideal - but it’s not uncommon to see. The most recent I can recall having bottom cabinet boards are WoZ, Hobbit and Alien.

Just found this old post...this was in regard to the magnetic reed switches for a creech bowl where it had been moved to the bottom of the bowl, but as you can see, it's apparently "a possibility."

I had two on my R&M and never saw it even close to getting stuck on em lol. Great product thou and easy install

A video of easy disassembly would be very cool!

2 more days til we see gameplay of Ultraman!

How did u get a topper for acnc? I'm number 10 on the list and they said they weren't making anymore. Which is a bummer.

I am personally a huge proponent of this. Although, there are a few hindrances. The chance of this happening with a licensed title is nearly 0%. License holders don't want to risk their assets being copied, and we do not want to be held accountable for those assets being copied. Yeah I know technically there are ways to rip assets anyway if you're tech savvy, and we could probably open source certain areas, while still keeping assets locked down/encrypted, but this is from a more legal, non-tech-savvy perspective. Then beyond that, there is the safety liability aspect. If we allow people to freely adjust their coil strength, and they end up setting a coil on fire and burning their house down, or worse, injuring somebody in the process, we would definitely take some blame for that. Even if we made every customer sign a waiver, it may not completely absolve us of blame. And I know I speak for everyone at spooky when I say the absolute last thing we want is to have one of our machines end up injuring somebody.

Now, with all that being said, I'll reiterate that I'm very much a proponent to opening up what we can, and hopefully in the future y'all will get to see some more customizable, mod-friendly things coming from Spooky. At the very least, I'm hoping we can open up the hardware a bit, to make maintaining your Spooky machines easier/cheaper than ever before. We have a lot of repercussions to consider though. But I will be a bug in the bossman's ear to push things in this direction

Looking back at emails…somewhere before 10/24/19 I requested the topper. I think it was problematic and they thought it best to discontinue it. I have taken it apart…to an extant…to get the brain to work correctly. It works great now, but I can see Spooky’s problem with supporting it.

Wait…that timeline doesn’t make sense…I ordered in June 2018 and requested the topper almost immediately when it was announced… must have been the replacement

WMS Pinball 2000 had the main driver board in the bottom of the cabinet (because the head was filled with the controlling PC and CRT display). WMS made a custom spring-loaded cover for it, and AFAIK there never were any real issues with the design.

However, that doesn't solve the wiring harness length issue, which I think is the main driving force behind Spooky's under playfield placement.

I'm not savvy to decisions behind pf thickness (that was decided waaay before I joined spooky), but I can confirm that the control board (Pinotaur) is mounted to the underside of the playfield, and it does consist primarily of surface mount parts. That being said, I am doing a LOT of work in the electronic hardware realm to make sure any any problems you might encounter are cheap and quick to remedy. While we are not the OEM of the Pinotaur boards (we buy directly from the designer/OEM), we will support troubleshooting and repairs as best we can, and even reach out to the OEM if we must. We have done *LOTS* of testing, (effectively years) and have found that even mounting the boards under the playfield, vibration is not an issue whatsoever. I do have experience in the automotive electronics industry as well; in general, surface mount is largely unaffected by vibration, though you do want to make sure your PCBs don't resonate under any vibrational frequencies you expect to encounter.

Honestly, I think a lot of people who are put off by the idea of repairing surface mount electronics would actually find it pretty easy with a little practice! It's really not terribly different from through hole. Regardless, I am making progress toward ensuring that what comes out of Spooky is as repair-friendly as we can make it. Whether or not it was a concern before, it's one of my concerns now, and hopefully you'll notice improvements in that regard as we move forward!

Of all of the podcast interviews I’ve heard with the folks from spooky and Ben heck I feel like they always shy away from the technical aspects of the game design. As soon as things got a bit technical the host always steers the conversation another way.

Honestly the game will speak for itself this stuff is way more interesting to me.

Screws and other electrically conductive things that might fall off the playfield can cause major problems with cabinet-mounted electronics. Even if we protected the boards from detritus, since the control board has to hook up to almost everything on the playfield, the wiring harness could get very messy/cumbersome if the control board were on the bottom of the cabinet.

Was thinking about "thin wood" couple days ago while helping Scott with Cuphead. His Baltic Birch from Woodcraft was 0.475" which is 12mm. Half inch would be 12.7mm

This is common for a lot of building materials - they list it in SAE/Imperial but it's actually Metric. Menards is honest, they'll sell you a 12" x 24" x 6mm piece of plywood. Says so right on the sticker. Hobby Lobby will lie and say 12" x 24" x 1/4".... but guess what? It's 6mm thick. (0.2362" IIRC)

I once ordered some 12 ft pieces of angle iron from McMaster. Turned up 11 ft long!! I called them up and they informed me their angle iron has a tolerance of +/- 1 inch per foot haha! So, technically my iron was within spec. Regardless, they sent me some 12 ft lengths for free. Great guys! Their customer service almost beats Spooky's :p

For me, other than that they are really really small parts, it can be a pain to find out what the part # to replace it with even is. And far as I know, Spooky doesn't hand out schematics

is there a standard playfield thickness? a lot of parts are very specific and can not be altert for thickness right? like the nylon flipper bushings.
i measured my Williams bride of pinbot playfield at 12mm.
so i always thought this is the standard. do other manufacturers have it different?

Not really....the bowl and rollover MRS' are not comparable - the old bowl switches used very different magnets than the rollovers - the rollovers magnets are about 1/3rd the strength....any hangup over the rollover should not be the rollover itself - it's not strong enough on a playfield with a 6deg pitch to hold the ball with any momentum behind it...further we have rollovers in early 80's pins with slower moving balls and less pitch with zero hangups...

Matt

How much clearance will the Pinotaur board have from the bottom of cabinet?
In the case that god forbid some drunken maniac has an accident with his Flagon of whatever the hip new thing is.

Open source while keeping licensed assets secure would require a pretty whiz-bang API. And it would have to be fairly universal … at least by manufacturer.

Have to think about that some more.

also, just the fact that you have to lock down assets would severely hinder what people could do. I really hate how IP and copyright is implemented. It's draconian and why so few give a shit about it.

Ready to really have your mind blown?

A 1.063" diameter pinball... Is actually 27mm!

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There are probably ways, but ultimately too much of a hassle and liability unless the IP holders don't care about what is done.

but is it standard between companies?

What would be good is for a GIT managed repo - where people could be invited to participate. Spooky still maintains control and bugfixes could be crowd sourced. Not sure what the % of developers owners are out there though.

I'm speaking more to Just Game Code that involves timing, or everyday function of game long term. Maybe have a couple open source portions that you could allow folks to look at. This way you can focus on making new games and lean on some of the community to help out without blowing up the coils or changing things up in a way that causes license issues.

Example... Ball search feature on Game X( 4 years old ) seems a bit glitchy when this event occurs. Home user knows how to reproduce and possibly solve issue. User makes a Pull request and Spooky either denies or approves. That would be super cool to be part of.

Open source at Spooky died thanks to Homepin.

Please direct all your anger at Mike. Thanks!