Have you changed the coil sleeve?

If somebody sells me a cheap copy of the game I will commit to making a home ROM for it that will solve this problem. Fact is, this offer goes for most System 7, 9 and 11 games. (Check out PEMBOT and "Jungle Lord new tricks" if you don't believe me.)

I love the frantic nature of the game. Would be fun to try to add more of the same.

It's one of two games that I remember first by sound. The other is EBD.

Every game that I have bought (only three, all from the 80s) developed a series of 4-6 board faults soon after purchase. After I fixed those (and dealt with the recommended cap and connector replacements) my boards have been solid. Maybe it has to do with my cleaning all the contacts when I get a new game --- I am imagining that this may increase the current draw --- and that I probably play way more games than the old owner did.

This is just a guess, though. I have wondered for a while whether my experience is strange or not.

Snazzy!

That's intriguing. Do you have any more info (or a pic) on this lock?

Thanks so much for the information, Dave, that's really cool!

That would be fun to try. I am always thinking about the next project, so this definitely puts the game on my radar. But I just got a Bad Cats. And I am very slow. So the next project is definitely a couple of years away at least.

Diner is one of my favorite Sys 11 games. I only wish that the right scoop were less rewarding.

Those adjustments will do the trick for me. (I have never played a Diner where I could adjust the settings.)

The second of my System 11 games now has a ball saver. There's PEMBOT and now here's The Cat's Meow:

Apologies for the spam (and the poor quality of the 19-seconds video), but I just wanted to advertise a Pinside Home ROM Development thread for Bad Cats for those who may have missed the announcement.

I have gotten great customer service from Wolfpack.

Without money as motivation, why are the games revisited at all? Making tournament ROMs is a great motivation. I don't play competitively, so I don't care all that much about tournament ROMs. My own primary motivations are i) that I am very opinionated (I don't like shared Jackpots, I don't like ball-3 gimmes, I don't like it when you can score highly on a game without having to use all/most of the available shots, I don't like light bugs, etc. etc.) and ii) that I like to experiment to see what's possible.

Reason ii is why I once explored adding a third ball to a 2-ball game (without adding a trough switch) --- https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/upgrading-a-2-ball-game-to-three-balls-with-software-can-it-be-done. The result: yes, it is possible but the result is clunky because you need a ball-search to handle the case when two balls drain simultaneously during multiball. That's also why you cannot modify Bad Cats to become a non-clunky multiball game without hardware modifications.

The experiment that currently rocks my pinball-coding boat is a patch for the System 11 operating system (rather than for a specific game) with the goal to shrink the amount of space required for the game code of any game. The recent beta code I sent to the testers for my Bad Cats ROM uses an early version of the modified virtual machine. No bugs reported yet.

I am using SWI to execute a single instruction of a "new" virtual machine, which I call the IVM. The IVM uses the WVM (Sys 11 Pinbol) interpreter as a "plug-in", so all the useful WVM instructions are available in-line (setBits, killThreads, exitThread, etc.). This alone saves tons of space in Bad Cats. In the IVM I reuse some of the WVM opcodes that are not useful as "one shots"; for example, opcode $01 (noOperation in WVM) starts WVM mode. I added new system calls, including display_str16 which you can use both in WVM_mode and as one shots. Finally, I added M6800 extension opcodes, such as PSHX, PULX, AAX, A2BX, etc. I have not yet implemented any string compression but I am pretty sure that I will at some stage. Eventually I would like to make this available to other interested parties.

What I like best about the IVM is that it is "boot-strappable": The first stage is a patch to the original WVM interpreter that adds one-shot capability while making the code 1-byte smaller. Therefore I can add the IVM to a game with zero bytes of free ROM. The space I get with the first stage is sufficient to implement the 2nd, etc.

Your conclusions based on incomplete information are very impressive --- all of your presumptions are 100% accurate. The "one-shot" method that I am using is not new. I did not know about the Stern VM slochar mentioned, but I have been long familiar with the use of software interrupts for system calls. In this sense, what I have done is simply to make the bytecode operations available as system calls.

If there is interest we could make a Pinball VM thread. My own experience is limited to Williams System 7 and 11, but slochar has analyzed several others, and there must be other Pinsiders who can contribute.

Unfortunately, I don't think that there is very much useful info on the Sys 11 WVM available on-line. However, since the Sys 11 WVM is very similar to the Sys 7 WVM (only a small handfull of the opcodes of the byte-code interpreter changed) the easiest way to learn about the WVM is using the code from a disassembled Sys 7 game. You can get a disassembler for Sys 7 games with config files for seven different Sys 7 games on Jess Askey's game archive (easy to find with google). Jess is on Pinside and at least slochar and I can also answer questions. Once you understand how it works in a Sys 7 game, the Space Station code will be understandable, too. I am happy to share my tools. But you really need to understand the basics of the WVM before you can use my disassembler and compiler.

• Very fun 3-ball multiball. (Unlike many other 3-ball multiballs without autoplunger, IMO.)
  
• Upper flipper that is important to use.
  
• Ramp with three different exits (diverters).
  
• Fun magnet for guaranteed ramp-shots.
  
• Progressive difficulty (starts easy, gets harder).
  
• Not a drain monster.
  
• Catchy music.
  
• Awesome Jackpot tune (kicks butt).
  
• Two-stage outlane saver (fun to watch, especially when it does not go according to plan)
  
• Habitrail loop for locked balls (to distract the player)
  
• Lost of software choice (two home ROMs in addition to stock)
  
• Good difficulty level (not too easy, not too hard)
  
• Variety of goals (MB, teams, combo shots, WILLIAMS count-down, Sudden Death mode)
  
• Excellent playfield design (very different in my small collection)
  

Most importantly, I can rarely leave the machine when it's time for me to do so. I bought mine before ever playing a game, because of word-of-mouth and because I like Sys 11 games. The diamond plate playfield (not all of them have that) and a fair price made this a no-brainer in my case. I am very happy with this game.

The Pinbot code is pretty amazing. I am not aware of any other game with such a tight synchronization between sound and light effects. The most obvious place this is used is in the robot mouth animation during speech, which is perfectly in sync. In other games (Bad Cats, for example) the sound and lamp threads are started at the same time but there is no synchronization once the threads are running. As a result, the effects never perfectly in sync.

I am proud to announce the release of THE CAT'S MEOW, a new Home ROM patch for BAD CATS. Major features of the patch include player-selectable rules, multiplayer games with handicaps, a ball saver, as well as the ability to pause/mute a running game. Game adjustments for all major game features provide 65536 different rules combinations. The patch is avaialble for free. For details see https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/the-cat-s-meow-a-new-home-rom-for-bad-cats/page/6#post-7912316, as well as may other posts in that thread.