#451 - Let the waiting commence Probably won't be as long as my P3 at least!

With mine due to arrive any day now, this playfield wear problem is concerning. I wonder if it might be worth putting a little bevel on the bottom of the post's outside edge to keep it from cutting in? I think I'll go scout out some nylon washers too, just to have on-hand.

451 finally shuffled its way into Vermont! Made the trip in good shape and seems to be working pretty well. It has thrown a couple drop target errors which will need investigating but the lock system seems to be working, so not sure what that's about yet.

One thing I'm not a fan of is the playfield mounting system. While lifting it to make sure everything looked OK underneath, I slid it out too far quite easily and dropped it into the cabinet at the back. Doesn't seem to have harmed anything but I don't like the lack of positive retention. That little hook at the end of the slide rail is near useless.

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Yeah, tomorrow is maintenance night at our co-op so I’ll be opening her up again to double check there was no damage from the pf drop and take a look at the drops. Ordered the post washers today too, as those Mylar disks are gone after a dozen games. They may as well not bother with those - they don’t last at all.

I’m definitely going to have to come up with something to retain that playfield or it will happen again. Just a matter of time...

Looking like some iffy switches here too perhaps. Several times last night we ended up with balls stacked onto the lower drop target after loading the locks then hitting the first one. Either that or the first one isn't reliably falling. It does work fine most of the time though. Going to run it through some drop target tests tonight and see what that reports.

I'm also losing the top line of display elements in the P3 score display. Happened two nights ago, so last night I reseated the connector and it was fine for a couple hours, then happened again. Tonight I'm not going to touch the connector and see if it's still out. If not, might be a heat-related issue. If it's still broken but works after a reseat, guess I'll need some new cabling.

Other than that, she's been playing fine. Sounds damn good at 11

I don't know if Scott follows the thread here nowadays but if so, one thing I'd like to see is a small adjustment in the font size of the High Score name entry screen. At least on my machine, the letters being entered are half off-screen at the top, making it difficult to confirm what is being entered. It's not a monitor issue, I don't think, as the other graphics all look perfect and well centered, etc. It's just that one screen.

On an unrelated note, anyone else have problems with a lot of airballs? I get that it's a fast game and stuff will happen, but I'm getting a fair number of balls hopping over the left slingshot into the outlane when kicked off the right sling. Everything seems tight and well-aligned so I'm not sure what's doing it unless it's just gathering so much ball spin it's climbing the left slingshot rubber and plastic.

On a further unrelated note, just put flashinstinct's TNA stickers on today and they look awesome. Highly recommended.

Anybody got a picture showing where/how the lighted side rail wiring enters the cabinet? I was reviewing the installation notes today and that’s the one thing that wasn’t quite clear.

Also, how do you get at the LED in the start button? Is it necessary to pop the microswitch off the back? Now that I’ve got the purple flipper buttons in, that white bulbs gotta go!

Thanks!

AFAIK, as long as you're not causing it deliberately, it's just pinball - play on!

Not seen that behavior on mine at all and it plays stupid-fast, as it should

I believe Scott has a note on the rubber ring list on his website that suggests moving down from 2.5” to 2.25” or 2”. Might try that. Spooky might also have some thoughts on the issue.

I’ve been running the beta about a week and would love to know if anyone else is seeing random extra balls thrown into play now and then. I don’t recall this in 1.2.1 but I may be misremembering. Trying to pin down if it’s code or hardware. Error report is not showing any trough errors though.

Yeah, had 2 hard crashes with the ball in the core building criticality. Also had several more instances of additional balls getting kicked into play. Rolled back to 1.2.1 and no further problems. Something fishy in beta-Ville I think

I am not aware of any sort of extra ball issue on the 1.2.1 release code. I have had it on the 1.3.0 beta code though. I thought I had tracked it down to my being stupid and losing track of ball searches and grace periods and all that, and that is certainly a part of it, but we had one clear case last night with several of us watching where a single ball was in play, no scoop launches or reactor kills, etc., and a second ball was launched into play. I am beginning to suspect hardware issues. Spooky has asked me to look at the trough jam opto, which I did. It looked fine as far as I can tell. Maybe it's registering spuriously and causing the game to try clearing a jam by pushing out a ball. I'm not sure yet.

On the positive side, the reactor heat-up game hang is fixed. Nice work tracking that one down Scott. 1.3.0b10 is pretty solid outside of determining whether these extra balls are code or hardware related.

Scott, is there any way for you to track in the log or something when balls are inappropriately launched?

Thank you for all your efforts on TNA Scott. Your close involvement with the community was one of the big selling points for me, beyond how great a game it is.

I sent you an email on this but I'll post here too as I'd be interested in seeing if anyone else notices it.

Reactor speed run tracking looks like it may have a bug somewhere. I currently have a 4 second kill time on Reactor 1. I see no way that's even remotely possible, even if I did everything correctly the first time. I'd have to plunge the rollover, fall directly into the scoop, abort the light show, eject, hit an orbit, build criticality, fall directly into the scoop, eject and hit the destroy shot. Seems suspect to me. I'm wondering if there's a bug where it's resetting the uptime, maybe in co-op or team-vs mode? Maybe I am that good but I don't think so

That's an interesting thought. I typically do start multiball any time I can, so maybe that's what happened - one hit the scoop, one went up an orbit and went critical and one of the other two hit the destroy shot. Under the new beta, that wouldn't be R, A or D on reactor 1, so it could have been just a pop bumper hit. Maybe I am that good!

I had done some tightening of switches in the Core earlier in the week but noticed they were starting to machine-gun a little. Watch out for that. I had to open mine back up a bit. I also adjusted my RAD targets to be a little closer and they've been much better - easier but not too easy. My 1-2-3 targets have been pretty good from the factory, as have the lower playfield slings.

I've had a couple failures recently of the lower drop target going down. I hit it well enough to knock the ball back and drop the middle target, but both balls pile up on the lower one, which hasn't gone down. I'll have to take a look at that mechanism and see how it works.

Just cleaned and waxed her this morning - she's playing fast now!

I have the beta on my machine and though I only had time for 3-4 games this morning after loading it, it did seem a lot smoother. I don't think I had any air balls at all and, at least in my case, the slings seemed equally as snappy as before.

A couple ideas for Mystery awards, though they may be too unbalancing, might be setting the reactor critical if it is started, and relighting the hands-off rollover so you could maybe hand-plunge it during a multiball.

What would be really cool would be a Settings option to add strings to the Joke Awards. Then you could localize the machine a bit, like "Remove all DAG High Scores" or oddball things like that. That would be fun

I reported this to Scott directly via email last night

I’m about 40-60 from the right flipper and maybe 70-30 from the left. I’m happy with that. What I cannot hit is that damned right orbit

It means I hit 40 out of 100 from the right flipper and 70 from the left. Just another way of giving percentages - 40% right flipper, 70% left. I find the backhand shot easier, probably because it’s a bit softer shot.

Like others, I did tune my flippers too. I reduced the strength until they just made the orbits, then added 1 to those numbers.

Just curious - anyone else have an issue under the latest release and the latest beta where a Tilt never recovers? Mine does it now under both those versions. It goes into Tilt and then just sits there. Only way out is to power-cycle. Scott told me he's aware of it but hasn't been able to recreate it, so I'm curious if others are seeing it?

Dave

I didn’t have a tilt issue prior to 1.30 so it seems software related. I’m going to try changing the setting for Ignore tilt in shooter lane and see what happens. I’ll also test with the ear plug removed in both settings of that option. The problem seemed to arise about the time that option was added. I am also suspicious of possible issues with the PROC driver boards. Maybe it is holding an input on when it should not be or something.

Co-op modes make it worthwhile. I still have an issue where the game locks in Tilt mode but in general it’s OK. Co-op is kick-ass though if you ever play with others.

Play around with the flipper software settings a bit. I adjusted the flipper power down on mine to where they still go around the orbit and I think I may have played with the Hold setting too. It felt like the right was getting a little hot on the defaults.

I'm in if there's a batch #2