I thought back hair was the only requirement...

This ^ Combine no cradling with those that feel nudging is cheating and we're getting a lot closer!

My question is, how would you enforce no cradling? Seems like a headache of micro management.

Can confirm lol

Well shoot, sounds like I am disqualified from any further tournament play

Get back to us in 10 years!

This is the most hilarious thing I’ve ever read

This is pinside, there is no shortage of micromanagers here.

For all future tournaments I do hereby promise and avow that I will not cradle the ball with the lower right flipper on Paragon.

Showing up at a pinball tournament....

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Yeah.. we all just need to aim to play like this guy ... also wondering where this set up lies with regard to cradle...

@crazylevi, I’m not sure the word “edging” is the kind of word we want to use on a family friendly pinball site.

When did Pinside become Family Friendly?

About 5 years ago. You were here for the massive moderator police raids to rid the threads of GIF boobs and the sorts of fun that grown men can laugh about together. To use a term bandied about in this thread, Robin became woke.

Pinside in general: We need to spread pinball to the masses!

Also Pinside: Scrub! LOL you suck!

Gotta cradle if in multiball play homie!

Am I a jerk because I actually don't care if we spread pinball to the masses or not? Look where the explosion in popularity the last few years has landed us. Yes, theres plenty of good, but at what cost? FWIW, I don't think this is the reasoning for the spicy responses.

You heard here it first folks: If you don't want your pinball forum site to be a clearinghouse for softcore porn, you are "woke!"

The best way to show you are unwoke?

Get horny on a pinball forum site! That'll show those snowflakes!

No your not a jerk.

Introducing folks to pinball helps the hobby. But once it becomes the cool new thing to own. Then a wave of trend followers who sometimes have little/no interest in helping the hobby and more of a "look at me" FB post (like, click, subscribe) mentality slide in and make my otherwise hated Gottlieb SYS 3, 80b and project pins 3 times the price they should be and were less than 10 years ago.

I'm jokingly bitter about the good ol' days of collecting after roughly 10 years. I can't imagine what folks who have been collecting for 30 years feel like. Vids are going up but at what I would consider a relatively reasonable rate. FS ads on pins have been laughable for sometime now. Doesn't stop me from searching for the deals though!

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Tell me you're an uptight American with mommy issues without telling me you're American.

"Clothed breasts are softcore porn."

I'm sure you know the difference between timing out low value modes versus timing out magnets. What I'm saying(and said in that post) is that exploiting that programming is a FORM of cheating. The game goes into ball search mode due to inactivity, so I say make a tournament ROM that either extends the time before the ball search starts or that removes that feature so it leaves the magnets on the entire time during the modes that use it, including during multiball. You can definitely still wait out the modes that use the magnets, but the magnets will stay on the entire time the mode is running. THAT is playing the game as it was meant to be played. Timing out the magnets is like using the "Pause button" in original Pac-Man cabs when going for a high score run. Sure, it's part of the software and is on every Pac-Man ever made, but the use of it isn't allowed in official high score record runs, or at least it didn't use to be.

I totally get modifying the games to make shorter ball times due to tournaments taking so long and I'm all for it. It's part of the reason I don't play in tournaments at shows, though. I'd rather go play all the games at the show and hang out with friends than be stuck in the tourney area all day, every day. You want shorter ball times on TAF, you leave the magnets on and extend the time before the ball search starts up.

No, it's nothing like pressing the Pause button because the pinball player hasn't done anything other than a legal pinball move to control the ball. I also don't see a difference in timing out modes vs. timing out the magnets -- a game feature is active that I'd rather not be active. In your Pac-Man example, someone has to reach down, press the button, and alter the state of the game. Timing out the magnets is certainly exploiting parts of the programming, but doing nothing isn't altering game state and it's not cheating. The game does it for me! It's an option available to all players based on game knowledge that doesn't give an unfair advantage such as ball search kicking out a locked ball for pseudo-multiball. Disable the magnets or come to an informal agreement with other players about timing them out. Otherwise, I'll play the code as-is and would expect other players to do the same.

Is controlling the barrels in Donkey Kong cheating? You're obviously not supposed to be able to do so and isn't how the game was "meant" to be played. Should every tournament Donkey Kong machine get a new ROM that removes this bug? Should tournaments ban the barrel trick? In a perfect world, yeah possibly. I even agree with you that custom ROMs make the magnet behavior better! But that's a bigger change to how the game was "meant" to be played rather than coming to terms with the reality of the machine in front of you.

Games generally won't go into a ball search if you're cradling a ball.

Maybe it searches for the player's balls

Well, you're right about the Pac Man pause feature. It's not really a like-for-like analogy. The correct analogy is the Galaga no enemy fire trick. It's in the code, whether by accident or on purpose has still yet to be known. But the use of it in tournaments and high score attempts is banned. As for the Donkey Kong barrel control, it's kind of close, but you can't control EVERY barrel and you can only sometimes influence some of them, and it's not on every level. If there was a bug in Donkey Kong that made the barrels stop coming out after waiting in a certain spot for a certain amount of time, or jumping 47 times behind the oil barrel, or some other weird trick like that, then that would be the same. Thankfully a bug that bad, like the one in Galaga, doesn't exist in Donkey Kong that anybody's found yet.

My point in all this is that pretty much every arcade game, both pins and vids, all have tournament settings and modes that remove features both physical and/or software-based and sometimes both. These settings are done for a myriad of reasons from closing loopholes and exploits of all kinds to streamlining gameplay and shortening the length of time the tournament goes. I don't think TAF gets a lot of tournament play simply because it's already too easy of a game. The tournament setting of disabling the magnets makes it even easier. I'm just saying if they want to increase the difficulty and randomness level of TAF, re-enable the magnets and remove the timeout feature for tournament settings.

A little late to the thread, but has anyone mentioned this section of the IFPA rules?

'4. Intentional Delays

No player may delay their game for more than 60 seconds, except to await a ruling or resolution of an environmental inconvenience.'

Cradle or time out modes all you want, just so long as you do it in under a minute. IFPA rules are big enough to require a PDF, which you can download at the IFPA website.

If you weren’t allowed to cradle, why would they have a hold circuit on the flipper coil?

So, you deny hanging out the passenger side of your best friends ride trying to holla at me?

Most modes are only about 10-20 seconds and almost all fall well under that 60 second limit.

Circuit and coil protection. Manufacturers try to make their games more sturdy and reliable as you have no idea what people on location are doing and need to design something that can withstand just about anything they can think of that might happen out in the wild like super long cradle times, kids machine gunning the flippers, people beating the hell out of the shooter rod, and who knows what else. It's literally about 70% of the reason so many games have survived the arcades and gas stations and have made it into our homes. Well, that and amazing operators/technicians. We can never thank those guys enough for keeping our games alive instead of just chucking them when they made their life cycle profit goal(as unfortunately so many other ops did back then).

My wife trapped a ball on the left flipper of our TFLE and was explaining the rules to some friends while playing. At about 30 seconds the transistor on the board fried, fuse blew and a bunch of newbs that we were at the time started freaking out not knowing what the heck happened. That was 5 years ago and it’s still all I think about every time I cradle. “Please don’t burn up, please don’t burn up…”

If they didn’t want you to cradle they would just have the EOS cut the power and not have a hold circuit on the coil. They are the only coils like that on a machine.

They also would not have designed two-stage flippers so you can cradle the lower and use the upper to shoot at the same time.

Why invest in flipper boards? I thought manufacturers were all cheap on the BOM and would have kept it simple as possible.

My point was addressing the original question about cradling- flippers are designed FOR cradling from very early on and it is considered part of the game.

Longevity and protection were designed after that theory of operation was accepted.

10 seconds? What modes are 10 seconds?

Most all timed modes are at least 30 seconds long. Most all newer games quickly pause timers when a ball is cradled, making timing out modes impossible.

There are plenty of other dual wind coils used in pinball that aren't flipper coils. The coil that raises the trap door on Funhouse is a dual wind coil. High power to open the trap door, low power to hold it open. Stern flippers use single wind coils. Lots of ways to skin a cat.

Next people will be whining about post and tap passing.

I'm shopping a Cyclone right now, bunch of 10 second modes.

Yes, that proves my point again. They engineered a low resistance circuit into driver boards to allow cradling. If they didn’t want it they would have just cut the circuit until the flippers buttons were released again.

I know there are other dual winding coils, there are exceptions to everything ever designed in pinball.

That would be known as an impulse flipper which has not been used since the 50's

If the coil is applied full power for any period of time the coils smoke, PERIOD. And that period is a lot shorter than you think! I have seen popper coils go up in literal smoke in mere seconds when stuck on.

Hence EOS switches in EM applications and later flipper boards and later still integrated into software.

FYI there are other uses for holding a flipper up rather than cradling, like deflecting a ball thrown from a chute or saucer for example. Damn Trek Pro will SDTM from the left lock unless you deflect it with an upraised flipper.

The magnets shut down to prevent overheating and locking on,/burning the playfield. Not ball search.
Ever seen an Addams with burn through the playfield from the magnets?
The best that can be done is turn them off to speed up play, and if the game has a tight tilt and open out lanes it is fine for tournaments.

Probably more than the number of TAF's I've seen without a burn mark. It's really all I cared about when I got mine, that it didn't have any visible magnet burn.

That's mainly on newer games, I guess. Raise the Dead is 30 seconds, I believe. All the rest are 20 seconds or less.

Wow, this thread has some turns in it! Now we are on timed modes and flipper designs.

If you really want some cool reading on modern flipper design, look at this link on Pinwiki which explains the Kurt Deger design, "hold voltages", Data East innovations, and why single wound flipper coils are the standard these days: https://www.pinwiki.com/wiki/index.php/Data_East/Sega#Flipper_Issues

Modern pinball would have never happened if not for:
Gary Stern
Lyman Sheats
Kurt Deger
Steve Ritchie

Need I say more?

That's not at all how it's done. It's done with software, which saves costs. Engineering a low resistance circuit into the driver board would increase development and board costs. You might want to read the pin wiki article linked above.

JJP and others are still using dual wind flipper coils, with permission from WMS. The first few Stern Spike games also had dual wind coils, until they went back to single wind.

IMO, WMS Fliptronic flippers are far and away the best. They're also the most expensive design, which is why nobody is using it now.

I was trying to keep the response short. Yes I understand it is software controlled but it does go through a power board doesn’t it. The cpu isn’t physically changing the voltage, a transistor is isn’t it?

Anyway, I wasn’t arguing about how it was executed just that it was engineered on purpose to allow cradling as an intentional part of the game… you know the original point of the thread.

?

A lot of people use the WMS fliptronic style of having separate transistors for power and hold windings, with the computer making the switch based on a preprogrammed time (which some games let you alter by increasing how many milliseconds the power winding is activated before the hold)

Just about everyone but Stern does their flippers like WMS.

People used to prefer WMS over Stern flippers. But I think a lot prefer the snappier Stern style because that’s what people are used to after Stern being the predominant builder for 20 years.

Put me in the camp of Stern flipper lover. Fliptronic used to be the best but give me stern flippers all day now

Aware but not the standard. Fliptronics was a bit over-engineered and unnecessary. Other manufacturers using dual wound flipper coils… outdated and behind the times? I think so. I would like to hear an argument to the contrary and why you think otherwise.

The entire point of my statement was to point out that part of the Deger design that BECAME standard across the board is STILL the standard way that power is applied to the circuit. That has not changed since (DE Robocop) where the controlled circuit was first used. Williams had to play catchup and the solution was Fliptronics. The DE idea and design changed the industry, NOT Fliptronics. "Fliptronics" was the response to DE, not the statement.

I'm sure you are aware that a "dual wound coil" is only one piece of of the original patent/design. Once SEGA(Stern) Whitestar existed (then became STERN, the ONLY pinball manufacturer), they decided to remove the "hold voltage" just like "JJP and all others" are currently using today.

The fact that some manufacturers use a dual wound coil and some do not is a preference I really don't care about. Is it cost cutting? Of course! Does it matter though? It doesn't matter to me as an avid competitive player and tech and it doesn't seem to matter much to the "new pinball enthusiasts" paying $10K+ for new machines or to the customers going to Barcades to play these days.

Details:
https://homepinballrepair.com/how-sold-state-flippers-work-fliptronics-de-sega-stern/

If it was the standard, everybody would be using it. Stern sells more games, but that doesn't make them the standard. JJP and other use WMS mechs to save money. They don't have to design a new flipper assembly and secure parts for them. Already out there.

I'm also a competitive player. Have brought games to many tournaments, been a TD and have help set up games at big and small tournaments. I also operated pins for ten years and have run my own pin repair business for more than ten years. I won't argue the differences between the different designs, but I will say that Fliptronics are the best flippers IMO. I can tip (not tap) pass with single wind coils, but they aren't as snappy as Fliptronics. Single wind is cheaper and 99% of players don't notice the difference. It's easy to see why Stern went back to it.