(Topic ID: 240307)

Twilight Zone Restoration

By McSquid

4 years ago


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  • 67 posts
  • 18 Pinsiders participating
  • Latest reply 1 year ago by McSquid
  • Topic is favorited by 27 Pinsiders

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There are 67 posts in this topic. You are on page 2 of 2.
#51 4 years ago

Episode 129: Probe 7, Over and Out

It's alive! I was missing a power cable for the DMD driver board. I studied Jillian Haffner's Addams Family on Saturday night and was able to recreate the cable in question today. Game now boots fully, and that includes diagnostics! We will make heavy use of those to get the game running 100%. I also finished off the apron, lower lock, and shooter lane shroud along with their decals.
Next: finish ramp, plug in playfield, Pray.

Episode 129 Is the tale of a lone astronaut who crash lands on an uninhabited planet and apparently, no one is coming to rescue him. It's a good episode (so no spoilers) New take on and old tale. Recommended.

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#52 4 years ago

Episode 130: The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms

Guys... It's alive. Like truly alive. I spent some time repairing the wire harness and getting the playfield hooked up. A lot of staring at the manual and about 100 crimp pins later and here we are. Nothing exploded when I turned it on either (The clock sounds like death though. SCREEEEEECH heheh). Obviously not everything works, but a lot does...
Ramp is almost ready to go in. Then there are still a bunch of plastics to install and adjustments to be made. Next up: Finish ramp, diagnostics on everything. Finish line is in sight.

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#53 4 years ago

Episode 135: The Long Morrow

As I believe I mentioned in a previous episode the clock was LOUD. So that needed fixing. Took it apart again, replaced an opto and greased the gears. Then ran the clock test for about 10 minutes to get the grease spread out. Nice and quiet now. Got some of the remaining plastics installed, and finally finished prepping the ramp for installation. Connecting up the wires will still be a bit of a chore, but it's all there. I may live to regret using Cat5 wire... But it's the only color coded wire I have.

Episode 135 was interesting. Man is about to go on a 40 year suspended animation space journey, meets a woman right before his trip, and they fall madly in love in 3.5 hours (like people did in the 60s I guess) she waits 40 years for him to return...

Not gonna ruin the rushed ending, but there was a solution they missed... Oh well.

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#54 4 years ago

Episode 136: The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross

This is probably the most important update this project will ever have. It plays. It is NOT done. But it's playable.

I installed the ramp yesterday, then today I spent the afternoon fixing optos one at a time. A few needed wiring fixed, a few needed to be replaced. And after that... All of a sudden I could play it! I then shortly figured out that the gumball machine didn't work. The motor was wired backwards, the switch had broken, and the motor driver board was broken. Lucky I had a spare of that one. So now with a functional gumball machine NOT stealing all the balls, I played for a while, Made some tweaks here and there, and then played some more... And some more... I got to Lost in the Zone and turned the game off. I've never player that mode before and I don't want my first time to be with the glass off haha!

The clock was still squealing really loudly however, so I took it apart once again. I removed and regreased every gear, but then realized the motor itself was the culprit. Blew it out with the air compressor and added some 3 in 1 oil I bought for the resin printer. Totally silent.

Figured now was a good time to build the backglass. Peeling the NOS translite was difficult, peeling the plexi was satisfying. Added the lamps and installed everything. I'm happy with how it turned out. I didn't do much coloration on it. Just yellow for the pyramid, ice blue for the gumball, and twinklers on the logo.

Convinced Whitney to film a bit of game play for me. Enjoy!



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#55 4 years ago

Episode 138: Black Leather Jackets

Today is the 60th anniversary of The Twilight Zone. I had hoped to be able to announce that the game is done today, but sadly it looks like I'll miss this milestone by a week or so. Instead I bring you this custom mod I created for the Powerfield! It's not painted yet, but it will be done soon. You can buy a version of this from some retailer or another on ebay (and maybe pinside?) but I didn't like their version as it seemed poor quality (from a 3d printing perspective.)

It's 3D printed. The bottom is vapor smoothed ABS, the top is UV resin. The eye will have an LED tied to the powerfield eye flasher.

Up next: Camera mod, hopefully working flashers?

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#56 4 years ago

Episode 140: From Agnes – With Love

Working flashers! and mods! These are a few mods I saw commercially available that I decided to model and make myself. Don't worry, I made the camera from scratch and the power pieces were remixed from creative commons pieces on thingiverse. Thanks to artists budque and ClassyGoat. I'm really happy with how they turned out. Might release them for free since the TZ owners community has been so helpful throughout this restore.

All the flashers work now after finishing up some wiring work, repinning the power connector, and wiggling some lamps. I also finished installing the permanent metal leg protectors. At this point the game is 99.9% done. Just working on tweaks so everything plays just right, and making sure the sound and light show are perfect. I'll be posting a bonus potentially boring episode about my quest for the perfect jackpot sound effect.


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#57 4 years ago

Episode 141: Spur of the Moment

Bonus episode, WARNING: this one is fairly boring/technical but might be interesting to some arcade/pinball people

So I had noticed a while back when playing emulated TZ (pinball arcade) that the jackpot sound effect was just... wrong? It didn't match my memory of playing TZ as a kid. I figured it was because of the emulation and because its not original hardware. As you all know Ive only recently gotten my TZ to the point where it can be play tested. I was not too shocked to find out that my game too plays the "wrong" jackpot sound. (since it is running a Pinsound board, although with the original sound pack)

Here is how the original sounded that my brain wants to hear:


And here is the emulated sound and my game:


Since I'm lucky enough to have a Pinsound board, In theory I can just find or create a recording of the correct sound and make my game use it. so here was the question:
Is this a result of emulation, or was the official sound changed in a ROM revision?
If its a rom revision, when the switch was made? and for the game trivia buff in me, why?

After some research I landed on the program M1 and BridgeM1 its GUI/frontend counterpart. The purpose of M1 is to emulate sound chips and play arcade sounds/music right off the rom / rom chip. Twilight zone was on the supported game list so I was excited! Unfortunately I couldn't get it to make any sound at all, though the program seemed to think it was working.

Next I found a tutorial in which someone imported RAW rom data into Audacity. I had more success with this method and was able to actually listen to some of the sound effects after slowing them down enough, unfortunately the sound we are interested was not one of them, and the rest played as screechy nonsense.

Lastly I was pointed at PinMame which is the arcade emulator that Visual Pinball interfaces with to actually run the game code. I was informed that PinMame had a sound command menu where you could send sound commands to the game and it would respond as it would if it received those commands from the game code. This is perfect! exactly what I had been looking for. After screwing with it for an hour (and studying the work of pinsider @Alby87) I had my answer:

The jackpot sound effect is actually 3 separate sound effects in the sound rom: The build up (which we knew was separate and not an issue), and TWO sound effects that combine (play over each other at the same time) for the second half/crashes. The pinsound and pinball arcade use the SFX at memory address F8, but they do NOT layer the other half over it (at address 7a0d) The sound effect was never changed, it was just HALF ripped a few times.

In addition, it is important that these two sound effects be played at the same time ON THE CHIP as they interact with each other and produce a unique sound that cannot be achieved by simply playing both sound effects at once in an audio editing software or platform like Pinsound.

Armed with this knowledge I wrote a sound command to the chip to play both of these sound effects at the same time. This resulted in the correct sound in the end which was then recorded. Unfortunately, PinMames emulation is not perfect, and so the sound is still a little off (especially the timing on the two SFX in relation to each other) but recording this was good enough to restore the original sound in such a way that doesn't make me cringe!

Thanks to The Pinside Twilight Zone community and Alby87 foir their help on this.

#58 4 years ago

Episode 151: The Encounter

Small update. Leg protectors installed, Wiring has been cleaned up, and two of the final demons have been slain.

There was a lot of LED "ghosting" (lamps flickering when they are supposed to be off) I found out how to find the problem after doing some research. I went through the lamps one by one and wrote down which other lamps ghosted when that lamp was lit. After I went through all of them, I had a nice spreadsheet of the problem. I used a unique filter to find a list of all lamps that had a problem and took a look at the lamp matrix... Well, All of a single column and row were the ghosting lamps. Find the lamp they intersect on: The buy in button. Turns out the Extra ball buy in button does NOT have its diode on the coin door interface board like the start button does. So it didn't have one at all, allowing power to leak backwards through the circuit into the other lamps. Adding this ONE diode fixed ALL the ghosting.

The other issue was way simpler. The pop bumpers were all different brightness levels. The lamp boards I bought have a brightness control screw that I didn't know about. Fixed. Thanks Rdoyle1978 !

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#59 4 years ago

Episode 156: The Bewitchin' Pool

Its done.

Honestly I thought it would take longer. I cannot describe the satisfaction in the culmination of that many hours of work. To be able to look at every single piece and seeing a story or a person who helped along the way is wonderful. Time to clean the damn workshop!

To top it all off I finally get to play one of my favorite games of all time infinitely and uninterrupted. This game introduced me to the feeling of wonder that pinball can provide. There were so many things to discover. Endless secrets just a few well timed flips away. One more game...I can do it this time!

Thank you for being a part of this with me and following along. Thank you for the encouragement, advice, and support you have given me along the way. I hope you enjoyed this series as much as I enjoyed creating it.

Special Thanks to the Pinside Twilight Zone Owners community for putting up with all my questions, dri for significant amount of spare and hard to find parts, Leslie Thompson for his excellent cabinet work, Jason Brassard for his excellent powder coating work and his insistence that everything be perfect.

Shot for shot before and after gallery is here:

https://imgur.com/gallery/Kc4ovOp

Here is a massive picture dump of the final product. Enjoy!

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#60 4 years ago

Two words only: FREAKING AWESOME!

#61 4 years ago

WOW, what an amazing journey! Awesome looking game. Color DMD next?

#62 4 years ago

Great work on the restoration and bringing this game back to life.

I just noticed in your completed photos that you are missing the post on the lower side of the piano hole. I'm not sure how much not having it will impact gameplay or wear on the target below it.

#63 4 years ago

Amazing! Awesome Job!! Thanks for sharing!!!

#64 4 years ago

Looks awesome in your lineup! Great job!

#65 4 years ago
Quoted from sagejr:

WOW, what an amazing journey! Awesome looking game. Color DMD next?

I have a Pin2DMD kit on the way

#66 4 years ago
Quoted from jedimastermatt:

Great work on the restoration and bringing this game back to life.
I just noticed in your completed photos that you are missing the post on the lower side of the piano hole. I'm not sure how much not having it will impact gameplay or wear on the target below it.

I left that one out, seemed unnecessary. If I break a stand up target I'll replace it and add the post in.

2 years later
#67 1 year ago

Someone asked me today to measure the backbox lamp board so they could recreate it for a restoration. Posting the resulting image here in case it benefits anyone else in the future.

TZ Lamp board (resized).pngTZ Lamp board (resized).png
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