Twilight Zone
Bally, 1993Sold a sample TZ to a nice lady the other day, and I told her I'd install the third magnet for her. I know third magnet kits come with only one opto pair, but because it's a sample, there's still wiring for another opto. This pair goes for monitoring the little lane between the clock plastic and the slot plastic. I know the original sample ROM had no use for it, but does the 9.4H? Any reason I should install this pair?
That's called the 'Clock Passage' switch. It does nothing in game, except to score you a small amount of points, make the clock GI 'dim' quickly, and produce a small 'click' sound.
You can install it if you want (I have it, along with the 2nd Autofire opto), but it's not necessary in a long shot.
Hey, a click sound counts. I thought it literally did nothing. Might as well stick it in. What's the second autofire opto? There doesn't seem to be room on the switch matrix for another switch.
I don't have my sample manual with me, but looking at the production manual -
Switch #71 was 2nd Autofire Opto
Switch #82 was Upper Right Magnet
Switch #86 was Clock Passage
The second Autofire opto was in place because there was a thought during game production to use the autofire kicker as a ball lock.
From what Ted told me once was this: "There is never a time when a switch doesn't do something.". Referring to the fact that when you're writing code, you don't 'see' the ball, you just know what switches are activated. So all switches removed between Proto -> Sample -> Production games still cause some result in code. (Because there may be games out there that have said switches installed.)
In WCS, for example, the two outer right loop switches still score, as does the 4th Striker target and the left ramp drop switch. 
Oh, silly me, missed that one. Cool. I figured it was just commented out of code. In fact, it seems a bad practice to leave useless stuff in. The kind of thing you'd get scolded for in programming 101. I guess they were beyond the days of having to squeeze everything into a tiny tiny PROM, but 4 meg is still enough for things to need to be erased for space purposes.
It's so easy to forget that back in the 90's, pinball makers REMOVED stuff before release. Now with Stern's updates, we're lucky if every intended feature is programmed in. Don't think they ever fixed some of those meaningless lamps.
Quoted from CadillacMusic:It's so easy to forget that back in the 90's, pinball makers REMOVED stuff before release. Now with Stern's updates, we're lucky if every intended feature is programmed in. Don't think they ever fixed some of those meaningless lamps.
So true, and if you take in consideration that at 1993 there was following releases from WMS:
1993-01 White Water
1993-04 Bram Stoker's Dracula
1993-08 Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure
1993-11 Star Trek: The Next Generation
1993-04 Twilight Zone
1993-09 Judge Dredd
It's pretty amazing how much stuff was removed from games after designing and prototype-phase.
Yup!
In fact, sometimes code isn't even removed - it's just "never called". Case in point - When I was beta'ing TZ's 9.4H (For Ted) I found a case in the magnet catch code at the start of multiball where the game would do the "toss" with all the balls. Under a very special situation, I could get the game to release three balls out of the lock area and "toss"then up around the loop to be held. (Instead of how the game is SUPPOSED to do it and catch from the autolauncber).
So the code was in there the whole time (as far as I can tell), it was just being skilled over; never used.
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Cleveland, OH
Kouvola