I’m not so sure about that. Williams System 3-7 was, and continues to be, pretty hellish. Scanbe sockets, running critical data lines through a temperamental connector between the CPU and driver board, a million PIA chips just to add to the complexity, needing a PhD to figure out how to change settings on the system 3 DIP switches.

Gottlieb games may not have aged well, but at least they were reliable from the outset. I’ve heard from people that the Williams stuff had issues even when it was new.

Hey now!! I had a Speak n Spell and loved it!! LOL :p

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I am bald and take offense. But I totally agree. If you don’t have your pins connected to a power strip surge protector and a switch to turn on the power to them, then it’s a pain in the arse to go between the pins to turn them on or shut them down. I bought a Beastron Remote Control Electrical Outlet Switch on Amazon. I put my pins on a surge protector multi tap.

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Try leaning if your arms don't reach.
It doesn't both me at all either, I dont understand the hate other than forgetting where it is, which I always do and laugh it off.

More so a design flaw than a manufacturing thing, but...

The far left target on Dirty Harry. It always gets beat up because the edge is exposed with no room for a post.

One could totally add a post, conserving the target, but increasing the difficulty by blocking part of the left orbit.

Maybe Oursler intended for it to look like the target was shot away like one you'd see at an actual firing range?

Then it looks like you need a history lesson refresher.

AussieArcade was a complicit supporter of Homepin from 2013 to 2018 to the extent that one of the AA moderators with the ironic username of Fair Dinkum Dan actually threatened pinside Admin with legal action at one stage unless the posts with less than fawning admiration about Homepin/Thunderbirds which were being posted on pinside were removed.

Homepin/TBAG should have been called out publicly at the latest by mid 2015 after statements were made by Homepin on local forums in Feb 2015 that machines were weeks away from completion and they subsequently failed to arrive thereby denying refunds as per the sales contract terms and conditions set by Homepin.

Despite the above, AussieArcade continued to perpetuate Homepin favourable propaganda for the next three years until 2018 by allowing him his own self moderated section and deleting general concerns about the overdue status of TBAG, lack of genuine progress in same and refusal to supply refunds to those who requested one. This constitutes blatant collusion between the AussieArcade hierarchy and Homepin to perpetuate a false narrative to a small but gullible userbase.

Homepin left AA in mid 2018 after he screwed over all the local preorder people in totality by selling to Nitro in Canada first as a breach of promise thereby losing the support of even the most diehard idiots on AA. The horse had long since bolted as the rest of the Australian pinball scene (98%) knew his backstory from July 4, 2013 onwards and refused to support the grub from the beginning. Does it not occur to you why he received so few preorders from Australia despite we were designated the primary target market for sales?

You cannot try to rewrite history at this post facto stage even after the AA hierarchy subsequently deleted all historical references to Homepin from their site once the shit really hit the fan in mid 2018 and all the once loyal Homepin supporters tried to do an overnight 180 degree turnaround to save face.

I have all the relevant screengrabs to validate the timeline referred to in my post so frankly I couldn't give a shit how the AA hierarchy and their plebs try to now spin the narrative and futilely attempt to absolve themselves on pinside. Particularly when they are now trying to absolve themselves by describing events which occurred in 2018 after Homepin left AA and was no longer a paid up forum sponsor.

I have to agree with whoever said Pinball 2000. Ugh. At least Pinbar appears to be waiting in the wings to take the crown.

Well there are 5 magnets, a physical ball lock that is covered by a detailed mold, the mini LCD phone toy that features custom character animations for each mode, the Quantum Theater toy that creates a projection effect on the playfield to interact with the ball, the moving mini drones, the trapped door that moves up and down for a shot at the left orbit, a subway, the moving arm on the mechanic that diverts the ball, camera that interacts with player, and an actual physical kickback. There's also multiple RGB lightning elements not seen in most games including the RGB lighting around the phone toy, side ramp, and Crazy Bob sign.

Dialed In is an incredible pin, hate on the theme all you want but many people find it to be a loaded fun game with incredible depth.

Check out the explanation here by Gomez. It's around 4:30. It made me a little less mad reaching for the switch. The real issue is turning on a row of machines and constantly going to the wrong location because you have SAM, Spike, JJP and WMS all mixed up. First world problems. This is a cool video.

Better yet hook the pins up to a smart switch. Where the stupid on/off switch is on a pin is pretty much at the bottom of the list of concerns.

I don't really care for the Stern screech either but always wondered how they came up with that awful sound. With all the sounds you can record and play for a free game, who decided that sound is the one that needs to be used on every single Stern game ever made? Why not a bell sound, a beep, train horn, or even a special call out? Nope, we get nails dragged across a chalkboard mixed with stepping on a cat's tail. I guess the idea is to get your attention and it sure does.

Still, the worst ever is the Stern pf peg supports. No question. So much fun to have to deal with those pegs and wrestling the pf back into place on my MET. At least they went back to supports and added a handle in the back on recent games.

Pin2K had some great innovations. The ability to pull the playfield easily and lay it wherever is amazing and makes a shop job a joy. Some of the diagnostic tools are great as well. Weren't the flipper bases no longer left and right biased? I get it if you didn't care for the screen, but there were some cool engineering ideas that were very much geared toward the people working on the games.

Correct.

Something something something node board...?

The head/cab black and white connectors that are the same size and can be mixed up on williams games.

Gottlieb System 3 games were rock solid and built like tanks.

I have a couple.

Bally 35 era manuals

Not as much a mistake as a complete oversight of how to make a good manual for troubleshooting. Meaning systemised way of putting forward the information in tables with overview. DIPs, coils w/ wirecolours and driver numbers, bookkeeping/settings etc.

And speaking of DIPs. Oh boy I wish they have had the concept of "recommended settings". As a common foundation of setting up games for competition now a days.

WPC minimum volume constraint

They should have done like Dataeast. Just let people know from the DMD that low volume potentially makes the game less attractive. The constaint have likely had pinball kickout of more locations than it has ever helped any earnings. And for home play - just pain in the ***.

I hate virtual ball locks, much rather have physical locks.

Don't forget the different leg lengths manufactures used.

Some WPC95 games like NGG have a fantastic audio knocker, how this wasn’t replicated is beyond me

Yeah I've seen that one before. I've been around enough of those corporate types to translate "making UL and ULC happy" to "we can now make our games cheeper AND save money on certification." This would be all well and good if they managed to lower the price of games, but they decided keep raising them while pocketing the rest.

Amen...
I would argue that while the spike system is an advancement and has potential, it has so far has been nothing but a total failure for the end user. The only thing that really benefits is Stern's bottom line.

This horse has already been beaten to death several times, so that is the last I will say about that. Either you will never buy a modern stern game or you don't give a sh*t....

Can't say I have ever noticed the audio knocker on some WPC games, which says that they did something right. It doesn't take an audio wizard to NOT make someone's ears bleed...

And yet, this community keeps buying and they keep selling them....so.....maybe a contender decision in this thread is:

"Pinside keeps buying half assed product out of emotion and nostalgia and hanging onto their childhoods."

How about on some games, Gottlieb sys 1 in particular the cable going to the power connector that isn't keyed, so you can plug it in upsidedown.

Stern playfields! Now I understand the process being used had to change. Some of the stuff they were using was outlawed. But they rushed it. They used untested clearcoat that didn’t age, didn’t dry, and basically didn’t work as it was supposed to.

The playfield is the highest cost item in a pinball machine. When it goes wrong, replacing it is a huge labor cost. The vast majority of parts in a game are manually put together and attached to that playfield. So when it needs to be replaced, that is a massive cost to the company. Therefore, they resist it. So they put out a substandard product, and try to get away with it. When I had one go bad, it took 6 months of bitching to get it replaced.

Well, it clearly wasn’t the worst manufacturing decision for them, but it clearly was for us, and that was for Williams to get out of the pinball manufacturing business entirely..

but there throughs did not have one switch per ball and never got to more then 4 balls.

Thinking that manufacturing is 'just putting some things together', and that it's easy to get going from scratch.

The kickback fires as well in sync with the knock just to simulate a coil shake, very well executed

I don't think that ended up being a problem, though. There was a switch on the entrance and exit of the trough.

It was just a different design choice they made. It still worked fine.

I wholeheartedly disagree. Kept JJP afloat!

They got screwed by the guy who was developing their first platform who picked up and left with everything 6 months in. Then they got screwed by Rockwell.

Gottlieb and Williams also guilty of this.

You can do that on my Data East pins as well, an advertised feature. The harness is long enough you can pull the playfield clean out without unplugging and lay on a table next to the pin.

Done it myself.

Can confirm. Made putting in side blades a breeze.

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still a decent seller and shoots great. Just based on pinside owners it is hanging with some of the most recent best sellers.

How about Williams using identically-keyed harness connectors - sometimes in the same color too! - in the System 6 era. When bulletins and guides to "which chips / boards / coils did you fry?" have to be made, ya done effed up on the line.

I'd also say the lack of rectifier fuses until System 11 seems like a bad manufacturing decision too, BUT I wonder if maybe they just didn't understand the risk when they designed their electronic platform.

The Bally -35 rectifier board also seems like a horrible manufacturing design too. "Undersized and hard to work on" always fits the "planned obsolescence" ethos. But maybe they lasted as long as "intended".

Data East had them by the third title, took Williams longer to catch up. Not sure why.

Realistically how long are pins suppose to last in the field? I'm guessing, but 2-4 years? Once they stop producing revenue a number of them ended up in landfills or parts machines for newer titles. That some are still trucking 30 or 40 years later is always a source of amazement to me.

Pin companies need to sell pins too, I'm sure making pins last longer than 5 years wasn't high up on the priority list.

That was a bad idea, then I took my Space Shuttle head off and put back together I noted the connectors very closely to make sure the color codes matched.

And then checked again.

Yeah, that's what I was alluding to. There's no question that for the "home use = forever collectible" market, and that same philosophy being applied 40 years later, that board was a terrible design. But of course, that's NOT the environment it was originally designed for, so maybe it was indeed "good enough". So in some ways it's hard to judge.

The Williams gaffes I mentioned, being design/assembly defects and/or safety hazards, are easier to damn.

Head bolts should be leg bolts!

I don't know about the projection effect or the trapped door sound cool. The mini lcd screen on modern games yawn same with the deverter I hated all crazy Bob modes JJP best game would make a good reskin

I agree!

It is a problem though. If you have 2 balls during a multiball drain and stack into the outhole at the same time the software never figures out where all the balls are after that (because it's counting them as they return instead of checking the status of all switches I guess, same issue with prototype Judge Dredd Ball locks on the ring). Even if you drain everything back to the trough. Typically have to power cycle the game to fix it. There are posts there to try and funnel the balls into the outhole 1 at a time but it still happens from time to time. Now I don't know if that's the case for the software for every single system 3 Gottlieb, but I've seen in on half a dozen titles.

Sega made a similar error when they switched from 2 coils to 1 coil on the below the pf ball trough. They initially forgot to add a ball stacking opto like on WMS games. So Space Jam (and possibly 1-2 other games) if the balls stack in the trough upkicker, that's it, game over man. The software never recovers as it doesn't kick the upkicker to try and clear the jam. I think this one is stuck even after power cycling and you have to manually undo the jam for it to recover. Explains why in later Sega and Stern software if the trough is missing a ball it will completely empty the trough. Surprises me still as it happens just as I am lifting the playfield to start working on the game.

Alvin g
Upright pinball cabinets have art that comes off if wiped with a damp cloth.
Gi plug not only burns up it can blow traces on the power board.
Flipper links are ridiculously thin and break easily.

Suncoast
Cannot remove coinbox without lifting the pf.
Ramps and wireforms are way to thin.
Few welds on witeforms.

Heighway
Undersized power supplies
Ft underpowered computer
Usb cables
Usb hub
Using two single row connectors for leds and switches
Induction switches should have had a spacer or greater range of detection.
Leds should not have been chained together
Brittle plastics
Servo controller easily fails
Cabinet design traps heat

Spinball
Unique flipper bats
Very little diagnostics
Artwork comes off with a damp rag

Spooky
Double sided tape to save on screws
Aprons on amh and rz
Amh uses screws instead of posts
Over reliance on servos in amh and rz

Stern/Spooky

LOUD POWER SUPPLY FANS... AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

The pressed newspaper cab material on the System 80B games is a nightmare if it ever finds any moisture.

but they did not do as much ball searching and would not work at all with 1 more balls missing.

Also I don't think any system 3 games had playfield hard ball locks that held across balls

Also Dips for settings but volume is digitally contorted. Dip's for all settings on an 90's DMD games?

I have a Laser Cue and it's perfectly fine without speech. Not every game has to talk back.. sound effects are fine for older games.