Tilting, taking turns, and winning free games: the many tricks inside old pinball machines
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- Опубликовано: 26 май 2024
- Tilt!
Links 'n' stuff:
The Pinball Playlist (it'll getcha to parts 1 and 2)
• Pinball!
This is the video on Bally Gay Time, a bingo machine from the 1950's
• Vic Camp Pinball: 1955...
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**Alec brings home pinball machine**
“This will feed our family for months”
I laughed like a fool after reading your comment.
Thanks for the endorphins!
I can hear the smirk in that comment. :v
“And it’s a tax write-off!”
Nekkimmut: “…through the magic of buying two of them…”
It's a hobby hole...you buy one and suddenly your just steeped in how it works 'cause as Marge Simpson put it: "It's just neat." Source: Bought my own and eventually I had 4 all self repaired.
@@headwerkn The LTT and Alec crossover we needed.
The fact that we can (probably) fit all the logic of this machine into something the size of a grain of sand now, is mind blowing. But perhaps equally impressive is that they were able to do all this complex stuff with just relay logic.
Yeah, its super cool that this uses physics to simulated "thinking" for lack of a better term. There's an artistic madness to the inside of a mechanical driven pinball machine.
@@Ironman1o1 We still do use physics to think, it's just much more complicated physics.
I saw a more modern one, the whole logic was in a board the size of an iphone 14 camera bump
Ya know, like almost nothing
Agreed, Tech has come a long way in the past 200+ years
It is possible to build a general purpose computer, and memory, out of relays. A few were made before thermionics and then semiconductors took over. In theory you could run Grand Theft Auto V on a relay-based computer, or indeed on Lovelace and Babbage's steam-driven Analytical Engine, if you built enough storage and were prepared to wait long enough.
25:11 "They only made their profit when they sold the machines, they didn't care how they got used"
Oh how I miss those times.
"You'll get used to not owning the thing you paid for." - Mega-corporations in the 21st century.
"Don't you guys have phones?"
@@Darxide23 most people who played pinball in the 20th century didn't actually own the machines though.
@@poochyenarulez Nobody expected to own the bowling alley, skating rink, or movie theater, either. A bad argument and a false equivalency fallacy.
@@Darxide23 I'm not sure what that changes. You don't own it either way.
I love watching Alec talk about balls and knockers.
[Insert very mature giggling.]
"This device prevents you from cheating."
Is... is he exploring the chastity belt in this one?
"o u t h o l e"
"The end of stroke switch in the ball count unit" 😰
Now, whenever someone asks me _How does a pinball machine work?_ , I can confidently say _I've got no clue, but I sure have a video series for you..._
I once was fond of saying "I have no idea, but I know exactly where we can find out."
I think nobody could explain it without the schematics and the machine itself.
The answer is black magic and the dreams of children (which is honestly just another form of black magic)
@@kittenisageek This is exactly what his comment was.. you just repeated it? 😐
@@IceTTom yes but provided a different way to say it, which I rather like and will be trying to use.
Had a pinball machine growing up. It was SO loud I only played when no one was home. Got home from school and it was gone. I asked why my parents sold it. "No one plays it."
Being considerate is always punished.
@JD2jr at least when your parents suck at communicating, it does 😂
My brother had a toy pinball machine as a kid that was insanely loud too (could use those speakers in my waterproof mini smart TV in the shower, which you can't hear a word out of when using the shower). One time we got a ball stuck on a bumper and watched the score roll up... deafeningly.
Q:
What happens if the building power goes out in middle of a game play?
@@glenncaughey5044 YOU LOSE. RESET. One of the tricks you could do was kick the power cord out 'accidentally'. Rage Quit.
46:20
Honestly the idea of having an internal outlet for a soldering iron is genius and a great QoL feature, I love how ya can just sorta ~tell~ it was added by an engineer who was sick of needing a long cable on their iron when they were building and designing the thing
Proot pfp, checks out. Where you plugging in your soldering iron?
His a-@@AstarothFox
@@SSFallingTTB *yells* Wrong socket!
@@AstarothFox oh. Well, I kept trying and he seems to like it
I like how in Brazil, "tilt" has become synonymous with something that stopped working, especially after misuse or attempts at percussive maintenance.
Nice to see where that actually came from!
someone else commented it came to mean the same thing in Italy haha
When internet gaming was a thing a player becoming "tilted" usually meant they were frustrated or angry and stopped playing with their team which inevitably causes them to lose the round or match. When you have a tilted teammate all you can do is watch the ball go down the drain.
@@joekenorer "playing on tilt" has been around longer than internet games, but it did popularize it with a modern audience!
Likewise in Flemish Dutch!
@@joekenorerwhy is this reply written in past tense? have i missed something about internet games?
11:10 Huh, so the "ball reset sound" in Space Cadet Pinball on Windows ACTUALLY used the real sound...that's so fascinating.
huh i never thought about that, but now after watching all these videos. hmm i wonder has anyone made a physical version of that pinball game?
@@Kafj302the nostalgia I associate with space cadet would make me spend way too much to get that!!!
Hey, that is true. The original commentor deserves all of the likes you can muster.
@@Kafj302 that would be quite difficult to entirely reproduce as IIRC some events are playing with the ball physics.
@@PainterVierax-- You could influence "gravity" by changing the board angle, and get some amount of bounciness by changing tension or voltage of the bumpers.
A pinball game that shifted the board angle would be pretty cool.
This machine is so complicated but when you really zoom in you find what looks like a rock hanging on a string haha.
Yes but it was a very advanced rock and hangar
my mind just went to "you can't play pinball during an earthquake"
Yes it's just as simple as a rock and a string. It's not like there is enough wire to wrap around Rhode Island or anything inside this also. It's not like the rocks actually ordered in a specific way that allows them to compute logic lol. This is identical to a rock and a string. That was sarcasm. I understand your comment but these machines are works of art, not a rock on a string. Learning about these machines taught me how to write simple programs on Arduino after I understood how each part of a program could be represented in a physical manner.
Complication comes from the number of rocks hanging on a string
@@madeintexas3d442 exactly. This is an ingenuous logic circuit before solid states. During this entire series my mind was thinking how easier those programmed sequences could have been made with just discrete TTL. The maintenance issues with his more modern pinball is mainly because they've cheapen out on the mechanical reliability and added way more complexity and fancy things than this 60's device.
Alec is doing future historians a huge favor.
I like how the service manual is essentially the source code and it is available to prove the design and aid in debugging issues.
More code-bearing boards should do that today
Definitely. Schematics and similar documentation are the primary thing (besides generally cheapened manufacturing, but that at least made the things cheaper) separating the 'reliability' of older electronics (even when they were a maze of arcing contacts like this thing) from modern 'disposable' electronics.
Everything's a 'trade secret' now, dependent on undocumented communication protocols, locked down to signed firmware, locked out from third-party components, and increasingly even SERIALIZED so that parts cannot be swapped to repair an ailing unit with parts from a failed one. It's not right.
I go far out of my way to try to find open-source hardware and software wherever I can, even if it's more expensive and requires more knowledge to use, and seriously consider going without when I can't find any, but there's just not much I or anyone else can do if both governments and consumers keep encouraging this stuff.
In my book, trade secrets and IP protections should be mutually exclusive like they were originally intended to be. You want to leave your protocols undocumented? Fine, but anyone who reverse-engineers them can consider them public domain. You want the government to enforce your monopoly on something, and you managed to meet whatever criteria they laid out to do that? Fine (for a limited time), but the EXACT schematics (including PCBs, communication protocols, source code, firmware signing keys, and IC layouts) are going in the public archive. Take your pick.
The thing is you might have knowledge on how to make it, but you still have to make it. That's a lot of hardware to buy.
@@davidmcgill1000 That's... what companies selling products are for. I don't generally self-source stuff (I was tempted to when I wanted a 3D printer, but I decided to keep that for my second 3D printer and buy a complete kit instead); but I demand the schematics/source code/etc. so that if I want to fix or change something, I can. It's pretty ambitious trying to build a whole machine 'from scratch' (doable, but very difficult and time consuming), but if you have all the 'source files' such as schematics, technical drawings/CAD models, source code, etc.; refurbishing one tends to be fairly straightforward, even if it's in very bad shape.
Of course, it's not strictly speaking in the interests of a company's profit (at least short-term) to spend effort to keep older, likely secondhand products on the market (in fact modern tech companies like Apple put a lot of effort specifically into preventing that), so it needs to be extra incentivised through other means, whether customer insistence, regulation, or other methods. It's critical to reducing waste, though!
@@05Matztho with commercial/industrial stuff where something's purchase price significantly outweighs repair costs things do get a bit different even today
My father, who was born in 1922, told me that it was common practice for the owner to buy back any extra games when you were done playing pinball. The owner had a way to wipe the free games off the machine after the payout. When I was a kid in the 60s, I heard it was a thing that happened, but I never saw it. Most people would just play until they lost.
I can imagine, "Hey kid, we're closing!" "But I have 12 free games!" "Here's $3, and I'm pulling the plug."
That actually makes a lot more sense
My dad worked at a bowling alley that had several pinball machines. they made payouts many nights at closing.
when i was in high school i would skip school and go to pinball shop..they had about 50 pinball machines..the owner was cool before they opened each day he would put a credit on all the machines so first people in could play for free..also great Rock and Roll playing at max volume...the place was closed down due to back in the "office area" (behind a curtain) which contained a couch (which was handy for sitting or laying) and a coffee table that someone had spilled some green substance on each day...the owner would entertain some students...enough said....ahh the 1970's
@@MickeyMouseParkinteresting how you know the details of that back room o.o
@@ttrreebboorr22000066bro was quite entertained as a teenager when he went "playing pinball"
fun fact: since pinballs didn't often get translated in italy the word tilt was often assumed to mean "out of order" or something like "kaputt". Today to "go into tilt" (andare in tilt) means to stop working
Same in Brazil. To "Tilt" means to stop working. To crash.
Now you say it, the same happened in German.
If I'd say Ich bin tilt(ed), it means I'm kaputt or knackered.
Same thing happened in Portuguese (Brazil), in the 80s and early 90s... It was synonymous with what today we'd call a computer or software crash.
Ok, that is legit a fun fact! How cool that old, old pinball games influenced the language across the world just by being fun.
In this context, "tilt" would better translate into something like "foul", as in a foul ball.
I work with FPGAs for a living, and I can't help but think of how these rotating cams and relays act as a state machines, and how the unit wiring is reconfigured by different actions.
All of this was designed without the complex software we use today. Fascinating!
I kept thinking that the machine might be best explained by a state diagram... but realized that it wouldn't help the intended audience. Still, I wonder if the machine was originally designed by putting together a diagram of a state machine just to keep things understandable, or if it all evolved feature by feature over the generations?
@@SkyhawkSteve it must have had a state diagram. There's just too many things to keep track of! 😂
I imagine if I had to develop a mech pinball from scratch
that i would have mapped it out with core functions
Tilt
Score reals
Bells
Ect
Then build apon that and add the second and third functions and look for ways to link the circuits to get the desired results
I'd really like to get ahold of the wiring diagram just to read it and try the understand more of the logic
"rotating cams and relays act as a state machine"... no, a state machine act like rotating cams and relays :P
I'm imagining how the designers of these machines must have felt once they discovered software programming. "You mean I don't have to wire the relay to test it?!"
Oh man, the dedicated outlet for the soldering iron is really very telling. Thanks for this series, enjoyed it immensely.
Hi! Stats person here, I ran the numbers on your question at 39:21. Short answer, it is actually just 10%, that's mostly human bias, BUT some games are way more likely than others, long answer:
EDIT: god damn it, I paused in my eagerness to go off and do the numbers... *sigh*
So, first of all, stats is impossible if you don't make some assumptions about what you're modelling, the big assumption here is that the "reward list" and "score list" (left and right columns of numbers in the video respectively) can be offset from each other by any amount at the start of the game, that offset can be any number between 0 and 9 (here 0 is the numbers as shown in the video, adding 1 shifts the score list down by 1)
We're pretty safe to make this assumption since the cumulative offset over the lifetime of the pinball machine (our starting offset for the game we're interested in) is just the last digit of a bunch of random numbers added together, over enough games this forms a uniform distribution, that is to say, any offset is just as likely as any other (which is why we can make the assumption and be relatively safe in doing so)
Since any offset is just as likely as any other, this makes our lives significantly easier since all we need to do is check each offset, see how many give us an extra ball, and that's it!
At offsets 0, 2, 5, 6 and 7, we can't get a new ball because of the issue shown in the video where no combination of reward and score values line up. At offset 1, there are two values that'll give us a ball, those being matching 00s or matching 70s. Offset 3 gets you one on matching 20s, offset 9 also gets you one on matching 50s. However, offsets 4 and 8 both have 3 lots of matching numbers that will reward you, 30s/60s/90s for offset 4 and 40s/80s/10s for offset 8. Here's all of that as a table:
Offset 0: 0 rewards
Offset 1: 2 rewards (00s, 70s)
Offset 2: 0 rewards
Offset 3: 1 rewards (20s)
Offset 4: 3 rewards (30s, 60s, 90s)
Offset 5: 0 rewards
Offset 6: 0 rewards
Offset 7: 0 rewards
Offset 8: 3 rewards (40s, 80s, 10s)
Offset 9: 1 rewards (50s)
Out of the 100 combinations of ending score and offset value (10 score values x 10 offset values), there are exactly 10 combinations that give you a reward, 10/100 = 10% exactly.
But more than that, notice that each rewarding value only occurs once in the table above, I think this is good evidence that the designers wanted the game to not be predictable, but at least to be reasonably fair in terms of your chance of success.
However, now that we know the secret formula for how these all go together, you could game the system. Stand around waiting at the sidelines and let someone else play until you can figure out what offset the machine is currently on (you could theoretically memorise every combination of reward and score list values for each offset, but my advice would be to just learn which offsets have which matching values, this does mean you have a few combinations where you don't know where you are in the list but it's a reasonable compromise).
Now you know what offset you're on, you should be able to keep track of what offset all future games are on as well, just pay attention to the final score when the game ends, then you can add that games offset to the running total and you should be able to predict the next game. After that you just need to socially engineer yourself into playing all the games where the machine is ready to give you a big win (remember offsets 4 and 8 have a 30% chance of reward, be mindful of the games where it's impossible!)
Good luck, may you use this forbidden and forgotten knowledge well!
nice work
🤠👍
So, to get the highest chance of an extra game, you do a pinball version of counting cards and try to swoop in at the best probability.
Congrats on the longest comment I’ve ever seen lol
Double damn it! I also paused to do this and then ALSO didn't see your post when I scanned the comments.
Speaking as a guy that cannot see the screen, I appreciate the quality of your descriptions.
My eyeballs work fairly well… especially with my glasses on.
But I really enjoy listening to these videos as I fall asleep.
Alec’s narration is so good… I can imagine a fairly decent version of the video with my eyes closed
Had this happen to me for a while, turns out it was the HDMI that was faulty. Hope you can fix it 👍
@@felio_ I also had this trouble, but it was because the path between my eyes and the screen was interrupted by a solid object.
@@felio_ LOL! I can fiddle with or replace the HDMI cable until the world stops turning. It will not compensate for the lack of photo receptors in my retinas. But thanks for the suggestion anyway.
@@surferdude4487 Oh shit, yeah it definitely is not the cable haha my bad 👍
I am the proud owner of a perfectly functioning Aztec. I am absolutely in love with this machine and its quirky electromechanics. Your video's on the internal workings are truly gems. Thanks so much for all the painstaking research that must have gone in to making these vids. I stored all three of them with my digital documentation of this wonderful machine.
BTW, nothing ever broke down on me in the last 20 years I had this machine. :-)
Online gamer here. "Tilting" as a term is still used today, and while physically tilting an online game is impossible, it has become synonymous with a player getting frustrated, or "tilted" at the game. It's often used in a taunting manner, much like the term "skill issue". When a player is "tilting", they are often making unwise decisions based on impatience. Needless to say this video was immensely amusing to me.
Makes me wonder if "Tilting" in a video game sense comes from pinball? With people getting frustrated during a pinball game smacking the machine and trigger a tilt. Or if it just comes from people being mentally unbalanced, or "tilted", in the moment and making hasty decisions because they aren't thinking right anymore.
yeah, came here looking for someone mentioning this, as soon as i heard alec speaking of tilting i made the connection that maybe the term used on online games is originated from pinball and arcade machines
@@vulduv no it definitely came from pinball. But esports kids probably picked it up from poker where they've been using it for decades already.
I played CS for a long time and the only way to win matches is to develop a good team and someone on your team getting tilted is absolute cancer and it makes everyone want to stop playing because despite your efforts that one person will cause you to lose the match. It's used to mean because of that players attitude the round is lost, like getting a tilt on a pinball machine all you can do is watch the ball go down the drain.
The sneaky thing Alec doesn't mention here is that it's not just about the switches! Some dastardly operators will leave the legs a bit loose to accentuate the table's ability to wobble. This means it's even easier to tilt without meaning to. Though doing this also risks wearing out the threaded shafts the bolts go into. And you do NOT want to see a pinball lose a leg! If you're lucky the player will kindly catch it and holler for you to come quickly. Otherwise, kiss your glass goodbye!
My aunt gave me a pinball machine back in the 1960's when I was in high school. It was well used and needed occasional maintenance. I quickly learned how to adjust the tilt bob for easier playing. I didn't even know what a relay was but I learned a lot from that old machine and eventually became an electrical engineer.
🤠👍
1960s *
You may be thinking of the apostrophe in '60s
LOL You're right! My aging brain trips me up sometimes.
I knew a pinball player that could work around these tilt mechanisms bouncing the machine in a circular motion. I imagine that the "rock" was largely stationary while the machine bounced around it. He would get in trouble with the machine owners but would shrug and say "There's no TILT alarm!"
I worked on plastics molding machines that had relay logic.
Intermittent failures were sometimes total hell fixing. I got pretty good at it....that and hydraulics.
👍
The wiring in that PinBall machine reminds me of the wiring in a early 747 airliner. Wires everywhere. I'm a A&P mechanic. Great watch, thanks..............
Yes its look same as wiring on 747 jumbo
Interesting
@@S500- Not sure but there is around (150?) miles of wiring in a 747.
To be fair, they are of about the same age, this is actually newer than the 747, as that was developed in the 60's (first flight 1970).
The next series of videos should demonstrate a 747, just like this. I'm sure he can get access to one.
There is a pinball museum near me where all machines are free that I'd be more than happy to capture and provide footage free of charge.
Are you in Seattle by any chance? I've been in the one in Seattle a couple of years ago.
@@paulbarnett227there's also a place in Spokane with free play machines, you just pay an entry fee, or donation. I forget what they call it exactly. It's a fun little place
The dedication to set score to the speed of light is awesome!
These electro-mechanical devices are nuts. Old mechanical washing machine timers which execute a whole washing program are also fascinating to me, and by the way those would also make a great video subject.
How about mechanical adders that allowed you to put 50 cents in a newspaper machine in any combination of coins minus pennies.
Infinitely more more reliable than any microcontroller.
At one time telephone operators at cord boards had to listen carefully as a caller at a pay phone deposited a pocketful of change for a three-minute long-distance call. Quarters, dimes and nickles went through separate channels inside a pay phone. Thus each triggered a different audible tone and the operator originally had to add these up in her head as they were deposited.
Before the Jan. 1, 1984 breakup of the Bell System long-distance telephone calls were costly. By the end of the 1960s Western Electric had developed and was starting production on operator terminals on which the change deposited would show on a digital display. This at a time when most long-distance calls were now being direct dialed. Even with direct dial, phone operators still had to interrupt to tell the caller how much change to insert.
@@JamieWoods-go1cv80s phone phreaking was good times. Some into the 90s but it was pretty well over after that.
You can find that in Tim Hunkin's series The Secret Life of Machines, which he's remastered and made available on youtube (along with a new series of videos explaining how to use various types of devices and equipment that are very informative).
Hearing someone rip on the stern knocker brings me infinite joy as a pinball technician
As I am someone not in the know, could you describe it?
@@melodycervantes4167 Two words: Tire screeches
@@melodycervantes4167You really need to experience it irl lol. It works TOO well. Everyone within 500 feet will know your good at pinball.
As a Gottlieb EM collector, I find it really interesting how differently the logic is implemented in Williams games of that era. Some aspects are more slick than Gottlieb's implementation, but they lack the mechanical rhythm of Gottlieb games which is what always appealed to me. Very impressive show of depth of knowledge btw - I appreciate how much effort went into this series.
My FIL has a 1950’s baseball-themed pinball machine. We were looking at it one day and I noticed that the wiring and mechanics were in a rough state, he plugged it in to my dismay and I was dumbfounded when 90% of the machine came to life and worked! A few lights and features were dark, but I couldn’t believe it hadn’t caught on fire. Amazing analog programming inside these.
I had to learn contact symbology as part of my degree. While it’s not difficult to understand, when you have this many contacts that are cross-linked, it can be difficult to see how it all works without doing exactly what you did these past few videos. So thank you for breaking it down for the masses!
I also had to learn it as an Electronics Engineer, both the regular notation and the "Ladder" variant.
I love the animations where he moves the linkages and highlights which wires are active. Great visualization!
As a railroad electronic engineer that works on locomotives with similar relay logic. They aren’t a million miles apart from pinball logic.
I'd be pretty curious to see his working for these videos. I'm picturing a series of huge flow charts hyperlinked together
I have a bs in electronic engineering and these things are confusing lol. The engineering is complex
I really love how the physical logic circuits closely resemble modern programming, like the ball count and coin count system looking similar to a nested for loop. The fact that engineers did this back then with way less visualization methods is mind boggling to me.
Came here to say I wonder if these designers considered themselves programmers, or should retroactively be programmers
@@JoeLion55 It's definitely considered programming.
For those wondering, a "slam tilt" is a kick from below the bottom of the playfield as a last-ditch effort to "save" a ball when it's already draining. That last part is a big reason why, iirc, the community agrees with the operators about how much of a no-no it is.
It's only frowned upon because it can cause damage to the machine. It's also not a "kick," it's just a firm smack on the front to bounce the ball up from the drain, and requires both skill and a specific layout to pull off.
YES!! You mentioned the soldering iron plug! I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone use an extension cord and I just walk up and say, "Why didn't you plug it in... there?" and watch their jaw drop. Never gets old.
And there are two other maintenance tasks that are constantly necessary: cleaning and polishing the playfield, targets, and rubber; and replacing worn rubbers. Some of those high angle tables really chew up the flipper rubber!
And the only table I found harder to work on than Theater of Magic was The Addams Family. Thing was forever getting stuck on his track!
Never worked on an ST:TNG, I take it? That’s a maintenance nightmare.
@@paulpalinkas - No, and I think I've only ever played one once or twice. Rarely saw one.
I can't get over how much this feels like a really complex Redstone machine. It's kinda cool that the spirit of these marvels of engineering still kinda live on in things like Minecraft even though they've been supplanted by modern electronics.
Redstone machines are based on either digital logic (more applicable to a game like this) or simply delay the input signal by a target amount (for anything piston-related). Digital logic of course does have the same sort of "complexity from simplicity" thing that electromechanics has, but since their cheapest form is in tiny mass produced chips it's a lot less interesting since all of the magic is so small.
The resemblance is really uncanny. I made a mastermind game with automatic scoring, and it used colour wheels with resets and state-enabled relays very much like this. The white-score counter even used the -1 offset just like the replay scorer triggering on 340,000 when a new 10,000 is added.
@@benuscore8780 digital and delay logic is only the beginning of redstone iceberg. There are also droppers, hoppers and pistons. From that, you can make pretty nifty count units by combining droppers and hoppers, and piston feed tapes could be used as a sort of a cam, etc.
That combined with the space constraints that redstone stuff operates in, probably creates something with quite an electromechanical vibe.
Some people may make fun of it but I think it’s really cool how Minecraft inspires a lot of people to get interested in programming
Thank you for answering what that "bang" noise was whenever I won a free game 😊
The very first time I won, that noise scared the bejesues out of me, and I thought I broke the machine because of how loud it was.
Caused a lot of laughter from the older players, who told me that I won a free game and I could keep playing 😊
I had to disable the knocker in my Rollergames machine. Bloody thing always scares the crap out of me. 🤣
Alec saying "Sure is worth it, though" and seeing the love in his eyes ❤
Fascinating learning the history and mechanism behind the "tilt"! Probably 98% of my pinball time has been on computer versions in the 90s, which built in the ability to virtually "bump" the machine of course. It always seemed (and probably was) arbitrary what about of simulated roughhousing would make it tilt and kid me had no idea why it was called that either
What does tilt mean
@@desiredditor Watch the video, dingus.
@@desiredditor0:48
If I had to guess, the tilt function on digital pinball was probably just a time threshold on the bump keys. Hold bump too long? That's a tilt! Fancier versions might've done a running average of bumpage against a decay over time, though.
I used to have a pinball app on my phone, and you could, for lack of a better term, jerk your phone around to bump it, but if you did it too hard, you get a tilt and all the punishments that come with it. It was really freaking hard to actually bump it properly, so I didn't do it very much.
I once build a relay t- junction traffic light controller for a school fair, with virtually every lab relay cards and banana plugs I could find.
It was a two tables full wire Spagetti burying the lab equipment beneath it.
My teacher looked at me and almost blurted out "HOW THE F DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING"
It was glorious and fully functional with fault detection and everything, even made it into the local newspaper.
BTW. Old school traffic light controllers are fascinating. Definitely a video worth since they have several interesting safety features.
Real-life Redstone engineering
Spaghetti coding in hardware!
The answer, of course, is that you know because you're the one who built it. God help the fool who comes by and tries to sort it out later...
Do you have a video of it?
I'm an electrical engineer, focus in manufacturing technology, & seeing these electromechanical devices interact absolutely excites my passion. Screw these modern day PLCs, i want to spend a day tracing the intricacies of a pinball machine! Please find more tech that operates in this manner & make similar videos!
When I retired from the Air Force wife gave me the machine that I spent my early teens playing. Gottleib’s Buckaroo. Found it at an estate sale from the owner of a pool hall. Listed as needing repair. As a hobby I have restored some vintage electronics so reading a schematic is not a problem. Table and glass after cleaning were in good shape. But the mice that took up residence inside were not as tidy. Worked on it off and on for a few years, but could not get it to do more than power up. Sold it on a collectors site for around what it cost.
31:58 I know you're saying that the volume of the knock is hard to convey, but you did a great job. It legitimately startled me!
Is got me too lol. That’s really loud!
Same, and he's totally right. On machines where its amped up, "balloon popping in face" is really accurate; its so alarming.
I'm sorta easily startled so I'm part of the problem but still.
The knockers on those 90s Bally/Williams really are SO LOUD irl, it always startles me even when I'm expecting it.
there is a pac man pinball machine with a knocker and i legit thought it was broken and would snap at you
When the flippers become that sophisticated, DTL and TTL ICs were widely available. At the time the guy doing maintenance told me that if he made the flippers silent by using ICs instead of relays, switches and plungers, people wouldn't play them anymore. All that clicking give a character to these machines.
As matter of fact I stopped playing flippers in the '90s - when manufacturers switched from an electromechanical design to a fully electronic type. The amount of work to build an electromechanical flipper became excessive as the work market changed mid '90s.
Thank you for this incredible video. I miss that flipper and all the afternoons spent playing and scoring - for amusement only!
Greetings from the UK
Anthony
Fortunately the electronic ones are still pretty noisy. Not as much as the EM machines, but since you still have a lot of physical things being slapped around by solenoids there's still plenty of audible and tactile feedback.
Pinball tech here. all of the noise from flippers comes from the solenoids, with a small bit of that coming from the linkage elements. Modern and old electromechanical flipper assemblies are remarkably similar
The knocker! The whole way I was yelling in my mind, 'what makes the free game CLACK sound!'
As technology progressed I realized the designers were making a choice to keep this mechanical sound when they had other options.
Later when I began working on blood analyzers, which had several solenoid valves, I realized this had to be what they're using. Nothing quite matches that electromagnetic thud. It's got no rebound, just a solid 'whack'.
So glad to finally see the device in action.
Great episode, & thank you for resolving a decades long curiosity.
The cleverness of EM games never ceases to amaze me. Bally implementing a 455 bulb in the tilt relay to add a delay, Gottlieb adding a spinner to a stepper unit to randomize awards, Fireball just being multiball, having zipper flippers, Williams “Hot Line” had a ‘dot matrix’ illumination that would spell out “Hot Line.”
Super rad.
Love your stuff, but as a collector myself, I’ve really been loving this series on pinball.
Kind of funny that extra credits would be enough to legally classify pinball games as gambling machines. Companies still try to walk this line today with loot boxes in video games. Just because there's an artificial block on selling something doesn't mean it doesn't have value to the player, and that it can't be gambled for. Of course the big difference with pinball games is that digital items are things you are intended to earn and keep... as opposed to a free credit which only has value for a short period of time.
This is also why a lot of modern games with 'loot box'/gacha mechanics dodge being labled as 'gambling' in a lot of jusridictions despite being entirely chance based and Quite Intentionally hammering all the same problematic mental triggers in the brain of the player and taking their money in the process: there's no way to 'cash out', because nothing that the player gets out of it is transferable in any way, shape, or form...
Meanwhile, the fact that you CAN 'cash out' is precisely why buying physical trading cards in randomised booster packs is so much less concerning (well, that and the odds being FAR less absurd... until you get to multiple layers of 'might not even appear in a given pack' rarities, anyway)... if you don't get what you wanted, and what you got wasn't intersting enough to use anyway, you can trade what you got with someone else (or sell what you got and then buy what you wanted from someone else). Video game companies go out of their way to prevent that.
I pumped countless quarters into THAT pinball game, Aztec, when I was a kid!!! Too fun!
It’s amazing that this old electromechanical machine even works. Just look at all the wires, contacts, relays, motors, lights and moving parts. It’s amazing that they were ever able to design, fabricate, distribute and make money on such a device.
Bringing back some memories for me. My two brothers and I fixed these machines in the late 70s out of my dad's garage. We would fix what we could and phone order parts we couldn't fabricate from Bally and Williams and get them in a few days, as both were based in Chicago which was 300 miles away.
At one point we had up to a dozen machines being fixed. We would also touch up paint and such.
My personal favorite was Bally's Loop the Loop. It featured a cross-field ball launch and a spinner in the middle that really randomized things when you hit it. But the best thing was it had really short but really strong flippers that could send the ball accurately and fast. Not easy to trap the ball with them, though. There's a YT of this game.
Good times. We all became computer engineers.
7:20 Also known as the "Anti Fonzie Switch".
Ayyyyyyyyyy
**Bumps jukebox**
Who would have imagined that providing some simple amusement for humans would ever need to be so complicated!! Amazing breakdown of the inner workings of relay hell. I'd love to see a similar deep dive into a "bingo" machine some time, especially since I spent so many hours of my teen and early 20's years in Utah punching off nickel games on 1950's antique "five in line" dingers trying to boost the odds. Always wondered how they configured the game counter relays to only add new features and increase the odds randomly after 4 to ~20 games were punched away. Interesting history in the way these gaming machines only made it over the border from Nevada until Utah outlawed them in like 1958,
I remember we had an arcade in the mall called Tilt, and I remember some people actually tilted a pinball machine and an alarm buzzed disabling the machine for the rest of the game!
I worked on these for 5 years in a repair shop, and I can attest to their resilience. They'd come in for servicing from the operators (we called them 'carnies') battered and dirty and sticky from spilled beer and sodas, and all they often needed was a good cleaning, some minor adjustments of the switches, and some rubber bumpers replaced. I confess I sometimes secretly readjusted the tilt mechanism if I thought the carnie had it set too sensitive. Don't tell anyone...
Electrical engineering student here, solenoids/relays being the equivalent to transistors/gates was obvious, but I just realised that all these units are finite state machines and oh my god this makes so much sense now
Hi Ho Alec: Vince from NJ here. Enjoyed this most enjoyable, entertaining and educational video. You are to be commended for a thorough and complete explanation of the most complex of issues. Bravo.....Bravisimo! I've noticed that, since I became a patron long ago, your list of patrons has grown considerably. No small wonder there my friend. With more than 2 million subscribers now! Impressive. Keep up the great work. God Bless. VGC
you some how conveyed a NJ accent into my brain while reading that
These machines and the massive nest of wires and relays is absolutely mind-boggling and amazing.
The fact that any of this stuff worked is really amazing to me.
Growing up, my grandpa had a fleet of around 30 pinball machines and other archade standup and machines as he owned his own amusement company stocking bars and lobbies and skate rinks and such with machines. He fixed all his own and had file caninets full of schematics and such. Back when companies wanted users to learn and fix their machines. But i learnes all about electronics, schematic reading, troubleshooting, and othsr tips and tricks from him. He closed his company in the mid 00's :(. But growing up in the 80's and 90's, going to play in his garage was a blast!!! ...his main job was a police sergent for Phx PD for 25 yrs. But he had a full bar and archade and slots (all free play) he buult in his house ans every friday night his dept would all come hang out and drink and party and have a good time. I miss the old days lol
Glad to finally see part 3 out!! 3 things of note to you though my good sir
1. EM Multiplayer machines couldn’t save individual player’s progress between balls, but they only ended up getting around to always RESETTING the previous player’s progress in the 70’s. Most all multiplayer games in the 1960’s, especially all Gottlieb’s, let the progress of the previous players carry-over to the next player, allowing a big jackpot (usually up to 500 points) to be cashed out by one lucky player that was good enough to collect it. Look at Masquerade, Paradise, and Hi-Score by Gottlieb for examples of this.
2. I left a comment a while back on the Oven-heat adjustment knob video, saying that the 455 ‘flasher’ bulbs often used in the backbox of EM pinball are the same mechanically-controlled opening and closing switch, that heat up when the bulb gets hot, breaking the connection and turning off the light bulb, and then letting the bulb cool down for half a second before turning back on.
3. Williams always just made the credit unit blank at zero all throughout its life, and Gottlieb always labeled 0 on their credit units. I even have an old 1953 Williams Silver Skates pinball that has a knock-off switch from the factory to knock off credits, and you should look up Gottlieb’s sweet add-a-line pinball machine. It’s got the biggest replay jackpot of all, awarding I believe 32 free games if you get all the rollovers.
Thanks for spreading pinball to the masses! I post my repairs here and on insta and faceb00k under the same name
Honestly carrying over jackpot values between players introduces some really interesting dynamics for competition. It's not ideal for a leaderboard, but the risk/reward element of collecting a jackpot or continuing to progress it knowing your opponent can swoop in and grab it if you drain has its own appeal.
'70s *
1960s * You may be thinking of the apostrophe in '60s
The detailed dissection of the multiplayer game handling and anti-cheat mechanisms was fascinating. Makes me appreciate these vintage machines even more.
I appreciate finally understanding how score keeping works. Knowing that it basically has a score keeping contact plate for every single player individually explains a lot I was confused by.
These are some of my favorite videos I've watched on RUclips. The quality of the editing/visuals and explanations are top notch and make it so easy to follow along.
Don't forget the snark! That's a vital ingredient!
@@minetogiveaway That's true! All good teaching requires some snark as a coping mechanism for those things in life that just make you go "well that's stupid".
Hes one of the best for sure. Noone covers the things he doea so well
Videos about this pinball machine never cease to remind me of lectures on the electrical equipment of the LM-68M tram, which is built on rheostats and contactors, and uses a "group rheostat controller" controlled by a servo-motor and an acceleration/braking relay for smoothing acceleration and electrodynamic braking. It seems to me that the construction of such trams would be an interesting topic. But perhaps it would be interesting only for transport geeks. Although I'm not a fan of pinball machines, but this video is exciting for me.
I'd watch it because I'm a transport geek
@@Decopunk1927 I'd watch it just to see Alex say "through the magic of buying two".
i have tinkered with several of these machines through the years. I,m always amazed by the genius engineering that these games employed. There are a lot of similar modules that are common in most games. You are fortunate to have a schematic that has not turned to dust.
These pinball videos are among the most welcome featured here. Here's hoping you are properly rewarded for these huge and entertaining efforts. They make me nostalgic for TV science shows for kids from decades past (when I was a kid). The amount of effort behind them must be enormous.
Something about the chaos of the wires and weathered ckt parts is extremely beautiful, and nostalgic for somereason
I can't believe I'm only now realizing where the terms 1up, 2up etc. come from. I knew they used to refer to a player's score rather than an extra life but I've mostly seen it in games where both players play simultaneously so I never made the connection with the word "up," what was originally a description for what the light indicates became a term for the thing itself
It probably comes from even earlier than arcade games... Presumably from any game where the player playing is standing up, and the others are sitting down.. like bowling or billiards or darts.
Slam tilts are so harsh because players can theoretically kick the machine from the bottom to keep a ball from draining. Not only do operators frown on it, for obvious reasons, but so does the community in general, feeling it's uniquely scummy since it's only useful when you've practically already lost the ball.
I am amazed at the durability of old technologies, and the tenacity of man to make such technology work. What a great video! Good job sir, good job.
I love your demeanor, communication skills, knowledge, and desire to share it with the world
Thank you for making this channel
It's interesting to me that this device is not a mechanical computer, but is actually a mechanical program.
The computer is a general purpose device that runs programs.
This device is a program that runs itself (when powered on)
"I've tried to give it some thought, but it hurts too much."
Thanks, I'm stealing that quote
I have absolutely loved this video series on mechanical pinball. Such a minefield of possible failure points - I'm amazed that these machines ever worked reliably at all.
Your ability to script and verbalise the process of operation in such a clear way is phenomenal.
Thank you for taking the time to put this series together.
Can't comment on the mechanical side but high quality relays are surprisingly reliable. They're a step or two above what's in this pinball machine but I've come across 30yo signalling relays that are still happily in use. Where the unreliability comes from is needing loads of them do anything vaguely complex and that troubleshooting them is an art.
Huh... The reliability of the older machine is surprising... You'd figure with that level of complexity, it'd be very easy for something to go wrong. Nice that it's so reliable!
Reliable by stupid parts but lots of them..
Many relays in same good quality won't break as if it is only one relay same make and model and load, so complexity does not add problems too much here
From my understanding they require regular and fastidious maintenance to continue working correctly
I think one aspect that makes newer machines "less reliable" is they use more toys, that physically change the layout of the playfield. I would not enjoy cleaning so many relay switches on a periodic basis. Theatre of Magic, the game being called out as rightly cantankerous, has as its main feature a rotating "magic" trunk. Only one of its faces allows the ball to drop into the trunk, while one of its faces activates a powerful magnet that literally lifts the ball up and holds it there for a moment. There are inner and outer loops that sometimes lock the ball for multiball play (this by memory, I think they were loops). On shooting one of the ramps, a piece of the playfield lifts up to allow skilled players to drop the ball into it.
They're reliable until you move them 😄
Pinball machines need almost constant maintenance. They are anything but reliable. Still, ones that are in good working order are pretty facinating.
Pinball machines are still similar to slot machines. They offer rewards (free balls, free games, high scores, wizard modes, secret characters, multi ball modes) and drive you to put additional money into the machine. The whole goal is to separate you from your quarters. Although people don’t win money, or typically tickets, it still operates off similar principles as a slot machine. Instead of a one armed bandit, its a two button bandit.
I'd argue a two button bandit is still twice superior to one. You have at least some control and it's more entertaining than rolling a dice and feeling your wallet get lighter.
@@ViciousVinnyD definitely addictive, though. I love playing pinball and have done since the late 70s
A slot is random chance, a person with skill and a little knowledge can walk up to a game on location and usually get a few free games out of it.
@@PeterBellefleur pinball is paid entertainment, but the overall goal is the same as a casino, sports, music concerts, and carnivals to separate you from your money through emotions.
@@doctoroctos Yeah, but you don't ever get free tickets to an extra concert just by listening really well. :D
I could watch this series 28 times and still barely understand the engineering of this thing, but I love the sheer elegant simplicity of how you adjust the sensitivity of the tilt sensor. It’s just a cone you slide up and down. I love it.
10 years, I was wondering how you are so ridiculously knowledgeable about its functionality. Last year I started working for an overhead lifting device service company. I spend most my time at site with DC top running double girder cranes. Some of them date back to the 40s.
Another method is mercury switches. Can't remember the specific game (also a pinball) but it had two such vials inside laid in a cross pattern in the center of the board. What's interesting is the fact that the glass vials had a well in the center portion where the mercury sat and both ends of the vial had contact wires passing through. A very sophisticated design for ... well, a game.
The quality of those close-up shots are amazing. Love all those details.
Analog programming is just utterly fascinating.
I love how much of the logic you're showing inside the cabinet instead of on a schematic. I'm farily familiar with them as I own and restored a Williams Aztec recently, inspired by your recent videos, and seeing them visualised this way is really cool!
For your Technology Connextras viceo, I would be interested in regional differences in this machine, as I've notived quite a few differences between my model and the one you're displaying.
I have a vague memory of a game giving out more than one free game per game, and in the end the player had something like 25-30 credits. They were sold to the next player, who played for a while, and then sold their 10 credits to the next player.
So it could happen. This would have been late 1970s, maybe early 1980s.
I just rewatchwd your first pinball video last night! I guess its back into the weeds of pinball today too! I could watch you talk about paint drying! Love the witty, snarky humor!
This video is very well made and explains amazingly simply. Just in awe at how things were done just using switches, relays and knobs!
Back in the late 80s my uncle had a Bally's Captain Fantastic pinball machine that I LOVED to go over and play. It took him a couple of months to work out all the little electrical gremlins after he bought it. He and my father spent hours pouring over the schematics, tweaking and replacing relays and so on to get it dialed in just right.
I'm assuming my uncle sold that machine when he moved later on in the 90s. He and another uncle bought side by side farmsteads and poured all of their money into buildings, equipment, horses and small planes. Even going so far as to build a private grass air strip until the FAA got involved.
I literally thought last night "wonder when a guy is gonna have more pinball content" yaaaay
I love the electro mechanical pinball machines. I went on a trip to Oklahoma in '85 and it was hot. The cabin/campground we stayed at had an arcade full of these and they were still set to a nickel per play. My parents didn't have to give us much money to keep us occupied during the heat of the day and we loved it. 🤣😂❤ Great video!
I really love the way you explain things. I have an EM machine myself so I already know how a lot of this stuff works but you put it into words in a far better way than I feel I could.
one of favorite channels is Joe's Classic Video Games, he often pulls down complete electro-mechanical assemblies like the player unit and explains how it works
I remember hearing that early pinball parlors would put nails inside of the board that stuck out of the bottom to deter players from violently hitting the bottom to manipulate the ball without setting off the tilt sensor. Don't know if that's true or not.
I love these old machines, it's endlessly interesting how they were able to make pseudo-computers out of wiring and a few rudimentary switches that could act like logic gates do now. Would love if you continued looking into these types of machines, whether it's old washers/dryers, vending machines, slot machines, or even more pinball. It's just amazing that you can accomplish this much without a circuit board.
Our old elevator had an electromechanical contoller very similiar to this machine.
ooooo, so that's why video games call extra lives 1UPs.... player 1 is up... I always thought it was just "your life counter went up by 1". (there was probably a language misinterpretation somewhere too)
I have a Gottlieb Sure Shot from '76. My dad bought it used in the mid 80's. Still works for the most part. The rubber bumpers are cracking or broken, and most lights have died.
But the elctro mechanical computer inside is one of the main reasons i got into computers and IT. At 6 years old, watching it work, was simply fascinating!
Sure shot is a great game! Fix it up, there are lots of resources online-bulbs and rubbers aren't too expensive
This part 3 of your outstanding feature on pinball machines was what I was looking forward to since I watched part 2! And again: well done, sir! Thank you very much for clear, concise explanations and well-edited video clips that explain it all, together with your own sense of humor - just great. For me, being a pinball addict since over 50 years, this 3-part series is one of the many highlights of „Technology Connections“! Will for sure recommend it to all around 100 members in my local pinball community.
As a kid in the 1960’s, I maintained a used Gottlieb pinball machine called “See the Sights by Harbor Lights.” Most of the maintenance was replacing dead lightbulbs, cleaning contacts, and replacing rubber bumpers. I remember adjusting the tilt several times and the unusual “thump” sound when we got a free game. That machine was fairly reliable.
In the 1990’s we bought a brand new Stern machine called “Monopoly” and never had any problems with it probably because it had personal TLC use only. Since it was solid-state and void of mechanical sounds, manufacturers added musical sounds through a speaker to excite the player. It was very effective. When downsized from a large house to small condominium, sadly we had to sell that beautiful pinball machine.
1960s 1990s **
You may be thinking of the apostrophes in '60s and '90s
@@BodywiseMustard Apologize for poor grammar as I composed to quickly without proofing. My strengths are engineering & math at the expense of writing.
Your timing is a little off here; Stern Monopoly didn't come out until 2001.
Very fun and underrated little game though, and it made great use of the license with its rules
Monopoly came out in 2001, but that’s not too far off I guess. Great game nonetheless, one of the better sterns in my opinion.
@@S.J.C._Entertainment You got me thinking deeper and we probably bought Monopoly near 2001 vs 1990.
The people who designed these machines of the past were most definitely total geniuses! This kind of electromechanical complexity is just mind boggling for the average person to comprehend, EVEN for people with more advanced "detail" abilities, like people with Autism, like me! (I'm still not a genius)
I have to wonder how much of this was inspirational genius and how much was just incremental improvement over the previous design.
It's crazy the ingenuity that went into designing these. It's all simple logic but putting it all together it becomes very complex. Imagine sitting down on a blank piece of paper, and just designing the circuit and then building it.
These deep dives are absolutely great! I've seen the Aztec cabinet personally and yours looks to be in great condition. Never got to see the guts of one until these videos.
Technical note @12:53, the player unit's PCB material is phenolic paper, rather than fiberglass.
Thanks, I was looking for this comment! :p
I'd have assumed these things are maintenance nightmares just for having dozens of incandescent bulbs in them, honestly.
Fortunately it should be easy to source LED replacement bulbs, and they'd probably be more reliable than most LED bulbs since they don't need a whole switching power supply crammed inside. Just the diode and a resistor.
@@stevethepocket Problem being you'd then be combining low voltage and high voltage in the same wiring mess.
@@davidmcgill1000 LED units run at the same voltage as incandescent bulbs, just lower current. They work fine in most games built for incandescent bulbs, though they can act strangely due to interference and leakage current in machines that weren't designed to manage that.
@@davidmcgill1000there are people who sell relatively independent aftermarket boards for older games that compensate for the lower voltage. I own a machine from the late 1970s that I swapped all the incandescent bulbs out of, and I had to buy such a part as part of the process.
Bulbs are easy enough to replace, and they usually last a few years too.
You're a good teacher. I'm not an electrician or hobbiest who knows these machines, and you explained the logic gates perfectly coherently.
These videos about Pinball machines have made me utterly fascinated with pinball machines, and how mechanical logic computing actually works. The ingenuity of mankind never ceases to amaze me.