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All posts for the month September, 2016

Having made some good progress on Playball in my last update, it’s time to continue the push forward and get this reset issue sorted out. I took a couple of days away from the machine to clear my head and (hopefully) prevent myself from making any assumptions on the machine. The fact I can play a game on it when manually pulling the control bank arm in tells me the game is close – something is just not quite right. There isn’t a lot on this game that has to be reset in order to start. My primary focus here is the control bank – and quite specifically, the SB armature switch.

Playball Pinball
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Since the playfield swap, Pinbot has been running really well and been a joy to play. Recently though, an error appeared when the machine was switched on. The game detected there were errors with 3 of the switches, and reported them during the start up sequence. They are reported as “switch adjust” errors and the knocker fires off 4 – 5 times for each one. It’s an obnoxious sound, and certainly gets your attention that there is an error. The game reported that there was an error with switches 35, 36 and 37.

Pinbot pinball
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Not long after finishing up on my X-Files machine, I was contacted by a guy who needed some help with an EM machine he owns. After reading the various posts I made on Space Orbit (Gottlieb) and Mariner (Bally), he was hopeful I might be able to assist with fixing his Playball machine. EM’s are really interesting to work on (plus a challenge), so was happy to offer my help. No promises were made, but I’d do what I could. Playball is a baseball themed pin released by Gottlieb in 1971. It has two sets of score reels, one to track the score and the other to track the home run count. It lacks a plunger to launch the ball, instead the ball is launched from between the flippers using the right flipper button to trigger a slingshot style arm. This actually gives the playfield area a little more space and room for features. Another really cool feature is the game has a ball save – if you fail to hit a 10 or 100 point target, the ball can be played again. I didn’t realise this kind of feature was present in EM’s – neat! I like the playfield on this game and I think it would be a fun title to play. That’s enough incentive to get cracking on it and get it working again so I can get a few games on it before it goes back to the owner.

Gottlieb Playball
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