Bride of pinbot

All posts tagged Bride of pinbot

When it comes to my Bride of Pinbot 2.0, I can’t help myself. I’m always looking to add upgrades and improvements as it’s my favorite game. With a four week break coming up, I have plans for a playfield swap and new decals over the Xmas holidays. Before I get to that however, there are a couple of smaller things I want to get done. The first is replacing the board that controls the lamps on the brides helmet with an upgraded version. When switching to LED’s, you lose the fade effect that would normally be present as part of the lamp sequence that plays out. As a result the different chase sequences that play out on the brides helmet are not smooth. Luckily, a pinside member created a new board to solve this. It can be used in a standard BoP and also a 2.0 machine.

Bride of Pinbot 2.0 Repair

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Something that has been on my to do list for the last 8 months is take a backup (drive mirror) of the hard drive in my Bride of Pinbot 2.0 machine. At the very heart of the 2.0 upgrade kit is a mini PC running Windows on a solid state drive (SSD). Solid state drives are very reliable, but like any computer – it’s at risk of failure over time. If your BoP 2.0 hard drive becomes corrupt or the drive dies – there’s no install CD to run and get it up again. The mini PC hardware can be replaced – but what’s on that drive can’t. Small SSD’s are cheap now (the one I purchased for this backup here was $35AU) and because it is just a Windows computer, you can mirror the drive with a full backup should some disaster occur. I thought I would put together this post for any other BoP 2.0 owners wanting to mirror their drive so it’s easy to restore if a new HDD / computer is needed. There’s a good video tutorial for backing up your BoP 2.0 on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOLaBT30dpM&t=849s), which uses a different method to what I cover here. Both methods work though, so go with what you’re more comfortable with 🙂

Bride of Pinbot 2.0 Repair
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I’ve been so busy lately working on other peoples machines, I decided to set aside a few hours this week to work through a few “to do” items on my own games. One of the things I’ve been really looking forward to doing is installing the Aux flipper switch upgrade board to my BoP 2.0. What is this? At present, when you’re in the profile menus or video mode, where the flippers would be disabled in modern DMD games, they are still enabled in BoP 2.0. So as you play the video mode, the flippers are still flipping away when you press the buttons. Scott Danesi created a small upgrade board which hooks in to two extra switches on the P-ROC board (CPU board supplied with the BoP 2.0 kit) and allows the flippers to be disabled while still registering presses. The kit is really straight forward and can be installed by anyone.

Bride of Pinbot 2.0 Repair
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Just before I was finishing up the previous Bride of Pinbot post, an important parcel arrived from the USA. It contained the BoP ramp entry protector set from Cliffy! Due to the issues with the heart beat ramp, I was in some ways forced to replace the ramp (or leave the various hacks that had been put in place for it). I had no intention of putting the new ramp in until the protectors arrived – so I was glad to see these.

Bride of Pinbot Restoration
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With four weeks off over the Christmas break, it is the perfect opportunity to continue with the overhaul of my Bride of Pinbot 2.0. The plan was to try and do the next few phases of the overhaul in smaller chunks, avoiding the downside of having the game off line for long periods. But this update turned out to be much bigger than expected and has been split into two updates. This happened mainly because getting the top layers off the playfield was a pain and having to put them back on only to remove a few days later for the next phase would create a whole heap of extra work. So once I realised I was in up to my elbows, I decided to keep going. Starting off small though, the first assembly on my hit list for this update is the shooter rod.

Bride of Pinbot Restoration
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