What’s involved in programming a pinball machine?

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After restoring a vintage 1979 Bally Paragon Pinball, I go on a quest to see what’s involved in re-programming a game like this and doing my own, custom ruleset. You may be surprised at how many things you have to take into account and keep track of. Let me show you some early progress trying to hack a pinball and re-design a new operating system and set of code.

This video goes over some general, philosophical considerations in pinball design. In future videos I will dive in deeper into the specific technology and coding.

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Fixing “weak” pinball flippers

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What happens when one of your flippers seems “weak?” What could cause that? I investigate on m y 1979 Bally “Paragon” pinball. But the cause of this could happen on any game regardless of era. Let’s take a look at how the flipper works and the different things that can cause “weak” flippers.

You’ve Got A Pinball Machine! Now What?

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This video addresses a common scenario that I often hear about – mostly from people who aren’t very familiar with these games. Someone gets a pinball machine and it doesn’t work. Now what? Let’s walk through this situation with a game I just picked up and explain the process of what to do when you have a new pinball that you don’t really know what condition it’s in or what’s wrong? What do you do? Are there things you should not do? How do you tell what’s wrong? Let’s get into it.

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Bulbs Vs LEDs Which is Best? YOU decide!

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I talk a lot about LEDs and their pros/cons (mostly pros in my book) but obviously this is a heated discussion among enthusiasts. I decided to try an experiment and do different configurations of stock incandescent bulbs, along with a warm white and cool white LEDs and even a mixture. Can you tell the difference? What do you think looks best?

Before I show you a video of the process, here are random pictures of the backglass of Paragon with different lighting configurations. If you don’t want to know which is which, don’t scroll down too far…

Ok, below is the same experiment done on video.. and if you scroll down farther, you will see the lighting configurations revealed… NOTE that the order of the light configuration in the video is not in the same sequence as the A, B, C pictures. I mixed them up for the pictures so people could try and guess first without knowing.

What do YOU think? You can also leave comments on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/Rjl4fi7t8I4

How to properly clean battery damage off a MPU board

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This is the next video in my series of work on Paragon. After the first look (http://pinballhelp.com/first-look-bally-paragon-pinball/) I discovered there were still issues with the MPU board that were the result of continued corrosion even after the battery was removed and the board was supposedly cleaned. Whoever did the previous work didn’t clean the board enough and corrosion continued. I’m going to do my best to salvage the board.