A huge lot of 50 Solid State Pinball Machines have appeared on ebay australia (although the item location is listed as Germany)
There are a ton of interesting machines in the container and surprisingly most of them appear to be in pretty good condition! It would be great to see these bought and restored by a collector/museum.
If you have a spare AU$45000 (£25000), a lot of space and you don’t live in the EC, you may be tempted!
You can see the auction here
I just thought I would let you know what I will be rambling about in the coming weeks.
I’m awaiting delivery of Microsoft Pinball Arcade after buying a copy of eBay for a princely £1.70.
It was released in 1998 and features 7 Gottlieb Tables:
Baffle Ball (1931)
Humpty Dumpty (1947)
Knock Out (1950)
Slick Chick(1963)
Spirit of ‘76 (1976)
Haunted House (1982)
Cue Ball Wizard (1992)
They included the obligatory ‘notable firsts’ such as Baffle Ball, which pretty much launched the pinball industry, Humpty Dumpty was the first pinball machine with electro-mechanical flippers, Spirit of ‘76 which was the first machine to use a microprocessor and Haunted House with the first 3 level playfield.
I’m looking forward to trying it out and seeing how the collection compares to modern pinball sims. I’ll let you know when the video is up on the 1000whenlit youtube channel.
Whist both Visual & Future Pinball are quite simple to use, there are a few things that can trip you up. I am currently putting a video guide together to walk people through the installation of each, right through to launching a table and installing a front-end.
Once that is done, I hope to get stuck into the video guides to specific machines and get started on building my custom pinball controller.
I like to keep my eye on pinball machine sales on ebay. Both out of interest and to help build a picture of costs for when I start my collection or find a table to restore.
Prices have dipped a little bit recently (I doubt you need telling the reason for that) but you still see the super inflated prices on some more popular tables listed as “mint” or “in collectors condition”. I’d find buying one perfect machine for same price as 2 or 3 decent ones a bit hard to swallow.
This Addams Family Gold was listed on ebay and failed to sell with a starting price of £2800. That does seem a bit steep for a starting price, especially when there is a regular Addams Family machine which has been heavily worked on, currently sat at half that with 7 hours to go, at the time of writing.
The owner of the Addams Family Gold machine mentioned above is also listing his Back to the Future machine which is currently at £550 with one bid. This is high up on my shortlist of 1st machines to buy so I will be watching this one closely. I’ll avoid saying anything about it requiring a 1.21 Gigawatt power supply.
This Seller may be worth watching, not for the Fish pond paint however. His listings of Terminator 2 and Lord of the Rings mention that 50 or so machines are going to be listed soon. The list of tables can be seen in the auction descriptions.
I am hoping to compile a good list of places to source Pinball Machines and Parts, so if you have any suggestions, I would be grateful to hear them. Ebay is great, but nothing beats a reputable dealer when you are potentially going to be spending alot of money. Ebay seems a bit thin on solid state machines too.
Anyone who has played Unclereamus & Noah Fentz’s VP9 version of Getaway : High Speed II should be looking forward to this table. The pacing and playability of their HS2 table were big improvements over the already good Pac Dude version.
As a victim of the Capcom Pinball closure in 1996 Kingpin never got past the prototype stage of development. It is even rarer than Big Bang Bar which suffered the same fate, but had a production run in 1997 by Illinois Pinball Inc.
With only 9 prototypes in existence it’s fairly unlikely that most of us will ever play the real thing, so a faithful VP reproduction is very welcome.
Apparently it is not possible to emulate the unique “Sudden Death” feature, which caused the flipper power to fade and eventually die, unless a certain shots were made within a time limit.
How many of us will be honest enough to drain the ball when we don’t make it?
“Hey you, with the face!”
Cyclone is one of my favourite pinball machines, so despite there already being VP8 and Future Pinball versions available, I will be happy to see another take on it come along in VP9. I have only had one opportunity to play the real thing.
It’s always great to see new table authors appear, and from the looks of the progress so far, Melon will be one to keep an eye on.
You can click on the images to see the WIP threads and stay up to date on the progress.
I will let you know when they are released and give full reviews/guides.
Update : Apologies to Noah Fentz. I Mistakenly left him out of the credits for High Speed 2 & Kingpin.
I have just read through an interesting article on the Cheep talk blog .
In 1986, Williams High Speed changed the economics of pinball forever. Pinball developers began to see how they could take advantage of programmable software to monitor, incentivize, and ultimately exploit the players.
Although I don’t think the Manufacturers “exploited” the players any more than change eating levels in video arcades do now, the post has some interesting points about how the manufacturers had to juggle difficulty and accessibility.
To anyone who started playing in the early 90’s, the ever increasing replay score was the norm and actually made sense. After you get used to a pin you are bound to score higher on average and the operator still has to make a profit.
Anyway, go and check out the article, it has some interesting info.
A blog about pinball in the 21st century?
I caught the pinball bug in 1992 after seeing one of the Adams Family machines delivered to the hotel arcade, whilst on holiday in Greece. I chose to play it after thinking that arcade games now seemed expensive, due to the home consoles spoiling us at the time. I figured I would try it, then go back to the trusty arcade machines… I didn’t spend a spare drachma on anything else for the whole 2 weeks I stayed.
There was just something special about the physical and mechanical side of Pinball that got me hooked. Once I got home, I found out where I could play new machines near me and tried to visit as often as I could. The list of games that I had access to was probably quite typical: Terminator 2 became a favourite and Star Trek: The Next Generation ate alot of my change. Unfortunately this was also when the arcades decided that they weren’t worth having and it became difficult to find new machines/machines in playable condition.
It has certainly turned into a niche subject now. With only one manufacturer left since Williams left the market in 1999 (apart from a short production run of Big Bang Bar by Illinois Pinball inc). Most arcades are now full of nothing but poor arcade racers and DDR machines.
Fortunately, aside from the happy few who can get their hands on the Stern machines as and when they are released or have a collection of classics, there is a community dedicated to recreating old tables using development software such as Visual Pinball/PinMame and Future Pinball.
The plan for this blog is to cover Pinball in both the real and digital world, featuring general news and reviews, Video Table guides, machine location notification, 2nd hand market info, coverage of pinball events etc. .
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