@TechConnectify new video idea: the whoopie horn. It’s an old mod for cars (my grandpa put one on his 1970 jeep) it’s a old electric horn that can play one of 64 short songs. I would love a video on the internals of it! Cheers!
@TechConnectify The Wire Spaghetti that somehow makes a playable game, no computers that can crash, just cleaning, and tracing wires. only bad thing I could think of is how much that unit takes to ship.
@TechConnectify When you talk about the amount of work and repairs required, one thing that I wondered is:
Do these need regular maintenance in regards to lube, oil and so on? And if so, how frequently? There's so many moving parts, I imagine it might be quite often?
@TechConnectify As a Non-native speaker, I fist associated "tilt" with "penalty"/"Something's broken" long before I learned it has to do with inclination.
Thanks "Epic Pinball"!
@TechConnectify I worked on vintage pinball machines to help pay for college, so this is like catnip to me. Thank you for this series!
I've always thought that electro-mechanical pinball machines were an analog (no pun intended) to digital computer logic; working on them helped me understand better how logic gates work. I also really found it therapeutic going through them, cleaning relays and adjusting points.
@TechConnectify For the backlight score matcher awarding a replay ball, there's going to be more to it than just the matrix you showed as that's just going to show you how many matches there are potentially in a given sequence. 1/
@TechConnectify Not every bumper or whatever is going to award you an amount of points to advance the 10s wheel and the matcher. If there's more whose points are 1, 2, 5, 100, 200 and not 10, 50, 250, it's going to take more bumper hits and therefore more time between advancing the matcher, and therefore less often that you get a match. And that is going to skew the distribution of frequencies of what the last two digits of your score are going to be. 2/
@TechConnectify I don't remember from the previous videos whether this particular game has a mode that changes the points value of the bumpers, but I know that's common on many pinball games even before the electronic era. My local arcade has one where the bumpers go from 10 points to 100 points, and it does that by rotating the hundreds wheel rather than by flicking the tens wheel 10 times. 3/
@TechConnectify You have to do the thing five times to trigger that mode, and then if you do it a sixth time it turns it off and you go back to the bumpers only being 10 points. If your Aztec has any mode like that, it's going to change the probability distribution of getting any specific digit in the tens column for your score depending on how often you hit that special mode which changes the rate the matcher advances. 4/
@TechConnectify TL;DR The ratio of the number of bumpers that award points that are factors of 10 to awards that are factors of 1 or 100 points will affect how often in a game you can advance the tens digit for your score, and that will affect how often at the end of a game, or sewering, that you'll get a match and a replay. Advancing the tens digit wheel faster means more chances, advancing it slower means fewer chances. Multiply that probability by the 1 in 10 of your matrix. 5/
@TechConnectify one final caveat that I just thought of. Physics. As you undoubtedly know, when you mash those paddle buttons there's certain paths that your ball is more likely to go, and some bumpers you'll hit frigging all the time, and some harder to get to. So in addition to the ratio of bumpers and their point values, you'd probably need a coefficient of how easy they are to hit. Momentum imparted by paddle or bumper, gravity on the slant, equals complicated real fast. 6/6
@bytor I appreciate your thoughts here, but in Aztec it is only 10 point bumpers that bump the match unit. No other point values cause it to advance and the 10 point bumpers are the smallest value.
@TechConnectify I love the detail on this series, and the historical bits.
I'm kind of curious how much overlap there was between the telephone design engineers and the pinball engineers; things like uniselectors and such all seem similar tech.