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The Bi-Weekly British Backtrack � Disco Fever Pinball Restoration 06

miner2049er — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 17:51:40 GMT

This backtrack is the final part of my pinball machine refurb escapades so congratulations to those of you who have stuck with it, it can�t have been easy. To those of you who haven�t stuck with it, well, you won�t be reading this I guess, but go screw yourself anyway.

By the time that Williams had evolved their pinball architecture to System 7 they no longer used transistor pairs to fire sounds in the same way and instead used a dedicated PIA on the CPU board to trigger sounds and later of course speech. This development also meant that they could incorporate more playfield coils and flash lamps in their later games as they had freed up several transistor pairs on the driver board and that translated to more playfield toys.

The playfield on Disco Fever is not overloaded with toys and features, having just 2 flippers, 2 kickers, 2 pop bumpers, 2 banks of drop targets, 5 roll over targets, 1 horseshoe lane and 4 stand up targets. Most of these were working fine but I stripped every component down in order to clean it, to replace all the rubbers and to replace all the bulbs, some of which can only be accessed by removing parts.

Other than replacing bulbs and rubbers, two parts of the playfield were not working properly, one was the switch in the horseshoe lane and the other was the left bank of three drop targets. That bank if you remember was actually not original to the machine and at some point had been salvaged from a Williams Gorgar so I wanted to replace the labels on them and also put new labels on the other bank as they were original and very faded.

The drop targets themselves are a quite simple mechanical design with fairly crude electrical contacts on them that complete different circuits according to whether they are in the up or down position. Once they are all in the down position they are reset by a solenoid that pushes them all back up at once via a metal plate.

As each target drops it completes a circuit that lights up the corresponding bulb on the playfield in front of it, and when they are reset the bulb goes out as that circuit is broken. One or two of mine were dropping but the bulbs were not lighting even when I had changed the bulb so I cleaned all the contacts and re-assembled the mechanisms which fixed them and the bulbs were lighting and the drop targets were registering the points as they dropped. Once re-assembled I printed new adhesive labels that looked like the originals and applied them to all five targets.

While I was under the playfield and looking around I noticed that the solenoids and the mechanisms for the pop bumpers were dirty and seemed to be sticking a little, and when I dismantled them it looked as though they had been lubricated in the past and that the lube had attracted lots of dirt and dust and it had turned into a semi solid mass on what should have been smooth and shiny pistons. Again a good dose of stripping down and cleaning sorted them out.

The final problem was the switch in the horseshoe lane that was not scoring any points when the ball triggered it.

The switch is made up of a simple piece of wire that the ball pushes out of the way as it passes underneath it, and that wire is attached to one side of a leaf switch under the playfield, and it was this leaf switch that simply needed adjusting so that as the wire is moved by the ball, it pulls the leaf switch far enough to complete a circuit momentarily to register a score.

As I stripped, cleaned and rebuilt the playfield items I was quite surprised to find that in general there were lots of cost cutting measures that had been put in place from the factory. Simple things like the screws that hold the stand offs in place for example. Generally around the machine these were like simple wood screws with a threaded top rather than a screw head so that a rubber or plastic cap can be screwed on to the top of them, and they were screwed in to the playfield as normal, but in certain locations they weren�t just a screw. The ones that tend to take a beating during gameplay were a more substantial bolt that went through a hole drilled right through the playfield and were held underneath with a nut.

I know that Williams (and other pinball manufacturers that presumably did the same thing) needed to make a profit on their machines, but this would save perhaps a few pence on each playfield and is perhaps compromising the build quality, but I guess if you save a few pence in that way and a few pence in a few other ways then over a production run of a few thousand machines it would add up. It just seems to be a little like penny pinching really.

So there I am with my fully functioning 1978 Williams Disco Fever pinball machine. Is it the first of many such machines? I think it�s a little early to say that, but I really would like a vintage Electro Mechanical game to fix up next.

They must be so much easier to repair��..

The Bi-Weekly British Backtrack � Disco Fever Pinball Restoration 05

miner2049er — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 22:27:56 GMT

Welcome to part five in the thrilling serialisation of my electronic blunderings through the world of pinball repair. I do this so you don't have to.

My boards arrived, or should I say, a CPU board and a driver board arrived, not the same ones that left, but a CPU board and a driver board nonetheless, and I was eager to get them straight in my machine and fire it up, but there was a little work to do first. Scott had replaced my System3 CPU board with a System 6 CPU board, easily discernible immediately by the different placing of the battery holders on the board. This isn�t really an issue but you might recall that I mentioned one of the first things you should do when repairing a machine of this type is to move the batteries of the board completely and house them somewhere else in the backbox because the batteries can leak corrosive material over the CPU and driver board. Not only that but the corrosive fumes from the batteries can also corrode the ROM sockets and the 40 pin connector strip between the boards. This damage is not always obvious so it�s a good idea to just do this modification anyway and put them elsewhere in the backbox and simply run wires back to the original connectors.

That done I fitted both boards and crossed my fingers as I powered the machine on. Once a few seconds had passed I began to breathe again, but only slowly, as I was fully expecting to smell the burning metal or melting plastic any second, but luckily it didn�t come. The machine had booted cleanly and none of the coils had locked on, the machine had reset completely.

It seemed like a good idea to insert a coin and play a game then, so that�s just what I did, albeit a very limited game due in no small part to my utter incompetence at playing pinball but also due to that fact that some of the playfield items were not working as intended. More important than that though, it was a very quiet game because I did not yet have a working sound board so I�d not connected to the driver board and it wasn�t powered.

For now though, I was more concerned with the physical aspects of the game, some of which weren�t quite working as planned, most importantly of all both of the flippers were quite weak, one of them in particular, the left one, was so weak that it could barely lift when the ball was on it so something was clearly not right.

Bear in mind that about half of all Disco Fever machines (including mine) have curved flippers which are heavier than normal flippers, so I changed them for a pair of lighter, straight flippers to see how much of a difference that made, but with the left one it wasn�t much. Flippers problems aren�t normally very difficult to diagnose and the cause can be found fairly simply by looking at the symptoms.

If the flippers don't work at all then it is almost certainly a blown fuse, either fuse F4 on the power supply board or on earlier games a flipper fuse under the playfield. Once the fuses are checked then you can test for voltage at the flipper coil, if there is none at all then you need to start looking at the connectors on the driver board that drive the flippers, check for broken wires and check the connector that links the back box to the playfield.

If you have power getting to the flipper coils but the flippers still won�t fire then you should check the ground wires from the flippers to the playfield to make sure that you have a good grounding. Assuming you�ve already tested the coils and resistance much earlier then the coils themselves should still be sound.
If the flippers work but "flutter" and don�t stay up when the flipper button is held then usually the hold winding on the coil itself is broken. The hold winding is the thin wire that makes up the coil and if it is broken you can usually see it broken away from one of the coil solder lugs. It could also be that the EOS (End Of Stroke) switch is not adjusted properly.

If both flippers work but are equally weak then the most likely suspect is the bridge rectifier as it runs both flippers, but if only one flipper is weak then that points to one of two things, either mechanical binding caused by mal-adjustment of the mechanism or once again the EOS switches.

As the left flipper was far weaker than the right, it seemed reasonable to assume that the bridge rectifier had seen better days but that there was another issue with the left flipper. The best thing to do in this case is to rebuild the flipper assembly to make sure that there is no mechanical obstructions and that the mechanism can move freely and that�s what I did, stripped them both down completely and cleaned them. Bear in mind that you should never lubricate the flipper assemblies because the lube would attract dirt and before long jam the mechanism up rather than keep it moving freely. Mine had not been lubed but were very dirty so I gave them a good clean before putting them back together again, making sure that the coil and the coil sleeve are not distorted because of heat from the coils, and making sure that the inner lining of the coil is not distorted either.

Once it was put back together again the mechanisms moved freely enough when operated by hand but the left flipper still didn�t fire properly which pointed me towards the EOS switch.

The way that a flipper works is that the coil is powered by the power supply board with two different voltages and it switches between the two voltages during use. The power supply board sends both 30 volts and 6 volts and the flipper mechanism controls which voltage is used and at what time. To physically move the flipper from rest to an up position needs a relatively large voltage, so when you press the flipper button the coil is energized with 30 volts and the piston is pulled into the coil by electro magnetism and the flipper mechanism moves until it hits the adjustable stopper where the flipper should be at its furthest extent.

Once the flipper is at its furthest extent, it no longer needs 30 volts to hold it there because holding it in place requires much less power than firing it, so as the mechanism hits the stopper it also triggers the EOS switch which is a leaf switch that breaks the 30 volt supply and switches it to the 6 volt supply. If this wasn�t the case then the coil would constantly have 30 volts running through it and would get very hot and wear out much more quickly. As we�ve seen elsewhere there are always steps taken to try and reduce the heat generation inside a pinball machine, either by design from the word go or by making modifications later, such as fitting more economic light bulbs and fitting more efficient transistors.

The reason I suspected that my EOS switches were at fault is because what often happens is they become dirty or pitted and no longer make a good connection, so if the current doesn�t flow through them it is as though the switch is open and only 6 volts is ever used. This is obviously not enough to fire the flipper from rest to the up position and can affect either one flipper at a time or both, rather than the bridge rectifier which affects both flippers equally. Once again I stripped down the flipper mechanism on the left flipper and cleaned the EOS switches before re-assembling and trying again. Lo and behold, both flippers now flipped equally, a little weaker than I would like, and eventually I will replace the bridge rectifier to improve this, but for the time being they are perfectly usable and I could have a few more quiet games on my improving machine.

The last major component to get working was of course the sound board, and to that end I built a simple device to test it with.

Testing the sound board is relatively simple because to all intents and purposes it is a complete computer with its own RAM, ROM and CPU (a 6808) as well as a single 6821 PIA like those found on the other boards. It also has its own Power Supply Unit and takes 18 volts AC directly from the transformer which it rectifies to 5 volts DC for the IC logic circuit and 12 volts DC for the CPU reset circuit. The Williams sound boards have several test points on them where you can check that those voltages are present, and on mine, guess what? Not all of them were present. The Williams sound boards also have a test button on them, but on two of their games this test button does not work and as you might have guessed one of those games is Disco Fever, the other is Phoenix.

I knew the voltages were fine going to the board but they were not showing up on certain parts of the board so it was going to be one or more of the components or one or more of the traces that were at fault. You can also get these voltages from a normal PC Power Supply which I fitted to a board along with a speaker to test the outputs.

The ROM chips on a Williams sound board are numbered by type, either Williams' Sound ROM 1, Sound ROM 2 or Sound ROM 3, and these ROM chips don�t store the different sounds as digital samples or WAV files but as mathematical strings which have different parameters such as attack, frequency, decay and echo to determine the way they sound when triggered.

The way that they are triggered is the same way that the coils in the game are triggered, by a corresponding transistor pair on the driver board grounding them. You can manipulate this process in one of two ways, either by using diagnostic mode or firing them manually. Diagnostic mode on a Williams machine has various stages that fire different parts of the game in turn so you can tell if anything is not working as intended. You can also fire them manually in the same way that you can fire the solenoids, by momentarily grounding the correct TIP120 transistor which is just mimicking what the game does anyway.

To do that you need a short length of wire with one end connected to a good grounding point and with the other end you can touch the end of a transistor when you should hear either a solenoid activate or a sound fire. If your game has special solenoids controlling flash lamps then you may also get a lamp flash. Be careful not to ground the transistors for longer than is necessary to prevent them from overheating and causing damage.

Here are the transistors for each part of my game other than the dead sounds of course.

When I tried to trigger the sounds manually none of them worked, and when I tried diagnostic mode the same silence followed, but very occasionally when the game booted and I played it, I would get a single droning sound which seemed to suggest that the sound board had tried to boot but had not done so cleanly and was playing a corrupted sound. It also seemed to play it at random times that had no bearing on what was happening in the game. Even out of the game on the test board the sounds were not firing, so bearing in mind the state that the other boards in the game had been in, I took what you might call the easy way out at this point.

If I�m honest, I�d had just about enough of trying to fix annoying faults on the machine, and I considered going through the whole process again of testing ROMs, PIAs and CPUs and I saw only frustration ahead, and because I was so close to having a working machine I decided to let somebody else do the leg work again and I found a member of the UK Pinball Group to help me. The owner of the site www.robotron-2084.co.uk, Dave Langley, had a fully working sound board and would swap it for my old one along with some spare boards I had, so that�s what I did. Dave sent me his board that was ready to drop straight into my game.

Once it arrived it was a case of fingers crossed while I booted the game, and would you Adam and Eve it, but the sounds worked perfectly which meant that I finally had a fully operational chain of ICs and transistors;
power transistor TIP120s

2n4401 pre-driver transistors

7408 logic ICs

6821 PIAs

Not to mention the sound board itself of course.

Tune in next time for the final part.

I promise.

The Bi-Weekly British Backtrack � Disco Fever Pinball Restoration 04

miner2049er — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 23:38:30 GMT

OK, OK so I missed the usual Bi-Weekly entry a fortnight ago but, like Microsoft and their Cloud Services, I blame it on the leap year so expect the same thing to happen again in four years time. Now that normal service is resumed I need to segway from the Leap Year to Pinball.

Speaking of Pinball, I was feeling like I was getting nowhere with this thing, and I was clear that the most important and the most difficult things to fix are the CPU board and driver board, and the ones in my game were no exception.

Like I said, the driver board is really an extension of the CPU board and they can be treated pretty much as one unit. The driver board controls the solenoids, lamps and switches, and the CPU board with its 6802 microprocessor controls the rest of the game through a series of PIAs (Peripheral Interface Adapter). The PIAs have addresses like RAM or ROM chips do and the game ROMs access them to see what is currently happening in the game and what solenoids are firing etc and will do things like update the scores when targets are hit.

On System 3 games like mine there are four PIAs, one on the CPU board that controls the score displays and three on the driver board, two of which control the solenoids and the lamps and one that reads the switches. If a PIA fails and is not readable then the game will lock up and will not work. That�s another reason why the two boards can be treated as one, because the CPU board cannot "boot" without the driver board attached. Not normally anyway but there are special ROMs that you can use to test them separately.

One of the most common failures of these boards is the connector strip that joins them together, and it�s reported that they can fail after as few as twenty five cycles, that is, removing and reattaching the driver board twenty five times, so I checked all of the pins and pin joints and reflowed the solder on a few of them that appeared to have slightly dry or cracked solder joints so that I got as good a connection as possible. Then I could focus on the boards themselves.

The most obvious thing about my driver board was that there were some heat damaged areas and it had plainly been very hot at some point, and probably over a period of time, as there was the traditional blackening of the connectors for the G.I. circuit, so all of those transistors in that area, and in fact beyond would need testing.

Parts of the driver board are made up of pairs of transistors that drive the solenoids located around the playfield, the transistor pairs are made up of a TIP120 and what�s referred to as a pre-driver transistor, a 2N4401. The lamps are driven by a different transistor, a TIP42 paired with a pre-driver 2N6122, and it is possible to test them with a multi meter but it is not always 100% accurate.

If any of the TIP120s are found to be faulty, and some of mine were (in fact quite a lot of mine were) particularly in that heat damaged area, it�s best to replace them with a more modern TIP102 which does the same job but under much less stress and will tend to last longer.

All of these transistors are driven by a 7408 chip, and you can also test those chips because sometimes a transistor being tested in circuit can test as bad while it is good, which means that the relevant 7408 chip is bad, so it�s important to test each part of the circuit in the right order, and only move on when you are happy that the previous components are good.

One of the issues with Williams machines of this era in particular is simply the way these boards were designed and interacted with each other. The fact that some PIAs were on one board and some were on the other, meant that the 40 pin connector between the boards was not only carrying voltage data or blanking data, but it was carrying memory addressing data, and if that got interrupted, even momentarily, the game would lock up. If the game booted and one of the components such as the solenoid PIA is not in the precise mode that it should be then it does not just affect the solenoids controlled by the PIA, the whole game locks up. Not only that, but because the game doesn�t boot properly, the post boot Williams diagnostic LEDs are rendered useless for diagnosing the issue.

It�s possible to �semi boot� the CPU board without the driver board attached which should make the two CPU LEDs blink on and off before staying on, so if then installing the driver board and rebooting causes the LED to stay on then it�s quite likely that the CPU board is fine and there are problems on the driver board.

A good way to test these two boards is to use a test ROM, one of which is called Leon�s Test ROM, and what this ROM does is ignore any other ROMS that are connected and sends consistent and known signals to various parts of both boards (though it�s probably best to boot with just the CPU board initially and test it on it�s own before attaching the driver board as well). It�s also best to remove the fuses for the Solenoid circuit and the Lamp circuit located on the power supply board as the ROM also cycles those, and we don�t want to energise them at this stage. You should also remove the power going to the sound board as the PIA outputs could toggle the sounds too.

So with Leon's test ROM fitted and the CPU board booted and running, or at least the reset and clock sections of it, both LEDs on the CPU board should be blinking about once a second and the two score displays may also flash a �0� in sync with them. The ROM is now testing all the PIAs by putting them �high� and �low� repeatedly, and you can test this high and low signal on every input and output pin on the PIAs with either a test LED or a logic probe.

You can also make your own test LED by soldering a 150 ohm resistor to the flat side of an LED and a piece of wire with an alligator clip to the other side of the LED. Then you would normally attach the clip to a +5v supply and use the resistor lead as a test probe which will strobe the LED in unison according to the signal sent from Leon�s test ROM. Obviously you would need to check each output and input on each PIA to ensure that they are not faulty.

So, armed with my new logic probe and test LED I booted Leon�s Test ROM and went about testing the PIAs, not forgetting that some of the pins on the PIAs are data lines which would be pulsing and those have to be tested with the logic probe rather than with the test LED. Needless to say if any of the PIAs are faulty (you guessed it, some of mine were) replace them and put a socket on the board before fitting a new PIA 6821 chip to the socket. The problem with testing components like this in situ is that something else on the circuit could affect the results, so always bear in mind that it is possible for a PIA to test as bad when it is good and vice versa.

Leon's test ROM also alternates the Blanking signal on pin 37 of the CPU board�s inter connecting strip so you should test that too, because with the driver board connected, the flipper relay flipper should click in unison. If it doesn�t it could either be because it is just slow to energise or because the blanking signal is either missing or is too short in duration for the relay to energise. This isn�t really a problem with Leon�s ROM, but when the game boots normally with its own ROMs the blanking signal needs to be set to high. If the solenoids in the game will not fire it could be because the blanking signal is set to low, so what you can do as a quick and easy visual test for this is to solder a test LED permanently to pin 37 on the inter connect strip. If it lights when the game boots then the blanking signal is as it should be.

It is vital for the blanking signal to be high or the game will not boot because that is how the CPU board and the driver board do their interpretation of the POST (Power On Self Test) and tell each other that the ROMs and the PIAs are good, so once the CPU ROM program thinks everything is good it sets the blanking signal to high which allows the game to boot. Obviously if the signal does not go to high then none of the solenoids, bulbs (other than G.I.) or score displays will work. It�s annoying but it�s a failsafe to protect the sensitive parts of the game, so rather than have a wrongly booted CPU board locking solenoids on and blowing components, the game just doesn�t fully boot.

In short, if any of the PIAs are bad they can lock up the CPU when the game boots, so test them and change them, and if it still locks then the likelihood is that the problem is caused by either shorted transistors that drive the solenoids, blown 7408 chips that drive the transistors or again the PIAs that drive the 7408s. Most commonly the PIA that will die will be the one that controls the switch matrix or the solenoids. The lamp matrix PIA seems to be fairly resilient. Most of all, test components multiple times and ensure the results are consistent, and if they aren�t then look at the usual suspects, the 5101 RAM, the 6810 RAM and that inter connecting strip.

All this diagnostics and repair is fine and dandy assuming that you have the ability to hold a soldering iron still and solder well enough to replace I.C.s and sockets without burning a hole through either the board or yourself and I am just about able to do that, but with this project I found that I reached a point beyond which I couldn�t continue. I tested, I replaced, I tested again, I replaced again, and I got to a point where I had to admit defeat. I couldn�t get the damn thing to boot properly.

I knew beyond doubt that the Power Supply board was working as it tested perfectly on every point that required testing. The problem was the CPU Board and the driver board. I formed the opinion, based on test results, that the PIAs were good, that the 7408s were good, that the transistor pairs were good and that the interconnecting pins were good, but the damn thing just wouldn�t run as it was supposed to. I guess at that point you could say that I took the easy way out. I sent the boards away to be repaired. Now normally that would be a very expensive business, something like �100 minimum and an hourly rate after that, but I had a cunning plan, and more importantly I knew somebody who had a working System 3 machine and who was more than capable of testing and repairing my boards for me. It seemed only fair that I send them to him and allow him the chance to fix them because after all, it had been him that had talked me into buying the bloody thing in the first place, so the least he could do was help me to get it running.

The man with a plan was no other than my co-host on the RetroGaming RoundUp Podcast �Scott Schreiber�, and having done this before on his own machines, Scott was able to go about things slightly differently and use each of my boards on their own in his known working System 3 machine �Gorgar.� What Scott found was that I had made a reasonably decent attempt at repair, and one that had every chance of success were it not for the state of the boards themselves.

He found a couple of broken traces on the driver board, but more importantly he found that at some point, it was as though the board had been flexed, because it gave up very inconsistent results as though the traces themselves were damaged and would sometimes make a connection and sometimes not. Rather than chase errors around on this board he felt that it would be wiser and much less time and labour intensive to simply replace the board for an identical one that he had spare and that only had a minor issue and then to use my temperamental, flexed board for spares.

Now armed with a fixable board and a repaired board the repairs and the testing went much more smoothly and he was able to run both of my boards in his Gorgar machine. All that remained was for him to send them back to me and for me to replace them in my own machine and see if the game would boot now, or if there were further problems either on or under the playfield that would stop it from running.

What the F@*k is a Vita?

indieseoul — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:44:23 GMT

Well the PlayStation Vita has been released around the world now and Sony fan boys have already started playing around with their new gadget. Most of the reviews I have read/watched have been lukewarm at best. Naturally that is to be expected after all it is a new gaming platform that needs time to grow. Sony seems to have done their best by throwing everything they could possibly think of into this piece of shit in order to please as many people as they can. I mean two touch screens? Really? Also in typical Sony fashion they have made everything from the memory cards to the USB cables proprietary in nature. Oh Sony, Face Palm, here we go again.

Well let me tell you what the fuck a Vita is. The PS Vita is another dedicated handheld that does too many things at once and few of them well. It continues along with the old brick and mortar standard of selling things but if you want to pay more for instant gratification that is possible as well. Do you want to play mobile phone games? It has them for many times more the price. Do you want to play PSP games? Well you can do that too if you re-buy your games at an expensive price point. Do you want to download Vita games instead of putting on your fucking pants and going into Wal-Mart? Oh wait nobody ever wears pants in Wal-Mart anymore!

Yes you can buy your vita games without ever leaving the comfort of your underground lair/crack house at only a fraction of the cost more than actually buying a retail version. Congratulations Wal-Mart and other retail stores, you fucking own Sony. As expected the Vita stumbles out of the gate like a drunken syphilitic whore with an AIDS monkey fucking her sideways up the ass. Will things get better? Well they can�t get much worse now can they? So line up fan boys and pick up Sony�s new handheld gaming device that will get much much better once the hacker heroes make it work properly. I just love being a mindless fucking consumer!

Yes I will probably buy one but not just yet. I'm always patient when new consoles come out. Also I spent too much money on Game Gavel this month!

Once again my favorite video that always sees into the future of Sony:

The Bi-Weekly British Backtrack � Disco Fever Pinball Restoration 03

miner2049er — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 16:41:50 GMT

Part 3 of the restoration process gets into the blood and guts of the problem, and although an initial view of the workings of a pinball machine are certainly daunting, they can be broken down into four main sub systems:
Power Supply
General Illumination (G.I.)
Lamp circuit
Solenoid circuit

That doesn't make it any easier to fix it though, it just makes it easier to organise somebody else to fix it.

The solenoids are effectively coils that are used to fire things like the flippers, launch the ball into the shooter lane, reset the drop targets and fire the pop bumpers. So in order to fix it I needed to arm myself with some knowledge and some tools to get the job done.

Basically, a few spares of the more common transistors and chips, a soldering iron, solder, desoldering braid or a desoldering gun, a logic probe and most importantly a digital multi-meter. Well, I say most importantly but what was actually most important were the pinrepair guides hosted at pinrepair.com which take you through each step of diagnosing and hopefully repairing issues on my machine.

When I first turned my machine on I could hear a coil locking on, and pretty soon I could smell a coil locking on, and that usually means an issue on the driver board, the CPU board or both, but before I could start to diagnose those, I had to go back and start at the beginning of the chain, the Power Supply board.

Looking at the back box (which is where all the fun begins) you can see the System 3 board layout, and all Williams System 3 to System 6 games share the same design architecture, a power board on the right and a "split board" design on the left which means that the CPU and driver functions run across two different boards. The thinking was that the driver board would be much more likely to fail and so a technician repairing a machine could simply swap the board for a new one have the old one repaired. Unfortunately, the method used to connect the two boards together was extremely prone to failure itself.

They used a long strip of pins on the CPU board that the driver board would be pushed on to, but they did not always get a good, clean and consistent connection, and these pins carried high speed data from one board to the other, so if a single pin did not connect properly or was intermittently connecting then the game would lock up and be unplayable as the driver board would receive an incorrect signal from the CPU board and would perhaps fire a coil, or worse still, lock a coil on, which was what mine was doing.

The Power Supply board in a pinball machine sends different voltages and currents to different parts of the machine, some of which are more sensitive than others. In the UK it takes 240 volts AC in to a transformer which then supplies the board with 18.6 volts AC and outputs +12 volts DC and +5 volts DC. It also takes in 90 volts AC from the transformer and outputs +/- 100 volts DC.

As well as the Power Supply board there are also two bridge rectifiers that supply unregulated 28 volts DC for the solenoids and 18 volts DC for the G.I. There is also a large capacitor in the back box that�s used for the lamp matrix power.

The first thing I had to check was that all of the incoming and outgoing voltages were correct on the relevant pins on the connectors, which initially they weren�t, but a common failure is the capacitor on the Power supply board. This capacitor in question is a filter capacitor C15 which is the +12 and +5 volt logic filter capacitor whose its job is to smooth out the DC voltage after it has been converted from AC. If the DC voltage it emits is not smooth enough (picture a flat line on a heart monitor) then the CPU board will not boot properly and will potentially boot differently every time making troubleshooting extremely difficult.

Electrolytic capacitors like this have a working life of about ten years, so if mine was original to the table, which it appeared to be, then it was fitted in 1978 which makes it over 30 years old, three times its expected lifespan, so I replaced it as a matter of course. Don�t even test it, change it.

It�s worth noting that capacitor technology, like most things, has moved on and a replacement capacitor of the same or even a higher value will be much smaller in size than the original, so fitting it will need either a blob of silicone or a cable tie to fasten it to the power supply board in place of the older and larger one. Once I�d changed mine, all of the voltages were reading exactly as they should be, so I knew the CPU board was receiving the correct voltages.

Also on the power supply board are several fuses, and when first testing the game it�s a good idea to pull these fuses out so that you are only powering up the power supply and none of the other boards or parts of table just in case there are problems elsewhere. One of these fuses in question was the G.I. fuse and as soon as I fitted a new one, the General Illumination bulbs came to life, well most of them anyway. An advisable modification for G.I. bulbs is to remove them all and replace them with a different bulb. Originally the table would have been fitted with #44s but they should all be replaced with #47s that will run much cooler and draw less power, therefore putting less stress on the bulbs, the circuits and the power supply. As a general rule the less heat generation you have in the game, the better.

Another advisable modification in the back box is to add a fuse to each of the two bridge rectifiers because it was essentially a design flaw not to include them in the first place, and one that Williams fixed in later machines. If either of the two bridge rectifiers (one for the lamp matrix and one for the solenoids) shorts out and the main fuse does not blow then the machine will set on fire, and that has happened more than once.

Another thing that has happened more than once, and in fact will continue to happen as long as pinball is played, is that the coils burn out. The coils are actually solenoids that fire a piston when they are activated. The solenoids in a pinball machine are electromagnetic coils with a metal piston inside that due to magnetism is forced out when electricity flows through the coil. The problem when the CPU or driver board is faulty is that they can leave a coil activated and as the electricity continues to flow through them they get hot and will eventually melt the plastic liner inside them, but before that, you can tell when they are about to fail or have already failed by testing their resistance.

The electricity is meant to flow around the strands of copper and travel around and around and around the single strands, but as the coil starts to fail the electricity finds shortcuts around the strands and it becomes less effective over time. When a coil is new it has high resistance and as it fails the resistance drops. Once it drops too low it will not be efficient enough to fire the piston and the flipper will not flip or the pop bumper will not pop bump. Once this happens the coil needs to be replaced.

One of the first tests that should be done on any pinball machine that is new to you or that is having issues is that you test each of the coils and any with low resistance should be replaced. The flipper coils take a lot of wear and tear and are usually the first to fail, even though they have a failsafe of sorts built in to them.

If you press the flipper button the driver board activates a small transistor which steps up to fire a bigger transistor which then sends 30 volts to the flipper coil and forces the metal piston out which moves the flipper. If you hold the flipper button in, the current would normally continue to flow to keep the piston in place which keeps the flipper in the up position. If you do this for too long, the flipper coil would get hot, fail and could well take out a couple of transistors on the driver board with it. What happens instead is that when the flipper button is pressed, the flipper moves up and at the full extent of its stroke the mechanism hits an �end of stroke switch� which cuts the 30volts and instead switches it to 6 volts. That 6 volts is high enough to hold the flipper where it is but low enough to not overheat the coil, and the flipper can safely be held in this position without damaging the driver board or shortening the life of the solenoid too much.

Once I�d tested the Power Supply and all of the coils, I began to work on the CPU and driver board. The CPU board contains the microprocessor which in a Williams game of the era was a Motorola 6800/6802 series. The CPU board also contains the actual game ROMs (the chips that contain the game program and data). Another thing on the board that really should not be, and should actually be relocated is the batteries and their battery holder.

The original board design was to have the batteries in a holder on the CPU board, but batteries can leak, and if they do they leak corrosive material over the CPU and driver board. Not only that but the corrosive fumes from the batteries can also corrode the ROM sockets and the 40 pin connector strip between the boards. This damage is not always obvious so it�s a good idea to just do this modification anyway and put them elsewhere in the back box and simply run wires back to the original connectors. Luckily this mod had already been done on my CPU board so I didn�t have to do it myself.

A final thing to check with the batteries is the diode D17. Diodes allow current to flow one way and not the other so this diode has a couple of functions. It allows the batteries to power the 5101 RAM chip when the game is off and not the whole CPU board. It also stops the 5 volt supply from trying to charge the batteries when the game is on. If this happens then the batteries will almost certainly leak.

This diode is a common point of failure and in my machine it had blown so I replaced it. As a check to see if it is blown or not you should test the voltage on each side of it. On the non-banded side the battery voltage should be about 4.5 volts and on the banded side it should be about .5 volt less. If there is no voltage on the banded side but there is voltage on the non-banded side the diode is at fault. If there is no voltage on the non-banded side then the batteries or the battery holder is at fault. Ultimately the power from the batteries goes to pin 22 of the 5101 RAM chip so you can also test the voltage at this pin, but bear in mind that this RAM chip is also a notoriously bad chip and will fail often so you will need to test it, probably using the built in diagnostic LEDs on the CPU board, but you have to get the game booted into audit mode or attract mode to do that, and I wasn�t ready for that yet, but basically booting into audit mode and pressing the lower diagnostic button on the CPU board with the coin door open will illuminate both LEDs if the 5101 is dead, and indeed mine would turn out to be dead too.

Well why not, everything else seemed to be having trouble, so why not that as well.

The Holy Grail of Game Boys: An Incredible Score!

indieseoul — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 13:11:50 GMT

Stalking the Retro finds the Holy Grail of Game-Boys. I found it in this little shop hidden away in an electronics super mall that I often frequent.

Techno Mart is one of Seoul's most famous electronics malls. Eight floors of electronic goodness

Techno Mart very rarely has any retro games but I managed to find this little dusty and poorly maintained booth that had what I was looking for. I had seen the booth before but the seller never seemed to be around. I have walked past that booth about a hundred times in the last two years mostly because of what I saw in the window of his little display. That day I had this lucky feeling that someone would actually be there for once.

So on Thursday after looking around for the shop again for about half an hour I finally found it. It really is an out of the way booth that not only has no signage but isn’t anywhere near the game sellers booth zone.

Sure enough he was actually, for the first time in two years, sitting there in his little booth. So I asked him nonchalantly if he had any Game Boys and so he went over to his little sliding glass case and pulled out an ugly looking bright yellow Game Boy. It was so NOT the one I was interested in. I pointed at the Game Boy Light and asked him if I could take a look at it. I was totally expecting it to be just an empty box that he was using for display purposes but boy was I wrong!

He pulled it out of the case and sure enough inside was the most pristine looking Game Boy Light that I have ever seen. Then came the frightening question as I asked him how much he wanted for it.

You see anything that is even remotely retro in Korea goes for exorbitant prices. Some sellers in this particular electronics market try to sell standard game boy pockets and game boy colors for upwards of 80 bucks!

I gritted my teeth and waited for some astronomical figure to come rolling off of his tongue. When he said 40 bucks my mouth almost dropped to the floor! I had lucked out and found the one guy in this country that didn't know what he had.

I fumbled around in my wallet and pulled out the cash almost dropping my wallet in the process fearing that he would suddenly change his mind and say, "Oh I mean a hundred and forty bucks". The money changed hands and I just stood there looking at the Game Boy Light with awe and shock on my face.

Now I realize of course that there are even rarer versions of the Game Boy Light but I am still very happy to have found this one. So what the hell is a Game Boy Light you ask?

The Game Boy Light came out in 1998 and to say the least wasn't received very well. Nintendo didn't even give it a chance to succeed because six months later they released the Game Boy color and a month after that completely removed the Game Boy Light from store shelves.

The Game Boy Light was only ever released in Japan and since it was only produced in limited numbers it remains the most rare line of Game Boys to ever hit store shelves. Rumor has it that only around 12,000 units were ever sold. What makes it an awesome little hand held is that it is the first Nintendo product to include a back-lit screen. In fact they wouldn't release another back lit system until the Nintendo DS in 2004.

Do you remember those Timex Indiglo watches that were all the rave back in the early 90's? Well the Game Boy Light uses the electroluminescent technology with great success.

So you might be wondering why didn't they release that same kind of back light on the new Game Boy Color line of Game Boys? I mean they had the technology right? The reason why of course is really the charming part about this kind of back light. Indiglo back lights emit an awesome greenish blue light that would have ruined the colors on a Game Boy Color. On a black and white display however they really make the Game Boy shine!

I guess I might just be a nostalgic nut job but I still really dig the greenish pea soup look of the original Game Boy.

Please check out my video review of the Game Boy Light!

Or watch it on You-Tube.

The Bi-Weekly British Backtrack � Disco Fever Pinball Restoration 02

miner2049er — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 22:35:54 GMT

Welcome back, I didn't expect you so soon. are you sitting comfortably? Well I'll begin.

Eager to get this thing working I started off by assembling the table, first by bolting the back box onto the cabinet, and once it�s physically attached with the bolts there are all of the connectors that link the playfield to the circuits in the back box and also a grounding strip.

Better not to get them mixed up.

Williams connectors are coloured and shaped so that they can�t be connected incorrectly but it�s a good idea to double check the colours of the wires that are going together as you connect them all up. There are a pair of white connectors and a pair of black connectors that are physically identical and you must get those the right way round otherwise you�ll send the 28 volt solenoid voltage down the 5 volt logic circuit and fry a bunch of chips on the cpu and driver boards. Like I said, check that the colours of the wires going together matches as it has been known for machines to be sold with connectors of different colours going together, if that's all the manufacturer had on the production line at the time and that machine needed to go out then the chances are that they would use what they had, so double check that the wires are the same.

While I was doing this I noticed a couple of frayed and broken wires that I fixed straight away, and once I�d done them I did a quick visual check of the whole machine to see if there were any more obviously broken or stray wires anywhere else.

Once I was happy with that I put away the backglass and the playfield glass so they didn�t get in my way or get broken while I was doing any repairs, and I flipped up the playfield to look at the workings of it underneath.

Oh my word!

Sorry, OMG!

There a few words that can convey the impact that doing that has on somebody about to repair a pinball machine. This was literally and figuratively a whole new ball game, it was my first glimpse of the learning curve that lay ahead of me. There was no way I could get my head around this thing and fix and maintain it was there? We�ll see.

Probably the most famous (or infamous depending on your point of view) feature of Disco Fever were its "banana flippers". Only two Williams games were ever produced with these bent flippers, Disco Fever and Time Warp.

Famous pinball designer Steve Ritchie remembers banana flippers, he said that they were called �Curved Flippers, "Banana" was a term some outsiders applied�

He adds:

�Disco Fever was actually the first playable game with curved flippers. Tony (Kraemer) had them made in the model shop out of Nylon, a nearly frictionless material that went "click" whenever the ball hit them, or they struck a ball. (Mike) Stroll played the Disco Fever with curved flippers more than anyone else. I don't remember Roger's (Sharpe) reaction, but Roger can always find something to like in every game. He has his favorites, but he always looks for the most fun feature and plays it as though it might be the last time he ever gets to play pinball. He is usually able to overlook the bad things and enjoy the good things. I don't think Roger ended up liking curved flippers, but you'll have to ask him.

The flippers were shaped like a Jai alai cesta, (that's the curved wicker basket that players wear, about 2 feet long and curved with a built-in glove on the end to put your hand into), the ball in the pinball machine did exactly what cestas do--- accelerate the ball at a fierce rate and shoot the ball out on a very straight course into the wall (or targets, on a pinball playfield). "Straight" means that the Jai alai ball (called a pelota) stays about the same height from the ground on its trajectory to the court (cancha) wall 176 feet away. Why? The pelota is slightly smaller than a baseball, very hard, and is caused to spin with great speed and momentum. Gyroscopic forces keep trajectory steady. The ball WHIPS out, and people have been very badly injured, even killed, by the 150 MPH(!!!) ball. But we're talking pinball here. The engineers made this silly looking thin rubber "glove" to fit over the hard plastic flipper. The gloves fell off often and "clogged the drain" rendering the game unplayable. I think we may have offered glove adhesive to operators, but I'm not sure.

Since the curved flippers were fixed horizontally, the physics are applied at 90 degrees to Jai alai, which meant that the targets in the center 6-8" were battered, and it was very difficult to hit outside loop shots, or anything else along the outer perimeter of the playfield. They did nothing to enhance the game, in my opinion. In fact, most of us simply stated "SUX" to ourselves, and waited to see what happened next. Stroll was not easily convinced that they weren't fun. Tony was confused and some Disco Fevers were shipped with them.

Then Tony designed Time Warp and a lot of them were shipped with curved flippers. Time Warp (and Disco Fever) made more money with straight flippers than with curved ones, that much I can ascertain through my stack of old Mother's reports compiled by Bill Herman. There are notes that state with/without curved flippers.

I remember that we also made retrofit kits so that the operators could use normal flippers on their games with mini-posts, as Duncan states. I seem to remember that both Disco Fever and Time Warp were produced in our factory with and without curved flippers. There is definitely no "correct" version of either game. Both games were made, played and sold with and without curved flippers.�

Ritchie also goes on to say:

�I adopted a philosophy about flipper placement after first observing pinball play in the early 70's at Atari. Games that had odd flipper placements GENERALLY did not make as much money as games that had more normal arrangements. There are Great Exceptions, including Capt. Fantastic, but even there, the basic 2 lowest flippers are in a very normal position.

"Standard" placement gives the player comfort in that recognizable and predictable play can be had on a given playfield, and flipper placement always has a huge impact on drain schedules and feeds to the flippers. Designers can never leave well enough alone, and when they don't, they end up with something like Star Trek: The Next Generation which I will always wish was not so brutal with side drains. Oh well.�

I would tend to agree with him, even playing emulated or remade tables, I�ve realized that I prefer a more traditional or �standard� flipper layout, so once I get this thing working, I�ll try it with the curved flippers but I think in the long run they�ll be replaced with normal flippers. All I had to do was get it working then.

The first job with the my arcade cab project was to strip everything out of it and get it back to a basic shell, then refurbish the shell first before fixing the inner workings, but on this project I opted for doing things the other way around. This was only one game compared to the MAME Cabs thousands of games, so if I didn�t particularly like it, it wouldn�t be a keeper. I would sell or trade it, but that is much easier to do and it makes it much more valuable if it is working. Refinishing the artwork and painting the cab might make it look a whole lot better but wouldn�t make it much more valuable or useful to me if it wasn�t working, so exactly what state was the machine in?

Well, it had all its legs though they were a little rusty and held on with an incomplete set of leg bolts. The paint work in general is OK but a little faded and in places has scratches through it and the corners have chips missing in places.

The backglass is showing signs of heat damage with cracking paint over most of the glass which is a real problem to fix, and certainly not as easy to repair as the cab paintwork. Usually the signs of wear and tear on a pinball machine are on the playfield where the ball constantly runs over it, particularly around the flippers and around pop bumpers where the ball is under quick changes of direction and travels often.

My playfield has a mylar coating over it which protects the paintwork of the playfield but if this is retro fitted it is sometimes fitted over the top of a worn playfield. What also happens sometimes is that the parts of the playfield where there are lights, there is as round hole drilled out of the wood and this is then filled with a plastic fitting that has the bulb inside it, but sometimes these plastic fittings can slip downwards slightly and that leaves a small recess in the playfield so they need tapping back upwards from underneath the playfield so it remains as flat as possible. Then of course are all the actual targets and toys on the playfield that need to be in working order so you can play the game properly.

As I said earlier though, the main thing for me with this machine is that it works, so I will get onto the cosmetics when, and only when, I can play the damn thing. I want to play my pinball, and until then the paint can wait.

The Bi-Weekly British Backtrack � Disco Fever Pinball Restoration 01

miner2049er — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 22:53:57 GMT

I really should stop listening to people sometimes, especially when they suggest that I need to add something to my minimalist home arcade, and even more so when that something is a pinball machine.

Yes, this is going to be about my next adventure in arcade machine repair, and in particular about the 1978 Williams System 3 pinball machine, Disco Fever, but first how did I come to own it?

I�d never really been a huge pinball fan because I�d always been much more into video games, and from my point of view a pinball machine just occupied the space that could have been used by two video games, so why were they in the arcade at all? I�m not the only person to see pinball machines in that light either, it�s a debate that�s every bit as relevant as the Commodore 64 / ZX Spectrum or SEGA Mega Drive / Super Nintendo debates, and it still goes on today long after the hey days of both Pinball and Video Arcades are gone.

In recent years I�d been playing emulated pinball on my MAME cab and also playing some great compendiums like the Pinball Hall Of Fame collections of both Gottlieb and Williams tables on PSP and the Wii, and also the Microsoft Pinball Arcade game on PC, all of which are fine to a point, but nothing like the real thing. You don�t really get any impression of the physical aspects of pinball like the nudging of the machine itself and the effect that has on the ball, even though you can use controls to nudge in these games, it is nothing like the real thing.

So with the decision made to find a machine I went about it the best way, by steering clear of ebay and its overpriced �L@@K RARE!� offerings. By far the best way to pick up a sensibly priced machine, and usually one that will need some TLC is by signing up to a forum or a pinball group. Luckily for me, one came up very quickly, a Gottlieb Jungle, EM machine, but for one reason or another I ended up not getting that, and instead I picked up the Williams Disco Fever from 1978, a System 3 machine.

So what is all this EM and System 3 business? Well, basically pinball, like anything else, went through several evolutions in its lifespan, originally evolving from outdoor games like Bowls and Croquet which in turn gave rise to indoor games such as billiards around the 15th Century. Pinball tables however bear a striking resemblance to Bagatelle tables which themselves date back to 1777 when a party was thrown in honour of King Louis XVI and his wife at the Ch�teau de Bagatelle. The highlight of the party was a new table game where players used a cue to shoot ivory balls up an inclined play field. The table game was dubbed Bagatelle by the King's brother and soon swept through France before becoming popular in America when French Soldiers fighting the British in the American Revolutionary War took their tables with them. Bagatelle became so popular in America that a political cartoon from 1863 shows President Abraham Lincoln playing a tabletop bagatelle game.

Naturally the cue gave way to the traditional plunger, and in 1931 David Gottlieb's Baffle Ball became the first overnight hit of the coin-operated era and it originally sold for $17.50. The cost to play was a penny and that got you five balls. The games could be found in many drugstores and taverns and were so popular that the owner could often make back the cost of the game in a matter of days. Baffle Ball sold over 50,000 units and established Gottlieb as the first major manufacturer of pinball machines. Presumably this is where the actual name came from, with the table being a wood base with metal nails or �pins� in it to form rings where the ball would come to rest, different rings of pins being worth different points values.

Soon tables began to use electrical components, and in particular electro-mechanical components to change the players score as they hit various targets around the table and those targets themselves would become electro mechanically controlled, but things really began to take off in 1947 when the flipper was invented and first featured on the 1947 Gottlieb table Humpty Dumpty, and not just 2 flippers but 6 in total. The EM or Electro Mechanical, era had truly arrived and stayed with us until we moved into the Solid State era where the moving parts in the back box and under the playfield of the EM machines gave way to transistors and micro chips of various kinds. There were still the usual flippers and flipper coils to fire them, but the control methods behind the scenes for them had changed, and the scores were now done with LED Displays rather than physical reels.

The next real era is dubbed the DMD era, DMD being an abbreviation for Dot Matrix Display, and these were used for scoring as well as later being used as a part of the game itself with some games having the playing interacting with the Dot Matrix Display and hitting a flipper button at the right time in much the same way as they would in a video game.

Video games and pinball fought out a somewhat inevitable battle with pinball being the loser for the most part, and most pinball companies going out of business, but the 1990s saw somewhat of a comeback when some new manufacturers entered the fray such as Capcom Pinball. This era was one of the digital age with the DMD games and big TV and Movie licenses such as Indiana Jones, Star Trek and the record selling Bally/Williams game The Addams Family hitting an all-time modern sales record of 20,270 machines.

By 1997 there were only two companies left, Williams and Sega Pinball, who later sold their pinball division to Gary Stern (President of Sega Pinball at the time) who called his new company Stern Pinball. Stern Pinball is the only current manufacturer of pinball machines, though recently a new start up called Jersey Jack Pinball have employed a lot of the well known game designers and programmers and are currently working on their first machine, a licensed game based on The Wizard Of Oz.

With this being my first machine I wasn�t really too fussy about what it was and from which era as long as it wasn�t too technical for a beginner to get in there and repair, and that was a big question before I bought machine. With my arcade cab, it is running MAME on a PC, so if it breaks, I�ve fitted everything there is inside the cab myself so I know what it all is and what it all does. Had it been a machine I had refurbished and brought back to life and restored, then it would have been a different matter and a much steeper learning curve. That learning curve going from a video game to a pinball machine is much steeper again I think as there is much more to it and therefore much more to go wrong. If it broke or indeed wasn�t working when I got it, would I be able to fix it?

Deciding that the answer was a definitive �perhaps� I bought one.

Disco Fever was produced by Williams in June of 1978 and they made around 6,000 of them. The game, and the name, bear a striking resemblance to the film Saturday Night Fever but presumably for licensing reasons it isn�t officially based on the movie but the artwork is immediately indicative of the movie right down to the lady in red and the man in the white suit pointing upwards on the dance floor. The table was designed by Tony Kramer with art work by Christian Marche (who apparently had the movie poster in front of him) and it was the fourth Solid State game produced by Williams and the second to feature electronic sound.

As the name System 3 would suggest, this game was built around the 3rd generation of the Williams hardware and software system that managed and controlled the games. There is a ton of help out there online if you know exactly what you are looking for so you need to know what your game is and what runs it.

Williams System 1 was basically a prototype machine made from a converted EM game called Grand Prix in 1976 and only one or two of them were made. System 2 was again a conversion of an EM game, this time Aztec, again in 1976 and less than ten were produced. System 3 came around in 1977 and the games that used it were Hot Tip (also available as an EM game), Lucky Seven, World Cup, Contact and Disco Fever. Williams had as many as 10 different evolutions based around the same system, and a game with a long run such as Flash was initially a System 4 game but was still in production when System 6 was being used and some of them shipped as System 6 games, though no known games were based on System 5. System 6 also ran the other game with curved flipper, Time Warp in 1979 as well as the first ever talking pinball machine, Gorgar. In fact all Williams Solid State games from the 1977 Hot Tip to the 1984 Star Light shared the same basic board design, and that is the boards that I had to fix.

Tune in next time to see how that goes....

The Bi-Weekly British Backtrack � A year older or a year younger?

miner2049er — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:31:08 GMT

A year older, a year wiser, a year younger. Well that's the way it feels.

Twelve months ago I sat here (well it was over there in the other chair actually, but you get the picture) and I wrote about the Christmas gift I was getting the next day, the Amazon Kindle. That Kindle is still going strong and is still being used almost daily. In fact it is so good out of the box that it's one of the few things I haven't hacked. I bought it to read on and it does that admirably well by default.

Of course a hacked Kindle would give me the option of new fonts but I like the default ones. A hacked Kindle would give me the option of a personal screensaver rather than the random default ones but when it's in the leather binder (which it constantly is) I see the screensaver for approximately 2 seconds on opening and approximately 1 second on closing, so what's the point?

Another device I've had for quite a while which has so far survived any hacking is my Nintendo 3DS. Not only because there is the chance that an online update from the big N will zap it, but there is hardly a library of games that I'm so desperate to play that I would risk the wrath of the Thought Police to try before I buy. Until now it seems.

The 3DS has had something of a lacklustre launch, a problem that even Nintendo recognised when they slashed the price by �100 or so. Not wanting to disappoint the early adopters any more then the lack of quality games did, they came up with the Ambassador Program and gave away a bunch of downloadable games to anybody that registered their console before the announced price drop.

Not wanting to pay such a premium for those games (most of which I have played or own already) I waited until the price drop before picking mine up along with the 3D remake of Ocarina Of Time. That cart has stayed in there almost continually since, not only because it's a great game, but also because it's just about the only title on the system that I feel compelled to buy. Until now that is. Now, finally some titles are coming. Now I can walk the streets without feeling the shame of being a 3DS owner.

This year I'm anticipating a couple of 3DS games for Christmas, ironically both first party titles, Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7, so I feel like I've regressed a little going from the Kindle one year to Mario Games the next, especially as I haven't received a video game for Christmas in donkeys years, but I'm looking forward to the dilemma of which one of them to play first.

Of course, they are once again first party upgrades of existing Nintendo franchises, but I�m hoping there is enough in them that�s new to keep them feeling fresh and worth the price of entry, which is so far incredibly expensive taking into account the price of the system and the three games I�ll then have for it, but hopefully this heralds the start of the quality games catalogue for the system, but somehow it doesn�t feel like the dawn of something big in the same way that the launch of the original DS did.

Having said that though, I�m content to make do with the quality that is Ocarina Of Time, Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7 until something else tickles my fancy.

Now I need to plan what to ask for next Christmas. Maybe an Action Man or a rattle.

Oh by the way, Merry Christmas.

See you next year.

King of Kong: A Fistful of Characters.

indieseoul — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 08:23:38 GMT

The year is 1982 you have a fistful of quarters burning a hole in your pocket. The only sensible thing would be to spend them on video games. King of Kong is a very entertaining documentary about high scores and the arcade paradise that was the 1980's. The makers of this film must have decided that in order to get more asses in the seats it would be prudent to create an entertaining rivalry. They did just that by characterizing Billy Mitchell as the cartoon bad guy and by using Steve Wiebe as a sort of counter point to Billy's brash way of speaking. I'm not sure that this was a fair characterization but it certainly is an entertaining one.

Billy Mitchell as the Terminator now that's a villain I can get behind!

The film does a lot to shed light on the great work of Walter Day the creator of high score record keeping and the awesome twin galaxies but of course Chasing ghosts does this as well. King of Kong is more about the two main characters Billy Mitchell who at the time of the film held the high score for Donkey Kong and the up and coming challenger Steve Wiebe who wants to be the new record holder. Billy is portrayed in the film as a real asshole that won't even give Steve the time of day and Wiebe is portrayed as the geeky social outcast that cries too much.

It really doesn't matter if you agree with the characterizations or not they are simply that characterizations. It is classic film making 101 to make one of the characters a bad guy and to pit him against a loser that we all hope in the end will prevail. Don't we all root for the underdog after all? Sure this could be considered shoddy film making but to be honest I think the person who got the biggest end of the stick was Walter Day. At times it seemed that they were portraying Walter as a kind of lackey for the great Billy Mitchell.This is certainly not the case, Walter Day is a very important person responsible for bringing attention to gaming records. Without him there probably would be no record keeping of game scores and of course no King of Kong. Besides he's a really nice guy and he provides an important service for gamers.

Now I will say this I have heard some interviews of Billy Mitchell and he does at least seem to have quite the narcissistic personality. So perhaps his characterization in the film is not all that unfair. Friends of Billy will always come to his rescue and call this film a character assassination and to be honest that could be true. Maybe Billy is in fact a very nice guy. I have no way of knowing for sure.

What is important however is that you watch this film, if you haven't already, simply because it is an interesting look at arcade gaming and the cut throat world of high score competition. I give this film 4 out of 5 bottles of Billy's hot sauce for entertainment value alone!

Now I'm sure that almost every member of this site has seen this film and that everyone has their own opinions on the great Billy Mitchell VS Steve Wiebe debate. I would like to hear your take on things.

What was your favorite part of this film? What did you dislike about it? Please leave a comment below as well as check out my new website where I put all of my little blogs and projects in one convenient location. Please check it out!

The Bi-Weekly British Backtrack � F1 (World) Grand Prix

miner2049er — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 23:25:32 GMT

These two week waits seem to fly by, much like the subject of this blog in fact (See what I did there?) This time we�re immersing ourselves once again into the world of Formula One.

Of course you remember one of my early postings about the Papyrus game Grand Prix Legends, and we�re moving forward in time from the era in that game, from 1967 to another truly great age of Formula One, the early 1990s.

We�re looking at one of my favourite games of all time. That would be Formula One Grand Prix on the Commodore Amiga and also DOS and written by Geoff Crammond. It's often referred to as Grand Prix 1, MicroProse Grand Prix, or just F1GP and in the U.S. it's known as World Grand Prix, and like I did with Grand Prix legends I'm going to give you a little background on the real world aspects of the game and why the game was so realistic and why it was important that it came out when it did.

If you didn�t like the detail in the Grand Prix Legends review then this one probably isn�t for you either as we go into a similar level of detail, so I guess I�ll see you in two weeks, but if you did enjoy that review and you�re still reading then climb into the cockpit and buckle up cos here we go.

Like Grand Prix Legends, Formula One Grand Prix is a racing sim, though it does have a quick race option it is definitely aimed at the sim racing audience rather than the arcade racing fans.

Throughout the history of motor racing there have been eras and great rivalries, great battles that have been fought out on track, and often spilled over into fisticuffs in the pits too, Moss and Fangio, Clark and Hill, Arnoux and Villeneuve, Hunt and Lauda, and this game is centred around the era of Senna and Prost, with of course a bit of Nigel Mansell thrown in, and this era is perhaps the last great era of the sport where drivers weren't afraid to overtake, and it's getting into the era of driving aids like traction control and anti lock brakes and even active suspension, all of which I'll get into shortly.

We've seen battles and rivalries since then, Hakkinen and Schumacher spring to mind, but in the modern era the race is often won or lost in the pit lane with drivers taking different strategies into the race so they won't get stuck behind cars and have to overtake them. Now when they come up to the back of a car, as long as it's within a certain lap window they'll dive in the pits to refuel so that when the other car comes out later it will hopefully be behind them.

This era though is when drivers still had the guts and the ability to overtake somebody else, sometimes making a mess of it, sometimes perhaps doing it on purpose, Japan 1989 and Japan 1990 both spring to mind. It wasn't just about that though, driver ability and rivalry, it was about pride too. Sometimes the rivalries were so intense that somebody like Ayrton Senna who was leading the 1988 Monaco Grand Prix and was being caught by his bitter rival Alain Prost, wasn't content to just sit on his lead, and by this time they were team mates. Prost was too far behind to catch Senna before the end of the race but Senna didn't want Prost to set a race lap record so he increased his speed to beat him. Prost responded and they were both setting race lap records but the McClaren team told Senna to slow down, he had the race won and was risking breaking his car or having an accident on the tight street circuit of Monaco. Senna didn't listen and continued to fight for lap times with Prost. He made a mistake, crashed his car and walked away as Prost passed him to inherit the lead and take the race win. Senna walked straight from his car to his Monaco home still in his overalls and wouldn't speak to anyone for days. That year also saw an incident in Portugal that Senna would later apologise for having almost pushed Prost into the Pit Wall as he overtook him.

In the penultimate race of the 1989 season at Suzuka, Prost was leading and Senna had to beat him to win the World Championship, but as he made his move Prost turned in on him and as they came to a stop with their wheels entwined, Prost got out of his car and walked back to the pits expecting to be champion, but Senna got going again and took the lead which made him champion, but he was controversially disqualified for missing the chicane during the crash and Prost was crowned champion. Senna was furious and he took his anger out on both Prost and the system the very next season at the very same track.

At the drivers briefing before the 1990 race Nelson Piquet stuck up for Senna's actions the previous year saying that had he turned around to face oncoming traffic and drive through the chicane it would have been too dangerous and everybody in the briefing agreed. Senna had been robbed. He blamed Jean Marie Balestre of the FIA and Senna was a man who held a grudge.

Going into qualifying Prost was favourite to take Pole position which would mean starting on the racing line on the left hand side of the circuit, but against the odds Senna took Pole and much to his disgust the Pole position slot was switched to the right. He believed, and not without justification, that it was done to benefit Prost. The interview Senna gave about this incident is one you have to watch as he leaves no doubt about why there was a switch and who was responsible for it, Jean-Marie Balestre. That interview was done a year later yet the anger can still clearly be seen as Senna describes his actions and the fact that he had enjoyed a much better season without political interference and without Prost.

Back to the race then, and Prost had to win to become champion and as the race started Prost got away well on the racing line and moved over to block Senna but Senna was having none of it, he kept his foot down and ran straight into the back of Prost as he braked taking them both out in a cloud of dust at turn 1, and as they flew across the sand trap together Senna knew he had won the World Championship. An act of recklessness and it was done apparently without fear to purposely crash into his opponent at well over 100mph.

Formula One Grand Prix the game is set in the very next season, the 1991 season, and though the game isn't affiliated with the F.I.A. or the Formula One World championship the car liveries and driver helmets are accurate for the year, but out of the box it doesn't contain any real world names, though you can put your own in which everybody did of course. Who wants to race as Carlos Sanchez for the Mcpherson team when you can race as Ayrton Senna for the McClaren team?

The points system was also changed for the 1991 season so that now the winning driver was awarded 10 points instead of 9 and the results from all races now counted as oppose to the drivers' best eleven results from the season. So that meant that a race win was much more valuable than it had been and it encouraged some of the overtaking maneuvers that we saw.

The Williams Renault car of this era was a far cry from those in Grand Prix Legends from the late 60s and like I said this was the era of Anti Lock brakes, traction control, semi-automatic gearboxes and active suspension, and in 1991 and 1992 Nigel Mansell won 9 out of 16 races in it, a record only beaten in 2002 by Michael Schumacher�s Ferrari when there were 17 races and again in 2004 when there were 20 races.

The Williams FW14 was designed by Patrick Head and Adrian Newey and was so promising that it tempted Mansell out of retirement to drive it. The engine was a 3.5 litre V10 Renault that powered a semi automatic gearbox using paddle controls. Technically and aerodynamically it was the best car on the grid but some called it too technical for its own good, and indeed its technical failures meant that in 1991 Senna and Mclaren took the title through superior reliability if not out and out pace, but what was all this technology doing?

Well, anti lock brakes is obvious, the clue is in the name. Instead of having to apply a certain amount of pressure to the brake pedal which applied a proportional amount of pressure to the brake discs, more pressure meaning more braking, and if the wheels started to lock lifting off a little, you just pressed the pedal and the system would dictate how much braking to apply. If the wheels began to lock then it would reduce the braking force applied to the discs until the lock had been prevented then reapply more pressure again to improve the braking force. This meant that a driver approaching a corner could just hit the brake pedal and the car would slow itself as quickly as possible and without skidding.

Traction control is another fairly simple one and is similar to the anti lock brakes principle except it applies to the throttle pedal. A racing driver normally hits the throttle and because of the huge amount of horse power at their disposal the wheels will spin and the car loses forward momentum, so what traction control does is monitors the amount of drive going to the wheels and if it is too much and the wheels are starting to spin, it cuts that power until the wheels are driving the car again, and if they start to spin again, it cuts the power again. All of this, along with the anti lock brakes happens dozens of times a second and the difference in speed between a traction controlled car and a non traction controlled car is quite big, especially in the wet, and driver aids like that can mean the difference between finishing a race and not finishing a race.

Active suspension is again quite a simple principle but is technically very difficult to get right, however the difference in cornering speeds especially is quite high. The idea behind this is downforce. Downforce is the force generated to push the car down into the track and improve its grip, and this is something that wasn't around in 1967 when Grand Prix Legends is set, the first wings began to appear the year after, and much more noticably in 1969.

As the car moves forwards the air passing over the cleverly designed body and wing structures does the opposite of what it would do to a plane. On a plane, due to the shape of the wings the air pressure below the wings is different to that above the wings as the plane heads down the runway. When the difference between the two pressure levels is sufficient the plane lifts off into the air.

With a Formula 1 car the opposite is true, the air rushing over the car pushes it down into the track so it has more grip and can go round corners more quickly. In fact the amount of downforce generated by a formula 1 car travelling at 100mph is greater than the weight of the car, so it could literally drive upside down on a ceiling at that speed. Anything that disrupts the planned air flow over the car reduces its downforce and therefore slows the car's lap times down. Now these cars are designed on budgets of millions of pounds in wind tunnels so the team know exactly how the air flows over every inch of the body work, and one of the most important areas is the underside of the car, or at least it was in 1991. Now the cars have what is referred to as the "plank" which is to all intents and purposes a long wooden board that is fastened to the bottom of the chassis and is inspected after the race. This is so that teams can't use air flow systems on the underside of the car to further increase downforce and therefore speed as airflow is disturbed by the plank.

Back then though, there would be any number of air flow devices to help pull the car down into the tarmac, and active suspension helped all of that to work. As the car travels down a straight the airflow is working at its best hitting every aerofoil and wing evenly and creating the maximum downforce efficiently, but as the car brakes the chassis rolls forward slightly as the nose dives down so now the air flow is not working 100% efficiently because its not hitting the car straight on and level.

The effect is increased as the car turns into a corner because now the chassis naturally rolls sideways and the airflow is hitting the car unevenly again so the downforce is decreased just when the car needs it the most, when its cornering. What active suspension did was keep the monocoque chassis level and upright at all times, so as the car was travelling down a straight it didn't have much to do as the chassis is pretty stable, but as the car brakes the nose naturally dives down and the monocoque tilts forwards, so active suspension quickly lifts the nose up without affecting the braking force, and as the car corners and the chassis starts to roll the active suspension corrects it and lifts the side of car up and makes it sit level again.

So going round a corner the wheels won't lock on the approach because the anti lock brakes prevent that, the chassis doesn't roll in the corner as the active suspension stops that and as the car exits the corner it doesn't spin its tyres as the traction control stops that, so this really was drive by wire technology making the car very fast and very stable, if not initially unreliable.

The FW14 made its debut at the 1991 United States Grand Prix in Phoenix and it was clearly the most technically advanced on the grid but teething troubles hampered its championship prospects and even though it was very fast its new semi automatic gearbox among other things gave it problems. In 1992 and with the benefit of further development the FW14B was the dominant car and Nigel Mansell wrapped up the championship with a then record 9 wins in a season, and his team mate Ricardo Patrese scoring a tenth win.

The FW14 won 17 grands prix, 22 pole positions and 289 points before being replaced with the FW15C for 1993, and given that current F1 regulations ban most of the technologies used by those cars, they are still today looked at as being the most technologically advanced racing cars ever built.

So why the history lesson? Well, the game Microprose Formula One Grand Prix is set around this era and features that car, among many others, and that is what sets it apart as a racing sim from something like Grand Prix Legends. Yes its also a driving game, a racing game, a racing simulation, but the two games are poles apart and the gameplay could not be more different.

Before this MicroProse was known for flight sims and military sims for the 8-bits as well as a few strategy games, and as technology moved on so did MicroProse and they went to machines like the IBM PC, the Amiga and Atari ST and in 1990 and 1991 they released Railroad Tycoon and Civilization which quickly became two of the best-selling strategy games of all time. That same year came Geoff Crammond's Formula One Grand Prix, first on the Amiga and Atari ST and then on DOS in early 1992 and at the time it was without doubt the best racing sim of any kind to date.

It is famous for its 3D graphics and attention to detail and it's the first game I played with accurate renditions of real world circuits, and I mean accurate, the bump in the road heading down to Mirabeau at Monaco, the exhilerating altitude and direction changes of Eau Rouge at Spa In Belgium and the adrenalin rush of the 130R in Suzuka, Japan. For the first time in a game you felt like you were driving a real F1 car on a real F1 circuit. The Papyrus game Indianapolis 500 had preceded it by 3 years and was up until that point perhaps the most accurate racing sim, but understandably those 3 years meant that F1GP took the 3D polygon graphics to a whole new level and the sound was so much more realistic too, not to mention the A.I. of the computer cars which was one of the major issues I had with Indy 500, and also F1GP featured a full season to compete in with all 16 tracks as oppose to Indy's single track. It also had a full and very functional replay system with the ability to change cameras, to show different views and to focus on different drivers.

When Indy 500 and F1GP appeared they were the first to implement "real world" racing physics, accurate track models and car handling that required driving skills to play well. Both games were also the first to offer car setups that actually made a real difference to the way the car handled. You could alter the gear ratios, the tyre compounds and the front and rear wing settings, all of which had an impact on your lap times. The cars also had functional rearview mirrors that were actually useful in race situations.

So how accurate a driving experience was it? Well, to really judge that you need to put a lot of time into the game and become really quite good at it, because the more you put in, the more you will get out. On the easiest levels there are driver aids available to you such as a steering assist, a brake assist, automatic gears, suggested gears, invincibility and a self correcting car should you get into a spin.

As you ramp up the difficulty levels there are less and less of these driver aids available until you are completely in control of the car, the throttle, the gears, the gear changes, the damage level, everything.

Once you do become good and by good I mean able to beat the computer cars on the hardest levels, you will be able to tell from one lap to the next whether or not you are on a quick one or not, whether your entry into a corner will compromise your exit or whether a slower entry into a corner will allow you to get a faster exit and a higher terminal speed on the next straight. You really do get a feel for all those things, and you will find yourself using the racing line but also finding your own lines through certain sections of track where a different line will better suit your individual driving style which you will come to develop.

Your driving style also becomes quite important to your race results as well, because tyre wear is accurately modelled in the game, so if you have a nice, smooth driving style you will not wear out your tyres so quickly and you will not need to change them as many times in a race. If you go attacking each lap as though it's a qualifying lap you will obviously go more quickly and open up a lead but you will wear out your tyres more quickly and there will be a quicker drop off in performance so you will have to change them more often.

Back in 1991 drivers were allowed to use a specific qualifying tyre, one which was made of a very soft compound that heated up to race temperature very quickly, stayed there for one lap and then began to melt and lose performance, and these qualifying tyres were only used in qualifying sessions, and each driver was allowed 4 sets of them which meant that in the qualifying session that decided your starting place on the grid, you had just 12 laps. 1 out lap, 1 hot lap and 1 in lap for each of your 4 sets of tyres.

In the race you had a choice of tyre as well, A compound which is the hardest so it will not give you so much grip but will last a lot longer before the performance falls away, and if looked after they will easily last the whole race distance, so while your opponents are in the pits changing their soft tyres, you breeze past and hope they don't catch you again. The B compound is slightly softer than the As and gives a little more grip and the Cs are the softest of all and give the most grip but wear out quite quickly. The final option is the wet tyres which become available when it rains.

In all the time I played the game I only ever had 1 wet race and it happened to fall at Monaco which made an already long, slow race even longer and slower.

Now, I consider myself good at this game, very good at it, and I competed in full length races over full seasons, so 16 races of anything up to 2 hours at a a time per race, not counting a 2 hour practise and a 1 hour qualifying session, though if you wanted to you could end the practise early and do all your qualifying attempts at the start of the qualifying session and then advance time until the session ended.

By the time I was playing on the hardest settings I would win Pole Position every single race, and I could win for example the opening race at Phoenix, Arizona by 4 laps. With a lap taking around 80 seconds, I could lap 4 seconds quicker than everybody else, so every 20 laps I would catch the second place car again. That's how good I got at it and how much time I put into it, even with a joystick to drive the car. Don't forget that this was a time when analog controls were not common place and I certainly didn't have any, let alone a steering wheel, so I had to make do with a joystick initially before moving on to more advanced controls like the QuickJoy Foot Pedal.

That still used digital rather than analog controls but it felt much more natural to play with pedals, and in order for the game to compensate for the on-off nature of digital controllers, Geoff Crammond implemented the driver aids to help drivers smooth out the controls a little such as the throttle assistance meaning that the throttle didn't have to be 0% or 100%, but like I said, once you get adept at the game you can overcome these things yourself as otherwise the game could be considered too easy with the car almost driving itself with brake assistance, throttle assistance and steering assistance, again not unlike the real life FW14B modeled in the game, and that is a major thing that sets this sim apart from Grand Prix legends. In that game if you are arriving at a braking zone and just hit the brakes you will more often than not spin. Your momentum may not be 100% straight forwards, it may be a little to the left, your tyres on either side of the car will not be the same temperature and will offer different levels of grip, the pressures in each tyre may not be the same and the suspension setting on either side may be different, so any braking force is not evenly applied, and there is no anti lock brakes, you have to do that yourself by adding a little throttle to rotate the wheels slightly.

In F1GP, that is not the case, your tyre pressures are not configurable so they are equal as are the temperatures, and though tyre wear is simulated it is simulated evenly across your tyres, so your braking force is applied evenly across the chassis as the anti lock brakes will prevent a skid and the active suspension will help maintain the smooth airflow over your wings and improve downforce. The cars in F1GP are easier to drive because the cars they model were also easier to drive, and in that respect it is a very accurate sim.

Despite this accuracy though, the game was not without its flaws. Geoff Crammond wrote the game long before DirectX, OpenGL and 3D acceleration video cards. So F1GP was built around a proprietary software 3D engine which was set up in such a way that a fixed frame rate had to be chosen (up to 25.6 frames per second on the PC version) and when running, the game would constantly try to render the specified number of frames. Unfortunately this meant that the engine would never drop frames when the CPU couldn't handle the rendering in real time and so the game time itself was slowed down.

There was an option to display the CPU-load and when it got above 100% it meant the game was no longer working in real time, and this phenomenon was known as "slow-motion driving". The rendering was obviously dependent on what was happening on screen so it would occur either on certain parts of the tracks or when there were lots of cars around you such as at the start of a race but to help reduce it you could eliminate trackside details or simply choose a lower frame rate to avoid the problem altogether.

Don't forget though, that this was 1992 when frame rate didn't really matter as much as it does now and the issue wasn't really seen as important until later when it meant that the game would not support multiplayer network play. That was because of the "slow motion driving" issue as it meant that "real time" in the game could differ between different players and computers as they slowed down at different times.

The game's sequels, Grand Prix 3 and Grand Prix 4, had LAN-play and could be hacked to play online over the Internet, but they never performed that well. Even when the first boom of 3D acceleration chipsets revolutionized gaming, the game didn't benefit because the flaws were hardcoded into the game engine, and no matter how much horsepower you threw at it you would still get slow down.

One of the interesting things about F1GP was that even though it didn�t support online racing, online racing communities sprang up where competitions were organised via online services like Compuserve and then the Internet as we know it once that became mainstream. The races didn't actually happen online because the game only had modem play so the races were based on competitors submitting game saves of qualifying laps and races that would then be collated by a race administrator.

Another flaw was found in the physics engine which only used horizontal collisions and not vertical collisions when calculating damage, so it was possible to use the rumble strips and kerbs on some tracks to launch the car into the air and bypass chicanes rather than driving through them without damaging the car when it landed.

Despite the age of the game and the fact that technically and graphically it has long been surpassed, F1GP still has a small active community and on-going developments are still happening albeit in a much smaller way. The best place to find one such community is SimRacingWorld.com which has an F1GP section with downloads and articles as well as a discussion forum.

So, I really can�t rate this game highly enough, it was amazing in its day and it is still very playable today for an F1 fan. It is I think the last game that I missed work to play on, completing a full championship in my week off.

The DOS version is very good but my favourite was always the Amiga version as that�s the one I had and played to death, but if you�re at all annoyed by disk swapping then you might want to avoid it as it came on 4 floppies and to get to the main menu you have to use the first 3 disks and to get into a race you�ll need all 4. Once it�s loaded and you are just changing circuits and trying different ones out you�ll only need to swap disks 3 and 4 but as far as I remember it only supported 1 disk drive so you couldn�t just put disks 3 and 4 into a drive each.

So if you only play one �. sorry, if you only play two Formula One games in your life, play Grand Prix Legends and then Microprose Formula One Grand Prix.

Videos

The Bi-Weekly British Backtrack � Dragons Are Real You Know!

miner2049er — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 22:39:16 GMT

Hands up America!

Actually I probably shouldn�t say that to you should I? Does that count as Terrorism now?

Let�s try this:
Hands up if you�ve heard of the Dragon 32?
Hands up if you�ve heard of the Dragon 64?
Well, you�re just about to.

The Dragon 32 and the Dragon 64 computers are from the real heyday of the home computer boom in the 1980s and they take their name from the Company that made them, Dragon Data Ltd who were based in Port Talbot, Wales. They were quite similar to the TRS-80 Colour Computer and actually share some cross compatibility with them as well. The other part of the name comes from the amount of RAM they had, obviously 32 kilobytes and 64 kilobytes respectively.
Like I said, they come from this real boom time in the market and they arrived in 1982 for the 32 and 1983 for the 64. They sold quite well and were quite well supported at the time by software vendors and developers, probably helped by the fact that they used Microsoft BASIC like the TRS-80 did, hence the cross compatibility, which didn�t extend to everything but meant they could share peripherals and some software.

The Dragon had a big advantage over the CoCo though because it had a much better keyboard, a proper typewriter style keyboard where the CoCo didn�t so it made much more sense as a business tool. The CoCo had a qwerty keyboard and a traditional layout, but the keys were not the traditional and responsive type, not quite a chicklet style but close to it. It was just easier to type for long spells on the Dragon than the CoCo and all home computers coming out of this boom time tried to market to business as well as home users, some with more success than others obviously.

Unlike a modern PC with the operating system on disk, the Dragon boots from its ROM based OS instantly when powered up. The author of the Dragon BIOS allegedly encoded his initials into the final image so all dragons may well have the initials DNS hidden within their ROM as an Easter Egg.

Some software providers also produced compilers for BASIC, and other languages, to produce binary (or "machine") code that ran much faster and made better use of the small amount of system RAM. Dragon Data also released an assembler/disassembler/editor suite called Dream but it came towards the end of the systems� life and wasn�t that popular.

As an alternative to this ROM based BASIC operating system both the 32 and the 64 are capable of running others such as FLEX, Forth and even OS-9 (Level 1) which meant that Dragon users could make use of multitasking, and the 64 was functionally identical to the 32 and could even boot in 32 compatible BASIC mode.

So hardware wise it ran on a Motorola 6800 CPU, a 6809E running at 0.89Hz and had like I say, 32 or 64 kilobytes of RAM, both had a parallel port and the Dragon 64 had a serial port which the 32 did not, so you could get a range of hardware for them. The 64 also had some minor ROM changes over the 32, bearing in mind that the ROM contained the Operating System and Basic as well.

They supported resolutions up to 256x192 through a composite video port so you could use a dedicated computer monitor or hook it up to a TV, and they also supported analog joysticks which most computers didn�t at the time so you could also use things like light pens as well.

The media of the day was of course cassette tape and the Dragons were no different in that respect, and they also had a cartridge slot like other contemporary systems.

The Dragon proved such a success for Dragon Data that they became the largest privately owned company in Wales and soon moved to a new and much larger production facility where they were immediately able to produce 5,000 machines every week, which soon rose to 10,000 per week.

Price-wise they were very competitive with the 32 launching in 1982 at �169 and the 64 launching at �225, compared to the British failure of the Tandy CoCo which launched in the UK at �400 and was only a 16K machine.

Part of the success of the different computers in the era was of course their ability to play games and the support that they got from game publishers, but sadly the Dragons suffered from having fairly poor graphical grunt and for games they paled in comparison to their rivals like the Ataris, the Commodores and the Sinclairs. As a business tool they also suffered because they couldn�t easily display lower-case letters without using high res graphics in software, but most didn�t bother and stuck to purely upper-case characters. That sadly killed it as an option for the education market which was also looking to move into the computer age, and as you know from previous shows, the BBC range did exactly that and swamped the education market leaving no room for the Dragon and most of the others as well in fact.

So with all of its markets slightly compromised, the Dragons didn�t stick around for long and Dragon Data collapsed in June 1984, meaning the line was discontinued.

We�ve seen examples in the past in other areas where competing technologies fight out the war for supremacy, and the better option doesn�t always win. Now I�m no expert but the Betamax format is always touted to be technically superior to VHS, yet VHS won through and Betamax all but disappeared. The same with Minidisc which is allegedly a better technology than Compact Disc, but try and find an album on Minidisc if you can.

The same could be said of the Dragon Computer because it was based on the Motorola MC6809E processor running at 0.89 MHz which was an advanced 8-bit CPU at the time, certainly newer and more advanced than the older 6502 from MOS Technology that ran the Apple 2, the Atari 800, the BBC Micro, the Vic-20 and the Commodore 64 among others, and the Zilog Z80 that was found in the Osborne 1, the TRS-80, ZX80, ZX81, the Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC. The trouble is, around this era graphics was king and games ruled the roost, so a computer without the ability to run graphically intensive games was always going to be at a disadvantage.

They did give a real good go though because they supported a lot of peripherals with the I/O for them being handled by two MC6821 PIAs (Peripheral Interface Adaptors) which you know all about from listening to me trying to fix my pinball machine, as that uses the same PIAs.

You can tell the two machines apart because they are slightly different colours with the 32 being beige and the 64 being light grey, and of course I�ve mentioned the serial port on the 64 which is missing from the 32. The Dragons were ripe for modding though because it was possible to upgrade a 32 and make it a 64 and a lot of 32 owners did that with a simple RAM upgrade, and some even went as far 128, 256 or 512 kilobytes with homebrew memory controllers or MMUs (Memory Management Units).

Another reason they were so ripe for modding was that they were pretty solidly built machines physically and they were very reliable too, the mainboard was renowned for being robust and there was lots of spare room inside the case which helped with adding ports and peripherals and not requiring any additional cooling. This was similar to the BBC range of computers that were easily upgradeable from one level to another making it an almost completely different computer in the range.

It was even possible to convert a CoCo into a Dragon by swapping the original CoCo ROM with a Dragon ROM and doing a slight modification on the wiring of the keyboard.

The Dragon's main display mode is 'black on green' text but this mode only supports blocky graphics made from a quarter of each block, so for games you have to switch to one of the other graphical modes, of which there are five, named PMODE 0 to PMODE 4 and each of these modes has two colour palettes selected by alternating from colour to monochrome, hence the poor graphical performance for games in comparison to its peers.

On the business side a third party company called Premier Microsystems from London produced a Disk Operating System for the Dragon called Delta, but Dragon Data weren�t happy about that at all and came out with their own version called DragonDOS which made it quite clear that Delta was not compatible with their �standard� version. It was also more expensive than the official DragonDOS too at �300 but as usual you get what you pay for because it widely regarded as being much superior in that it was bug free, easier to use and had more features.

So this fragmentation added to the confusion at the time for businesses who were spoilt for choice with not only what machines to use in their company, Commodore, Atari, BBC, Amstrad and Sinclair, but if they chose the Dragon they might also have to choose an OS to use as well. Understandably, most stayed away and Dragon was in trouble. Even if Dragon had not competed with Delta they might not have fared any better but now they were in real trouble.

As a last ditch attempt to recover the situation Dragon Data started work on the next range of Dragon computers, again two models of different specs, the Dragon Alpha, known as the Professional, and the Dragon Beta, known as the 128. In an interview for the magazine Dragon User in December 1983, the Managing Director of Dragon Data (Brian Moore) officially announced that the 128 was under development and that it would be compatible with the Dragon 64 through the use of OS9 but not Dragon Basic.

The Alpha was an altogether different prospect though and Dragon were clearly aiming it at the high end market based on its rumoured specs. It allegedly used dual 6809 processors, 256K RAM that would be expandable to 768K, twin 3.5� floppy drives, an optional external hard disk, an 80 column display with resolutions up to 320x256 and 16 colours along with modes that had support for teletext and its 40 column display, no doubt in an attempt to cash in on the end of the Prestel system and to compete with other systems that were able to run teletext at the time.

Estimated retail price for this monster was rumoured to be around the �2500 to �3000 mark which is a lot now and was certainly a lot then too, but if you aim for the moon, you may just land on a star.

During this development period Dragon Data were taken over by GEC who rebadged the existing 32 and 64 and quite a few of them were sold with GEC branding and known as the GEC Dragon.

Unfortunately though, the new systems only made it to the prototype stage during 1984 when the company went into receivership and were bought lock, stock and barrel by a new Spanish company, inexplicably called Eurohard, who acquired them for a reported �1 million. Eurohard had actually already signed a deal with Dragon Data to manufacture Dragons in Spain for the home market both in Spain and in other Spanish speaking countries, but now they had the freedom to do whatever they wanted with it, and what they wanted to do was move in on the education market, backing up the computer hardware with a television show that used it and demonstrated it in much the same way that Acorn and the BBC had done in the UK as they cornered the UK education market. Eurohard were so successful in their strategy that the Spanish government subsidised any Dragon computer bought by a school making them an even cheaper prospect.

Of course this had a knock on effect on the home market too because the computers on the television and the computers used in schools would be complimented if the same computers were also used at home, so lots of Spanish children ended up with a Dragon at home.

Production in Spain was delayed, so to meet the increasing demand and the 25,000 pre-orders Eurohard purchased 13,000 Dragons from GEC at a very low cost and sold them at a huge markup, �200 for the 32 and �300 for the 64 which was still cheaper than their rivals, and don�t forget, they were subsidised to the education market so schools didn�t have to pay anywhere near that.

Eventually the production issues were resolved and the Spanish Dragon 200 model, a 64 clone, started to roll off the production line at a rate of around 500 per day.

On the US side of things, Dragon Data was originally set up by a toy company called Mettoy, and in the early days when sales were doing quite well they were in negotiations with the American Tano Corporation and looking to open a North American branch of the company, but then when things began to slow down a little those negotiations came to nothing and collapsed, but Tano did release an Americanised version of the 64 called the Tano Dragon under license from Dragon Data, and sold around 36,000 of them in the first two years.

The European Dragons used a European video output as standard with 625 lines as oppose to the NTSC standard of 525 lines, but the Tano Dragon had NTSC video output as well as 110v input and some subtle differences like the case colour and the power button. Until recently the Tano Dragon was available for purchase from a distributer called CA Digital who bought up the unsold Tano stock.

Well as this is a retro gaming show let�s have a look at some of the library of Dragon games. A lot of the popular game publishers of the day programmed for the Dragon range including some of the big hitters like Bulldog, Imagine, Mastertronic, Melbourne House, Ocean, Quicksilva and Virgin and they made a mixture of original games and ports from other systems. They also seemed to show something of a sense of humour with their game titles, as a few did back then.

There were ports of popular games of the time like the Spectrum game Chuckie Egg, the arcade game Hunchback and the multi system game Manic Miner, but the Dragon had its own game mascot called Cuthbert who starred in several games of varying quality. Cuthbert Goes Digging was a clone of Lode Runner, Cuthbert Goes Walkabout was a clone of Amidar and both had very poor, almost stick figure graphics, but King Cuthbert was a clone of Donkey Kong that looked much better. The original games were Cuthbert in the Mines which was a platformer style game but played much like Frogger with you making your way up the screen while avoiding things, Cuthbert and the Golden Chalice was a black and white game but had a huge Cuthbert sprite and was a run and jump affair, albeit run slowly and jump slowly affair. Cuthbert in Space and Cuthbert in the Jungle are basically the same game but with different platform layouts, and they look somewhat similar to JetPac where you are collecting things and returning them to your ship at the bottom of the screen.

It had text adventures as most did then and a notable one was Adventure: S. S. Poseidon which is purely text based, but we didn�t mind that did we?

An interesting couple of games were Alcatraz which actually asks you if you are playing on a Dragon or a Tandy Colour, and Astro Blast which says on the title screen that it is a �Hi Res Action Game� yet it plays in black and white. What the game does do though is demonstrate this necessity to switch graphical modes to display different graphical resolutions because the game is in black and white, but when you get shot the sprites and the explosions go into colour. Surely they could have made the whole game colour.

There are some good games on the system and we played them quite a bit back then but honestly, in comparison to our Commodores and even Spectrums, most of them end up looking very garish with horrible bright colours from the limited palette, and they�re fairly blocky and graphically poor like Cave Fighter or Skramble, more clones from other systems. There is an amusing clone though, and I mentioned the sense of humour in the game titles earlier, and in fact Cuthbert is something of a humorous character name, but there was game called Zak�s Son, as in son of Zak, which as you probably guessed is a clone of the arcade game Zaxxon.

Like all good retro systems the Dragons still have an active community, and we�ve talked before on the show about modern day releases for retro systems, and the Dragon is no different in that respect, with a new cartridge game called �Glove� being released in 2007 which was a clone of Gauntlet, and a remake of 3D Deathchase being released in 2009.

So is the system worth owning? Well I would say so, but I think you�ll always find yourself drawn to something else. If you�ve got a retro hour to fill, I think you�ll fill it doing something different, just because the Dragon does a lot of things the others did, but just doesn�t do them quite as well. Of course if you want to run Forth then it may be a good option for that, but when we were kids, the Dragon was always seen as the little brother of the systems we owned and was always the underdog.

Not that the underdog doesn�t have some redeeming features or isn�t worthy of your support, but it is the underdog for a reason after all.

The Bi-Weekly British Backtrack � Lest We Forget

miner2049er — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 20:32:53 GMT

How ironic that the Bi-Weekly British Backtrack falls on this day of all days, a day for us to be British and a day for us to look back.

There are ways to connect this to gaming, which is ostensibly what this blog is about, but it�s also about being British and all that being British entails, and I don�t just mean bad teeth and drinking tea at 3pm. I mean British tradition, British quirks and some general wackiness along the way, but this time around it is of course 11/11/11, or as the Americans put it, 11/11/11.

Remembrance Day / Armistice Day / Poppy Day is when we remember the soldiers who have died in the line of duty and is observed across the Commonwealth on November 11th, the official end of World War I in 1918, and as you know the hostilities formally ended "at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month" with Germany signing the Armistice.

King George V dedicated the day as a day of remembrance to honour those killed in World War I, though now of course that has been expanded to include other battles and wars, with perhaps the most poignant in recent years being the First World War because we still had surviving veterans of course. Each year the BBC broadcast the Remembrance Sunday ceremony from London which is attended by those surviving veterans, who unfortunately numbered fewer and fewer with each passing year, until of course the inevitable happened when the world's last known combat veteran of World War I, Claude Choules, died in Australia aged 110.

Choules was known by his comrades as Chuckles, and the British-born veteran was a demolition officer who joined the Royal Navy at the age of 15 having lied about his age after he was told he was too young to serve. Ironically Choules later became a pacifist who disagreed with celebrating Australia's Anzac Day, and refused to march in parades.

As the years continue to pass, the same will become true of World War 2 veterans who attend ceremonies each year.

The adopted symbol of the day is of course the red poppy that people wear which signifies appropriately the blood spilled on the battlefields of France, though it actually derives from the poem "In Flanders Fields" a renowned poem written during the war in the style of a French rondeau by a Canadian physician and Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae.

McCrae�s inspiration for the poem was witnessing the death of his friend, 22 year old Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, which inspired him to write the poem the very next day, and thus the poppy, which grows in abundance in the fields and cemeteries of Flanders, became the universal symbol of Armistice Day.

This was captured quite brilliantly in the final episode of Black Adder Goes Forth which ended in a scene showing the soldiers going �Over The Top� and fading into a shot of the poppy fields. A memorable and melancholy moment that stands out among the many side splitting moments from the series.

In addition to the wearing of poppies, the occasion is marked either by a one or two minute silence at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month and a Service of Remembrance will often include the playing of the "Last Post", itself a most haunting tune, then a minute�s silence followed by "The Rouse".

As members of the Cub Scout movement we would take part in �Walking Day� which involved marching behind the flag of our Scout Group and gathering around the cenotaph in the centre of town where wreaths would be laid. Other organisations would also take part in the same march, such as the Royal British Legion, the armed forces, the local council, army cadets, Guides, Boys' Brigade, St John Ambulance and the Salvation Army. We would then march to a nearby field and sing various songs and listen to prayers before going home for a big Sunday Dinner, which as you might have guessed, suggests that this would be done on a Sunday rather than actually on the 11th which would usually be a school day. Remembrance Sunday is always the second Sunday in November but a silence is always observed on the 11th no matter what day it falls on, and as a school we would also commemorate the occasion with a service in the church.

So wherever you observed your silence, and I trust that you did, why not do it again on Sunday and try to catch a recital of �In Flanders Fields� while you�re at it?

In Flanders Fields
Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The Bi-Weekly British Backtrack � Halloween

miner2049er — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 22:29:57 GMT

So I had a week off work this week and planned a lengthy and inspiring article to round it off, waxing lyrical about the quite recent �Americanisation� of Halloween that has happened in the UK in recent years, turning what was a popular event into a much more commercial and wider celebrated event. It was always the little brother of Bonfire Night but has now overtaken it as kids are putting much more effort into their Trick or Treating and the Health And Safety bods get their hands on Bonfire Night and the practice of setting off fireworks at anything less than a distance of 100 metres.

Things got off to a good start with a nocturnal visit to Spooky World on Sunday, a small theme park on a working farm in Cheshire that has a maize maze and other attractions, but it takes on a spooky twist on the run up to Halloween.

There are four main attractions, Disturbed, Quarantine, Haunted Hay Ride and Field Of Screams. The first two are indoors and you make your way through dark and creepy buildings while live actors add to the horror by touching you as you pass and jumping out at you when you least expect it. The third is a tractor ride through the corn fields with things flying towards you, actors jumping on board and chain saw wielding maniacs chasing you through the fields, and the fourth is the same but on foot as you take part in a real life scene from Children Of The Corn or Joyride / Road Kill.

So what went wrong then? Well, Monday meant taking a trip to Air Kix, an indoor skydiving centre where you are lofted above the ground over a giant stream of air. How close it is to the real thing I wouldn�t know, because I�ve only ever flown on the inside of a plane before and have always chosen to land when the plane does, but it did create a weird sensation of flight.

It also created a very real sensation of waking up the next day and not being able to twist my neck at all, not being able to cough, sneeze or fart without a bolt of lightning shooting through my neck, and slightly more worrying, not being able to sit, stand, lie, squat, lean, crouch or slouch without being in intense pain. Hence the short entry this month with no real insight into anything other than a couple of trips I�ve been on.

Things are once again looking up though as tomorrow we are planning a trip to Southport where among other things we will take in a vintage coin op museum. Maybe next year I�ll wax lyrical about Halloween, but until then:

Double, double, toll and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Eye of newt, toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing.

That�s from Shakespeare's Macbeth.

Crap isn�t it?

The Secret RGR Conspiracy

indieseoul — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:41:25 GMT

Hello fellow RGR members it's me again your intrepid reporter Indieseoul. I was the one that broke the story of the Great 3DS conspiracy. Here is the video if you have forgotten.

This latest conspiracy clearly threatens our very sanity. I don't have to worry about my sanity however. I'm locked away in my secret underground lair complete with moat and electrified fences. There are alligators with laser guns in the moat as well so don't even try to swim across it.

Also I'm currently wearing my tinfoil hat that blocks mind readers and government satellites from interrupting my thoughts. Of course I'm also taking large amounts of psychedelic drugs. (Doctor's orders.) This latest conspiracy concerns a very important member of the Retro Gaming Round up crew. New imagined evidence has come to light that is definitive proof that one of the members of this podcast isn't who he says he is.

The voices in my head are telling me it is the truth so I must listen to them as always. Well except for the one that tells me I'm insane. That voice is clearly bat shit crazy. Halloween is right around the corner and this new revelation is sure to be the most frightening thing that you have ever seen.

So without further ado here is a trailer for my new film. Young children are advised not to watch unless you want them to wet their beds.

I will not be convinced that Scott is not Alex Jones until I see them in the same room together. That is the only way that this conspiracy can be proven wrong.

Muha ha muha ha ha..... cough......

Sometimes the things that scare us the most are the things that are true.

Just messing with ya Scott. Happy Halloween RGR crew and all of the great people that I have met on this site. Oh and fuck Wiki leaks and nut jobs like Alex Jones. :P