From: ung@felix.filenet.com (Bill Ung)
Newsgroups: rec.games.pinball
Subject: Re: Trouble reporting (was: Re: LW3 and Super Mario Brothers)
Date: 12 Aug 92 19:59:18 GMT
Reply-To: ung@fritz.filenet.com (Bill Ung)
Organization: FileNet Corp., Costa Mesa, CA

In article <SBB.92Aug10203608@panix.com> sbb@panix.com (Steve Baumgarten) writes:
|In article <LFS.92Aug9165437@damon.ccs.northeastern.edu> lfs@damon.ccs.northeastern.edu (Lyman F Sheats Jr.) writes:
|
|   Basically, bubble levels (especially the side to side type) are
|   something operators would really rather not have players see.  If
|   you can see it, and it's not right, you can complain about it with
|   proof.  If you can't see it, you have no proof, and you'd be hard
|   pressed to find someone who is willing to check it for you.
|
|Sad but true.  Sadder still that those darn levels are needed at all,
|since it means that so few operators bother to play their games to see
|for themselves what condition they're in.  (By "operators" I mean
|either the arcade owner, manager, or on-site repair person / game
|maintainer.)

Well, if the operators play pinball, then cool, but I doubt they have
time to visit all the games in the arcade on a regular basis.  Also,
for folks who are hired to fix games, I think the owners would like
playtesting to be minimal, especially if the guy charges by the hour.

|If the game is out on a route, all is usually lost; a lot of these
|guys know all sorts of technical details about a game but have no clue
|if it should be listing 15 degrees to starboard.  I guess the same
|could be said for most operators.
|
|A big problem with today's games is the amount of junk in them that
|can break.  I played HSII the other day with a non-working
|Supercharger loop.  The game seemed to compensate OK for it -- it was
|much less exciting to play, however -- but there was no outward
|indication that this major playfield piece was on the fritz.  Likewise
|when it randomly tosses one of the balls deep inside the cabinet, or
|out of reach somewhere on the playfield: who's to know until some poor
|soul steps up to play, then feels ripped off when he finds the game in
|disrepair. 

Tell me about it, I deposited $1.00 into a HS2 only to find the upper
flipper broken (worked about 20% of the time, and NOT at full strength).
With the first game in progress and on the first or second ball, I
informed the folks working there who promptly refused to refund my
money.  Hey, the games are still there, I haven't used them yet!  They
wouldn't even transfer my credits to another game.  Now THAT'S what I
call bogus.  I know a lot of places have a "No Refunds" policy, but is
that fair?  Shouldn't there be a law that if a game is broken, they're
required to refund your money?  If you see a movie, and the film breaks,
you get your money back.  If you buy a VCR and it doesn't work, you get
your money back.  Why not for pins/vids?  To top it all off, they didn't
even bother to put an out-of-order sign on it.

|The tiny, unnoticeable "trouble periods" beside the remaining credits
|indicator are little help -- they mean that something's wrong with the
|game, but who knows what?  No one can afford to open up every pin that
|displays that period -- they'd never make any money that way.  Nor are
|the "Press Enter for Test Report" messages at power-on time
|particularly helpful.  By the time anyone's looking, those messages
|are long gone.

Especially since most operators just throw the main power switch in the
back room.  *I* wouldn't shut off each game individually.

|I think it's high time a secret "report mode" was implemented on new
|games.  Imagine being able to find out the exact state of a game
|without unlocking the coin door and futzing around with the game's
|audit and settings controls.  Maybe pressing START three times while
|holding the right flipper -- something like that.

Why secret?  Games like HIGH SPEED, PINBOT, CYCLONE, SPACE STATION etc,
all have the same type of error-checking that the newer games do, and
these games DID report problem switches (maximum of 3) upon power-up.
It was nice to know what worked and what didn't.  I suppose operators
got annoyed because people like us would go complain that these three
switches were bad and needed to be fixed.  So, they hid them (like the
bubble levels on LW3).

|Then the game can report: "Supercharger on the fritz, ball missing,
|game 3 degrees off-level" or something like that, and the operator can
|decide whether he wants to take the time to fix these various problems
|now, or schedule the game for maintenance later.  No need to have the
|keys; no need to open the game; no need to take more than a few
|seconds at each pin.  Quick and convenient -- and if we ever want
|operators to keep their pins in good repair, someone had better make
|it a lot quicker and a lot more convenient for them to find out what's
|wrong.

It was (see above).  How would a game know if it was off by 3 degrees
anyway?  Easy or not, I don't think it matters much.  The bottom line
is that there are good operators and there are bad ones.  Even if it
were "fix all bad switches by pushing this button", there'd still be
a lot of operators that just wouldn't get around to pushing that button.

|Novices are unlikely to come across the secret report feature, and
|wizards (and folks who read this newsgroup) can at least take
|advantage of it to decide whether a game is going to be a potential
|rip-off. 

Well, if it gives us that much more info, I'm all for it, but I doubt
it would ever come into being.

|With all the sophisticated fault-detection and -reporting software in
|modern pins, and given that everyone's using a full-height dot-matrix
|display these days, how hard could it be to implement better trouble
|reporting?  I realize that the programming time required would be time
|away from more nifty bonus countdown display animation, but I think I
|could live with it if it meant that I could once again play unknown
|games with some degree of confidence.  

Most of the programming is already there, no?

|"Secret Trouble Report Mania", anybody?
|
|--
|    Steve Baumgarten       |  "New York... when civilization falls apart,
|    PANIX, New York, NY    |   remember, we were way ahead of you."
|                           |  
|    Email: sbb@panix.com   |                            - David Letterman

Bill Ung
  ung@filenet.com