Tim Arnold and the Pinball Hall of Fame: about to go bloody well under??

Isaac Sauvage

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I met a guy at a pinball tournament up here who went there recently and said the place is pretty much a dump, with a lot of the machines in pretty poor shape. Ah, but I wouldn't go there for the quality but the quantity. That's a lot of damn machines!
 
makes sense.

it seems the problem comes from his early decision to run the place as a nonprofit, donating the proceeds to the salvation army. this apparently leaves him reliant on volunteers to help run the place... and perhaps to help fix the machines. otherwise he has to do all the work himself.

if i lived in sin city i would mos def be volunteering. fixing EM's was a blast for me, and i'd love to learn about fixing solid states and modern machines.

hopefully some superhero can fly in at the 11th hour.
 
There is also "the purist motive" which is to keep the machines in their original condition instead of replacing circuits with the current substitutes. That becomes expensive as well.
Now if 3D printers could do chips...
 
you might be right on target, there. sounds like no manufacturer is making the kind of EPROMs that are needed, in many cases.

actually the VPMAME team's work could be essential in this case. as in, you could replace all the table's circuit boards with VPMAME running on a $40 raspberry pi, connected to a custom board to interface to the table's hardware.

you see people consistently building / selling stuff like that for various VP and MAME cabs, so why not for real-life machines?
 
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