Dukes Of Hazzard Pinball

[Isaac Sauvage]

awesome, sweet. PM'd the email addy.

i'm about a third of the way through the double album. listening to exile makes me realise how much i don't listen to classic rock anymore. the zep, the who, the floyd, the stones, etc...

this seems a shame on one hand, but it also makes me suspect how much one's preference in music might correspond to one's youthful energy. or general level of health. something like that. these days my body feels tired and creaky, so i listen to a lot of world music, lounge - trip hop (if you know what that is), and classical. bill, if you remember that dean martin song i recorded, i was definitely having an anomalous good day with several whiskeys to help things along.

anyway, there are a couple songs i don't remember from the stones album. i'll have to keep that on play for the time being and see how it treats me. on the pinball, i think my high game was 140K so far. what really gets me is having the difficult, sparse layout of the 70's machines combined with the fast action of later machines. i really wonder if the original machine played that fast.

 

[sleepy]

Oh yes it did. It did play fast, especially on the lower left/right loop shots, though in VP the ball returns to the flippers from the top of the table too fast. It's like smack the ball. It goes up and right back to the flippers way too fast too often. Like an unrealistic short distance for the apparent dimensions of the table.

And yeahhh, music. It wears me out. Television and modern dramatic tension wears the fuck out of me. Puts me on edge, and then I get the Lexus or other car ad, and they are soo mod and steely arch, I could throw up on them and it wouldn't stick.

I mean what for? I'm not even doing what the songs are about anyway, so the song pumps me up for what???

I also used to get horribly depressed after a night at the arcades for wasting too much time and money that was hard to come by in the first place. I would have been happier reading a practical science book, like how to build my own electric motors, wind speaker coils and build speakers, learning something useful...and then get drunk. :)
That's why I Love the Internet.

I was wondering just yesterday whether anyone has combined ski slopes of soft powder snow with boards tethered to a hang glider for low flight over the downward incline. I need to look that up, but I wonder how much slope would be needed for a hang glider + sled board and rider to gain sufficient speed and/or to separate from the slope and lift off the ground?

I was thinking, if it works, to call it a Snowbird, but I need to check out whether people are already combining skis or sleds with hang gliders.

Another thought was to combine a hang glider with a radio controlled vehicle or boat for towing the hang glider rider while being driven by the hang glider rider, like a self-driven para-sail boat.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

had one more go at the table in a fit of self-pity and finally realised how illogically i was approaching the game. the speed had sort of suckered me in to playing in a 90's style, but i see now that the way to properly play this table is to approach it almost like a scientist.

you must work out all the major ball-to-PF object interactions and formulate the correct actions and responses in all cases. usually this involves giving a critically needed nudge and / or urgently (almost frantically) slowing down the ball as much as possible to maintain control. flipper-handling is critical. then, keep experimenting to find more and more efficient responses, and train the correct responses to make them automatic reactions. so that's a lot of careful work there, although i was indeed starting to enjoy the methodical nature of it. average scores started getting better immediately and i hit 200K in that span of 4-5 additional games.


about the commercials,
i totally hear that. i find most current TV shows and ads painfully obnoxious and unnecessarily showy. just the sounds of the voices and the manner of speaking is highly irritating to me, like the standard ad voice-over of the 24-yr old kid speaking in that wannabe-hip monotone.

yes, i much prefer european sensibilities with the 'in-your-face american' aspect left out. "pawn stars" is one of the few modern american shows that has just the right amount of sauciness and stupidity for me, although i definitely enjoy the educational aspects also. when my ST sources all disappeared i kind of shifted to collecting that series instead.

here's the backing track i imagine for your snowbird invention:
Tron Legacy - Soundtrack OST - 03 The Son of Flynn - Daft Punk - YouTube


:)

 

[LeeVanCleef]

awesome, sweet. PM'd the email addy.

i'm about a third of the way through the double album. listening to exile makes me realise how much i don't listen to classic rock anymore. the zep, the who, the floyd, the stones, etc...

this seems a shame on one hand, but it also makes me suspect how much one's preference in music might correspond to one's youthful energy. or general level of health. something like that. these days my body feels tired and creaky, so i listen to a lot of world music, lounge - trip hop (if you know what that is), and classical. bill, if you remember that dean martin song i recorded, i was definitely having an anomalous good day with several whiskeys to help things along.

anyway, there are a couple songs i don't remember from the stones album. i'll have to keep that on play for the time being and see how it treats me. on the pinball, i think my high game was 140K so far. what really gets me is having the difficult, sparse layout of the 70's machines combined with the fast action of later machines. i really wonder if the original machine played that fast.

LOL! You knocked That's Amore out of the park! "Let's not forget the certain "burnout factor" of the classic rock genre. For me, I listened to it a lot in my youth, then had it pounded into my brain during my years as DJ at a classic rock station. Now, most of it just leaves me empty. I downloaded the reissue of Dark Side of the Moon a month ago; listened to it on the Sennheisers and it sounded spectacular... and then I deleted it. I just don't need to hear it again... it has nothing new to show me. Especially "Money". I never need to hear "Money" again. That's what's great about Exile... not only is it their finest album, not many of the songs have been run into the ground, besides "Tumbling Dice" and "Happy". And even those two are on the lower spectrum of overplayed warhorses like "Start Me Up" and "It's Only Rock and Roll."
Arne's right... those lower loops were killer on the real machine. Hit it too fast on... I think the right loop... and it just went right for the center drain. As fast as JP's table is, it's not quite as cruel as the real thing.

 

[sleepy]

Aw Bill, you're a DJ. You know better...

And what about...radio ads. Man, when I was in my Prime as a Runt,
I had Koss headphones grafted to my ears, but the ads on KMET FM
were for Zeidler and Zeidler shoes, Tower Records, CSN&Y -Y +Y at the Santa Monica Auditorium, or Tull or Floyd at The L.A. Coliseum.
Or McCartneys, or Bob Seeger's, or Steve Miller's latest album. Or for a Marantz receiver, maybe featuring SQ Matrix Surround @ a WHOPPING 3Db. Front to Rear Channel Separation!
But the point was, the ads were Relevant to the living.

These dayz...eh...the classic rock station...eh...Plavics(sp?©), Celerex(sp?®©), The Neptune Society(cremation services for the dearly departed®©), fat pills, diet pills and Cialis with Lasik Surgery thrown in for good measure®©♂☼☻...and Cancer PSAs...all in 6 minute blocks with two songs in between plus much talk, much talk,
it is good for you.

 

[sleepy]

And Damn!

I forgot the car ads on radio...

At least in the 70's they were limited to Custom Parts shops and salvage yards, not $35,000+ wonders.
Hey, I guess they figure people who spend all day listening to Classic Rock radio have some kind of Heavy Cash, eh?

 

[sleepy]

Hey FIXIN, I'm sorry about this thread being hijacked, but *sometimes* there are industry folks flowing through these forums and who knows...

maybe they'll take your idea too.

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Aw Bill, you're a DJ. You know better...

And what about...radio ads. Man, when I was in my Prime as a Runt,
I had Koss headphones grafted to my ears, but the ads on KMET FM
were for Zeidler and Zeidler shoes, Tower Records, CSN&Y -Y +Y at the Santa Monica Auditorium, or Tull or Floyd at The L.A. Coliseum.
Or McCartneys, or Bob Seeger's, or Steve Miller's latest album. Or for a Marantz receiver, maybe featuring SQ Matrix Surround @ a WHOPPING 3Db. Front to Rear Channel Separation!
But the point was, the ads were Relevant to the living.

These dayz...eh...the classic rock station...eh...Plavics(sp?©), Celerex(sp?®©), The Neptune Society(cremation services for the dearly departed®©), fat pills, diet pills and Cialis with Lasik Surgery thrown in for good measure®©♂☼☻...and Cancer PSAs...all in 6 minute blocks with two songs in between plus much talk, much talk,
it is good for you.

Wow, that's freaking disturbing! Classic rock stations now have the same advertising for the "people-about-to-die" crowd that watch the CBS Evening News?
Marantz? Man' is that a flashback! I had to google it just to see if the company still existed (amazingly, it does)! Overall, you had much cooler commercials than we had in the Central Plains... but we did have a stereo store advertising Marantz systems. It was called Rolling Thunder. As a kid, I had no idea they took their name from the codename for a carpet-bombing operation of North Vietnam. I wonder if there's any Shock'n'Awe sound systems stores?

 

[sleepy]

Disturbing?
You mean grafting Heavy Man Koss stereo headphones to one's ears ain't? Just to hear what the high school chick who dumped you on Grad Night is up to?

Oh, and I left out the spots for Bail Bondsmen, lawyer services for debt management and how-to books on remortgaging your home...

This is on KLOS FM; ClAsSiC rOcK

The last time I checked the dial, on another station mind you, there was a personalized ad by the on-air DJ for an online jukebox site, can't remember the name, but the poor guy was reduced to promoting a music service where the subscriber can listen to any song on-demand...and ultimately put the DJ out of a job, and by the end of the spot, though he was doing first-class workmanship in representing the sponsor, you could tell that he sounded very depressed about it.

And the second curse of modern radio. just shoot me. I made the mistake of thinking to the local folks how the ads across the dial were staggered and how I would not like to see synchronization of the ad breaks across the dial so that the ads are inescapable.

The folks of course implemented ad break synchronization, so now you can't change the station to avoid the ads. Aren't they something?

This practice is definitely in play with the radio corps, CBS, Clear Channel, who else. They now synchronize the ad breaks on all of their company-owned stations in-house, no matter if the stations are music, news or talk format.

Again, just shoot me...

 

[sleepy]

As for other stations, soul and dance, they used to have sponsors for clubs, taverns, concerts, nightlife, and (often) Brew 102, the local brew. Again, the ads were Relevant to the living. This tends to be the case even now, but not as well done as it used to be.
And Brew 102 is loong gone, for decades now.

The top 40 stations, KIIS FM, KIQQ FM, were still teeny-bopper, zit creams, etc. however...about how to improve your Social Status by painting your face with Sulferous Clearacil, Propa PH, and washing it down with Binaca Breath Spray with the delightful mint licorice flavor.
In 1966, Binaca spray was the modern updating of the former Sen-Sen breath bits product.
Sen-Sen was made with soap, came in an aluminum envelope with a Dandy *I think in Top Hat* for a mascot trademark, and looked like tiny mouse droppings!

Now, the Marantz company was bought by SONY out of their Trinitron revenue in the '70s.
I remember there were even local musicians who Loved Marantz, though I only heard muffled resonant mid-bass coloration, though that could be modified with a 12 band equalizer for an additional cost.
Problem was, the EQ controls are analog split two channel, so if you are adjusting the bandwidth for an SQ Quad recording, your left/right channel adjustments had to be Precisely Matched in order to prevent errors in the rear channel decoding as the SQ (and Sansui QS which used a 90 degree phase mix different from SONY SQ Quad) matrix mix was/were both 90 degree phase and amplitude dependent.

It was like taking the standard FM Stereo and modifying the frequency bandwidth EQ separately for the common compatible mono signal And for the stereo difference signal. You would need to match the bandwidth on both signals precisely the same manually to achieve the correct stereo separation recovery.

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Disturbing?
You mean grafting Heavy Man Koss stereo headphones to one's ears ain't? Just to hear what the high school chick who dumped you on Grad Night is up to?

Oh, and I left out the spots for Bail Bondsmen, lawyer services for debt management and how-to books on remortgaging your home...

This is on KLOS FM; ClAsSiC rOcK

The last time I checked the dial, on another station mind you, there was a personalized ad by the on-air DJ for an online jukebox site, can't remember the name, but the poor guy was reduced to promoting a music service where the subscriber can listen to any song on-demand...and ultimately put the DJ out of a job, and by the end of the spot, though he was doing first-class workmanship in representing the sponsor, you could tell that he sounded very depressed about it.

And the second curse of modern radio. just shoot me. I made the mistake of thinking to the local folks how the ads across the dial were staggered and how I would not like to see synchronization of the ad breaks across the dial so that the ads are inescapable.

The folks of course implemented ad break synchronization, so now you can't change the station to avoid the ads. Aren't they something?

This practice is definitely in play with the radio corps, CBS, Clear Channel, who else. They now synchronize the ad breaks on all of their company-owned stations in-house, no matter if the stations are music, news or talk format.

Again, just shoot me...

HA! That poor bastard! Forced to tell his listeners the best way not to have to listen to him. So glad I got out just before the internet silver bullet put the radio wolfman in his grave!
I'm lucky enough to live in a market where the stations are owned by more than two corporations, so the program directors still stagger the station ads. I worked with a very savvy program director who always made sure we were playing music when our competitor was in commercials. So happy to hear that stations don't even give a shit anymore. Hope there's a job for program directors on that internet jukebox site, 'cause it doesn't sound like they're needed any more than DJs are now

 

[sleepy]

You know, I doubt it.
The DJ explained (By Contractual Obligation for Pay!) that the site is commercial-free with no interruptions, so it probably runs as a Bot with on-screen information, like the song title/artist/album/etc. info available with HD Radio. The info is embedded with the song, like CD and display.

Now, if they use the song identification software where you can hum a few bars of a forgotten title and the computer or smartphone return the track info, then that could be trouble.
I do remember Once calling a station, trying to hum a few bars of a forgotten tune to get the name of it.

My hum didn't help at all...

 

[FIXNWILLIAMS]

Say, if there are any Damsels out there reading this,
I recommend a Men In Black III Pinball Machine.
Apparently the plot of III involves time travel back to the 1960's and encounters with people such as Andy Warhol.

Think Attack From Mars Meets Austin Powers with retro music, but in MIB form with crunchy aliens.

They're making a MIB III movie? Bad ass! That would be a bad ass pin, combine stuff from all three movies on there, and like you said some cool tunes and that would be a rockin' theme!

 

[FIXNWILLIAMS]

Hey FIXIN, I'm sorry about this thread being hijacked, but *sometimes* there are industry folks flowing through these forums and who knows...

maybe they'll take your idea too.

Hey, highjack away I get to learn about the members and a bunch of other stuff thats going on. I'm cool with it. Knowledge is power, even if it's hobby knowledge! Besides, as a newb reading these threads thats that many less questions I will have to pester people with.