What happened to tiltjlp?

[greenknight]

I've been out of VP for a few years and come back to find VP10 out & running, re- downloaded a few favorite tables but cannot find any recent posts by a good old VP friend of mine Tiltjlp (John Patton?) either here or on VP Forums.
Is he OK?

Thanks for any info.

GK

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Sadly, he probably is not okay, judging by the posts from 2014 in this thread

The Purpose Of This Topic - Pinball Nirvana Forums

We're also currently worrying about sleepy. If you happen to know sleepy or have a way of contacting him, please post or PM us.

 

[greenknight]

Hmm... that's not good news at all! Thanks for the info. I do know John didn't enjoy the best of health way back in the early noughties, so it looks like we can assume the worst.

I shall go to bed feeling very sad tonight as it looks suspiciously like this world has lost a decent, good-hearted man. John and I corresponded for quite a while ages ago and it was John who did my profile a good ten years or so ago entitled "A very British bloke" or something like that.

We both had a great love of cats and we shared many a cat story. Only today I found & played my favourite table he and Terry Briggs created - Country Carnival. Most reckon the Bronco Buster table was his best creation but Country Carnival was always my favourite.

Fare well John, we miss you buddy.

P.S. if anyone does find out any info about John and he is still contactable, please pass on my best wishes to him. Thanks,

GK

:verysad:

 

[Duglis]

He posted from a nursing home in that pipe forum in early 2014 and has had replies from others to this day. But he never posted again after the initial post. I fear he may be gone.

 

[GSGregg]

greenknight;

Six posts in almost twelve years? Must be nice to be at peace with the universe.....

When John's name came up recently, it reminded me that I hadn't played Country Carnival in a while, so I hit VP8 and there was no longer any trace of the table, or VB6.0 (Service Pack 6 or otherwise), or VPMIDI anywhere on my rig. Disregarding the long story of a feeble mind trying to remember how to use Command Prompt, I can now say I just finished playing a few games of CC (though without the VPMidi file, apparently---three hours to get back what I have, and more to do) and it's still fun shaking one's head after dyslexically failing to switch left and right when the 'ball' drops to an adjacent playfield.

I haven't played Bronco Buster, and so I'll look for it; also, thanks to JPH for keeping alive the link to CC v1.2 in the old thread I stumbled into on a web search.

I never met tiltjlp, or even corresponded with him beyond maybe once or twice since everyone's heydays were way before mine, (not even a web rookie until 2009) but I think we're close to the same age and I enjoyed his writings about growing up, etc.

Gregg

 

[Duglis]

He was kind to me and we talked a lot , especially when he started this site and he had a love for my table Struggle Buggies and I think or someone else modded it for him with my permission.

(sigh) and my dad died 4 months ago at 91 too. (mom left us in 2011)

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

dang, i either forgot or didn't know that he went to a nursing home.

 

[greenknight]

Thanks for the update Ike.

Well Gregg you've done better than I managed to on my new Windows 10 PC. Had to resort to my old trusty Windows XP PC.

I tried registering the VPMIDI DLL which went ok but I still couldn't get CC to run. My highest score so far is 540,000.

I just wish I could have some success contacting John again!



I've never been one for making many posts on forums: I tend to lurk more.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

so greenknight, you did some VP tables back in the day, right?

i seem to remember john's articles about you and others from around 2002, when i was pretty new to the scene.

...

i do recall there being one solid lead as to john's whereabouts, and that was one of the guys on a pipe tobacco forums who seemed to know where john was being transferred. IIRC he didn't want to share the info publicly, but seemed open to personal message inquiries.

pretty sure the forum link in question appears in one of these "where is tilt" threads.

 

[GSGregg]

I've had three harddrives fail starting Feb 2011. First, a recently installed 1GB DIMM crapped all over itself (its twin had no problems), ripping out some of the Admin files and sending the machine into an endless bootloop; 50 months later, I got in a hurry hunting for a GPU driver update and neglected to enable the onboard before I removed the main (oops!)---no problem, except that Narrator mysteriously quit working so I couldn't 'see' to enable VGASave; and, 3 months later, the friend-donated relic separated its platters from its motor.

In the first two instances, I was able to put the HDD into an external enclosure , then read and transfer / copy files; I can't figure how ALL of the Visual Basic 6.0-related stuff plus the MIDI just seems to have disappeared.

Along with any record of my high score; I managed 200K yesterday, but without any multiballs and/or whatever happens after all targets are dropped,,,,,(looks like the Rules disappeared from my head) I think your half-million is safe.

Regarding the obstinacy of your W10 machine; this is from the Wikipedia article 'Visual Basic':

"On April 8, 2008 Microsoft stopped supporting Visual Basic 6.0 IDE. The Microsoft Visual Basic team still maintains compatibility for Visual Basic 6.0 applications on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 including R2, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 and Windows 10 through its "It Just Works" program."

Maybe that'll help.

Nice meeting you; lurk away.


Gregg

 

[greenknight]

Thanks Ike, I'll have a poke around and see if I can find that useful link.

I don't recall making any tables but John and I did kick around the idea of doing a joint one for a while on the theme of The Man From UNCLE, but that's as far as it got.

Gregg that's a whole load of trouble you've had PC-wise. What was the make of hard drive? That's rotten luck with the memory too. I don't think I ever had a problem with memory, but there's always the first time I guess.

Thanks for the link on VB6 BTW Will investigate further.

GK

so greenknight, you did some VP tables back in the day, right?

i seem to remember john's articles about you and others from around 2002, when i was pretty new to the scene.

...

i do recall there being one solid lead as to john's whereabouts, and that was one of the guys on a pipe tobacco forums who seemed to know where john was being transferred. IIRC he didn't want to share the info publicly, but seemed open to personal message inquiries.

pretty sure the forum link in question appears in one of these "where is tilt" threads.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

honestly, we should probably pursue that lead as quickly as possible. even a year or two on the internet is a bloody long time.

let me know if you can't find it, greenknight.

 

[GSGregg]

Ha.

My PC problems began early; in July of 2009 a friend who had bought a new computer for the son of a former live-in girlfriend (this computer, as it turned out) gave me his old Dell Inspiron 1100 with the blinding CPU speed of 1GHz and I just farted around with it, shopping for parts for a neighbor's 1974 GMC Eleganza motor home (The Wife was infinitely better than I on computers, but was very tired after twenty-plus years of Hubbie's projects, so I did the shopping). In September I finally decided to try the Internet and signed on with AT&T; the following night, the Dell broke with an "unmountable boot volume", I think. I dropped the CPU, HDD and optical drive at a recommended shop for testing, and when I picked them up the HDD sounded like a baby's rattle. I've never gone back to that recommended shop.....

Skip forward to early December; the 'son' was dissatisfied with the comp and the friend dropped it off to my surprise and said, "Here. If you don't want it, I'm throwing it out". So, I had a computer. AGP mainboard, single-core Celeron at 2.66GHz, two 256GB memory DIMMs, and a son-added video card that was maybe 2% faster than the Mirage onboard graphics. (I've since moved through a GeForce 6200 and got my current Radeon HD4670 'Ice-Q' AGP-8X in June of 2011.)

26 months later, the fun resumed; Feb 2011, I upgraded the memory to 2 x 1GB, but went the cheap route with Nanya instead of Crucial or Corsair, etc. and two weeks later one of them just came unglued; Memtest 86 showed so many errors (hundreds of thousands before I ended the test) that the page looked half red. A few days later I bought some Corsair memory, and things settled down, but the HDD was scrambled. And now the actual answer to your question---sorry about the long wind:


HDD 1) Western Digital WD800JB 80GB mfd Jan '08 (computer was assembled in April)

HDD 2) Maxtor 'Diamond Max Plus 9' 60GB mfd May 2003, derailed by my driver-swap mistake April 2015; still works, but no display

HDD 3) Maxtor 6J080J4 80GB ---Lots of numbers, but no mfr date identifiable---whine indicates spinning at max speed, but no data produced. Lasted Apr 26 - July 30, 2015

HDD 4) Maxtor 7Y250MO 250GB mfd ?/2005---Currently doing fine.


If you made it this far, thanks for reading---but if you didn't, thanks for trying.
Ike; I vaguely recall the post you mentioned, but haven't run across it yet this time. Maybe a few extra pairs of eyes.....

Gregg

 

[greenknight]

Thanks for that info Gregg. Guess the moral is go with trusted brands. Don't think I ever used Maxtor drives (now part of Seagate). I used to use IBM drives (now part of Hitachi but ISTR they were bought out by Seagate or WD recently.

I bought a WD Enterprise RE 4 series 1tb with 128mb cache and Corsair Vengeance LPX memory (3ghz)

One golden rule: always use a good quality PSU and over-spec it i.e. if your total power consumption is 400w, buy a 750w. Oh, and don''t skimp on the cooling.

Sorry Ike, I've searched high & low for that post but no joy. I've even searched a load of pipe smokers web sites. It seems John was something of an expert in tobacco blending.

Hope you or someone can find some more info about John. I've drawn a blank so far.

:verysad:

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

okay, in the thread leevancleef shared earlier, post #9 contains the link, i.e.
http://mayberryusa.phpbb3now.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=226&sid=f21c0f1c68d0220a6e39fd052baa0930

following that link, it appears the forum has either been shut down or now requires membership to view.

and as you probably already read:

John was very popular on many forums and was known at the Cobfather has been admitted to a nursing home due to his health. John was a friend and after calls and emails with no answers, was able to get police to go to his house and find out if he was OK. They said the landlord said he went into a nursing home but they cannot give any more information on that.

...

while i was searching around, i also found that crazy frenchman "jive" seems to have passed away. he was very active in the scene around ten years ago. IIRC he was mainly known for doing art cleanups on various tables, like indiana jones. he was also a huge doom (classic videogame) enthusiast and used to run a popular doom site.

http://roguepinball.com/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;id=387

...

btw, i just noticed that sleepy last logged in on 6-22, after some of us were wondering about him. hard to understand the silence.

 

[greenknight]

Thanks Ike: yes, I had read that site, so sadly it looks like either John is no longer alive or hopefully is still in the unknown nursing home taking it easy and enjoying being waited on. I just wish there was a way of getting a message to him if he's still alive.

That's awful news about Jive too: I clearly remember his tables which had very good clean artwork.

Guess that's another night I shall go to bed feeling very sad.



Found this site that gives a bit of info about Jive. I've actually played that Legacy wad file he created - without knowing it was the same Jive.
http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Jean-Yves_Delpech_(Jive)

 

[Duglis]

RIP John L Patton

 

[LeeVanCleef]

btw, i just noticed that sleepy last logged in on 6-22, after some of us were wondering about him. hard to understand the silence.

Well, he sure enough did! Or, at least, someone using his computer did. Well, I sure hope it was Arne. And, if so, hey, we can wait.

 

[JonPurpleHaze]

Hello Duglis and everyone!

I've been afraid that tiltjlp is gone for a couple of years now, I back in the day also used to talk to him and even received snail mail from him with diskettes of his poems and writing. We didn't always agree with each other but I miss him, I do know that his health was not good decades ago and he was over 10 years older than me.

Here's a link to some of tiltjlp's Articles!


Also wanted to mention that ever since the upgrade back in January, occasionally a registered user of the site would have a post that would be sent to the moderation queue even though permissions were properly set to NOT do that! A few of you posting in this thread had this happen to you and I'm sorry that happened but I might have finally fixed that thang. Might have had something to do with something called Akismet.

 

[Duglis]

JPH,
While I have the chance, I want to thank you for all you've done for the vp community, irpinball, this site, and for being a friend! Thank you!

 

[greenknight]

JPH,
While I have the chance, I want to thank you for all you've done for the vp community, irpinball, this site, and for being a friend! Thank you!

Hear hear from me on that too.

I guess a line from Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell sums up our thoughts here... "you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone"

The older I get, the more true those words ring!

GK