Seeing as its Furlough Friday, I figured I would *finally* get around to changing what JJP calls the "CPU battery" on the motherboard of Dialed In! The battery preserves the BIOS settings for the PC that powers the machine, and the manual states that it needs to be changed at least every three years, to make sure that the battery voltage never drops below 3V. If that happens, its says in the manual, the BIOS settings will be lost and the PC won't boot.
OK, that's not really bricking the machine, but it's pretty close to that: the machine won't start up any more, and you have to go through the procedure of putting the BIOS settings back in before the machine will boot again (something I vaguely remember doing on a 286 PC 25 years or more ago.) JJP say that they will help if this happens.
So wtf? Surely in this day and age there is a way of storing the BIOS info in some form of non volatile memory so that the pinball machine doesn't rely on a CR2032 battery never dropping below 3V when the machine is switched off. Talk about poor design.
The thing is, when JJP unveiled Dialed In at Pinball Expo Pat Lawlor got all Steve Jobsish about how brilliantly Dialed In! had been designed (by him), and how the screen hinged from both sides, there was a volume control on the outside, yadda yadda yadda. He was almost wearing a black polo neck jumper.
But when it comes to changing the battery, the design is so bad it's almost unbelievable. The battery is wedged in between the wall of the metal PC casing and a video card with an unprotected spinning fan, and you are supposed to remove the battery by constucting an extraction tool out of sticky backed plastic (I kid you not) and somehow stick it to the battery, and then yank the battery out. This ignores the fact that the sticky backed plastic (I even tried duck tape) wont stick strongly enough to pull the battery out of its holder, which has a metal clip which needs to be undone first (although there is no mention of that in the manual.) This has to be done while the machine is powered on, so that fan is spinning milimeters away from the battery.
Anyway, after grating my finger on the fan a few times and pocking at the clip with a long plastic pokey thing as well as using my sticky back plastic tool I finally managed after about 20 minutes to get the battery to spring out of its holder onto the floor, and get a new one in. Good thing too as the old battery was on 3.07V according to my meter, so it needed changing.
I don't know how things are done on other machines, but this is ridiculous.
The thing is that it's a great game, so I guess I will just have to grin and bear it!
OK, that's not really bricking the machine, but it's pretty close to that: the machine won't start up any more, and you have to go through the procedure of putting the BIOS settings back in before the machine will boot again (something I vaguely remember doing on a 286 PC 25 years or more ago.) JJP say that they will help if this happens.
So wtf? Surely in this day and age there is a way of storing the BIOS info in some form of non volatile memory so that the pinball machine doesn't rely on a CR2032 battery never dropping below 3V when the machine is switched off. Talk about poor design.
The thing is, when JJP unveiled Dialed In at Pinball Expo Pat Lawlor got all Steve Jobsish about how brilliantly Dialed In! had been designed (by him), and how the screen hinged from both sides, there was a volume control on the outside, yadda yadda yadda. He was almost wearing a black polo neck jumper.
But when it comes to changing the battery, the design is so bad it's almost unbelievable. The battery is wedged in between the wall of the metal PC casing and a video card with an unprotected spinning fan, and you are supposed to remove the battery by constucting an extraction tool out of sticky backed plastic (I kid you not) and somehow stick it to the battery, and then yank the battery out. This ignores the fact that the sticky backed plastic (I even tried duck tape) wont stick strongly enough to pull the battery out of its holder, which has a metal clip which needs to be undone first (although there is no mention of that in the manual.) This has to be done while the machine is powered on, so that fan is spinning milimeters away from the battery.
Anyway, after grating my finger on the fan a few times and pocking at the clip with a long plastic pokey thing as well as using my sticky back plastic tool I finally managed after about 20 minutes to get the battery to spring out of its holder onto the floor, and get a new one in. Good thing too as the old battery was on 3.07V according to my meter, so it needed changing.
I don't know how things are done on other machines, but this is ridiculous.
The thing is that it's a great game, so I guess I will just have to grin and bear it!
