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Thunderbirds are Go

As an epic Gerry Anderson and Supermarionation fan this feedback is great to see!

But I agree on the yellow DMD - it dates this game unfairly - Maybe the ColorDMD guys will work their magic.

Cheers
Neil
 
Big thanks to @Homepin for getting it into the country. Big thanks to @philpalmer for loaning it to NERG. Big thanks to the NLP team for getting it to the event and huge tanks to @Wizcat for staying up most of the night Saturday, communicating with Mike in China to find a solution to get it up and running again. It really was like and episode of Star Trek. Diverting power etc....
 
I managed an interesting ball hang up you might want to look at Mike @Homepin

Here are a couple of pics

In the first pic the ball bounced off the ramp and got stuck under the tree next to the pool. The ball search did not fix this, so we switched it off (as we didnt have key to remove glass at the time) and lifted the machine so the ball was in the pool, hoping when we switched it back on the ball search would have cured this, but of course it doesnt as it just realised that there was a ball missing from the trough so the games then wouldn't start. A ball search on power up if a ball is missing would of cured this.

Cheers

kev

IMG_2991[1].JPGIMG_2992[1].JPG
 
Neil McRae said:
As an epic Gerry Anderson and Supermarionation fan this feedback is great to see!

But I agree on the yellow DMD - it dates this game unfairly - Maybe the ColorDMD guys will work their magic.

Cheers
Neil
Click to expand...
Could you pop a colorDMD or pin2dmd in and manually set to blue or cyan? It doesn't necessarily need the full-colour treatment. I think it's the only thing that pulls you out of the magic, everything is coloured so perfectly with the blue of Thunderbirds with the exception of the orange display.
 
A blue filter would work, wouldn't it?

Agree that the orange DMD really dates it. Wouldn't be so bad if it was monochromatic, just not orange.
 
You'd never get a decent blue from orange using a filter, the best you'd get is a sort of brownish green perhaps? I doubt enough blue light is emitted to get a vivid colour from it.
 
Fair dos. In that case a blue DMD, or better still - a ColorDMD - would look much better.
 
I dont think there is a filter on it at the moment as the DMD was really bright and caused reflection issues, ao we put a pinguard on it and it made it a lot better to play. Could really do with a filter of some sort
 
@newdos

Thanks for bringing it to my attention. In fact, Thunderbirds Pinball does indeed do a ball search at game start if there are less than 5 balls in the trough and part of that search opens the pool so the ball would have been recovered in your case.

The problem with this machine, at the time you experienced the issue, is that someone had "fiddled" with the factory settings so I am assuming that some element of the ball search had been turned off?

In response to the videos shown after the show we have now added a function to the menu where you can press one button and it resets ALL game settings to "Factory OEM" meaning they are all reset to the factory optimum settings in case someone fiddles with things and it causes issues.

This reset doesn't affect the audit figures.
 
Homepin said:
@newdos

Thanks for bringing it to my attention. In fact, Thunderbirds Pinball does indeed do a ball search at game start if there are less than 5 balls in the trough and part of that search opens the pool so the ball would have been recovered in your case.

The problem with this machine, at the time you experienced the issue, is that someone had "fiddled" with the factory settings so I am assuming that some element of the ball search had been turned off?

In response to the videos shown after the show we have now added a function to the menu where you can press one button and it resets ALL game settings to "Factory OEM" meaning they are all reset to the factory optimum settings in case someone fiddles with things and it causes issues.

This reset doesn't affect the audit figures.
Click to expand...
Nice one glad you got it covered!!

Cheers

kev
 
Even "back in the day" when I was servicing pinballs in fish & chip shops I could never understand why the leg levellers were always metal and they ALWAYS chewed up the lovely tiled floors.

Every shop owner used to hammer me about it and, of course, there was nothing I could do as a humble service tech.

Fast forward 30 years, Homepin, China, my own factory and my own design - I am now in a position to actually do something about this very p-i-s-s-poor design .

I'm pleased that a lot of the 'common sense' innovations we have built into Thunderbirds Pinball have been seen by some pinball enthusiasts - thankyou!
 
Thanks for the valuable feedback from NERG. One thing that was mentioned is the sling rubber bounced behind the kicker arm a couple of times. I have had this reported to me only once before and I didn't give it much more thought as it had never happened in all of our testing. However, a second report (from NERG) was enough to get me looking further.

This morning one of my engineers modified our mould and moved the kicker arm plastic actuator up by 3mm. This is the piece of nylon that actually pushes the sling rubber out. We believe this small modification should cure this fairly obscure issue.

The mod was made easy as we made the original mould in-house and we mould the plastic parts ourselves so a staff member is now busy chipping all the old parts and moulding new ones.

The pic shows the original one in white and the new 'taller' one in blue (that was the colour plastic loaded in the machine at the moment).

QQ Photo20180720145934.jpg
 
Homepin said:
Thanks for the valuable feedback from NERG. One thing that was mentioned is the sling rubber bounced behind the kicker arm a couple of times. I have had this reported to me only once before and I didn't give it much more thought as it had never happened in all of our testing. However, a second report (from NERG) was enough to get me looking further.

This morning one of my engineers modified our mould and moved the kicker arm plastic actuator up by 3mm. This is the piece of nylon that actually pushes the sling rubber out. We believe this small modification should cure this fairly obscure issue.

The mod was made easy as we made the original mould in-house and we mould the plastic parts ourselves so a staff member is now busy chipping all the old parts and moulding new ones.

The pic shows the original one in white and the new 'taller' one in blue (that was the colour plastic loaded in the machine at the moment).

View attachment 68167
Click to expand...

Could have just moved the hole down which would probably have been an easier mod to the tool.
 
I don't think stern would of bothered lol. They would of just ignored complaints and carried on counting their pennies.

Shows like nerg seem a good way of road testing new games. Nice to see you taking everything on board and fixing minor faults. Not a theme I like but I look forward to having a game on it at some point [emoji106]
 
Homepin said:
Thanks for the valuable feedback from NERG. One thing that was mentioned is the sling rubber bounced behind the kicker arm a couple of times. I have had this reported to me only once before and I didn't give it much more thought as it had never happened in all of our testing. However, a second report (from NERG) was enough to get me looking further.

This morning one of my engineers modified our mould and moved the kicker arm plastic actuator up by 3mm. This is the piece of nylon that actually pushes the sling rubber out. We believe this small modification should cure this fairly obscure issue.

The mod was made easy as we made the original mould in-house and we mould the plastic parts ourselves so a staff member is now busy chipping all the old parts and moulding new ones.

The pic shows the original one in white and the new 'taller' one in blue (that was the colour plastic loaded in the machine at the moment).

View attachment 68167
Click to expand...




Wow

I only told you Wednesday night!
There's a good reason to do as much stuff in house!
 
Sven Normansson said:
Could have just moved the hole down which would probably have been an easier mod to the tool.
Click to expand...

The engineer and I discussed all options and we chose moving the edge up as the easiest and fastest option. We did look at moving the hole but that was problematical and would have made a ton of work.

It's not really a big deal because it never really caused any problems but might as well fix as many small things as possible before too many roll out the door. This is a problem we have as every single part is new and made by us so we have had to tweak many many things.
 
If you're gonna go through the tremendous gonadal ache and investment of making it all in house - you better use the advantage like these guys have!
 
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