Crane machine in France

Took these pictures on holiday - at least on our way to our holiday destination.
They're taken at a truck stop on the highway (autoroute) between Metz and Strassbough.



This crane machine was just standing outside next to a restaurant ?!?!?!
Why would anyone think it's a good idea to put an electronical vending machine outside, without any cover ??

As you can see it was even still filled with toy animals.
The glass had a lot of moisture on the inside.. I don't want to know how the stuffed toy animals smelled or how unhealthy they must be for children now ??

Pinball photography

Been busy the past evenings taking photographs of my pinball machines.

I bought a serious camera last year with the intention to make nice pictures for my website. Started to learn more about photography, and learn, and learn, and learn, .. and before I knew it I was more interested and invested more time in photography than in my pinball machines.

I always tried new things, but my goal - to make nice pictures of all my games and to upgrade my website with lots of cool, large photos, didn't happen..

I did start to work on a new article for my website about photography.. been thinking about it a long time, started some things in draft a few months ago, but now I'm serious working on it (which means I put a lot of hours every evening into it, writing things, testing it, taking photos until I know what I write is correct and I know what works and what doesn't work when taking pictures, and actually trying to take all the pictures required for the article.

Since a short while I'm also experimenting with 2 strobes, offcamera (yes, full strobist style of shooting) which also is a learning curve.. but it's fun. Only now I start to appreciate the potential of my camera :-)

I guess in about a week or 2 the article will go online.. watch this space :-)

Back from vacation, AFM sound upgrade

Back from vacation.. loved it !
Haven't seen a pinball machine on location.. although in the north of Italy there should be a few at campings, but we were in a fancy hotel in a large town that mostly had an older population.. still had a good time, we had very good weather (the belgian summer has been rainy and cold :(

Haven't worked more on the pinball machines except that I upgraded the speakers in Attack from Mars too.



Here's a picture of the subwoofer in my Twilight Zone..

I did start on a new article about pinball machine photography but as it'll be a very big article, that may still take a while until it gets published on the site.

Medieval Madness sound upgrade finished

Had time to work on my Medieval Madness sound upgrade yesterday evening.

First tested with the new tweeter that had some distortion.. put in the 6.8mfd and 4.7mfd capacitors instead of the default 10mfd, but it didn't make any noticeable difference, the speaker still distorted :(
Even tried adding some resistors. But only when I added 3 resistors of 5ohm it didn't distort anymore, but you hardly heard anything from the tweeter..
So I soldered back in the original tweeter.

Then I tested with a pot on R17, to bring out the bass and get more sound out of the cabinet subwoofer. That really made a nice difference, and I noticed the backbox speakers also lost some of the high notes.
So I put in back the improved tweeter and this time it didn't distort anymore.
Excellent ! Tested a bit and around 8k7 ohm it gives the best setting for my MM with new car speakers..

The cabinet subwoofer still isn't very loud, it doesn't give out a real hard beat you would expect from a car subwoofer.. but it's ok for me. To get a good bass I probably need to add an amplifier, cut out the hole, and remove my spare parts boxes from underneath the game..
but now you hear the game has some added bass compared to the default setup, and you definitely feel it, the cabinet vibrates slightly from the bass.. it's nice :)

Empty gameroom..

..well she's half empty that is.

Just re-read some of my posts here. In januari I posted we were going to sell some pinball machines but I never followed up.
Anyway for those interested, our gameroom is about half empty now. It really was too full, 2 rows of pinball machines with only some space to walk in the middle. Nice to play pins but not a nice room to sit in and relax.

So we sold some games, put the repainted fridge in there, a small coffee table and two comfortable sofas..
When you now enter our gameroom, the left side was like before: a whole row of pinball games. On the right side the only pinball machines are Black Hole and Orbitor One).
The rest of the right side is a family part now - fridge, seats, toys for our daughter she can play with in the garden, .. so the gameroom isn't for daddy alone anymore but to be enjoyed by the whole family.

At the moment I only have 8 working pinball machines in my gameroom.. quite a difference as we always had 14 in our gameroom, and about 5 years ago when I still had an external storage place we once even owned more than 20 pinball machines at the same time..


More updates on old posts: those dvd's I made in 2007 ? Well they're since a long time not for sale anymore.. there just wasn't any interest in them and for a few euros I made on them I didn't want to bother sitting at my computer for half an hour waiting until it was burned, going to the post office, ..
Well if anyone is really interested then you can always mail me about them, but I took down the pages on my website.
First 2 dvds I made are still available in the USA, see the trailers at:
http://www.webwidevideo.com/showproject.php?project=P1062
and
http://www.webwidevideo.com/showproject.php?project=P1063

Third dvd is only available from me as I even didn't bother to make an NTSC version and send it to the USA for distribution..


And that Whitewater switch problem I had since last year - I posted about it in december 07: it suddenly disappeared.
I have no idea what caused it and what made it go away ?!?!?!
I still played Whitewater but not very often as I had to wait for the ballsearch to get the pinball out of the lostmine. My daughter wanted to play the machine too last week, and suddenly the game worked fine ! It must be my daughter is some kind of magic-pinball-repairlady as I have no other explenation for it. But I'm happy, another game without any problems :)