Alpha Bravo Pinball

I started a second channel (abpinball2) where I plan to post more experimental videos as well as some gameplay footage outside of the deep dive videos etc – keeping those there to not clog your feed if you don’t care about that stuff. For Alpha Bravo die-hard fans only!

First video: 2 minute video showing the results of my experimenting with grading 10-bit log footage to HDR. If you have an HDR monitor, check it out! And if you don’t, well, I’m still curious what you think of the quality of the video – to my eyes at least, when YouTube crushes it down to SDR, it doesn’t look as good as if I grade it manually to SDR (such as my main Bon Jovi video). But, it should hopefully look good on a true HDR monitor. It’s not the easiest thing to do and I’m still learning, so let me know your thoughts!

Oh and pro tip, you can use YouTube’s “Stats for Nerds” to see which version you’re seeing. If you see “bt709” under Color, that’s the SDR version. The HDR one will say “smpte 2084 (PQ) / bt2020”. “Stats for Nerds”, confirmed! 😂

Back when I first designed the “version 2” of my pinball playfield inclination tool (version 1 was a simple wedge, allowing the user only to measure a single inclination), I didn’t yet have a 3D printer – I had to rely on a friend to print it for me.

Well, that’s changed now, and with that I was able to experiment a bit more on this tool to try to evolve it and solve the main complaint I have about it – it is annoying for it to be a two-piece tool, requiring the bubble level to be moved from step to step.

With that, I present version 3 of the tool, now with built-in bubble levels! It uses 10x10x29mm bubble levels that are cheaply available online. On the plus side, reading the tool is super quick and easy, and the tool now includes the ability to read side-to-side level in addition to inclination!

On the downside, I find these cheap bubble levels not super accurate, so some tweaking is needed to get it to read correctly. I’d recommend comparing the levels against v2 of my tool (see the post here), and try flipping the little bubble levels around if they don’t read the same. Anyway, I thought I’d post the model here in case anyone wants to give this one a try!

Download it here!

See it in action in this video!

I recently borrowed a friend’s Cactus Canyon pinball machine, and did a video on it going over the details of the game and game rules! It’s notable for being the last traditional pinball machine from Williams before they shut down their pinball division, leaving Stern as the only company still producing pinball machines in the early 2000’s. Check it out!

This is also my first video doing live gameplay recording in 4K/60, which definitely took some work! I’m happy with the results overall though, and hope you enjoy it!

These days updating pinball machines is simple – most new games self-update from the internet, and you don’t even need a thumb drive anymore!

In the 80’s and 90’s it was not quite that simple, and most folks didn’t have the equipment needed to be able to do it at home. Thankfully now you can buy an EPROM burner & eraser for not a lot of money. If you’ve never actually burned an EPROM before, though, check out my walkthrough video below!

I did it in the context of trying to resolve a rebooting White Water machine, but the same process would apply for any game that pre-dates USB thumb drive updates (everything up until the mid-2000’s) that you’d like to upgrade the code for.