Scottacus

[Scottacus]

@ Bord  No I haven’t but I see that we have a schematic so we can figure out the rule set.  Cuphead is reaching the stage of making the final playfield so in a few months I should have time to work on this if you want to.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Scottacus.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Scottacus.

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[Scottacus]

I adjusted this to 100ms and voila… much, much, much better performance. Not 100% perfect, but not sure it’ll ever be… in Eight Ball, the startup melody still misses a few hits, but far-and-away hitting more notes than before.

That makes perfect sense.  By increasing the duty cycle time of your coil, you increased its strength which resulted in stronger and better hits.  There will be a slight downside to this and that is that by setting this 100ms you will limit the maximum speed of cycling to 100ms plus whatever time it takes to get the slug away from the chime bar and far enough down into the coil to be ready to cycle again.

I’d be interested in seeing just how fast you can cycle your chime using this test table, changing the length of the chime200 timer and playing around with the duty cycle of the coil (ie try 90ms, 80ms).  Post the shortest time you can get by this method (ie base table fastest timer is 130 ms).  You just might be able to tune your unit to play the entire start up song.

The only other possible things to try would be to hollow out the chime slugs (Bally did this) to make them lighter and more responsive and to raise the coils up to be closer to the chime bars.  When I’ve watched my unit not quite be able to cycle fast enough it looked like the slug was oscillating just below the bottom of the chime bar.  Raising the coil might just get the bar/top of slug into position to strike at faster speeds.

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[Scottacus]

New Chime Speed Test Table is uploaded onto this forum and can be found here: https://vpinball.com/VPBdownloads/chime-speed-test-table/

I really hate to put something like this up and push other tables down the list on the forum home page but I don’t want this table taking up space on my Google Drive for years and years.  I needed space on my drive which is why the original table from 2017 that you guys were looking for isn’t available. My hope is that by having VPinball host the table, it will be around in 2025 when the next group of chime unit speed junkies are looking for it.

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dondi

[Scottacus]

Since Eight ball runs from a ROM there is no way to go into the table and change the speed of that fast three strike portion of the melody.  @scampa123 I’ll see if I can build you a test table today.

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[Scottacus]

I can’t find the old chime test table but it was just timers set at different intervals that activated upon keystrokes so it would be pretty easy to reproduce.  I didn’t have this Eight Ball table on my cab so I loaded it and my chime unit cannot play all of the notes.  It misses the last few where the same chime is cycled a few times in a row.  I also noticed that the script calls for four different chime tones so if that is true my 3 chime unit could never play it anyway.  I think that @randr might have a four chime unit in his cab?

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[Scottacus]

That table was on my google drive account and in the intervening three years it has been deleted.  I’ll take a look around my cab’s computer and see if I still have it somewhere.  If I remember right all it was, was a table with timers of various intervals that you could call by hitting keys on the keyboard to activate them.  This would send pulses of various lengths to the chimes  to see how fast you could drive them before there were missing hits.

 

Not sure about 8-ball, I’ll have to check that on the cab.  If I remember right, there were some tables that I couldn’t get a chime unit to fire fast enough on and there were others like Evil Kineval (sp?) that had four bar chime units that I couldn’t play with my standard 3 bar chime unit.

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[Scottacus]

Before you go buying a new coil just unhook it from the system and check it’s resistance with a multimeter.  If the resistance reads the same as on a chart of coils (or the same as the other coils next to it in the unit) then the coil is not your problem.

@Borgdog is absolutely right about checking the power demands for your system.  Current = Voltage/Resistance so if you know the resistance of your coil and the voltage running it you can calculate how much current it will draw at steady state.

Adding in a cap is like putting a battery into the circuit.   In terms of size for the cap, bigger is better.   Just be aware that a charged 10,000 uF cap can give you quite a jolt if you happen to discharge it by touching it!  I would think that you would just have one cap across the positive/gnd on your power supply and it would work for the entire system.  Borgdog, correct me if this is wrong.

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[Scottacus]

Yes, news of my death has been exaggerated (Twain).  I’ve been rather busy here so not a lot of vp work in the last half year

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/cuphead-home-brew-pinball

One of the chime bars sounds weak to me while another sounds fine.  Voltage is probably your issue or too short a pulse wave in DOF.  The plastic tips are there to protect the bottom of the chime bars.  Since the chime bars are aluminum and the slugs are steel, slugs without plastic tips will chew a circle into the bottom of the chime bar.  I’ve seen this firsthand on one of my EM flips.

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[Scottacus]

When you say it was horrible, what does that mean?  Were the slugs not hitting the chime bars well?  Was it missing notes?

@Outhere probably has the right solution if it was missing notes.  Too low a drive voltage may prevent the slugs from driving hard enough to hit the chime bars.   By increasing the voltage you will increase the coil field magnetic strength which will make the slugs move faster (at least on the way up since gravity takes care of returning them to the start position).

Another solution that I think I may have messed around with is raising the slugs up so they don’t have as far to travel.  You could test this by putting a small shim under the slug to raise it up from the rubber stopper that it rests on in the down position.  Shorter travel should make the unit cycle faster.

One thing to remember is that chime units that we might buy on e-bay likely come from old AC EM machines.  Eight ball is a solid state machine so I’m going to guess that it uses DC to power its coils.  Typically AC coils have lower resistance because the actual voltage to produce the magnetic field is the RMS or about 70% of the rated AC voltage.  Since V=IR, lower voltage requires lower resistance to generate the same current flow.  Hooking these lower resistance AC coils to DC (like in our virtual cabs) will actually increase the current to higher levels if you use the same voltage in DC as the machine was designed for in AC (ex 24v AC is about 70% of 24v DC)  so you will get a stronger magnetic field in the coil with 24v DC than you will with 24v AC.  More voltage = more current = stronger magnetic field = faster motion = more heat generated.

Hope this helps!

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[Scottacus]

Congrats on a really nice table, very well done!

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bord

[Scottacus]

Yeah and by the time the ball reaches the top of the outlane it will be moving so fast that nothing short of a tilt will bring it back into play.

I have to confess that when I first saw how wide open and bare the lower playfield is, I didn’t have high hopes for the game but after watching the game play video in the first post I’m pretty jazzed to give this a try.  You gotta love Zale tables!

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[Scottacus]

Nice job on this table!  It features the worlds longest death lane, gives you plenty of time to think about what you’ve done as you watch the ball make its way to the left out lane…

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[Scottacus]

Oh I see I was paged?   I’m so busy with Cuphead that I don’t follow along here so that was a great way to get my attention @bord!

The letters “D,I,X,I,E,L,A,N,D” on the backglass have some sort of payout when completed?  If so then you must have some variable like “dixieland” that gets incremented by one each time whatever game play event gets completed.  When “dixieland” gets to 9 then the game pays out?

First off you’ll need to have a system in your table for saving a “high score” file to the computer.  If you don’t have one open up Grand Tour and copy out the save and load high score subs and use those.  Save the dixieland variable to that file and when a new instance of the table starts in VPX read that variable from the file.  On the B2S you probably have lights that correspond to the letters?  Set those up as values like 100, 101 … 109 and use the B2SSetData to send the instruction to B2S to light the letters.  In this case you’ll probably need a loop to send all of the numbers (100 and 101 and 102 if lit to the X).

If you’ve got questions PM me.

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LTA

[Scottacus]

This was a lot of fun to work on.  I did some research into how rototargets work and basically there is a solenoid that fires and free spins the targets.  Brief time later the mechanism locks the rototarget in place.  What this means is that the target free spins a random number of spots forward and then rotates back to an index position.  If you watch this roto spin (Hint hit the “s” key to spin as much as you like) the roto will spin a random amount past a number and then move back to the index of that number.

In addition to this since Bord built a full rototarget primitive, we were able to make the roto target bend backwards and then forwards with a ball hit.  All these are subtle visuals but they make the rototarget look real.

If anyone needs a rototarget please feel free to steal this one and use it in your table.  @Bord let’s do another wood rail if you find a good candidate.

 

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bord

[Scottacus]

It’s problem with my hastily put together matching, I’ve PM’ed you a fix.  Basically if you get a 0 for matching the table will explode.  Oh that and smoking is bad for you.

 

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Friffy1

[Scottacus]

So that’s who the guy in the ref jersey is!

I think that Onevox’s idea of a special backglass as a prize for a tourney is a fantastic idea!  Joey will have fun with this when he has pinhead company over to play on his cab.  In my mind it goes something like this, he casually asks his guests what table they would like to play then scrolls across them until he lands on Cuphead.  He then mentions that they should check out the backglass, and says “oh by the way I won it as the prize for winning a world pinball tournament.”

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[Scottacus]

I’ll check and see, if I do I’ll PM it to you.

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Tom

[Scottacus]

@JR I love the Happy Gilmore video and yes that is a regulation sized center drain, just get out your virtual ruler and measure it .

The Cuphead is 3d printed in PLA and came directly from Thingiverse which is a great place to look for stuff like this.  The base is made from some walnut that my dad and I picked up directly from a mom and pop lumber mill in Northern Wisconsin around 1983.  They sold fairly green cut local sourced lumber and you had to dry it yourself for a couple of years before you could use it.  It was like being a kid in a candy shop for me, I was surrounded by hundreds of board feet of just about every hard and soft wood from the area.  Maple, birch, black walnut, hickory along with pine and basswood.  We even found some birds eye maple in one of the stacks which I still have.

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[Scottacus]

Ok we’ll tee up the tourney again once @Onevox releases the new version with the fixed “S” lane.  In the mean time I’m going to ship the trophy to Bord so his kids can play for it (see page one of this post) and the winner of this tourney will get bragging rights and the satisfaction of total pinball domination.

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bord

[Scottacus]

@Tom sadly that is about the only thing that I have made in Blender and it didn’t taste very good.

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