How Pinball Machines Work

lot harder to find them. It's a whole lot harder. So those of you guys and gals who are around the age of your beloved hosts may already have picked up on what we're about to talk about. You youngsters out there may or may not know. We're going to talk about pinball machines. Yes, something that I am actually very enthusiastic about. I love pinball, Yes, I agree. We grew upaya. It's a great game. Um, and it was uh sort of the precursor to the arcade machine, the

video game. Um, you know, pinball were pinball was what video games were before they were video games, and then they were uh, you know, they kind of existed side by side video games for a while, but as arcades died out, so did pinball machines. Partly because, in fact, I would say in large part, because they have lots and lots of parts and uh and you gotta do a lot of maintenance to keep them running in good condition. Plus I I have, I have the real reason why

pinball machines are so hard to find now. But hardly anyone's making them. Well, yeah there is, but there well there's no one making them side stern. Yeah, at least not in the United States. But um, but no, they're I was going to get into that we after we talked a little bit about you know, so you normally do the history of sure the pinball machine. I was

going to do that, Okay. Um, Actually, you could argue that pinball machines in their earliest form weren't really techy at all because they were mechanics, simply mechanical, right And and in fact, if you want to go before pinball machines proper and all, first of all, it all depends on how you define a pinball machine, right, I mean, the earliest pinball machines were basically a piece of wood with some pins. Uh. They were a lot more vertical

than they are now. Yeah, and then you would drop a ball down from the top and they would plunk down along the pins and then eventually land somewhere at the bottom. Yes. Actually, if you've if you've ever seen the the Japanese phenomenon pachinko, pachinko is very similar to what the earlier pinball machines were here in the United States, because they were serious. They're seriously gravity driven. There're a

lot more upright, you hang them on the wall basically. So, for instance, um, a precursor to the pinball machine was the Bagatel. Yes, the Bagatel was a uh device where it looked a lot like a pinball machine. Usually it was a cabinet that was higher on one end than the other. So you have introduced the element of gravity

into the game. And you would use probably a plunger or perhaps a a lever of some sort to maneuver a ball so that it rolls from the top to the bottom and it goes down a series of various pegs like we had mentioned before, until it lands in a slotted spot at the bottom, which would have a score associated with it, and that's how how you would accumulate points. There's not really any skill involved, is all luck pretty much. So this device gave way to other,

uh similar devices. Uh. Now, we have an article on our site about how pinball machines worked in which we state that the first pinball game was Humpty Dumpty by Gottlieb in ninety. Now that's something that some people would argue is not entirely true. I would argue that that's not entirely true. Now I think I know the reason why we stated so in our article. It's because Humpty Dumpty was the first machine that introduced flippers. So you

have they call them flippers. Flippers, yes, yes, lightning. Oh wow, now now we've lost even some of the people our age. Um, exactly is this pinball machine dolphins safe? So yeah, it was the first. The Humpty Dumpty was the first game to introduce flippers, which allowed the player a chance to alter the course of the game. Actually, really, well, that gives you an opportunity to interact with the game right then, just watching the ball moved from the top of the

playing surface to the bottom. Right before that, people usually played would try and manipulate the game by nudging the machine and trying to get the ball to go one way other rather than another, which still, of course happens with pinball machines, but we'll get into that. So that is probably why they call Humpty Dumpty the first pinball machine in the article, because again, flippers, first time you

got those. But you do have machines before that that had pins that the ball would bounce off of, and uh, those technically could also be called pinball machines. Um. I think of Humpty Dumpty as the first one because I think of when I think pinball machine, the flippers are definitely a part of that. I think of the others as variations either, um, whether the variations of Bagatel or variations of the pinball machine, but not actually a pinball machine.

So um. But yeah, so so I go with hump Dumpty Humpty Dumpty as the first one, even though I know there are some pinball fanatics out there who would argue that that's not entirely accurate. I'm glad that there are still pinball fanatics out there. Otherwise the game would have died out already, and it's it's still coughing and wheezing. It's not doing great. Um, So let's uh describe the anatomy of a pinball machine just in general terms. You've

got the head or the back glass backball box section. Yeah, that's the section that's vertical that you you look at and usually has some pretty amazing art on it to attract the eye so that you go to that machine versus any other. Then you have the body or cabinet section of the machine. This is where the playing field is, where the ball comes out at the top and gravity

pulls it towards the bottom. And then you use your various flippers and elements in the playing field to keep the ball going as much as possible and to rack up points. Yes, now, um, this is the reason you would want flippers anyway. And the reason that pinball machine is different from a baggytell is that at least in in the age of electricity, um, you know, the mid early earlier, I guess mid twentieth century, um, electro mechanical

pinball machines came into being. And this is why, because otherwise there's no point in and trying to get the ball except you know, well, this is headed for the forty point slot. I'd rather it ended up in the seventy point slot. So you want to keep the ball in play because the electro mechanical games have a number of switches and buttons and bumpers and all kinds of other dude ads that help you continue to accumulate more and more points since the game goes on um and

they do this. These games were primarily before or so based on what I was able to find out in the Internet Pinball Database. I didn't know there was an Internet Pinball database you. I used to use that all the time. It is a great resource and I got a lot of valuable information about it. I p dB dot com um. But uh, as a matter of fact, I got a lot of descriptions for things I didn't know what they were. But on the playing field, I would say the probably the biggest thing in all these

games dating back quite some time now, would be the bumpers. Yeah, you've got the bumpers, and you've got a couple of Sometimes you would have some some holes that the ball could fall into that would accumulate some points as well, but the bumpers, and then towards the base of it, you would have the drain that's where the ball. When the ball goes through the drain, that means that that play is usually over at that point. So so your goal is to try and keep the ball out of

the drain and in the playing field. UM. So you've got the bumpers usually towards the top, You've got the flippers at the bottom. You might have some sling shots on either side. Those are the kind of triangular uh elements that you see towards the near where the flippers are that have the the the really powerful bumper that will knock the ball right back towards the top. So those are usually called sling shots, even though they're not really slinging. They're they're punching the ball as hard as

they can. Um. These elements all have something in common. They are controlled by or they're powered by, something called a solenoid, which is not a decepticon. I'm so disappointed. I see these things that I'm like, wow, there's a transformer in there, And sometimes there is, but it's not the kind of trans former I'm thinking of. It's not

even a gobot. So solenoid is a coil um It's used in all kinds of things, but Basically, what happens is when there's electricity running through the solenoid um it causes UH, a magnetic field, generates a magnetic field which moves a piece of something, a piece of equipment. Yeah. Often there are two coils. There might be one in the center and one on the outside and right, and what happens is you've got two magnetic fields that are um. The are the same, so they repel one another and

that pushes something out of the solenoid. And in this case, like with the flipper, when you press the buttons on the side of the pinball machine, it's since the electrical circuit or it completes electrical circuit, which then causes the solenoid to activate, which makes the the flipper go up. What's interesting is that there are a couple of different

styles of flippers. There's somewhere if you hold the button down, the flipper will remain engaged and it'll it'll because it'll the solenoidal they'll be poking out essentially when you release the button. I like that type, those favorite flippers. And then there's the other kind where it has a timer on how long the button can be pressed down. It'll it's usually pretty much an instantaneous thing, like if you

were to hold the button down, it wouldn't matter. The flipper would activate, but then immediately stop because it would just be like a quick on switch. And then until you release the button and press it again, the flipper would remain in the down position. And uh, those are a lot harder to use for those of us who like to finesse the ball and juggle it in various ways. Yes, those were invented by someone evil. Yes, yes, someone evil who wanted to make sure that we spent more and

more nickels, dimes, quarters, whatever. Yes. Um. Now active bumpers there are two different kinds of bumpers. They're active and passive. Passive ones were used in the earlier machines were basically when the ball would strike the bumper, it would register that it had hit and would give you the according number of points. Now, active bumpers use the solenois to

bump back, bump back the ball across the playing field. Right, there's a plunger inside the bumper that that activates, and there's a little metal ring, which you know, that's when when the metal ball comes in contact with the metal ring, then that that's what activates it to um too activate the solenoid, and the plunger moves the bumper and it it propels the ball somewhere else on the playing field, which is you know, that's when you can get like

maybe that there's often you'll see a configuration of three bumpers. Three is three is pretty common. I mean you'll see others like maybe two or maybe as many as five

or six. But if you luck out, you can get the ball to bounce back and forth between the three or more bumpers and rack up points really quickly that way, yeah, yeah, Or you know, the ball could go careening into a drop target, which is a little object I guess made of probably plastic or would um that when the ball hits it, it drops into the table um and gives you the according number points. You can't hit it again

because it's gone. But yeah, if you usually if you hit all of the drop targets along a certain section, it'll reactivate and uh give you a bonus of some sort, and then all the targets will will spring back up and then you'll have them to hit again, but you you have to knock them all down or sometimes after

a ball drains. It will reset the board um versus a standard target or stand up target I'm sorry, which is you know, usually a lot of times they're they're round, be like a lollipop there, you know, on some kind of um something mounted to the table itself, but they don't go anywhere the and it does it's usually through uh, depending on how old the machine is. If it's an older machine, it's usually a leaf switch. Yeah, and a

leaf switch is uh. Well, here's an easy example. Think of two strips of copper, all right, that are close to one another. Their their parallel and on one end you have the two strips embedded in an insulating material. Yes, all right, so it's sort of like a v yeah. Yeah. And then on the other end you've got the the two free standing strips of copper. When they come into contact with one another, uh, it creates a circuit and that's it activates like a switch. That's the the whole

uh concept of the leaf switches. Whenever the two pieces of copper come into contact, that means that it has

registered something registered the contact. So a lot of the old electro mechanical pinball machines use leaf switches to register contact along various parts of the board, and it maybe everything from a stand up target like you were mentioning, or it could be a switch that's on the actual playing field so that when the ball rolls over a certain point, it uh it makes a contact and creates some sort of reaction, whether that's more points or changing

the mode of play or whatever. And uh, that's really what the older machines rely on. Newer ones have things called micro switches, which are similar to the leaf switches, but they are self contained. They have they're usually protected in a little case. Um, and they're they're smaller and they're more sensitive. So uh so don't upset them or they'll cry. That's not what I meant. But sure, um, they're they're less likely to uh malfunction to break down. Um.

Here's an example I used to play. There was a game that I played while I was in college. It was an older pinball machine. Don't don't assume when I start talking about this pinball machine that it was new when I was playing it in college. It was a Star Trek pinball machine from the seventies, and it was an electro mechanical pinball machine, and it had a sensor in the upper left corner of the playing field that would register when you would roll the ball over it.

It would uh start accumulating points towards an extra ball. Well, the one that we had in our student center, which I guess was donated by either a student or a former student. Um the the sensor would stick, so if you could get the ball to roll over it once or twice, it would stick long enough for it to

register as an extra ball. So anyone who knew how that machine would work would the very first thing they would do is aim to get the ball up in that upper left hand part of the playing field, because as soon as you registered an extra ball, you could play the ball as recklessly as you like, because once it drained, you got another ball to to play. And then again as soon as you got the extra ball, aim for the upper left After a couple of hits,

you would get another extra ball. And this these games could last forever. I actually managed to turn that game I got. I went over the top, as they say, Yeah, I went over the top and reset the score back to zero. By the way, once I did that, it did not register it as a high score anymore. That kind of was kind of a bummer. It took me about an hour and a half I think total, and I had more than sixteen free games racked up after

it was done. Good times. Um, so yeah, there are there are other new technologies now, I'm just it's good. There are other new technologies too that h have been made possible with advanced electronics, such as the opto or opto electronic sensor um, which basically records what the ball is doing with light. Yeah, there's also proximity sensors that use magnets. Yes, basically basically the same kind of do hikey that registers whether or not your car is sitting

there at the light. Because it uh, it basically identifies when a ball has passed over it without their needing to be a physical switch. Right, it changes the the the electron flow through the circuit um. We should say, however, that when I said it uses magnets, I really should have said it uses magnetic fields. Doesn't really use a magnet because a lot of a lot of a common complaint among pinball users is, oh, this thing must have

magnets to make it drained so quickly. Um, all of all the research I've done, all the magnets that are used in these these pinball machines are used in such a way that either the player has control of it or it is a specific mode that gets activated within a pinball game, and are all electro magnets and otherwise there are no magnets in penell There aren't any magnets and pen ball machines specifically designed to make the ball drain faster. No, no, um, despite what you might think

as you're playing and cursing. Well, these these devices that we're talking about are used more commonly in in what's known as solid state games, which are the heavily uh electronic type machines that you see, you know, you saw started seeing and then the late seventies, early eighties and into the es where it would usually be more than you know, they didn't have the numbers, the mechanical numbers. It would flip over anymore. Um more. Yeah, it's it's

not even an led. They're actually using plasma displays, um,

some of which had electronic games baked into them. Yeah. Actually, um, well, look just to to differentiate a little more, the electro mechanical pinball machines, they used a lot of switches, they used motors, scoring wheels, which would be like the digit counters um where each each number, each digit was on its own wheel that would turn as you accumulated points, and the number of wheels it had would essentially tell you how high your score could go before turning back

over to zero. UM and stepping units relays that kind of thing. So lots of electric electronic um, electromagnetic stuff, not electromagnetic stuff, but stuff you would find in basic electronics. That's what we're in the old pinball machines. Electromechanical stuff is solid state. Would be more things like circuit boards and UH and micro switches, things that are that don't rely on so many moving parts necessarily. And as for displays, instead of the score wheels, you might have the most

common word dot matrix. Displays choose dots to indicate what the what was going on, you know, your score. You might have a special video mode, like you were saying, a little mini game pop up. Some had LED displays. The segmented plasma displays were a little different. They weren't like a plasma display like an HDTV. It was it would plasma would illuminate a small segment of the scoreboard and that could form either letters or numbers, so it's almost like a neon sign, is kind of what they

look like. It wasn't that you would necessarily get a very high deaf um uh experience from it. Yeah, because people associate plasma these days with high definition. No, not so much. Pinball had kind of a rocky road to go through. Do you you know that some places uh outlawed pinball machines? Yes, because they by giving away free games, they were gambling. Yeah. The idea here is that you would have to pay to play a pinball machine. Therefore,

playing pinball has a value. Right. Let's say it's a quarter, so it's a quarter of play. That means that you have assigned the value of the experience of playing the pinball machine to cents. If you were to win a replay that is a free game, that means that they've just given away a twenty five cent experience. Therefore you have uh gambled. You gambled to win another game. Uh. Most of us would consider this crazy, And eventually almost everyone did consider this crazy, and they decided that it

wasn't really that big a deal. But for a while it was a big deal when when gambling was it was being what. There were crackdowns on gambling across the United States and in other parts of the world too, although in Japan UH pachinko is such a big deal and you can actually win prizes and in some cases people are who are professional pachinko players can actually make

UH money playing pachinko. So and not everybody is well and some and some pinball machines actually did reward people with coins or or credits or things like that, something beyond just the free games. So there were games that did UH have more of a gambling element to them than just the free play. Let's talk about some of the other things that you might find in pinball machines.

Depending on what you're playing there, there are lots of different variations because I mean, of course, you've got your basic board, which is your your elevator. You know, you're tilted playing field so that gravity pulls the ball downward. You've usually got some bumpers. You might have the slingshots at the bottom and the flippers. You've got a plunger that allows you to propel the ball up to the top of the playing field so that you can start play.

And then you got the drain at the bottom. Uh. But on top of this, there have been lots and lots of innovations for pinball machines to kind of differentiate them from everything else. So you've got things like spinners, sections of the playing field that spin around and around, depending on you know, some some might spend the entire game, some might spend if you activate a certain switch, and that can alter the course of a pinball as it

rolls across. You've got ramps are very basically got the ramps that will lead to possibly another section of the um the playing field, or even another separate playing field that is otherwise inaccessible from the the the regular playing field. You've got different lanes that the ball can go down. Often these lanes will have lights above them that are activated, and in some games you can manipulate where the lights are using the flippers, and if you light all the lanes,

then you get some sort of bonus. You've got various kickers, which are holes that the ball can go down and then it'll kick it back out. Yeah, and there are a lot that where you might knock a ball in a hole on one part of the playing field and the ball will come out in a totally different part of the playing field that reminds me of one of my favorite devices in a pinball game, which is really very little too with the experience, but it's just weird.

The knocker. Yes, when you hit a replay, it's a solenoid that's inside the uh, the the actual pinball machine, and the only thing it's supposed to do is hit against the side of the pinball machine to make a really loud knocking noise and it indicates that you have won a replay. It's way louder than that. Yeah, it was the same, and they had one in UH. I think in the Cubert video game too, if I'm not mistaken,

when he'd fall off suddenly. But you you'd hear this, you know, you feel and then the joystick that you used to manipulate the game, you would feel this, you know, whack. Yeah, it's it's often. It can be very loud and very um very disconcerting, disconcerting. Yeah, you'd be in the middle of a and you'll hear it. Usually either if you've earned a replay by hitting a certain score, or if you hit a match at the end and matches where

they you see a random set of numbers. It's usually uh. Uh, you know one through zero followed by a zero, and if they matched the last two digits on your score, you get a replay. Uh. You may suspect that people fiddle with the odds because usually would think one inten chance. Right. Yeah, there are a lot of machines that can allow you to fiddle with the odds and lower it to as low as one percent chance of it landing on what

you actually scored. Well, I'll get back into that in a minute, but I also wanted to mention another feature that you can't see in games. Are you gonna talk about tilting? Yes, you're not ready for tilting. Now let's talk about tilting. Well. Uh, in the early games like bagatell you you needed to tilt the game table to actually get the ball to move where that was you

know in some of those games. But um, in pinball machines, they didn't want you to do that because, you know, for one thing, they didn't want you to get more play than you should be getting for your quarter. But for another, there are a lot of different parts in these pinball machines, and some of them are kind of delicate, and there's a very good reason that you really don't want to tilt it too much, so, uh, they added what what's called a tilt bob, which is essentially a

pendulum inside a metal ring. So as soon as you tilt the game more than just a little bit, um, the pendulum is going to strike the ring, which is going to cause the machine to tilt. Yeah. It's kind of like the game operation. If the tweezers in the game operation touches the side, then the guy's nose lights up, and then you've killed a patient. So every time you tilt a pinball machine, some patient dies. I might have mixed that up a little okay, um, but well, that's

one kind of mechanism. There's also a ball roll tilt. Yes. This is a ball that's in a little channel underneath the playing field and at the top of the channel it's it's aligned in the same way as the playing field, so it's it's on an incline and at the upper end is a sensor. And if the ball should come in contact with a sensor, that triggers a tilt. Yeah, and that's uh moving that is generally going to cause

what's uh, what's known as a slam tilt. These are very bad, Yeah, For one thing, they can be they can damage a machine, and for another, it's just considered bad form. Yeah, a slam tilt is basically they're they're telling you that, um, you really messed up, because not only I mean in a regular tilt, you would lose your points and the flippers don't move, so it's like, dude, no, you lost it. Yeah, yeah, it'll it'll it'll kill everything

on the playing field. The ball will drain, you won't get any bonus, and you won't continue to score for that round. Yeah, But in a slam tilt, it actually resets the machine. This is you know, generally a solid state era yeah device. And there are other sensors that can also trigger a slam tilt. Usually they are located mostly in the coin slot area, like anywhere where the coins are collected. That's usually where you're gonna find a

sensor for a slam tilt. Yeah. I don't want to mess with the but I mean, if you really enjoy pinball, you don't want to You don't want to break the machine. So there's there's that too. You don't you really don't want to tilt it for that reason. Um, so should I get into the demise of pinball real quick. Yeah, let's talk about let's talk about Yeah, let's talk about the way pinball's kind of kind of fallen apart recently, and then let's do a little bit talk about some

of our favorite pinball machines before. Um. Okay, Well, a few months ago I did a blog post because I happened to hear um Jeff Eli Uh, an economics professor in Northwestern University on the radio, and he had written He's he's an economist, but he wrote a post on pinball because he has also a pinball aficionado. UM. And he met somebody who had designed two of his favorite games, Black Night and High Speed UM and those were some of the earliest, uh, serious digital high end pinball machines.

Some of that that that really got going UM and it was it goes back to what you were talking about, Jonathan, because over the course of pinball history, I mean, you think about it, we were going from a gravity only game to something that has flippers that you can put back and put the ball back into play. It's got electronic switches that enable you to rack up lots and lots of points. They're trying to add new gimmicks to

keep you playing, keep you spending money on pinball. Um. Well, so they start adding these ramps and you know, the habit trails the ball goes through and the little uh you know, get it in the monster's mouth and he'll spit the ball back out kind of stuff. Yeah, there you go. Um, all kinds of stuff like that to

get you to keep playing and enhance the experience. Well, some people got so good at the game that they could win free replays often, so the pinball manufacturers started enabling the amusement facilities owners to adjust the odds of getting a replay by doing the number match there and the more people I mean, it stopped people from uh exploiting the game by being really really good at it, but it also kept new people from entering. And because it was so difficult for them to score replay that

they couldn't, they weren't interested in playing. I mean you also started seeing circuit boards eventually that could adjust the score that was needed to get a replay. It would just increminally increase, so if people were getting lots of replays, it would keep upping that score to make it more and more challenging to get a replay because they figured you were going to keep pumping coins into it anyway, and of course they were going to keep playing, so

why should we give it you a free game. There's also the whole three ball versus five ball thing, where you could set it to either be a three ball game or a five ball game, and of course if you found a five ball game, you said, all right, I'm gonna be here, this is what I'm gonna play. But yeah, yeah, I did set the bar pretty high. And it didn't help that there were other pinball machines that started coming out that really catered to the hardcore

pinball enthusiast. I mean, it meant that the pinball enthusiasts were they loved it, but it acted as a barrier for anyone who enjoy wanted to wanted to play pinball, but didn't understand all the different modes and all the different tricks you needed to do in order to score well. So it just became a confusing experience for anyone who wanted to get into pinball. So that also really hurt

the game overall. And to that, the rise of video games, especially really good video games, and uh um, the the temporary demise of the video game market. A lot of the people that were making video games were also making pinball machines. So when the coin operated arcade sort of went out of style there for a while, some of the people who were making pinball machines failed, some of emmerged and then failed, And now a few years ago

there were only two companies. Now Stern Pinball is the only company ball machines here, and uh, you know, I don't know of any I don't know of anybody else worldwide. Those old Bally and Williams games, they were fantastic, they were so much fun. Let's talk a little bit about some of our favorites. Um uh. One of my favorites is also one of the games that actually, I think uh contributed to the downfall of pinball, and in fact, even the creator of the game would tell you that,

and it's twilight Zone. Twilight Zone was an amazing pinball machine, but it also was one of those that was really geared for the hardcore pinball enthusiasts. So people like me, we loved twilight Zone, but anyone who just stood came up to play it would get really frustrated pretty quickly and then never play pinball again and the designer for twilight Zone was Pat Lawler. Pat Lawler is kind of a legend in the pinball field, even though really he came in on the scene pretty late. He wasn't like

one of the people who shaped what pinball is. But he designed some of the greatest pinball machines from the you know, late eighties and uh into the nineties and up to today. Um and twilight Zone was one of them.

And he actually said that, yeah, they thought they didn't have any real limits on what they could do because before he built twilight Zone, he built the Adams Family, which is my all time favorite machine ever, one of the best pinball machines ever in my opinion, and uh, it was so successful that they essentially had uh a you know, an open sky to design twilight Zone. And he said that was the problem was because they were

allowed to do anything. They put everything in it and then made it so complicated that only the hardcore enthusiast wanted to play it. But um also he designed Funhouse, which had Rudy the talking ventriloqu with dummy head that would insult you as he played the game, and you could knock the ball into his mouth and activate multi ball that way, and it was pretty cool. My other favorites were Theater of Magic, Medieval Madness, Monster Bash, Junkyard.

I loved Tommy Who's Tommy That had a mode where as you're playing, a shield would come up and block your view of the flippers, so you had to play blind. Um. I actually would use the There was a way you could start off that way and just play the whole game blind, and that's how I would play because I'm hardcore. And there's one other game I want to mention, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, not because it was awesome, but because it gave you the chance to choose which music you want

to play. You could either play the the soundtrack from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or you could play Edgar Winter's Frankenstein. Oh nice, I think you know which one I chose. Yeah, I'm sure. Don't don't done, don't done. That's all I can home about that before we have to pay your turn.

It's funny because Internet Pinball database actually lists most of your favorites in the top ten of all player rated games, and they are awesome games of Twilight zon Zone being number one and those would be the solid state games. I would guess, yes, mechanical ones. You know they have

a separate list for electro mechanical um mine. Actually high Speed I really loved High Speed UM which kind of makes me sad now because that was one of the ones that I really really enjoyed playing, and then now I know it was sort of the beginning of the end UM. But I also loved Space Shuttle. That was one of the games that I played all the time when I was growing up. Just just happened to be

a lot of those machines floating around out there. Um almost as if in zero G. But now I feel like going roller skating and Jerry knee high simply because you know, this whole pinball thing is bringing that up. So and you know, there are a lot of places on the web where you can read about the care and maintenance of pinball machines, and there are auctions out there where you can purchase pinball machines. Yeah you can. You can still buy them, Yeah you can. You can

find them on sale. I would be very careful about buying them, just to make sure you know you've got a reputable seller before you you engage in something like that, and uh yeah, definitely look into the whole uh um maintenance issue too, because these machines do require a lot of upkeep to keep them running smoothly. There's just a lot of moving parts there and uh and things do need to be replaced and h and repaired over time.

So it's it's a really cool thing if you want to pick up a hobby, especially if you're interested in electronics. But they're expensive and they you require a lot of work, so keep that in mind. Yeah, um, just we need to close up here, but I wanted to uh tell you that if you haven't seen the episode of How It's Made on Science Channel that tells you how pinball machines are made, there is a clip from that on how stuff Works dot Com and I totally recommend that

you see it because it's it's really interesting. You you uh, you'll see when they pull the you know, when they're putting the playing surface together that uh, I mean, the whole underneath of it is just like spaghetti with all the wires and gadgets and stuff that it takes to do it. Um, but it's fascinating stuff to see how

they actually have to wire everything together. And also if you are interested in buying a machine and really thinking about the maintenance involved, scare the crud out of you, right, I have to deal with that. It's it's a lot, So check out our article. You can find that at how stuff works dot com. Check out our blogs. You can find a link to that on how stuff works

dot com. Remember that Chris and I do a live show every two day at one pm Eastern, so that's also you can find us to that on Hey what's that website? Post up work struck. Thank you Chris, And if you want to ask us any questions or send us suggestions anything like that, write us at tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and we will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com? Let us know what you think. Send an email to

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