Tweet
One of the recent threads on realiability brought up this old memory— one that I had been trying to bury. And since it unburied itself, I had to share it with you. You may not quite appreciate the technical details, especially if you don't have experience with related things, but for those of you with parallel experiences...
One fine day in [don't remember the season], I received an email: I was going to be receiving a test piece. They needed it tested, and follow up done. The game was called Ghost Catcher. It turned out to be a rather small game, probably 2/3 meter square by just under two meters tall: very short and small for an arcade game. The game itself was fairly interesting: it would shoot small white marble-like balls up into a bagtalle-like playfield (think of one of those kiddie pinball games with no flippers, just a lot of plastic pegs for a ball to bounce around in) that was perfectly vertical (the balls fell quickly). Near the bottom of the game was a basket that the player could move back and forth. If he got enough of the balls to fall through the basket, he got a prize.
Sounds pretty good, right? The part that should have warned me was the manufacturer's logo: Coastal Amusements. The company with the cheapest (in all senses of the word) manufacturing anywhere.
Let's start with the way the balls entered the playfield. Most companies would have used a solenoid similar to what's found in a pinball: just a magnetic coil that pulls a metal shaft into the middle of it when voltage is applied. Industry standard, very common, and if it's capable of propelling a 1 1/16" steel ball bearing up a steep pinball ramp at high speed, it's perfectly capable of sending a smaller plastic marble 30cm straight up... but that's not what they used. Instead, they had a motor with a toothed gear on it. There were teeth on about 1/4 of the wheel. This was mated with a plunger that had teeth on it, that would be pulled backwards until the gear on the motor ran out of teeth, at which point the extremely strong spring attached to the plunger pushed it upward, smacking the ball into play.
It worked. Sorta. Except they forgot two things:
1) That much force causes quite a bit of vibration. More than a pinball-type solenoid would, and those are secured quite strongly because of all the issues vibration causes. NOTHING in this game was secured very well at all.
2) They made the gears out of a soft brass-like metal.
Now, if only the problems had stopped there. They needed to read how many balls were sent into play, and stop at a specific number. Most people would use a tried-and-true cherry switch, or something like it. But not these people. For some reason, they wanted optical sensors. Even that wouldn't have been bad if they had used some sane system, but their plan was to take a board that screwed into the back of the playfield, and solder two secondary boards onto the first, one with the emitter, one with the detector. These would then be stuck into the guide pieces on either side of the plunger lane.
OK, let me recap the important parts here: two small PCBs attached to another one by nothing other than solder. Resin core lead-tin solder. In a game that has a lot of vibration.
But we're not done yet! I didn't mention the basket yet! Remember, the player can slide this basket back and forth. There's nothing to slow it down (this is a fast game). Or to prevent kids from abusing it. Even when there's no game playing. Oh, and there's no rubber stops to decrease the amount of banging and smacking this thing does.
Cool, huh? Oh, and this uses optos, too. A single PCB with both emitter and detector, so I don't have a lot of complaints there. But... who in their right mind would attach this to the game with 28 (or maybe 32) guage telephone wire? Yep, you heard that right. Thinner than the 24 guage wire that's considered the smallest you dare go with in a pinball, where everything is firmly secured. As a concession to wiring problems, though, they zip-tied this cord to the framework of the catcher assembly... after I complained about how their test piece sucked.
Now, this game was down over a third of the time it was on test. I recommended that we avoid it beyond the test pieces. That didn't stop corporate from picking up 25 of them. Five years later, we were trying to sell them for $25 each, and I seriously think the only ones we sold were to employees looking for bonfire material.
One fine day in [don't remember the season], I received an email: I was going to be receiving a test piece. They needed it tested, and follow up done. The game was called Ghost Catcher. It turned out to be a rather small game, probably 2/3 meter square by just under two meters tall: very short and small for an arcade game. The game itself was fairly interesting: it would shoot small white marble-like balls up into a bagtalle-like playfield (think of one of those kiddie pinball games with no flippers, just a lot of plastic pegs for a ball to bounce around in) that was perfectly vertical (the balls fell quickly). Near the bottom of the game was a basket that the player could move back and forth. If he got enough of the balls to fall through the basket, he got a prize.
Sounds pretty good, right? The part that should have warned me was the manufacturer's logo: Coastal Amusements. The company with the cheapest (in all senses of the word) manufacturing anywhere.
Let's start with the way the balls entered the playfield. Most companies would have used a solenoid similar to what's found in a pinball: just a magnetic coil that pulls a metal shaft into the middle of it when voltage is applied. Industry standard, very common, and if it's capable of propelling a 1 1/16" steel ball bearing up a steep pinball ramp at high speed, it's perfectly capable of sending a smaller plastic marble 30cm straight up... but that's not what they used. Instead, they had a motor with a toothed gear on it. There were teeth on about 1/4 of the wheel. This was mated with a plunger that had teeth on it, that would be pulled backwards until the gear on the motor ran out of teeth, at which point the extremely strong spring attached to the plunger pushed it upward, smacking the ball into play.
It worked. Sorta. Except they forgot two things:
1) That much force causes quite a bit of vibration. More than a pinball-type solenoid would, and those are secured quite strongly because of all the issues vibration causes. NOTHING in this game was secured very well at all.
2) They made the gears out of a soft brass-like metal.
Now, if only the problems had stopped there. They needed to read how many balls were sent into play, and stop at a specific number. Most people would use a tried-and-true cherry switch, or something like it. But not these people. For some reason, they wanted optical sensors. Even that wouldn't have been bad if they had used some sane system, but their plan was to take a board that screwed into the back of the playfield, and solder two secondary boards onto the first, one with the emitter, one with the detector. These would then be stuck into the guide pieces on either side of the plunger lane.
OK, let me recap the important parts here: two small PCBs attached to another one by nothing other than solder. Resin core lead-tin solder. In a game that has a lot of vibration.
But we're not done yet! I didn't mention the basket yet! Remember, the player can slide this basket back and forth. There's nothing to slow it down (this is a fast game). Or to prevent kids from abusing it. Even when there's no game playing. Oh, and there's no rubber stops to decrease the amount of banging and smacking this thing does.
Cool, huh? Oh, and this uses optos, too. A single PCB with both emitter and detector, so I don't have a lot of complaints there. But... who in their right mind would attach this to the game with 28 (or maybe 32) guage telephone wire? Yep, you heard that right. Thinner than the 24 guage wire that's considered the smallest you dare go with in a pinball, where everything is firmly secured. As a concession to wiring problems, though, they zip-tied this cord to the framework of the catcher assembly... after I complained about how their test piece sucked.
Now, this game was down over a third of the time it was on test. I recommended that we avoid it beyond the test pieces. That didn't stop corporate from picking up 25 of them. Five years later, we were trying to sell them for $25 each, and I seriously think the only ones we sold were to employees looking for bonfire material.
Comment