I recently posted a video about the various tilt mechanism an 80s pinball machine has.
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@apzpins And amazing how little the history of technology is known.
@amoroso I had always expected event the basic understanding would be there, but then I have a friend whose now adult son has never operated a VHS recorder nor a 3.5" floppy disk. He's also completely amazed to see a 5cm thick laptop and wonders why didn't they make it slimmer, which prompted me to show him a draggable with a CRT.
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I recently posted a video about the various tilt mechanism an 80s pinball machine has. It got bit of a viral hit compared to what I normally post and it has reached a lot of new audience. From that I'm amused to see a thing I often come across when talking about things that were made 40 to 50 years ago: people questioning the implementation and suggesting "obvious" ways they should've done it.
A popular take on the various mechanical switches to detect rough-handling a pin is that OF COURSE they should've just put an accelerometer in there! I mean those cost a penny, everyone and their grandma has put one on an Arduino and made a thing that plays Star Wars light saber sounds when you wave it in the air.
But the thing is that while accelerometers did actually exist in the 80s, they were more of space technology compared to what was put in amusement games where a one penny leaf switch would do the job. So amazing to think how ubiquitous low cost technology is these days.
@apzpins I've seen this play out a bunch on Youtube, the comment section is always a wasteland of confidently incorrect 'corrections' underneath a video of someone who clearly knows more about the subject than God
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@amoroso I had always expected event the basic understanding would be there, but then I have a friend whose now adult son has never operated a VHS recorder nor a 3.5" floppy disk. He's also completely amazed to see a 5cm thick laptop and wonders why didn't they make it slimmer, which prompted me to show him a draggable with a CRT.
@apzpins I owned one of those laptops back in the day.
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@apzpins I owned one of those laptops back in the day.
@amoroso Me too. Some I have in my collection are my own old machines, some I've had to reacquire when my teenage old stuff was thrown away as "junk".
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@rlonstein So true.
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@apzpins I've seen this play out a bunch on Youtube, the comment section is always a wasteland of confidently incorrect 'corrections' underneath a video of someone who clearly knows more about the subject than God
@gloriouscow Any major social media or video sharing site comments are always full of that crap. The most common one is a drive by comment, where they watch exactly one second or just read the title and then drop a demeaning comment that also acts as a self-ownage when their claim is debunked by the video. For example I've posted a lot of repair videos that start with the symptoms, some pointing to an obvious fault but I don't really see point of making a video about obvious stuff. So imagine my amusement when the mandatory "Lol R U n00b, of course it's Obvious Fault" comment lands and the video proves it otherwise.
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@rlonstein This has also been very clear, even when looking at late things in the news and their parallels in what I learnt in history lessons. But it also makes me connect so much better to the people back then - when I read about bad people coming to power and majority of the people not instantly resisting, it's so easy to take a stance of "well if I had lived back then, I would've...". Yet now when the same happens again, once again people just try to live on their lives because what was done to a certain group of people didn't directly involve them, yet.
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I recently posted a video about the various tilt mechanism an 80s pinball machine has. It got bit of a viral hit compared to what I normally post and it has reached a lot of new audience. From that I'm amused to see a thing I often come across when talking about things that were made 40 to 50 years ago: people questioning the implementation and suggesting "obvious" ways they should've done it.
A popular take on the various mechanical switches to detect rough-handling a pin is that OF COURSE they should've just put an accelerometer in there! I mean those cost a penny, everyone and their grandma has put one on an Arduino and made a thing that plays Star Wars light saber sounds when you wave it in the air.
But the thing is that while accelerometers did actually exist in the 80s, they were more of space technology compared to what was put in amusement games where a one penny leaf switch would do the job. So amazing to think how ubiquitous low cost technology is these days.
@apzpins It's actually rather amazing that microchip accelerometers have gotten so damn cheap that they're now cheaper than the old "metal weight on a string inside a loop of stiff wire"
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@apzpins It's actually rather amazing that microchip accelerometers have gotten so damn cheap that they're now cheaper than the old "metal weight on a string inside a loop of stiff wire"
@becomethewaifu It's also just how recent those are when it comes to mass produced devices. People have gotten used to every mobile phone having them, but I still remember my first Thinkpad that had it, not because it was intended for for the user's entertainment, but to catch the moment the computer was dropped. This was later incorporated in the HDD itself. I think the peak implementation for the Thinkpad was when someone made a Neverball variant that could be played by tilting the machine itself. Felt like magic. It's also easy to forget how much processing power is needed to actually made real time decisions about it and just how weak the CPUs used in early pinball machines were. Unlike the current generation that are just ARM based Linux computers.
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I recently posted a video about the various tilt mechanism an 80s pinball machine has. It got bit of a viral hit compared to what I normally post and it has reached a lot of new audience. From that I'm amused to see a thing I often come across when talking about things that were made 40 to 50 years ago: people questioning the implementation and suggesting "obvious" ways they should've done it.
A popular take on the various mechanical switches to detect rough-handling a pin is that OF COURSE they should've just put an accelerometer in there! I mean those cost a penny, everyone and their grandma has put one on an Arduino and made a thing that plays Star Wars light saber sounds when you wave it in the air.
But the thing is that while accelerometers did actually exist in the 80s, they were more of space technology compared to what was put in amusement games where a one penny leaf switch would do the job. So amazing to think how ubiquitous low cost technology is these days.
@apzpins huh I never questioned that implementation as I know it was just a holdover from the purely electromechanical game days... and if it ain't broke don't fix it, especially because an arcade tech running a route of machines they maintain will absolutely 1000% appreciate only having to stock one common part, and that one common part works perfectly fine for its job.
now the one time I played a Judge Dredd where the bob had obviously fallen off... lmao
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@apzpins huh I never questioned that implementation as I know it was just a holdover from the purely electromechanical game days... and if it ain't broke don't fix it, especially because an arcade tech running a route of machines they maintain will absolutely 1000% appreciate only having to stock one common part, and that one common part works perfectly fine for its job.
now the one time I played a Judge Dredd where the bob had obviously fallen off... lmao
@apzpins that is the one time I ever successfully Death Saved the ball without tilting hahaha
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@apzpins huh I never questioned that implementation as I know it was just a holdover from the purely electromechanical game days... and if it ain't broke don't fix it, especially because an arcade tech running a route of machines they maintain will absolutely 1000% appreciate only having to stock one common part, and that one common part works perfectly fine for its job.
now the one time I played a Judge Dredd where the bob had obviously fallen off... lmao
@vxo There's a lot of legacy stuff still in pinball that exists just because it has always been like that. Some of it is because the legacy stuff just works and keeps the game feel as it has always been, like the plumb bob tilt that exists in 2026 games just as it existed in 1933 games.
Another thing is the cabinet shape. If you open a modern pin, there's a lot of empty space in the cabinet. But that's where the huge banks of relays used to live, but when they went solid state, they kept the shape so it wouldn't look too alien to the players.
Now there's so much empty space there for smaller of us to explore...
