The 8 Year Rule

In a recent kerfuffle, Sonos (makers of mid-high speakers) announced that out of necessity, they’d soon cease support for new updates to some of their older equipment. Twitter got mad, bloggers blogged, tech pundits bristled while others apologized. It was a whole thing. The Sonos CEO issued further statements to add clarity and to try to calm the mob.

In the hobby of retro gaming we are constantly reviving 30+ year old gadgets. It occurred me that in other parts of my life (when looking at products) I operate under a proclivity to be selective in some cases and lax in others in adapting new tech. As as much an exercise in introspection as explanation, I thought it might be good to look at this topic and ultimately consider how to might apply to the retro-gaming, arcade and pinball hobbies.

A while ago, I got a text from a pinball-player friend.

I met him in front of a 80’s constructed home on an oversized lot in one of the largest subdivisions in our region, about 3,000 homes. He was playing coy b/c he had found a steal. As we walked down the basement to find his snag, I felt like we were transported to 1996. 1990’s furniture (in surprisingly good shape) buffeted a room with 1990’s Bose sound equipment, a ping pong table, a period entertainment center and in the corner of the room a mid-90’s Williams Pinball of some renown: Tales of the Arabian Nights. 25+ year old electronics, all of it.

The thing is, the stereo and tv still worked. The pinball machine needed some repair (which was why he bought it as a fixer-upper) but it was totally repairable with skilled hands and bench-typical soldering tools.

A Thought Experiment

Now, imagine the technology you have today in your living room, your gameroom or your pocket and imagine jumping ahead 25 years to walk in the room exactly as it is today. Sort of like Sam Flynn flipping on the lights in his Dad’s arcade.

How well do you think your smartphone will work? If the battery hasn’t exploded in the intervening time, the cellular network will surely no longer support the same mixture of communication protocols and radio frequencies we call LTE. Probably a commercial running on the holo-emitter for “17G, from Disney Wireless: All the power to drive your 20k holo-displays.”

Your smart-home devices, will they work? “Alexa, turn on the pinball machines.”
The internet will look dramatically different 25 years. More than likely having long sense dropped support for IPv4. Your cable or DSL modem will no longer have a compatible peer to connect to. No way 2025 is still using DOCSIS 3.1 over hybrid-fiber-coax. DSL probably won’t even exist.

The fancy fridge you bought with a giant iPad on the door - still doesn’t make ice correctly and while it keeps your food moderately cold, the display’s internals have long-since failed. The wifi-connected stove doesn’t turn on anymore. The motherboard has failed in your smartphone-accessible Washer and Dryer.

I know, it’s a long walk to a known conclusion

Technology ages in dog-years.

Specialized & physical vs generalized & virtual

That 25 year old Pinball machine is powered by solid state through-hole components. Electrolytic capacitors, carbon composite resistors, field effect transistors. The smallest components are still easily serviceable with a desoldering pump and soldering iron in most cases. Even better, the full original board schematics are available for free and are part of the public domain.

Simple logic gates and good electrical design make that 25 year old boardset as easily repairable today as it was 25 years ago. What’s more, it is repairable with 40-50 year old tools. I can fix nearly anything on these games with a good multimeter, diode tester, soldering tools & a logic probe. Hell, even the sound and logic ROMS are available so you can burn new ones.

WPC-95, WPC-DCS, SAM, Sega WhiteStar, DE V3 are all pretty simple to maintain with common bench tools.

No operating system, just (relatively) simple, well-documented logic circuits.

But, technology must advance. Excelsior!

Most modern JJP, Stern or Chicago gaming machines have some flavor of Linux at the bottom of the stack. For you non-PC folks, Linux is an Operating System, like Windows but not. MacOSX under Intel architecture is a Linux-adjacent operating system in some ways. Embedded Linux and Embedded Windows are what we call it when the OS runs as part of a distinct hardware framework or chipset. Odds are that your media center DVR, your smart fridge, your connected-washer & dryer, your smartphone, your Alexa Speaker and yes: even your Sonos speakers are running some flavor of an embedded Linux OS.

Operating systems are bootstrapped hardware abstraction platforms. Layers of hardware-interface software (drivers) with numerous common services and platforms on top. These services encapsulate and simplify more complicated tasks. Things like the 3d graphics and physics engines OpenGL or DirectX on PCs or METAL on iOS. Things like a Network IO stack for communicating with other machines and local IO Services for interfacing with peripherals. When you have to wait 6 minutes for Windows to boot or 45 seconds for your old Android phone to boot - you are watching the hardware load the operating system and related services.

Embedded-circuits are designed and purpose-built to provide a certain set of behaviors time after time. There is no operating system in the traditional sense outside of instructions encoded to roms and processors. A real “computer” has an operating system and is suited for tasks that require higher complexity or more dynamic. Ultimately, you can sometimes get away with using a computer beyond the limited constraints of its limited design but an embedded circuit will rarely show the same level of adaptability.

Without knowing the symbols the pinball diagram looks incredibly complex and difficult but if you trace functions by pinout to their related circuit you can use these schematics with success to get to your problem areas. The key is reducing your focus to parts of the board related to specific feature features. In the schematic above, when a switch that is ultimately connected to J2 on the board no longer works, you can pretty readily isolate all of the components in the circuit to find your problem area.

Software stacks are often more complicated to troubleshoot, sometimes by design. The schematics for your 25 year old pinball are available but the source code for Windows (usually) isn’t. In addition you still have the risk of underlying hardware that will eventually fail but with often less-clear symptoms.

Through-Hole vs Surface Mount

Modern logic boards (PCBs, motherboards, etc) are comprised of mostly surface mounted components while older equipment was often through-hole. That is to say that an older Arcade or Pinball mainboard might have a bank of dozens of resistors and half-dozen transistors that are stuck through holes in the board and soldered in place, interfacing with traces that were printed on the board. By comparison, modern PCBs are mass-produced and often the components are laid down in a very specific grid (envision the mesh that holds together tile backsplash but super-tiny) and later applied to the host board with hot-air.

Surface-mount components are a fraction of the size of their through-hole counterparts, in most cases. They are also often “different” in some way, internally. For instance, 80’s and 90’s resistors are usually of carbon composite construction where modern resistors are “film” constructed. Guess which ones are more reliable? It’s debatable. In theory, a smaller component with less conductive material should generate less heat. (Heat is the enemy because temperature cycling contributes to component failure over time.) But, smaller isn’t always cooler. When smallness is achieved be densely packing components together the heat scale can often go the other way.

A modern i5, i7, i9 processor bottoms out at around .014 micron. That’s equivalent to 2.7 billion transistors packed into a roughly 1 inch square. It gets hot.. quickly! Hot components = reduced service life.

Side Note: If we were to print a schematic for the typical i7 quad-core processor with the same scale as the pinball PCB schematic above, it would wrap around the earth at the equator once. So that other schematic seems more manageable eh? :)

A Tech stack, for Tech stack’s sake

Modern Pinballs, Arcades, Refrigerators, Smart Speakers, Dishwashers, Toasters and more have tiny low-powered computers on them running a manufacturer variant of some operation system or another. This allows your smart speaker to connect to your favorite music streaming service over wifi, your Sonos multi-room audio to sync up, your Galaga/MsPac Reunion to boot an emulated version of the original games.

We’ve been in a trend where “tech layers” get added to everything from kitchen appliances to the company operations of luggage manufacturers and other traditional companies.

Hey, computers are great and tech can enhance our lives. When you attach a computer to an appliance you immediately speed up the aging process for that appliance. Today’s smart fridge with 3 cameras and a smart assistant is tomorrow’s bricked android device.

It wasn’t uncommon for our parents to get 30 years out of a dishwasher or washing machine. Now, they have motherboards (single-board-computers or SBCs) that run a software stack to enable the smart features. Even your LG, Samsung, Vizio Smart TV is partially monetized from aggregate data collection on how you watch it and which smart apps you choose. You totally read the privacy policy, right?

This marriage of technology provides a wonder of convenience, sure. But will that LG wifi-enabled Dishwasher stand the test of time? It isn’t reasonable to assume so. I’m a programmer. I’m proficient in many languages, can muddle my way through anything from an a mainframe to cloud services backed machine learning running on a smart phone. Even I.. a card-carrying nerd find myself eyeballing needless tech in appliances as potential future weaknesses.

8 Years

The number I’ve settled on is: 8 years. That $1000 wifi-connected washing machine? In 8 years you’ll (probably) need another. That Nest Thermostat? Plan to replace it in 8 years. The crazy-awesome technology features in your new Ford? 8 years.

Granted there isn’t an actual 8-year electronics death clock out there running somewhere in ULs labs.

The 11 year old somewhat-computerized stereo bluetooth nav system in our SUV still works.. mostly. We all have 30+ year old consoles that still work. I have a 2009-era iMac that works. But, I suspect that these are more attributable to Honda, Apple and Nintendo using quality parts or over-speccing components.

When these tiny components fail, it usually isn’t a complete failure either. The preset station ‘4’ on my 08 Mercedes Convertible no longer recognized button presses because the surface-mount-resistors around the button had failed. That Harmon Kardon stereo would still Jam, though. In fact, I think I miss that radio more than the car… (focus, Bill.. focus..)

When the SUV’s bluetooth controller failed, I was able to fix it once with a heat gun and eventually replace it for about $400.

Increasingly, I’m feeling the trueness of that “they don’t make them like they used to”, sentiment being muttered at barber shops and country breakfast buffets across our fair land.

And it’s true: They don’t. They use machines to make other machines that are (in some ways) millions of times more complicated than what was necessarily 2 decades ago.

That’s progress. I’m not railing against it but I want to have fair expectations.

Bringing it Back to The Hobby

Every new Stern Pinball designed after 2015 has Single Board Computer (SBC) in the back box. It handles lamp control, registers switch hits and powers coils through a modular system of ethernet-connected peripheral PCBs (node boards).

Stern SPIKE:
Proprietary SBC in the Back, Many Proprietary PCBs in the Cabinet

Stern's SPIKE 2 System (in the backbox)

Typical Stern Node Board.

Typical Node Board Placement

CGC/PPS:
Proprietary SBC in the Back, Big n’ Honkin PCB in the CAB

Every new CGC/PPS Pinball includes a similar design and adds a half-playfield-length board beneath the playfield that handle coil control, switches, controlled lamps & flashers.

Typical CGC Backbox (SBC Controller)

Typical CGC under-playfield board

Tiny little mass-produced surface mount components in all of it.

JJP:
Blended / Modular Approach

Every new JJP pinball that was ever made includes an actual PC connected to an IO controller to make all of that pinball magic happen.

Hobbit and Woz both used a commercially-available MSI ATX motherboard, ATX power supply mixed with a proprietary IO Controller and sound card. Notably, the IO Controller still has fuse-able circuits and transistors. I credit JJP for these decisions. Those modular designs with open components will-be repairable in 20+ years.

What about The Others?

I personally wouldn’t be too interested in owning a pinHeck-based Spooky title. Nothing against the electronics design so much as the pinball designs themselves didn’t jive with my tastes. I actually like the modular nature of Danesi’s Total Nuclear Annihilation but the clear-coat curing issues around posts scare me off from that game. I don’t know enough about Rick & Morty’s electronics to comment as of this time.

Closing thoughts

Pinball machines are computers now. You know what that means, right? That means they inherit all of the bullshit you get from computers. Boot times, patches & hotfixes and boards that will be increasingly difficult for a hobbyist to repair. Somewhere, someone is having a SCRUM standup related to a pinball software release. shudders poor bastards

Nearly every arcade machine from the 2000’s on have been some form or another of computer. Sometimes they look more like repackaged console systems and sometimes they look more like traditional PCs. But make no mistake - they are PCs. You know what that means right? You shouldn’t be surprised by the failure of the Big Buck Hunter hard drive or Hydro-Thunder PC.

Mario Kart GP/ GP2, Maximum Tune 3, Tekken 5 & order mid-2000’s arcades are running Tri-Force hardware that is very close to GameCube.

Offroad / Hydro / Arctic Thunder looks something like this

On the upside.. It also means you inherit all of the cool stuff attributable from having a computer under the hood. Expandability through software, richer audio-visual experiences, fine-grained control of components (like pinball coil strength or video game joystick sensitivity), social gaming features and a more-connected future.

It also means that we might be entering into a world where our $1000-$15000 collectible toys have a comparably shorter lifespan.

Those tech-stack dog years might not be kind to us.

The next time I buy a “modern” or NIB pinball, I’m leaning towards a CGC/PPS Remake or JJP for the overall build quality and design. Either way, before I buy another NIB or modern pinball (or arcade for that matter) I’m going to ask myself some questions.

• How proprietary are the components of the game?

• Are parts available today and at what cost?

• Is it likely that this company will be operating in 10 years?

• If the company folds, how likely is it parts (or parts analogs) will be available?

• Do they have a customer-support reputation, post-sale?

• What is my average game-retention time? Is the game likely to “age out” in that window?

It is fair to note that in the case of pinball boards, boutique electronics companies filled the void long after the original manufacturers left the space. Rottendog, Alltec, Great Lakes Modular & others stepped up to build replacement boards that blended the old design with modern components. (With subjectively mixed results compared to the originals.) This was made possible through availability of original schematics, ample demand in the community and an increasingly empowered Maker’s culture.

Who knows, maybe 20 years from now we can buy electronically guided, micro-scale hot air rework stations for the price of a shovel at Home Depot, making these boards reasonably repairable again.

Sometimes, the best way to deter obsolescence is to go modular like JJP did. All-in-one solutions will only last as long as the weakest component. For those folks that bought a high end SONOS speaker system, the traditional approach of a receiver + speakers + components would probably have aged better.

Data is Beautiful, Video Game Sales Data is Sublime

I ran into this on the SFGE Facebook page and wanted to share it. Kinda fascinating.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019 Release) Campaign

Story Spoilers for a 3-month old game follow.

COD and Me

I’ve enjoyed all of the Call of Duty campaigns that I’ve played through. Though, admittedly I’ve sat out for a few in the current-gen console releases. The Original Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2, as well as Black Ops and Black Ops II were a neat experience, as were the WW1 & WW2 predecessors.

I still frequently enjoy playing split-screen multiplayer against bots in Black Ops and I used to really enjoy meeting up for squad-based action with coworkers and their ridiculously talented teenager kids. I unfortunately don’t have the pleasure of working with those folks anymore and their teenagers are in college now. So….. yeah, I’m pretty stale.

With increasing focus over the last half-decade towards multiplayer experience juxtaposed against a phoned-in single player experience, I’m happy to see that they spent the resources and gave this Call of Duty a first-class campaign experience.

Campaign

The campaign story-writers did an excellent job of borrowing from (and remixing) elements from recent military history to make the campaign relatable.

A nebulous proxy war with Russia involving Islamic freedom fighters & WMD intrigue? Check!

Old guy with creepily similar name to recent events, big forehead & dirty motives? Check!

Omar Sulaman, Bad Guy du jour

Good guy with bad mustache and familiar sounding voice? Check!

Alex (Mason?) – Aka “Echo 3-1” - I’m redesignating him as: Friendzone

Campaign Mission Breakdown

Fog of War

You are a CIA operator in pursuit of chemical weapons. Military jargon ensues. Characters are introduced. Stuff happens.

Piccadilly

You are in a carload of fellow plain clothes military operators with small arms. Civilians everywhere. How can that go sideways? Shades of the July 7, 2005 London bombings but with some key differences.

Embedded

You are a CIA operator embedded with a group of freedom fighters in the fictional nation of Urzikstan. Conceal carry, amateur masonry and pyrotechnics are on tap for this adventure.

Proxy War

Fight alongside Urzikstan’s freedom fighters as you attempt to neutralize the base of forward operations for a (rogue?) Russian general. Non conventional weapons at your disposal include R/C planes with C4 and molotov cocktails.

Clean house

Follow our favorite SAS operative as you infiltrate a 3 story home occupied by terrorists. Lots of on-rails breach and clear action using suppressed weapons and night vision.

Hunting Party

Meet up with a marine division, make tactical use of a mobile heavy-armor. (Think: Honey Badger from previous installments of the franchise but with more umpf.) Seriously cool and technical infiltration of a hospital with complex cover and unexpected shooting lines. Super creepy friend or foe judgement calls, culminating in a seriously dug in MG nest. I really like this chapter. COD at its best.

The Embassy

The first part of the embassy mission are a combination of the 1979 Hostage Crisis in Tehran, the 1984 Embassy Annex Bombing in Beirut and some fiction sprinkled in for flavor. The second half of the embassy mission is proof someone at Infinity Ward watched 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi and/or read the book it was based on. After evacuating the embassy to a nearby compound, you defend from the rooftops through multiple waves of assault. They have the numbers. They have technicals. They have mortars. You have flares, better guns & training, high-ground that would make obi-wan proud and best of all: drone support, which makes for stark differences from how it went down in the real-life events from which this was inspired.

Highway of Death

You get a sweet new gun with an even sweeter scope. 600 yard shots, you get to deal with distance and wind.. A solid sub-coriolis sniper mission from a poor & exposed position.

Hometown

I could have done without this stage. Origin story from a primary character, you play as a child through the hellscape of an ethnic-cleansing committed by genocidal Russian soldiers under orders from a particularly asshole-ish general.

The Wolf’s Den

This starts as Zero Dark Thirty and ends as the underground staircase from National Treasure.

Captive

Meant to provide character development and motives, this stage instead serves as a first person perspective of torture followed by an unlikely battle with strange technicalities. They convinced me to like this character (and I do) but I don’t like this stage.

Old Comrades

Very much a Matrix-style Agents vs Neo chase scene to capture (alive) as hostile through an improbably large supporting suppression force. I believe I also saw this scene in Hitman’s Bodyguard or Self/Less on Netflix. It has a chase vs fight dynamic that is complicated by limited ammunition and the presence of friendlies along with a “he got away” timer to keep you from digging in for any particular portion of the engagement. It has an uncomfortable conclusion for you black hat gamers who chose to play through it.

Going Dark

A pretty cool night stealth search & rescue mission with a solid technical dynamic of using the environment to increase cover. I liked this stage alot.

Into the Furnace

As far as boss battles go, this.. is one. Lots of shooty-shooty-bang-bang. You start with reasonable armor and aerial support against an uphill, dug-in adversary. You infiltrate a multi-level industrial complex with plenty of cover and unexpected targeting lines. There are drones, sniper rifles, rpg’s, a mini gun, a big Russian dude laughing at you from beneath improbable amounts of armor. There are bad guy monologues and (maybe) some character sacrifices to be made. That’s a big maybe.

Post-Credits

Post Credits scene provide nods to long-term fans of the franchise, hinting to the return of some familiar names and providing a smooth segue into the Special Ops (Co-op missions)

Should I let my kid play this?

Depends on the kid, I guess. It is ESRB rated for 17+ for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes & Use of Drugs. I don’t recall any drug use or sexuality in the game. It is violent and does bring into question some topics like torture, murder of civilians (including children) and these topics can be a bit much for some kids. I let my 14 year old daughter play through parts of it with me and we discussed some of the topics along the way. I didn’t let my 10 year old anywhere near it. YMMV.

Closing Thoughts on the Storyline

The two flashback missions involving Farah Karim are a little jarring in terms of continuity and frustrating in terms of playability. At the end of the first, her and her brother are captured by Barkov and then later you wake up 20 years older, imprisoned by Barkov. Yet, in the intervening time Karim has become a full commander in her militia. So, when did they get let loose as kids? Barkov captured them again as young adults? Why does Barkov look like Lou Diamond Phillips? He doesn’t seem Russian at all Get this man a fuzzy hat or a bear to ride on. Something.

Aside from confusion around General Lou Diamond Phillipski, I thought the story was mostly good. It was also a treat to see Nick Tarabay rendered digitally. I liked his work in The Expanse.

Having grown up playing Red Alert, I’m finding myself uncomfortable with the Zeitgeist that our antagonists always have to be tied to Russia in some way. Can we please just stop antagonizing the other superpowers? Thanks.

Multiplayer

You’ll note the title of this article specifically references Campaign. Lately, my ability to enjoy a multiplayer experience has felt frustrated by the combination of 40-year old twitch reflexes, a wifi-connected PS4 and playing on a larger-than-optimal for competitive-play, TV. I really need “drunk mode”, “old guy”, “big tv”, “distracted room” matchmaking. Get on that, Infinity Ward.

While, I don’t see those matchmaking customizers coming anytime soon, this installment of Call of Duty Modern Warfare Multiplayer brings the ability to play matches between PS4, PC & XbOne owners via something called Cross Play. Destined to answer once and for all the question of which is better: Keyboard & Mouse or Gamepad, I think this is a really neat and hopeful turn in multiplayer dynamics. Other games have done it with mixed success but I’m glad to see Infinity Ward take a stab at it.

Build it and they Will Come

A great multiplayer platform is one that is open enough for unexpected things to happen but closed enough so that it doesn’t get out of hand. You’d like players to discover new combinations of perks, loadouts, kill-streaks and score-streaks to be able to create stand-out moments that get everyone pumped and are share-worthy.

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Enemy team was talking trash so we hit’em with that Beta cheese from r/modernwarfare

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In the same accord, you don’t want the entire game to migrate under the map through boundary-clipping bugs or certain load outs that create repeatable lopsided advantages.

Such glitches have riddled Call of Duty games and other (more?) popular battle royale-style multiplayer games.

For games with this sort of visibility, studios usually do an admirable job of patching them quickly. It’ll be interesting to see if Crossplay makes that easier (or harder) given the particular implementations of PSN, xBox Live & PC Net gaming.

So far, what little I’ve played of the COD multiplayer has me wishing for those days when we’d squad up with coworkers a few nights, each week. Between the solid campaign and a strong multiplayer it seems like Infinity Ward has a winner on their hands with 2019’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

RetroStone 2

yeah, my living room table is a little bit of a catch-all. keepin’ it real, ya’ll.

On a cold night one of my favorite things to do is to sit by the fire with a handheld game system. This simple wish was my hope for the RetroStone 2. I’ll briefly walk you through how that’s worked out, so far.

What’s a RetroStone?

There have been a myriad of portable retro gaming offerings over the last few years in a variety of form-factors. Everything from jailbroken PSP’s or PSP-clones to custom-built raspberry pi handhelds and everything in between.

Looking ahead for the holiday gifts, I ran across the Retrostone through a few articles & reviews. In the process I found that they were planning a hardware refresh, the Retrostone 2.

Pi-based retro gaming systems have been popular projects over the last few years. Even Amazon has Raspberry Pi-based kits that can be built into NES, SNES and other clone cases. For a small fee, including SD cards pre-loaded with games and ready to go. Over the holidays I bought my son this handheld retro multi-game from Amazon.

The Retrostone is essentially this, built into a Gameboy-esque case. The average Gameboy multi console on Amazon costs between $45-$100, the one I mentioned above was $60. This Retrostone 2 costs around $225 by comparison. I ordered the Pro version in order to get the 8gb NAND and gambling those load outs would ship first.

Hardware

The Retrostone 2 runs an ARM Cortex-A7 A20 processor running at 1.0GHz.

Why they opted for the custom board vs the $35 Raspberry Pi 4, I’m not sure. Assuming it has something to do with power draw.

At first impression, I’m seeing performance issues galore but this 1Ghz dual-core should be more than enough for most classic games.

For now I'm going to just have to trust the smart-guys’ judgement on this.

Complication Station

This is the part that’s annoying. Because of the legal and licensing minefield associated with such things, the RetroStone comes without any software installed. You have to handle that part and as far as I can tell there isn’t an abundance of folks willing to stick their necks out with pre-configured microSD cards. Like most MAME and console emulator builds these things are a kludge of loosely related bits of mostly volunteer maintained open source software. I’ll try to remove some of the “who does what”, below.

Retrostone runs RetroOrangePi, which is a bundle of various open-source tools optimized for the Allwinner CPU.
RetroOrangePi includes a variation of Armbian, a Debian ubuntu linux distribution for ARM CPUs.

It also includes RetroPie, which itself includes RetroArch and Emulation Station. These lines are less clear but you can think of it is a multi layer bean dip with Armbian on the bottom with RetrOrangePi modifications, talking to RetroArch in the middle which is standardizing I/O between multiple emulator hosts and Emulation Station on the top providing a slick launcher front end to launch your games.

Initial Impressions

The Pro versions did ship a few days earlier than the rest, so that gamble paid off a little.

Packaging was good. Lots of padded envelope goodness.

Holding it and pressing the buttons, it had good tactile feel. The case is a bit on the chunky side but I don’t see that as a knock, it feels well built and has good weight. The screen-size, which is report-ably the big upgrade over v1, seems really nice.

From there, my initial impressions are frustrated a bit by the software side of things. On the day my RetroStone arrived, I found dead links at the Retrostone 2 tutorials pages, dead links for some of the RetroOrangePi variants OS and little or no documentation.

In this way the Retrostone 2 reminds me alot of the ArpiCade. Relying on the goodwill of people on an enthusiast forum to get your $200 toy to work. In fairness the Retrostone site and related kickstarter pages are very clear that it doesn’t include software.

I would imagine that is because: lawyers and because: support. I get that, really. But it doesn’t change the frustration level for me as a person that “does computer troubleshooting and programming things” for a living when my hobby has me doing similar computer troubleshooting and programming things to a degree that isn’t expected.

Reading on forums of others who aren’t necessarily as technical and unable to figure it out, I saw an apologist throw out this line:

Why would you expect anything different? Cars don’t come with gas from the manufacturer and guns don’t come with bullets loaded".”

Which, to me, is an asinine comparison considering every car sold by a dealer has a full tank of gasoline and a sticker telling you exactly what kind of gasoline to use. The bullet analogy is misguided too. More accurate would be if you bought a gun and have to make your own shells from existing reload supplies. But,I digress…

First Impression: Oh crap, is It Completely Broken?

My third downloaded image from the RetroOragePI site was labeled “Retrostone 2 Beta” and was under a “Full” heading, implying the build that would include the full linux support. Initial bootup showed a “No Gamepads Detected” welcome screen.

Welcome, indeed.

Clicked all buttons and d-pad, did nothing. I sat it down to grab a whiskey and when I came back, the D-Pad inputs actually worked.
This happens on every boot. A 30-45 second “lock up” and error message complaining about the gamepad.

Looking at the RetroOrangePi forums it seems like this might have been a bug as a result of the late addition of wifi as part of the kickstarter stretch goal. Initially, when I got the error above, I went on to try other (and earlier) Retrostone builds. My thoughts were:

Hey, the kickstarter as all of these screenshots of this thing working, maybe I can get some joy from an older build and just adopt the recent build when its ready for primetime. “

Evidently the existing tutorials and docs for Retrostone 1 don’t apply to Retrostone 2 and I suspect they may not even apply to Retrostone 1 anymore because the software stack has changed considerably.

The most noticeable example of this is in the instructions on how to add games.

Problem is in this version of the software the Start-button popout menu does not include the launch desktop feature.
After some digging, I found the Desktop feature. It is under RetroPie-(System) then RetroOrangePI.

After plugging in a USB keyboard and mouse combo, you have a full X server linux desktop to interact with. From here, you can file copy roms from a thumbdrive to the running machine image so that they will show up in the menus.

UPDATE: After getting to this point, I found this sticky forum post dated 1-7-2020 that covers the location of the Desktop and steps to get wifi connected.

its go time…..?

After successfully solving the escape room UI puzzle to get the linux desktop going and get some ROMS loaded, my brain dropped a little dopamine to give me a spike of excitement that maybe we were ready to rock with this thing!

The result?

Unfortunately that first build wasn’t ready for primetime, at all. At that point in my adventure, every game on the system that I tried across multiple systems (NES, SNES, Megadrive) including those sample games included with the image are too laggy to actually be playable rendering the Retrostone 2 as a paperweight or nerd wall-hanger.

Another trip to the forums and I found a new build was ready, this weekend…

The latest version of the software does have the linux desktop shortcut on the start menu, though when I tried from that menu it locked up. The retroOrangePi shortcut continued to work, though. The dev had a few suggestions following the build that weekend, one was to disable gpio and the other was to change the default SNES emulator to snes9x2002. I believe both of those suggestions are formalized in the latest build.

Lag Fixed? Success!

The latest build was much better. NES, SNES & Megadrive games all seemed to be playable. Sometimes there is a lag but nothing quite as disruptive as before. The latest build starts to normalize the emulation station config, as well. Putting the Desktop feature on the start menu (though that part actually hung when I tried) and tweaking towards a generally cleaner theme.

Summary

My suspicion is that this is one of those projects where the “the hardware team” and “the software team” behind the scenes aren’t fully gel’d up. I suspect, though that those are teams of 1 (person) doing it part-time, for fun on the side. (But that’s just a guess.)

Over on the software side, I’m monitoring the forum and trying to send good vibes to the volunteer work going on to solve some of these problems. I’m trying to be useful but not in the way. I’m not really mad at them, seems like they got the final hardware on the same day I did. Alexkidd released a few builds this weekend, alone & I expect there will be future updates while it has his attention.

I’m not really mad at the hardware side either.

Over on the kickstarter comments of the hardware side, people are giving Pierre hell about shipping delays and every other imaginable thing. Sometimes kickstarter is like Twitter but worse because everyone paid to be there. I’ve found Pierre to be very responsive over on the 8BCraft site. That said, I didn’t really pick the Retrostone looking for a kit. Had I wanted a kit experience I would have thrown the best possible hardware at it and minimized the software stack to my purposes. It definitely isn’t a polished system right now but I think it has alot of power & potential to be an ultimate handheld solution.

I did get finally get to spend some down time on a cold night with a dog snuggled in on one side, the cat snuggled in on the other, a black coffee on the table and some retro gaming goodness in my hand..

Concluding Thoughts

I’m good w/ my purchase but at this time I don’t think I can actually recommend the Retrostone 2 given the current state of affairs. This is based solely on value & performance. Retroarch gets chunkier with each release as new, advanced features get piled on. (Things like streaming, recording, network stack support, bluetooth controllers and more.) This creates a platform baseline overhead in CPU and RAM consumption. The Retrostone 2 screen is really quite good but I suspect the choice to step backwards in CPU capability is going to haunt this device’s upgrade potential over time.

of course.. I could be wrong. I’d like to be proven wrong.

I plan to revisit the project in a month to see how it has developed and I’ll update my opinions if I see a performance optimization miracle. In the meantime, I urge patience for those customers of the Retrostone 2 and I also suggest Retrostone 2 customers consider making a donation to the RetroOrangePi developer for their efforts on this project. If you do, reference Retrostone in your donation and it’ll inevitably get the technical love it needs to go from good to great.

Nintendo, The Over-achiever

My son’s been complaining on and off for a couple months that one or more of his Nintendo switch joy-cons were drifting. Thing is, when he handed me the controller it would stop as soon as I gave it an input.

Honestly, it seemed like a nitpick to me and admittedly at the time my Mr Fix-it priority list looked something like this:

1. Why the heck isn’t this c# app compiling and why does Nuget package restore keep failing

2. “Honey”, the car has been making a funny noise

3. “Honey”, the heater fan in the house has been running non-stop for days

4. The lawnmower sounds like a Blue Man Group concert when you engage the blades

5. “Honey”, the gas stove delivery people said they can’t handle the install

6. Medieval Madness’s left orbit kick-out is hanging at the top of the VUK during gameplay

7. Scared Stiff’s crate is eating balls during multiball

8. Galaga’s Fire button is loose

9. Cocktail Table needs to be Degaussed

10. “Explain Common Core Math to me”

11. Christmas is coming

12. Miles’ Joy-Cons occasionally drift.

Finally, over the holidays I took some time for a stay-cation and to catch up on my Mr. Fix-it list and found myself a couple days before Christmas, looking at his Joy Con issue.

Turns out, it is a real thing. I found this article from over the summer: The Verge - Joy Con Repair is a Thing

”Cats in the cradle and the silver spoon”…

..I started to feel like a real Daddy-McJerkface for shrugging off his concerns and not looking at this sooner.

Admittedly, though I have a little controller-spend PTSD, partially attributable to Microsoft.

Yeah, this tool box in my garage is a bit of a mess. Judge not, lest ye be judged.

There, in my garage toolbox, three allegedly broken XBox 360 controllers sit like abandoned Andy’s Toys waiting on me to verify their functionality, fix or throw away. Another 2 or 3 of these $69 money-pits are lurking somewhere in my office as well, awaiting me to get around to repairing them.

Solution

We bought Miles two more joy-cons (which cost about half what the other systems charged) and it only took about 10 minutes to test and identify the affected controllers, fill out the RMA form and print the (free) return label.

Seriously, Nintendo even covered postage.

2 major holidays and 3 weeks later, the impacted joy-cons arrived back - fixed and ready to rock.

If you’ve ever had to endure the mostly common sense Customer-Service training that large corporations thrust upon their employees under the guise of an employee benefit, it goes something like this:

Day One: A look at Disney hospitality
Day Two: Role Playing: Turning a negative into a positive

The gist is that an unhappy customer on the phone is an opportunity to dazzle them and win loyalty.

Looking back, Nintendo really did just that. It was a fast, hassle-free repair arrangement and… at no cost to the consumer, even for shipping? Nintendo is an Over Achiever ya’ll.

Progress Bars are Hard

In 2020 even Pizza Deliveries have progress bars that are more accurate than Windows, Mac, ChromeOS and Linux. Seriously, the math behind a progress bar is:

100 x (([Number of Operations Total] - [Current Operation]) x .1)

But the best and brightest software companies on earth (ever) just show a spinning circle during long operations or a bar that looks like a coked-out squirrel running back and forth at the bottom of your TV.

See below, Nintendo (in partnership with a third party dev firm) ported a version Mario Kart to iOS.

Look at that glorious progress bar… Not only do you get real progress bars but they went so far as to include an extra decimal point. Nintendo is just showing off their mad 4th grade math skills to the world.

I’m sorta half-kidding here but all joking aside that port of Mario Kart from the Switch / Wii codebase is pretty good considering the limiting nature of touch controls.

Speaking of the Nintendo Switch

Maybe the reason I have a sensitivity towards progress bars is that we are stuck staring at them so frequently. Every time I turn on the xBox One (when it worked..) or PS4 it seems like another 10-30gb update is waiting and needs to be applied before you can play.

Meanwhile after being switched off for 2 months, I pick up one of the classic NES controllers for the Switch and press A. It turns on, applies a quick 200mb update and within 20 seconds I’m at the game-selection menu of their quite awesome Classic NES library of games.

Just to appreciate the hidden complexity of that mundane task… This Switch has bindings for 5 total controllers. The controller, which still had a charge -turned on and woke up the Switch, which assigned to Player 1 status and booted up ready to go.

No “resync” the controller nonsense. It.. just .. works.

Repeating the theme “It Just Works” zooming out on the right, huddling in the dark - there is my 35 year old NES which.. also .. still works. Above it, the 23 year old Nintendo-64, still works.

So do all of their accessories.

Meanwhile over at Microsoft…

For contrast: There, beneath a pinball machine amongst a sea of parts totes and a broken guitar amp sits my XBox One. Lonely, unplugged and unplayed for over a year. My $500 Day-1 XBOne was unplugged for good following the 5th optical drive failure and about 16 total hours invested in frustrating technical support/RMA calls and emails with Microsoft.

A VCR-sized paperweight with just about as much utility. Part DVR, part game system, all missed potential and confused strategy.

When it was working, load times were long and update necessity was frequent. X-Box Live was a very good experience, otherwise.

To say I was a Microsoft gaming fan is an understatement. You can find pictures of me standing next to the Master Chief statue at the old XBox offices in Washington following a series of interviews with another division at Microsoft. There are no fewer than 4 working XBox 360s in our home. My license plate was D0tN3t for Pete’s sake.

This was the road from a nearly fanatical apologist fan of all things Xbox to the dusty & dejected hunk of plastic you see above.

Honorable Mention: Playstation

Also: good job, Sony.
In the interest of fairness. Our two PS4’s, PS3 and Vita all work, have always worked and I’ve never had to fix or replace anything on any of them. Their game load times were a little faster between the PS4 and XBone (for the same game title).

Updates and downloads are still large… Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019) needed a 90 gb initial update to be playable but that’s as much on Activision and Infinity Ward as it is Sony. PSN can sometimes be a slight pain or feel like an afterthought by comparison to X-Box Live.

But all things considered the Sony ownership experience has been a solid one, as well. Sony’s exclusive titles haven’t grabbed me like Halo did back in the day but Sony has earned my loyalty.

Conclusion

Ten months from now the next-generation of consoles are going to be competing for your hard-earned money and coveted spot beneath the Christmas tree. As I stare at the two displays trying to decide what to get:

I’m going to remember that the xBox One was a hot-mess designed by the disjointed committee that brought us Windows ME and not the visionary genius that gave us the original x-Box and later made the x-Box 360 so dominant.

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I’m going to remember my overwhelmingly positive ownership experience with Playstation products, how much fun we had with PSVR and how great God of War was.

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Finally, I’m going to remember that for 35 years Nintendo has been making and delivering solid hardware and software with few exceptions On the rare occasion that I had an issue, they made it right. Over-achievers that they are.

The Groovy Goat

The Groovy Goat is a sports bar and restaurant at the OWA Park in Foley, Alabama. They have a giant menu, great margaritas, solid nachos and good service.

In the back of the restaurant or to the left of the park box office, is the Arcade. Attached to the restaurant, it is OWA’s take on the Arcade gameroom.

Big Games

The Groovy Goat / OWA arcade is a pretty traditional redemption arcade. Big games, big cost, little prizes.

This claw machine is about the size of a Prius.

I do like the giant LED matrix versions of Space Invaders and Head to Head Pacman. Be aware, it is on a hard setting with very few lives awarded.

Giant Halo is cool.

Giant Tomb Raider was fun except for the fact that one of the guns was out of order.

I gave my kids two $50 game cards. They lasted about 15-20 minutes before the $100 was spent.
They each got enough digital tickets for one very small stuffed animal, about the size you’d find in a Walmart claw machine.

Takeaway / Impressions

OWA’s redemption arcade is big, filled with big games and generally pretty stingy ticket allocations. The games are usually set to higher-than-average difficulty.

The kids dig it but it isn’t my cup tea.

Ice Cold Beer

First, the Happy Ending

The Road from “Got it!” to “Thank Guinness, it finally it works”

Summary / Timeline

July
With Excitement: Taito Ice Cold Beer!

August
With Anticipation: Taito Ice Cold Beer!

September
With Exasperation: Taito…Pass me an Ice Cold Beer

October
F@!#?@! Taito… Ice Cold Beer.

November
Holy Shit! I finally get to play Taito Ice Cold Beer.

The Snag!

A local collector, knowing I’ve been looking for the game offered to sell me one of his two games so as to make room for two A-Tier titles that were on the way. I was ecstatic. The price was, um…about what you see them go for these days - after all that’s what he had in it too, so I felt it was a square deal (and still feel that way).

Tapper and Ice Cold Beer… They make a pretty pair.

Everything is great, until it isn’t

There was one known bug in the game. The errant-ball-kicker/ solenoid didn’t work. I replaced the solenoid with a new one from Pinball Resource and picked up a power supply modernizer from ArcadeShop.

Usually, these power supply adapters from Arcade Shop are the cat’s pajamas. This time, not so much. The general idea is that it gives you a factory header-side harness where you can bypass the original power supply and run your game from a modern 8-liner without hacking up the harness. Unfortunately, this kit didn’t have full 5v service from the pinout and his suggestion was to solder a 5 volt jumper to the test point pictured above.

Instead… I used a crimped molex pin. Good thing, too. That adapter is a piece of crap so I ended up rebuilding the original power supply instead.

By piece of crap, I mean that - in addition to not being hack-free in terms of connectivity, you can’t get consistent gameplay (I tried several new 8-liners) because the regulated power supply seems to jump around and the 5volt jumper hack created logic problems on my game, causing it to freeze. (and yes I adjusted voltages as best I could..)

It was a little disheartening seeing just how much rust had accumulated. I bought new screws, tumbled and cleaned anything that couldn’t be easily found at a hardware store.

Guide My Balls

I found myself with the need for a new ball guide and a very generous friend sent me a repro from a KLOV contact.
The original was very brittle in places and the ball would actually puncture through at certain points.

As you can see in the video, there are some subtle differences between the original and the repro that matter. This took quite a bit of trial and error to get right.

Solenoid Problem = Board Problem

So, it turns out the issue where the errant ball solenoid wouldn’t fire was an issue with the drive transistors on the PCB. I tested the transistors and one was bad, one was good.

Unfortunately it looks like someone used an EZ Bake Oven and maybe a soldering torch to try to repair this area of the board. Since the board isn’t replaceable I sent it to the venerable Chris Hibler for repair and cleanup.

Chris did his magic, got the transistors swapped out and cleaned up the mess as best he could. The solenoid now fires!

Kicker Hurdle

Unfortunately due to differences between the repro and original ball guides, the kicker assembly plunger was no longer able to engage with the ball. Let’s be honest though, I don’t know if this ever works. Extra unfortunate is that the plunger (2 in the graphic above) is unobtanium. I ended up using a knocker plunger and modifying it for length with a… dowel rod. Yeah… I know.

Concluding Thoughts

I called this “The Out of Order Corner” at the last show I went to.

Fun to play but ownership is not for the Faint of Heart

If you find one at a show, play it early because it will likely be out of order by the second day of the show. I can go through my camera roll and find at least three examples of Ice Cold Beer’s with Out of Order signage. Which, taken as a whole, is surprising considering the game’s simplicity of being 12 switches, two motors, a PCB for logic and a PCB for scoring display. You’d expect the game to have higher reliability than a pinball of the same era but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Remember when I said I bought one from a local collector that had two of them? Yep, his other one is down too..

What Ice Cold Beer has going for it is:

• Theme

• Approachability

• Novel Gameplay

• “Just one more game” X-Factor

What Ice Cold Beer has going against it:

• Poor reliability despite simple electronics

• Poor parts availability

• Poor aftermarket for critical components

• Lackluster Factory Documentation

You can probably tell that, for me, initial ownership has been a bit of a let down. It has been a constant battle over what should be simple stuff that feels more like punching myself in the groin than an enjoyable hobby exercise. At his point of the hour-meter in a typical pinball restoration I would be getting to super-detail OCD items but in this game I haven’t even begun to address the small stuff.

I still have… a screw head that engages with the art. Coin mech, coin door wiring issues... Quieter motors…. Cabinet touch up… EOS adjustments… Ball rail re-true and polish…

To end on a positive note, I’m hoping as I get to spend more time playing the game with family and friends the hassle memories will get crowded out by happier ones.

Fairhope Pins & Pints

Over the weekend I got the pleasure to attend the soft opening at Fairhope Pins & Pints in lovely Fairhope, Alabama. Apologies for the video quality. That’s a re-download of a Facebook live post, a lot gets lost in translation. Like 2.7k of resolution worth.

Fairhope is such a unique town. Looking at the founding documents sounds more like Walt Disney describing his Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow than a typical South Alabama coastal bayfront community.

to establish and conduct a model community or colony, free from all forms of private monopoly, and to secure to its members therein equality of opportunity, the full reward of individual efforts, and the benefits of co-operation in matters of general concern

Fairhope feels more like a New England Hamlet with a tinge of Austin in the artsy-fartsy department. Lots of foot traffic and small boutique shops and eateries. A cool place for a pinball hangout.

The owner is a local collector, enthusiast that resells new pinballs on the side.
..and.. a super nice guy.

A nice turnout for a soft-open. With the weather getting nice, I’ve got really high hopes in this place succeeding in growing the pinball hobby in our area.

As a bonus, it was super nice to get to play some of the newer Stern titles in a more intimate setting than the usual show-floor experience. Star Wars and Deadpool really stood out to me.