#pinball

Pinball 2000 was Williams' last platform and in a lot of ways it was the culmination of every possible quality of life improvement they had come up with the previous generations. The idea was that you could have an extra playfield, that you just quickly swapped out at the location so you could clean and repair the old one at the privacy of your shop without a nosy drunk giving you their repair advice. Thanks to this, you can literally disconnect and remove the playfield in seconds, a thing that in many other platform takes forever and needs help to lift the playfield. It does not have the prop rod like virtually every previous machine ever had, but the playfield rails are at the very back, so when you lean it against the backbox, everything is nicely at your reach. The 1/3 pulled out position is also there for those of us who prefer to do flipper rebuilds that way. One fun detail is that you can leave the balls in the game, there's a flap that closes the ball trough when the playfield is in upright position. #pinball #arcade #repair #retrotech #mildlyinteresting

The crappy flipper buttons, don't get me started on those! Since the beginning of the time everyone used the kind where the moving part of the button was secured by an e-clip. Then something happened (early enshittification?) and a model where the center was just pushed in place surfaced. It had a small collar to prevent the center from just jumping out of the button frame, but that wore off from normal wear and tear, leaving surprised players with the flipper button center in their hands mid-game! The Mandalorian seen here is just from the era where the good old model had made its comeback and in this case the button wasn't a total loss, the e-clip had just come off for some reason. Oh and the black ones are relatively rare, I think the Mando is the only one of mine to have those. #pinball #repair #pinrepair