Installed a tilt bob, which had to go on the right side due to how I'd routed the wiring, etc. Even in this position I'm still going to need to trim the rod some to keep it from catching on stuff. Plus I need to earplug it!
With that installed, I realized I still had no way to kill power to the flippers, so I installed some relays too. Now the tilt works properly in game, and the flippers also aren't energized when there isn't an active game.
While opening the game to check on something, I noticed I had four pinballs piled in the front left corner of my cabinet. Occasionally, balls hit by the right outlane saver will airball over the lower left flipper/guide and fall down in there, and rather than grasping around for them I just grab another ball
So I set up an airball catcher, made from scrap lexan and attached to the existing ball guide
In order to get the height right, I also had to put the glass back in, which was a problem since I didn't have any siderails. I dug a pair of stern side rails (from replacing with lollipop rails) out of my spare parts, and they seem to fit the williams cabinet fine. Eventually I'd like to get proper williams rails on there, but I need to get the secondary holes for the extra flipper buttons, so that's been on the backburner. Since the stern rails are narrower, they fit above the buttons fine.
My lockdown bar is also still covered in rust, so I grabbed one from my whirlwind for now, and for the first time actually had the game assembled with glass+lockdown bar. It's surprising how much of a difference this makes. The game feels much more like a 'real' game. A lot of the noise gets quieted down, which also makes the gameplay feel smoother. A big improvement, although I still need to get a coin door skin somewhere...
With the mechanisms quieted by the glass however, it becomes much more obvious that I don't have any sound effects! I think this is going to be a big focus soon; I need to start finding (or recording) sound effects and callouts for everything. I'm not really sure how I want it to sound either. Most card themed pinball machines are EMs, and the solid state ones fall into that weird early 80s state where the only sound effects that could be generated were laser blasts and explosions (Eight Ball Deluxe always stood out to me for this). By the time sound designers were free to use any sound effects they wanted, poker themes weren't really popular. I think the only two games that'd fit that category are High Roller Casino and World Poker Tour. For better or worse, the sounds on those have never really stood out to me, to the point where I can't actually remember what they sound like to use as a reference. For a while I was tempted to stick a chime box in this game and call it done, but I'd like to try to get some actual sound effects in.
For now, I think I'm going to try to make all the sound effects be related to actual poker. Chips clinking, cards being shuffled, etc. Not a ton to work with but maybe it'll be enough. Not sure how that'll feel as a pinball game either though....
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