One of the wild things about learning to repair old #pinball machines is trying to reverse-engineer dead concepts. There are things that were duh-obvious to the creators that I have to painstakingly deduce over days of effort.
@williampietri
As an avid player of older old pinball, I can maybe assist with that. The latter day old machines, not so much.
@ClaraListensprechen4
Sure! The current thing I'm puzzling over is the relationship between the coin relay and the credit relay. In modern machines, the mental model is "put in coins for credits, use credits to play". But there's some complexity to suggest that there was an older mode where putting in a coin started the game directly. Have you seen that in action?
@williampietri
The earliest basic pinball machines didn't count on people getting good at it, or manipulating the entire machine body to get a remarkably high score, so a TILT mechanism was added later but not a whole lot later.
A TILT condition would wipe out both your score and your credits and lock up the machine until a new coin was inserted.
Every progressive version of pinball always made playing the game harder than earlier versions.
