Hacking Pinball High Scores | Hacker News Reader

Hacking Pinball High Scores

gwern.net

22 pointssurprisetalk13 comments

Assuming you have physical access to the inside of the machine…

Most all machines from the 80s and 90s (Williams/Bally/Gottlieb) store their high scores and adjustments in an SRAM like a 5101 with a battery backup. They are stored in binary-coded decimal and protected by a checksum.

If you could tap into the bus (possibly while the CPU is halted or by removing it) you could modify its contents.

A common aftermarket mod is to remove the backup battery (they like to corrode) and replace the CMOS RAM with a nonvolatile FeRAM. In that case, just pop it into a programmer like a TL866 and program a new image with your desired high scores.

I’ve considered doing this… I wish my 1.2 billion on my Getaway hadn’t been wiped out…

The links in the article are all annotated with a symbol (showing what happens when you click the link?), which breaks the flow of reading imo. I don't feel this helps communicating the message of the article.

[Example](https://imgur.com/a/wWltrg9)

I agree it's not helpful. The star marks a 'new' link (ie. seen for the first time recently in the website corpus). It's useful for helping flag recently-modified writing or new additions in my essays, where I might have added a bunch of links 15 years after starting the essay, and then the interesting new paragraph jumps out. They are 'starred' as something new which might be worth looking at even if you've read that page before. (Classic but forgotten Web 1.0 design pattern.) Unfortunately, in cases like this, I haven't ever written about pinball hacking before, so almost all the links are new...

I've thought about how to handle it, but haven't come up with a good answer. It may be that since 'blog' posts come with a clear temporal context, compared to my usual pages, it makes more sense to just disable that particular feature on all blog posts. We'll think about it.

Achmiz argues that it makes more sense to define each page as 'new' vs 'old', and disable the black-stars based on that, rather than on whether it's a blog or not. This is more work, but makes more sense (and we might want to do other things based on that binary variable, like emphasize the created date at the top of the page, to warn readers that something is recent and thus still half-baked). So we're implementing that now.

Early 80's, when I was 6 or 7, my best friend had a pinball machine in his basement. The front door "hatch" to it was unlocked and we spend countless hours poking the insides with a long screwdriver to trigger various component. Probably wasn't safe but it sure was fun!

The machines from that era had 75 volts DC sitting around unprotected at the lugs of the solenoid coils.

One hand on the screwdriver and the other hand touching a grounded coin door would have been pretty serious. You were lucky.

> Consider a scenario like "convincing a third party that you got a high score on the pinball machine"

I'm imagining some barfly drinking next to me trying to assure me that they're DDOM, the high score on the pinball machine in the corner, and them pulling from their pocket a notarized certificate to that effect, lol.

"My sealed, postmarked, and notarized certificate stating that my nickname for pinball playing is 'DDOM' is raising a lot of questions about my pinball nickname I really thought I had already addressed."

Story time. A friend of mine in highschool was a ranked pinball player, just significantly better than the rest of us. Their game of choice was Medieval Madness, having logged countless hours on that machine.

As a mischievous high schooler, I was a huge fan of classic con movies like The Sting, and legendary hustlers like Titanic Thompson [1]. One of my favorite stories about him was when he took a standard horseshoe pit, extended it by a foot beyond regulation, and practiced on it for months. Then, at the appropriate time, he challenged a professional horseshoe player who unknowingly playing on a subtly modified field couldn’t understand why all their throws were falling just short.

To that end, I decided to pull a harmless little prank on my buddy.

We were friends with the owner of the local arcade, so after closing one night, I talked to him about a setup I wanted to try. With his permission, I took some adjustable furniture risers and placed them under the back two legs of the Medieval Madness machine.

The result was a subtle increase in the incline (just a few degrees) but it made a big difference in gameplay, especially for someone attuned to the machine’s usual angle. Visually, the machine looked completely normal and indistinguishable from the others. It was nestled between other games, so even if someone had known to look for a difference, the risers were virtually invisible.

Both the arcade owner and I spent the rest of the evening practicing on the steeper table. Naturally, we challenged our friend to play Medieval Madness the following day.

Their game was totally thrown off. I managed to get close to their score which under normal circumstances would’ve been borderline impossible. I didn’t quite pull it off, but I got close.

They were still incredibly skilled, but I remember them muttering under their breath, clearly irritated at missed shots, failing to hit the usual ramps, and even some inexplicable ball drains. I think if they'd played longer they would have swiftly adapted. My armchair analysis is that professional pinball players probably have to subtly adapt to the fact that even the same game across different tables will have subtle variances (strength of flipper solenoids, etc).

I never did tell them what happened.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic_Thompson

At least in my case, that last paragraph holds true. In 2022 I discovered my small town had a few places with big collections of pinball machines. I went from playing a few games after time at the attached bar to skipping the bar and spending hours figuring out the tables, watching videos on how to exploit them, etc. Even though a couple of the places had the same machine, it played totally different depending on which place it was at. Slanted floors, warped playfields, old solenoids on flippers and slingshots all mattered.

It is often the case that a machine in poor repair is already difficult to play, almost without intending it. And from 1999-present, I have found plenty of machines in poor repair, in a convenience store just designed to eat a few quarters. But I have also found them with oversensitive TILT, laterally unbalanced, or the steep incline you describe. I mean, the feet are adjustable!

Sometimes even more egregious are the custom settings on classic video games. You can walk up to a Ms. Pac-Man or a Galaga and find all the action is sped up 1.5x, or just the ghosts/bombs/adversaries are always overtaking you. I think that a few decades of evolution in the ROMs either gave way to crooked ones that could be set to "impossible" levels, or the settings were always there and waiting to be discovered.

So a well-tuned pinball machine was a joy and a pleasure. I played mostly from 1992-1998. I did not enter any tournaments or play competitively. But I had a habit of entering the initials of my current "crush" when I achieved high scores. Sometimes, in a lonely place, I could aim to fill a top 10 board and attribute it all to the object of my affections. Good times!

To some extent playing pinball is hacking the machine.

Nudging it just enough to not cause a tilt. Manipulating the ball to get a high probability of points. Etc.

If you could manipulate the flippers to cause a stack overflow, would that be fair game?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com