arborelia

Silver Ball Century ep. 18 - late 1975

Tables in episode 18: Gottlieb "Spin Out", Williams "Triple Strike", Gottlieb "Tiger", Gottlieb "300", Maresa "Big Horse", Bally "Bow and Arrow", Gottlieb "Abra Ca Dabra", and Zaccaria "Red Show"

Last week's post introduced pinball in 1975, and this week we're finishing it up. There's a major development that happened at some point in 1975: the first solid state pinball machine built by a major pinball manufacturer.

Bally's "Bow and Arrow" was released to distributors as an electromechanical game in 1975. They prototyped a solid state version from it, producing 17 copies that were not sold to distributors. So we don't have a release date for the solid state version, because it wasn't released. IPDB lists it under its project start date of 1974.

Solid state technology (transistors and integrated circuits, instead of electromechanical relays and switches) would make pinball easier to design and maintain, and in 1977 it's going to quickly take over pinball, but we get a small preview of it in this episode.

It's not all about that one machine: Gottlieb's "Spin Out" brings back roto-targets, Williams' "Triple Strike" introduces the ten-rollovers-as-bowling-pins playfield, and Gottlieb's "Abra Ca Dabra" is just a really good design.

Episode 18 goes live Tuesday, March 4, at 8:30 PM, on https://twitch.tv/arborelia.

Tables in this episode

As usual, you will need free accounts on VPUniverse and VPForums to download most of these.

With the introduction of one solid state table, we now need ROMs of the game code to emulate with VPinMame. Fortunately, pinball ROMs are not usually a yo-ho-ho sort of thing: they're important tools for maintaining pinball machines, and the ROMs for all major manufacturers except Gottlieb can be readily and legally found on the Web. I'll start including links to the relevant ROM downloads when I can.