Silver Ball Century ep. 20 - Late 1976 - Start Playing With Tomorrow
Welcome back to pinball in 1976. Pinball has been widely legalized and two new pinball companies have appeared!
Atari, riding the wave of the commercial success of Pong, decides to try bouncing around a real ball also. Meanwhile, the thriving Japanese arcade company Sega creates a subsidiary that is (seriously) named Sonic, building pinball machines in Spain and exporting many of them to North America, a business plan I can't comprehend but apparently it worked.
The revolutionary thing about Atari's pinball games for 1976 is they are all made of solid state electronics. Bally and a couple of minor companies have been experimenting a bit with converting their designs to solid state, but Atari is in the unique position of being born digital and not having to convert anything.
Meanwhile, Gottlieb dips their toe into licensed themes with "Canada Dry", and also comes up with two much better machines, "Surf Champ" and "Volley".
Silver Ball Century is live tonight (Tuesday, March 18), at 8:30pm Eastern Daylight Time, on https://twitch.tv/arborelia.
Stream break
This is going to be the last new episode for a while! This may be sad news for you, but it's incredible news for me, because I finally get to have my major gender-affirming surgery.
I can't say for sure when I'll be back. I'll probably be able to do some short, low-key Twitch streams, but I'm guessing it'll be two months before I'm able to prepare and broadcast a new episode of Silver Ball Century.
I'm hoping to squeeze in one more bonus stream: I want to redo episode 2, which fell into the Twitch hole and disappeared, possibly on Thursday night at 8:30pm.
Tables in this stream
Most of these are tables for VPX (Visual Pinball 10). Here are some setup instructions for the current newest version, Visual Pinball 10.8!
To download tables for VPX, you'll need free accounts on VPForums and VPUniverse.
- Surf Champ (Gottlieb) - VPX by Mustang1961
- Volley (Gottlieb) - VPX by loserman76
- Moon Flight and Wood's Queen (Zaccaria) will be played using Zaccaria Pinball
- The Atarians (Atari) - VPX by Wiesshund. For more physically plausible gameplay, I recommend editing the script and setting
FlipperPower = 1500on line 790. - Canada Dry (gottlieb) - VPX by Teisen
- Faces (Sonic) - VPX by Nestorgian. I made the b2s backglass for this one!
- Rancho (Williams) - VPX by klodo81
- Hang Glider (Bally) - VPX by VPinWorkshop
The Atarians, as a solid-state game, needs ROM code that is publicly available on IPDB. Download the one that's labeled that it works in PinMAME, and put it in VPinMAME/roms in your Visual Pinball folder.