Silver Ball Century ep. 21 - Winter 1977
Silver Ball Century returns this Thursday!
No, I'm not fully recovered and ready to do long streams again. So we're covering 1977 as four short streams, which I think I can handle. Winter 1977 is what I'm calling the first stream, with machines released in January through March 1977.
I think of 1977 as the year that solid state pinball takes over. Most of the new designs are still EM, but Bally alone sells tens of thousands of solid state machines, taking a majority of the market. (Williams, Atari, and a new company named Stern Electronics sell a smaller number.) Operators see solid state machines, which are lighter and easier to maintain, as a clear advantage, and Bally's head start in solid state manufacturing pays off hugely for them.
In this first episode of 1977, we see just one solid state machine: Bally's Night Rider. It's a well-known classic and its scoring absolutely sucks, and we're going to see why.
This episode goes live tonight (Thursday, April 24), at 8 PM Eastern, on twitch.tv/arborelia.
Tables in this episode
Most of these are tables for VPX (Visual Pinball 10). Here are some setup instructions for the current newest version, Visual Pinball 10.8! Zaccaria Pinball is a separate application that can be bought on Steam.
To download tables for VPX, you'll need free accounts on VPForums and VPUniverse.
- Jacks Open (Gottlieb) - VPX by Goldchicco
- Big Deal (Williams) - VPX by Klodo81
- Aerobatics (Zaccaria) - in Zaccaria Pinball
- Nautilus (Zaccaria) - in Zaccaria Pinball
- Night Rider (Bally) - VPX by Goldchicco - ROM available on IPDB
- Prospector (Sonic) - VPX by loserman76
The Pinball Primer has guides to four of these tables (not the Zaccarias).