arborelia

Silver Ball Century ep. 24 - Fall 1977 - BAOOO

List of tables in this episode, also described in the section below

Tonight's episode of Silver Ball Century brings us to the end of 1977. We'll see a previously unannounced appearance of Gottlieb's first solid state table, Cleopatra, which I previously thought wasn't going to work. We'll also see Williams' first solid state table, Hot Tip, and an unusual cult favorite table, Interflip's Dragon.

Silver Ball Century goes live tonight (Thursday, May 22) at 8pm Eastern, on twitch.tv/arborelia.

The dragon says: "BAO"

Interflip's Dragon is surprisingly well-known today, compared to other Spanish tables from the '70s, and there's one clear and unusual reason.

Interflip is one of the Spanish manufacturers who distributed their machines overseas. They sent a shipment of 160 Dragons to "John's Jukes" in Vancouver, which went out of business in the early '80s and went into receivership. The machines sat in a warehouse until 2006, when legal matters were finally cleared up to make the inventory available.

At that point, it became possible to buy a new-in-box 1977 pinball machine, which is an amazing thing if you're into classic pinball. Several locations did. I've played at least two different Dragons.

I'm paraphrasing this from the Pinside forum for Dragon, which also contains this picture of the shipping label, from new-in-box Dragon owner tatman9999:

A worn shipping label in Spanish, tracking 160 units of Dragon sent from Madrid to Vancouver.

The other cool thing about Dragon is that the dragon-head targets make a cool noise when you hit them, with an electronic noisemaker installed into an otherwise EM table. Players have described the noise as "moo" or "BAOOO". The copy of Dragon at Velum Fermentation in Pittsburgh emits a powerfully amplified BAOOO that is the loudest sound in the whole pinball area. The other copy I played was only up to making a feeble "weeee". The recording used in VPX goes "moo".

If you talk about Dragon on BlueSky, you are likely to summon pinball legend Bowen Kerins, who I hope ends up reading this post and correcting anything I got wrong.

Yo ho, yo ho, a Gottlieb life for me

When I've been providing links to the VPX recreations of solid state tables, I've made sure to link to the ROM as well. Most pinball ROMs are readily and legally available, given they're an essential component of machine maintenance. Usually, you can get them from a canonical source like IPDB, or even directly from the manufacturer if they're in business.

Gottlieb is an exception. The holding company that owns Gottlieb's IP does not want you to have Gottlieb ROMs, or even manuals for the machines, unless you pay them. I will not be linking to Gottlieb ROMs here.

You might find a way to acquire the ROMs anyway. By which I mean, of course, hooking up the ROM dumper you own to the circuit boards of Gottlieb pinball machines that you also own. Not by Googling or anything.

Also, there's an issue where many people had an incorrectly-dumped base ROM for Gottlieb System 1. An update to PinMAME, the emulation component used in VPX, broke compatibility with the incorrect ROMs. If you have a new version of PinMAME (3.6 or later), you will need new, accurate ROMs for it, and vice versa.

When I didn't know what was going on here, I didn't think I would be able to play Cleopatra, Gottlieb's first solid state game. Now I do, so it's on the schedule tonight!

Tables in this episode

#pinball #silver ball century