Hi Jim,
Yeah, there are possibly hundreds of different pinball designs. Though
for newbies sake I wanted to give just a basic design for a reference.
However, now that you mention it I think it was 5 balls instead of 3
that I use to have at the arcade. It has at least been 20 years or more
since I was at a real pinball table. They aren't too easy to find these
days.
Jim Kitchen wrote:
Hi Thomas,
That was a great description of a classic pinball table. However almost
all of the pinball tables that I played in the sixties, seventies and
eighties did also have shoots on the far left and right hand sides.
Actually twin shoots. The far left and right shoots the ball if it went
down them would end up going down the same hole as if it had come down
between your flippers. The shoots just inside those shoots the ball
would roll down and roll onto your flippers. If you didn't press the
button to flip your flipper the ball would roll off of the flipper and
go down the hole. You could also hold your flipper in the up position
and the ball might instead of bouncing off of the flipper roll up it and
up the shoot. The far right shoot was just inside of the launcher
shoot. I'm pretty sure that way back then we would get 5 balls for a
quarter. And then there were tables with two or more sets of flippers.
And into the eighties there were multi level tables and there could be
more than one ball in play at a time. There were also round bumpers and
flat sided bumpers with bells as well as targets to hit that would
retract when your ball hit them for points. I also liked this one game
that had upper shoots. They had spinner gates and buttons up them. So
if you used your flipper and sent the ball up them real fast, the
spinner gate would spin and spin racking up points and the further the
ball went up the shoot the more buttons it would hit and give you more
points. You could send the ball up so hard that it would come out of
the shoot at the top of the table and be as if you had sent it up the
launcher shoot. There were also little holes that your ball could land
in, get spun and shoot out in any direction. This one table just had a
rubber pad in the center of the table that would change the direction of
your ball. There was just an endless variety of different pinball table
configurations.
---
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