3 ms·

Hacking Pinball High Scores

22 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

cameroncf 1y ago
Early 80's, when I was 6 or 7, my best friend had a pinball machine in his basement. The front door "hatch" to it was unlocked and we spend countless hours poking the insides with a long screwdriver to trigger various component. Probably wasn't safe but it sure was fun!
- joezydeco 1y ago
  The machines from that era had 75 volts DC sitting around unprotected at the lugs of the solenoid coils. One hand on the screwdriver and the other hand touching a grounded coin door would have been pretty serious. You were lucky.
janwillemb 1y ago
The links in the article are all annotated with a symbol (showing what happens when you click the link?), which breaks the flow of reading imo. I don't feel this helps communicating the message of the article. [Example](https://imgur.com/a/wWltrg9 https://imgur.com/a/wWltrg9)
- gwern 1y ago
  I agree it's not helpful. The star marks a 'new' link (ie. seen for the first time recently in the website corpus). It's useful for helping flag recently-modified writing or new additions in my essays, where I might have added a bunch of links 15 years after starting the essay, and then the interesting new paragraph jumps out. They are 'starred' as something new which might be worth looking at even if you've read that page before. (Classic but forgotten Web 1.0 design pattern.) Unfortunately, in cases like this, I haven't ever written about pinball hacking before, so almost all the links are new... I've thought about how to handle it, but haven't come up with a good answer. It may be that since 'blog' posts come with a clear temporal context, compared to my usual pages, it makes more sense to just disable that particular feature on all blog posts. We'll think about it.
  - gwern 1y ago
    Achmiz argues that it makes more sense to define each page as 'new' vs 'old', and disable the black-stars based on that, rather than on whether it's a blog or not. This is more work, but makes more sense (and we might want to do other things based on that binary variable, like emphasize the created date at the top of the page, to warn readers that something is recent and thus still half-baked). So we're implementing that now.
msarnoff 1y ago
Assuming you have physical access to the inside of the machine… Most all machines from the 80s and 90s (Williams/Bally/Gottlieb) store their high scores and adjustments in an SRAM like a 5101 with a battery backup. They are stored in binary-coded decimal and protected by a checksum. If you could tap into the bus (possibly while the CPU is halted or by removing it) you could modify its contents. A common aftermarket mod is to remove the backup battery (they like to corrode) and replace the CMOS RAM with a nonvolatile FeRAM. In that case, just pop it into a programmer like a TL866 and program a new image with your desired high scores. I’ve considered doing this… I wish my 1.2 billion on my Getaway hadn’t been wiped out…
vunderba 1y ago
Story time. A friend of mine in highschool was a ranked pinball player, just significantly better than the rest of us. Their game of choice was Medieval Madness, having logged countless hours on that machine. As a mischievous high schooler, I was a huge fan of classic con movies like The Sting, and legendary hustlers like Titanic Thompson [1]. One of my favorite stories about him was when he took a standard horseshoe pit, extended it by a foot beyond regulation, and practiced on it for months. Then, at the appropriate time, he challenged a professional horseshoe player who unknowingly playing on a subtly modified field couldn’t understand why all their throws were falling just short. To that end, I decided to pull a harmless little prank on my buddy. We were friends with the owner of the local arcade, so after closing one night, I talked to him about a setup I wanted to try. With his permission, I took some adjustable furniture risers and placed them under the back two legs of the Medieval Madness machine. The result was a subtle increase in the incline (just a few degrees) but it made a big difference in gameplay, especially for someone attuned to the machine’s usual angle. Visually, the machine looked completely normal and indistinguishable from the others. It was nestled between other games, so even if someone had known to look for a difference, the risers were virtually invisible. Both the arcade owner and I spent the rest of the evening practicing on the steeper table. Naturally, we challenged our friend to play Medieval Madness the following day. Their game was totally thrown off. I managed to get close to their score which under normal circumstances would’ve been borderline impossible. I didn’t quite pull it off, but I got close. They were still incredibly skilled, but I remember them muttering under their breath, clearly irritated at missed shots, failing to hit the usual ramps, and even some inexplicable ball drains. I think if they'd played longer they would have swiftly adapted. My armchair analysis is that professional pinball players probably have to subtly adapt to the fact that even the same game across different tables will have subtle variances (strength of flipper solenoids, etc). I never did tell them what happened. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic_Thompson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic_Thompson
- Slenth 1y ago
  At least in my case, that last paragraph holds true. In 2022 I discovered my small town had a few places with big collections of pinball machines. I went from playing a few games after time at the attached bar to skipping the bar and spending hours figuring out the tables, watching videos on how to exploit them, etc. Even though a couple of the places had the same machine, it played totally different depending on which place it was at. Slanted floors, warped playfields, old solenoids on flippers and slingshots all mattered.
hawrshsdg 1y ago
[flagged]
- gwern 1y ago
  No, it's not. As should be obvious from the writing style alone - no LLM writes like that, and you should easily see the absence of the usual markers like the ChatGPT twist ending or the repetitive triplets... If you're that bad at spotting LLM writing, don't go around accusing people of it. I did ask the LLMs for ideas, and used many, but the original idea and seed list was mine, the curation was mine, and the overall work is mine, and I wrote almost every word myself because I disliked the LLM style that much. I take full responsibility for it as being worth reading and better than any LLM does on this topic. (This is why I do not credit them as co-authors like I do on some of my pieces.) Also, a lot of them were dumb and I discarded them entirely. (I'm sorry, Claude-4-opus, you really wanted some sort of quantum multiverse or anthropics category of pinball hacks, but I just couldn't think of one which wasn't stupid.) If you are curious, I am happy to share my LLM sessions as best as I can (sometimes the 'sharing' is disabled for reasons I don't understand, which makes it hard). Here is the main ChatGPT session: https://chatgpt.com/share/683c93e8-2c74-8006-a5f6-f08cbaa96058 https://chatgpt.com/share/683c93e8-2c74-8006-a5f6-f08cbaa960... Also https://chatgpt.com/share/683c948e-57e8-8006-8064-2c768e2db3c0 https://chatgpt.com/share/683c948e-57e8-8006-8064-2c768e2db3... https://chatgpt.com/share/683c94a1-37d4-8006-8618-98543430aef8 https://chatgpt.com/share/683c94a1-37d4-8006-8618-98543430ae... So you can see for yourself what I curated and rewrote into into my final version, and how I did it.
lelandfe 1y ago
> Consider a scenario like "convincing a third party that you got a high score on the pinball machine" I'm imagining some barfly drinking next to me trying to assure me that they're DDOM, the high score on the pinball machine in the corner, and them pulling from their pocket a notarized certificate to that effect, lol.
- gwern 1y ago
  "My sealed, postmarked, and notarized certificate stating that my nickname for pinball playing is 'DDOM' is raising a lot of questions about my pinball nickname I really thought I had already addressed."
bb88 1y ago
To some extent playing pinball is hacking the machine. Nudging it just enough to not cause a tilt. Manipulating the ball to get a high probability of points. Etc. If you could manipulate the flippers to cause a stack overflow, would that be fair game?

22 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

Early 80's, when I was 6 or 7, my best friend had a pinball machine in his basement. The front door "hatch" to it was unlocked and we spend countless hours poking the insides with a long screwdriver to trigger various component. Probably wasn't safe but it sure was fun!

joezydeco 1y ago
The machines from that era had 75 volts DC sitting around unprotected at the lugs of the solenoid coils. One hand on the screwdriver and the other hand touching a grounded coin door would have been pretty serious. You were lucky.

janwillemb 1y ago

The links in the article are all annotated with a symbol (showing what happens when you click the link?), which breaks the flow of reading imo. I don't feel this helps communicating the message of the article. [Example](https://imgur.com/a/wWltrg9 https://imgur.com/a/wWltrg9)

gwern 1y ago
I agree it's not helpful. The star marks a 'new' link (ie. seen for the first time recently in the website corpus). It's useful for helping flag recently-modified writing or new additions in my essays, where I might have added a bunch of links 15 years after starting the essay, and then the interesting new paragraph jumps out. They are 'starred' as something new which might be worth looking at even if you've read that page before. (Classic but forgotten Web 1.0 design pattern.) Unfortunately, in cases like this, I haven't ever written about pinball hacking before, so almost all the links are new... I've thought about how to handle it, but haven't come up with a good answer. It may be that since 'blog' posts come with a clear temporal context, compared to my usual pages, it makes more sense to just disable that particular feature on all blog posts. We'll think about it.
- gwern 1y ago
  Achmiz argues that it makes more sense to define each page as 'new' vs 'old', and disable the black-stars based on that, rather than on whether it's a blog or not. This is more work, but makes more sense (and we might want to do other things based on that binary variable, like emphasize the created date at the top of the page, to warn readers that something is recent and thus still half-baked). So we're implementing that now.

msarnoff 1y ago

Assuming you have physical access to the inside of the machine… Most all machines from the 80s and 90s (Williams/Bally/Gottlieb) store their high scores and adjustments in an SRAM like a 5101 with a battery backup. They are stored in binary-coded decimal and protected by a checksum. If you could tap into the bus (possibly while the CPU is halted or by removing it) you could modify its contents. A common aftermarket mod is to remove the backup battery (they like to corrode) and replace the CMOS RAM with a nonvolatile FeRAM. In that case, just pop it into a programmer like a TL866 and program a new image with your desired high scores. I’ve considered doing this… I wish my 1.2 billion on my Getaway hadn’t been wiped out…

vunderba 1y ago

Story time. A friend of mine in highschool was a ranked pinball player, just significantly better than the rest of us. Their game of choice was Medieval Madness, having logged countless hours on that machine. As a mischievous high schooler, I was a huge fan of classic con movies like The Sting, and legendary hustlers like Titanic Thompson [1]. One of my favorite stories about him was when he took a standard horseshoe pit, extended it by a foot beyond regulation, and practiced on it for months. Then, at the appropriate time, he challenged a professional horseshoe player who unknowingly playing on a subtly modified field couldn’t understand why all their throws were falling just short. To that end, I decided to pull a harmless little prank on my buddy. We were friends with the owner of the local arcade, so after closing one night, I talked to him about a setup I wanted to try. With his permission, I took some adjustable furniture risers and placed them under the back two legs of the Medieval Madness machine. The result was a subtle increase in the incline (just a few degrees) but it made a big difference in gameplay, especially for someone attuned to the machine’s usual angle. Visually, the machine looked completely normal and indistinguishable from the others. It was nestled between other games, so even if someone had known to look for a difference, the risers were virtually invisible. Both the arcade owner and I spent the rest of the evening practicing on the steeper table. Naturally, we challenged our friend to play Medieval Madness the following day. Their game was totally thrown off. I managed to get close to their score which under normal circumstances would’ve been borderline impossible. I didn’t quite pull it off, but I got close. They were still incredibly skilled, but I remember them muttering under their breath, clearly irritated at missed shots, failing to hit the usual ramps, and even some inexplicable ball drains. I think if they'd played longer they would have swiftly adapted. My armchair analysis is that professional pinball players probably have to subtly adapt to the fact that even the same game across different tables will have subtle variances (strength of flipper solenoids, etc). I never did tell them what happened. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic_Thompson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic_Thompson

Slenth 1y ago
At least in my case, that last paragraph holds true. In 2022 I discovered my small town had a few places with big collections of pinball machines. I went from playing a few games after time at the attached bar to skipping the bar and spending hours figuring out the tables, watching videos on how to exploit them, etc. Even though a couple of the places had the same machine, it played totally different depending on which place it was at. Slanted floors, warped playfields, old solenoids on flippers and slingshots all mattered.

hawrshsdg 1y ago

[flagged]

gwern 1y ago
No, it's not. As should be obvious from the writing style alone - no LLM writes like that, and you should easily see the absence of the usual markers like the ChatGPT twist ending or the repetitive triplets... If you're that bad at spotting LLM writing, don't go around accusing people of it. I did ask the LLMs for ideas, and used many, but the original idea and seed list was mine, the curation was mine, and the overall work is mine, and I wrote almost every word myself because I disliked the LLM style that much. I take full responsibility for it as being worth reading and better than any LLM does on this topic. (This is why I do not credit them as co-authors like I do on some of my pieces.) Also, a lot of them were dumb and I discarded them entirely. (I'm sorry, Claude-4-opus, you really wanted some sort of quantum multiverse or anthropics category of pinball hacks, but I just couldn't think of one which wasn't stupid.) If you are curious, I am happy to share my LLM sessions as best as I can (sometimes the 'sharing' is disabled for reasons I don't understand, which makes it hard). Here is the main ChatGPT session: https://chatgpt.com/share/683c93e8-2c74-8006-a5f6-f08cbaa96058 https://chatgpt.com/share/683c93e8-2c74-8006-a5f6-f08cbaa960... Also https://chatgpt.com/share/683c948e-57e8-8006-8064-2c768e2db3c0 https://chatgpt.com/share/683c948e-57e8-8006-8064-2c768e2db3... https://chatgpt.com/share/683c94a1-37d4-8006-8618-98543430aef8 https://chatgpt.com/share/683c94a1-37d4-8006-8618-98543430ae... So you can see for yourself what I curated and rewrote into into my final version, and how I did it.

lelandfe 1y ago

> Consider a scenario like "convincing a third party that you got a high score on the pinball machine" I'm imagining some barfly drinking next to me trying to assure me that they're DDOM, the high score on the pinball machine in the corner, and them pulling from their pocket a notarized certificate to that effect, lol.

gwern 1y ago
"My sealed, postmarked, and notarized certificate stating that my nickname for pinball playing is 'DDOM' is raising a lot of questions about my pinball nickname I really thought I had already addressed."

bb88 1y ago

To some extent playing pinball is hacking the machine. Nudging it just enough to not cause a tilt. Manipulating the ball to get a high probability of points. Etc. If you could manipulate the flippers to cause a stack overflow, would that be fair game?