Making game easier
Games affected: all
There's a few things you can do to make the game easier. By easier we mean it coughs up features faster so you aren't spending most of your time cycling the machine trying to get the game to a point where it's interesting to play.
If you want information on a specific game, send in a comment.
Adjustment plugs
Many games have plugs that can be moved around to modify the overall game percentages. Typically you'll find these guys:
- reflex adjust
- extra ball
In all cases I can think of, the game gets easier when you position the plug to connect as many wires as possible between the plug and socket. The reason is that what the plug is usually doing is connecting more rivets on the spotting disc into the game circuits, or in some cases it's bypassing things like mixers which reduce your odds of something happening.
Mixer #4 relay
The best single tweak works on any game that has a mixer #4 relay, which is all the screen games and mystic line games, and some of the late model other games. Mixer #4 is responsible for cutting off the power into the feature and extra ball step-up circuits.
In normal operation, the mixer #4 relay closes at a rate proportional to the scores. The higher the scores, the more frequently mixer #4 relay closes, and thus the less frequently you get the features or extra balls. Oddly, the mixer #4 relay is "backwards". When it's powered, it's bad for the player. The operators hated this, since any problem that would cause this relay to not close when it should made the game easy enough that anyone could win - lots.
The simple gaff is to just put a hunk of folded paper under the relay plate of mixer #4 relay so it can't close. Now the features and extra balls will be awarded as determined by where the spotting disc stops without any consideration for the scores. The reflex unit is still doing it's thing, so the game gets harder/easier as the credits are won/played, and score advance is still proportioned correctly.
Since you will get after 5th and extra balls much more easily, in theory you should be able to win. You still need to make the holes, though.
Reflex unit
The nuts-n-bolts of the reflex unit is covered elsewhere, and part of that material has some info on setting the reflex unit, to make the game permanently as liberal as possible.
Setting the reflex unit at full reset position makes score and feature advance easier.
Unit wiring
On most early games, and many later ones, Bally often has additional solder lugs on the mixers and spotting disc unconnected. By connecting these lugs, you add additional circuit paths and therefore increase the odds of something happening.
The trick here is that you need to look at the unit diagrams to figure out what options you have, and in the case of the mixers, there are no diagrams until someone gets around to drawing them and posting them on the site (which has some). The spotting disc, though, is fully diagrammed in the manuals. Generally what you are looking for is disconnected solder lugs. You would jumper the disconnected lug to one of the adjacent lugs to add more rivets to the circuit.
Spaghetti
The most complicated option is to do the opposite of what some operators did, connect more rivets - usually on the spotting disc - than Bally did when they made the game. This is really just one step further than unit wiring above.
If you look at the disc diagram, any unconnected rivet is available to wire up to any circuit you want. You just need to be careful to make sure you don't wind up connecting things together that should never be hooked up, and creating a short that would pop fuses only when the spotting disc stopped a wiper on the rivet you tied in.
We're assuming almost nobody would do this, but there's a few folks out there who like the challenge. One of these days, we'll get around to posting Dennis's modification which created a feature that when lit, hitting the yellow rollover button not only enabled before 5th, it also enabled the red rollover button.