There are a few reasons for this, and I have never promised again to update or redo the site "in considerable time" because I just knew it wouldn't happen. However, as I'm writing this, things have come to a point where I really feel that pinball will become interesting to me again in the near future.
I have read all the articles on this website again, which I haven't done for a long time, and I'm actually chuckling at myself quite often for being as "naive" as I was, especially in the first year. I can see myself in the past and how I felt about pinball; it was the strongest and really the most important thing in my life since I had found a passion to live for, which must have been the first time in my life that this happened.
Today this passion has been pushed aside by another passion which I'm very serious about: making music. My band Szanaterria , of which some of you returning visitors may have heard before, has come very far in the two years we spent in the formation of five, and coming far requires a lot of work, time and money first. I found a new dedication in my life and this is something that I have in me just like the fascination of pinball.
And this is why I spent most of the time caring about the band and my drumming instead of pinball during the past couple of years. However, other things that needed my time and attention as well have recently changed. For one, I'm living alone now and my cat Kenny not the same cat you see on the photos, but he looks similar!
During the three years I spent with my former girlfriend I sold all of my pinball machines except for Space Shuttle, simply because I needed more money to keep hold of the flat we lived in.
The financial situation was quite problematic actually it still is now, but I'm recovering with a job and stuff. I practically said goodbye to pinball as a hobby and a passion for quite some time and I saw my band getting more and more serious, so I didn't really miss pinball most of the time. But sometimes I would wake up from sleep, having dreamed about a certain pinball machine and wishing I could have it with me now.
It was never dead, it was just on standby so to speak. What I'm doing this year, and I mean that I am actually doing it and not just saying I want to, is to take my three-year-old Space Shuttle game and restore it. I haven't done serious work on a pinball game for many months; the last time I did was when I had traded my Johnny Mnemonic game for another STTNG that I had for a month and later sold away to gain more money. That was a long time ago and I feel that I'm starting to actually miss pinball as an active hobby again.
Since I'm recovering from all the things that happened and giving my life a new direction, it will only be a matter of time before I can afford to buy a new pinball game, which I will. And until that time I'm trying to kickstart the hobby by doing what I could have done way earlier: taking apart the only game that's left in my flat and giving it the attention it deserves and which it never got when I was in a relationship. Talk about irony I simply want to give a shout out to the people who are still visiting this site and writing me messages, asking for advice from someone they believe knows enough to be of service.
Every one of those messages reminds me that I'm in fact kind of expertised at some aspects of pinball and I should take my knowledge from years ago and perfect it in a second run. This time around I won't be as naive and it won't be as much of a passion as before, but it will be a lot less stressful and more inspired by the pure fun and the fascination of the silver ball.
Because that is what pinball ultimately means to me, seeing the ball roll. Without a promise: this year a relaunch of this website is a lot more probable than last year! So you may want to check back if you're interested at all. I quote: So, unless our house burns down, you can expect at least one update in If this update makes you think "yeah, whatever", that's totally understandable.
Still, people seem to come to this site even though it was never updated during and that's a very good sign indeed. As I said, I have no intention of removing this archive of pinball information it's not much more than that right now and one of my determinations for the new year is to definitely get a new pinball machine AND update the site. As I've practiced some website design recently and this is what came out of it, I plan to reopen Silverball Magic with a new design, new information cleaning up the mess that is still left , new pictures and multimedia downloads.
But that's only gonna happen once I'm back in pinball. I really miss it sometimes I've got one machine left, Space Shuttle , but as I said earlier this year ha ha there are a lot of other things occupying my time and lack of money means I cannot spend it all on pinball. With any luck, will bring some improvements and at the first chance you can bet that I will get a new game to write about right here on this site.
The bottom line is, expect something to happen to this space in ! Though it may take a while. No updates. Actually I hate people who never update their websites. I'll tell you this I have two machines in my flat, The Machine and Space Shuttle. The Machine is still in perfect condition, however it actually doesn't belong to me any longer because I "temporarily sold it" to a Pinball Network forum member who will come and pick the game up in spring unless I'm able to pay the money back to him. It was kind of an emergency sale.
Pinball is a luxury I cannot afford at the moment; it seems that standing on one's own feet comes at a price. Since I have found some other interests motorcycles recently, more in theory than practically and I play in two rock bands now as an active drummer, it's not like I'm missing pinball a lot.
I simply get my free time's worth in other ways. The thing though is that I still access all the pinball stuff on the net to keep up to date, I still play incoming Future Pinball tables if you haven't checked out FP, go there now and of course whenever I enter the pinball room, I look over the two machines that are left and I admire them like trophies of a glorious time.
I wrote a rather long post months ago on the Pinball Network explaining that I felt quite detached from pinball at the moment and I didn't feel any fun or interest in the machines I owned, and I had to sell JM because of financial regress. However, since I couldn't sell it for a good price, I took an offer from a good pinball friend and swapped JM for an STTNG which had good substance and needed some technical touchup.
I quickly solved the little problems that kept the machine from running and when I booted it up for the first time, it was like a blast from the past! Talk about irony. Maybe some machines should not be sold when you feel they're right. Because the financial situation didn't get better, I had to sell the newly awakened STTNG, this time for a right price, and this helped a lot over the next month, but it wasn't enough.
I'm not a student anymore at this time, I have a clear wish to go to the SAE Institute in the near future and I need money to start there, so I'm looking for part-time jobs. Finding one is tough in Germany though unless you want to be a call center agent or serve coffee to stressed people, so I try to get my money from the state first.
This process takes a long time, though, and I've lived without any income for a while which led to the situation I am describing. The Machine is the core of my pinball hobby and she's in a shape that can't be reconstructed from another model since something will be missing, so selling it would not be an option; however with the "credit" I got I can still buy it back before it goes away. Should it leave my collection, it would go into a collection which even has a webcam installed so I could always watch my Bride being played in another place!
It would be very sad to lose her, but the fact remains that this machine, which I did not sell because I felt she was the "rightest" I could get, bores me when it comes to gameplay.
She's beautiful and I have a link with her from the past which makes her the 1 machine in my collection. I don't play her anymore, though. When I do, it takes ten minutes to turn it off again. Of course I enjoy friends coming along and playing her together with me, and I still love the flow of the ball, the flashing lights, the sound etc.
But I could have that on another Machine model in the future if I really needed to give my model away. It just wouldn't be the same, then. Now, wrapping up this rather long and personal rant I'll say a few words about the site. I know that many people who have been here have enjoyed reading the stuff I put here; this site is listed in some directories on other pinball websites including PinLinks and whatever may come, the site will always be online as an information resource.
Epic Pinball. Pinball Illusions. Silverball, Added to website: All copyrights, trademarks, etc, are property of their respective holders. Back to top. Submit Cancel. Saving, please wait. DIZ is a plain text file containing a brief description of the content in an archive ZIP file , usually written by the developers themselves. In the mail I told her that quite a few fans of the pinball game would like to know what she thinks of it and what she felt like when she recorded the lines for the Bride.
Sadly, she never replied - until April when I suddenly found a mail in my inbox from Stephanie. It said that she had read the old version of this article and liked my site, and that she had in fact replied to my e-mail from , but it seemed that it got lost. So she summed up in this new mail what it was like to record The Machine's voice - check it out, you'll be surprised! I think the year was [it was - Max] and it was me and my boyfriend in my parents' living room with a portable DAT machine.
No special mics or sound filtering devices. We did about two or three takes of each section and it went very quickly. I'm pretty sure I made about 50 bucks from it, though it may have been slightly more. Fifty is what I usually got from Williams for these things, which, at the time, seemed sufficient, especially since these recordings were done "off the record. Rich Karstens my boyfriend at the time gave me some direction and I added some of my own ideas. We had many laughs while recording it, getting the character just right.
Then we did the clips. It was quite fun, lively, silly and rather quick. I did not know it would become so popular; I had done many of these and no one ever asked my name or cared After we engaged into a more regular contact via e-mail, I met her in Frankfurt in July, and I wrote an article about this meeting. Stephanie Rogers' website is www. She is an independent artist whose albums you can only purchase locally or on the Internet in a special CD shop. I highly recommend listening to some MP3 samples on the site since the music is freaking great and if you like The Machine, it's a must anyway!
I also created a nice clean wallpaper out of a few photos and a flyer scan. Flyers and photos can be found at the Internet Pinball Data-base. Using info from there, I was also inspired to make a custom pricing card for the game that shows general information about The Machine instead of the useless pricings. You can print this card at dpi and cut it out to put it into the card holder.
It's not the best, but I'd still have to do better than that! We were on the final class trip shortly before the school year's end and there, in a large empty white room, she was, the "Bride". Everyone loved her; we couldn't resist asking the staff if we could turn her on and play a few games, and there was no problem. So, every evening when some of us had a few coins left you know money is thin when you're a youngster , we would go down and play The Machine.
It was actually the first time that I played pinball on a real machine with open eyes. Before this, I had only played it for fun, not really knowing where I was aiming, regardless of the score I'd get, and so on. Only a few months before this class trip, I had started to play pinball simulations on the computer and had learned about the common rules, features and score opportunities in pinball games, and now I tried to use this knowledge to my advantage with The Machine.
The result was that I got the 2-ball multiball after completing the second face, however I lost both balls very quickly and was amazed at the speed this feature was offering. Plus, since I was so interested in how pinball machines worked, I spent quite a few minutes standing around the turned-off game and inspecting it closely for everything it had on the playfield.
I once even found a small sheet of paper in one of my old document stashes which had the measure-ments of the ball, flippers and bumpers handwritten on it. I remember taking those measurements from The Machine back then, just because I wanted a reference.
Yeah, I'm weird XD Whenever I thought about pinball machines, this game was the only one stuck in my head with prominent features I kept remembering: the wheel on the center of the playfield, the head, the voice and the quote "I can speak", the digit displays, the ramps and the grayish spacey colours.
Once I saw photos of the game, I also remembered the name yes, I had forgotten it no matter how simple it was , the shuttle, the helmet, the backglass, the cabinet art, you name it. It came all back to me from the rear of my head and that's why I decided that this machine absolutely had to be mine someday. And after one month of playing the F and getting bored by it, I quickly had an offer in my PM inbox on the Pinball Network forum: a man named Peter from Berlin had a Machine for sale, but he wanted Euros which I didn't really have, so I agreed to exchange my F plus for The Machine which was an equal value.
The playfield was worn down especially around the inserts, had crowfeet all over and the person who removed the mylar years ago obviously didn't know how to do it correctly, as many insert letters and the paint around them were worn down or taken off with the mylar. However, the playfield played excellently without the mylar compared to my mylared F which was a mess and slowed down the ball quite a bit.
Strong, crispy flippers and a high playfield angle made the game fast and precise and gave me a very cool feeling when I played it for the first time. I thought, "wow, so this is what it can be like", being totally used to weak flippers and the open playfield of the F Plus, when I first saw The Machine in reality again after seven years, it was such a beautiful reappearance that she took my heart by storm, and this time I knew she would be mine soon.
A week later after I had graduated from school with my final exams completed wow, graduation again! Assembly Apart from the standard backbox-legs-move thing, my friend Lars and I had to reinstall all the plugs and cables in the backbox since it had been removed by Peter for transportation. The weight was so much lighter without the backbox that carrying the game around was quite easy.
Thank god he had marked all plugs and sockets, so assembling the backbox was like painting by numbers and after half an hour The Machine was ready to be turned on. Everything worked fine except for a flasher in the right side of the helmet, the helmet lamps and the head: it turned to the right only, never to the left, which gave some strange results during the game when the face changed to something that was obviously wrong. The same night I found out that we had missed one tiny plug in the backbox that was still loose and controlled the rotation to the left plus the helmet lamps.
Moral: a single little plug or wire can disarm half of the solenoids this should be very true later when I installed the new playfield! Theme The Machine is what the title says, a machine, a female robot. The initial message that is displayed in attract mode sums this up with a few words: "Make me live, make me sing, make me feel like a woman If you look at the artwork on the backglass and cabinet, you instantly see how the designers wanted to give her a full female look, especially around the legs.
Why she is built by astronauts in space is beyond me, but the combination of space and a huge cyborg coming to life makes for a nice playfield design which gives you a very sci-fi-like atmosphere. If you listen to the sounds and especially the music, this atmosphere is enhanced because the sound is very special in this game.
Using the traditional sample and synthesis system for audio, Williams created a mind-blowing soundtrack that cannot really be placed anywhere. It's neither rock nor techno, it's somewhere between the two, but there is a pop flavour to it as well.
If you want to know what I refer to by this, check out the media section. Also, lighting is very defined. The lamp inserts are extremely sharp and crystalline, delivering a prism effect that enhances the light greatly.
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