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3.11 - How does the game know when a ball is stuck? (Playing Pinball)

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This article is from the General Pinball FAQ, by Keith Johnson keefer@access.digex.net with numerous contributions by others.

3.11 - How does the game know when a ball is stuck? (Playing Pinball)

Well, the true answer is that it doesn't know, really... at least not at
first. When the game has been idle for a little while during play (no
sensors have been tripped, and you're not holding a flipper up), it goes into
"ball search mode." This basically involves kicking every solenoid in the
game in an effort to lodge the ball free from wherever it might be. Usually
this is sufficient because a ball will be resting against a fairly
unsensitive jet bumper or perhaps accidently trapped by a diverter (seems to
happen in IJ a lot, at least to me, on the right ramp during or just after
multiball). However, sometimes airballs (or "glassies") will cause the ball
to land in a place that it shouldn't have been able to get to. :) In a lot
of these cases, no amount of solenoid kicking is likely to get the ball free.
Now, at this point you have a few options: Try to shake the ball lose,
risking a tilt; wait for a few ball searches, and the machine will either
kick out any locked balls (if there are any) or (very rarely) give you a new
ball at the plunger; turn the machine off or slam tilt it to make the machine
give up on the ball for good. Option 1 will at least let you continue your
game if you get the ball unstuck. Option 2 will let you continue your game,
but often relocking a ball that got kicked out from a lock will just make the
game sit there again until it kicks the locked ball out again. Draining the
newly given ball will usually mean you have to resort to 1 or 3. Option 3
should be a last resort, obviously. When the machine comes back on, hitting
start will give you a "pinball missing" message for 30-60 seconds, then let
you start a game with the ball missing. This means that multiballs will have
1 less ball if applicable. If there are 3 balls installed, and there's a 2
ball multiball, you'll still get 2 balls. But with 3 installed and a 3 ball
multiball, then you'll only have 2 and it'll end when 1 of them drains. If
there are 6 balls, then 3 ball multiballs will work OK, but obviously only 5
will be available during the 6 ball round.

The (rather alarming) trend in games these days is that if a ball should
somehow get unstuck during a game after the machine has flagged it as
missing, draining one of the (now two) balls will usually end your ball no
matter how many targets you hit after it starts counting your bonus.
Hopefully, the other ball will drain while your bonus is counting and the
game will realize that it now has all the balls again. If it doesn't,
though, and the ball winds up in the drain while the other one is at the
plunger, you may wind up with 2 balls in the plunger lane! This is bad,
because the game will still end your ball after one of them drains. The
trick here is to just get one into play. This is impossible, though, if the
game has an autoplunger. You're in real trouble if this is the case...

 

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