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📖 TROPICAL PINBALL← WIKI
Tropical Pinball screenshot

Spell SURF, wake the tiki, and ride the wave.

The sunset machine, and the classic of the range. A synthwave sun cut with bands sits over a turquoise bay, surf rolls across the lower playfield, two big palms lean in from the bottom corners, and a carved orange tiki mask sits in the middle of the board with the scoop as its mouth. Spell S-U-R-F up the left lane to wake it, feed it for Luau multiball, and ride the WAVE by alternating the orbit and the ramp. A third flipper up the left works the bank.

▶ PLAY TROPICAL PINBALLVERSION AMby Pinball Peter

STORY & LORE

Last light

Set at the end of the day on a beach that is closing. The sun never quite goes down, the surf keeps rolling under the flippers, and the tiki's eyes brighten as you get closer to waking it. Coconut jets up top, shell standups guarding both outlanes, and a wave that carries a clean left shot all the way back to your right flipper.

HOW IT PLAYS

Spell S-U-R-F

Four drop targets up the left, under the third flipper. Complete them and it is SURF'S UP: multiplier up, the tiki wakes, targets reset. The jets spot one every twelve pops, the top lanes spot one. Two in a game is an extra ball.

Wake the tiki

With the tiki lit, the centre scoop starts LUAU MULTIBALL — 32 seconds, two extra balls, and the FLASHING LANE pays the jackpot: shoot it and the jackpot moves to the other lane. The unlit lane pays 1,500 and points you back. The scoop itself pays the super jackpot once it is relit.

Ride the wave

This machine's own rule. Alternate the orbit and the ramp and the WAVE climbs, 1,100 a step up to x8; the same shot twice running breaks it. Every third orbit is a BIG KAHUNA WAVE, every third ramp a TRIPLE RAMP, and twenty spins of the tide spinner light the kickback.

The Surfer — the moving toy

A surfboard rides back and forth across the bay. For six seconds after you make an orbit or a ramp it glows: catch it then for 2,500, and your WAVE stays alive, so the next big shot always steps it up. Three glowing catches wake the tiki on their own. Unlit, it is a plain target that pays its switch value and bounces the ball softly.

Hurricane — the wizard mode

Start two multiballs in one game. The next time the mode shot is lit, it starts HURRICANE instead: three balls, every lane lit, and every ramp, scoop and target pays 8,000 times your multiplier, for 45 seconds or fifteen shots. Once a game.

The flippers, and how they answer

A still bat barely rebounds, so you can trap the ball and cradle it to aim. A swinging bat throws it, hardest at the tip and softest at the pivot — where on the bat you catch the ball sets the angle: about 75 degrees off the middle of the bat, 50 off the tip. THE AIM LINE shows you: while a slow ball sits on or rolls along a resting flipper, a dotted line draws where a flip right now would send it, from the same kick and spin the physics uses. It moves as the ball rolls; wait for it to cross the lit shot, then flip. Tap the left half of the screen for the left flipper and the right half for the right; hold one and tap the other, the multi-touch is tracked per finger. On a keyboard that is Z and / (or the arrow keys). LANE CHANGE: every fresh press also shifts the lit top lanes one place that way, so you can line the unlit lane up under a falling ball. Press P (or switch tabs) to pause; tap or press any key to play on.

Launching

A ball waiting in the shooter lane puts a power bar in the middle of the board. Hold ANYWHERE on the glass — or any key — to pull the plunger back; the bar fills and the spring ratchets as it goes; let go to launch. The flippers do not answer until the ball is away, so the plunge cannot be fumbled into a flip. The pull decides where the ball enters, and it is the same on every machine in the range: a full pull goes round the roof and drops into lane one at the far left; softer pulls fall short and land further right; a lazy pull comes down the right side to the flipper. One lane is lit for the skill shot each ball, and the bar names it.

Nudging and tilting

Swipe across the glass and the cabinet shoves that way — left, right, or a flick upward to lift the ball off the drain. On a keyboard it is , and . and the up arrow. It genuinely saves a ball drifting down an outlane, and unlike the two-finger gesture it replaces, it cannot fire by accident: holding one flipper and shooting with the other is the most basic skill in pinball, and it used to tilt the machine. You get two TILT WARNINGS. The third kills the flippers for the rest of the ball and wipes your bonus, exactly like the real thing — but hold the machine steady for about eleven seconds and the bob settles, and a warning is forgiven.

Bonus, and why the ball is not over when it drains

Every switch you close builds bonus in the background — jets, targets, rollovers, ramps, the scoop. When the ball drains the machine counts that bonus up and pays it, multiplied by your bonus multiplier. Light both inlane rollovers to raise the multiplier, up to 6x. A tilt loses the lot.

Ball save and ball search

The first 9 seconds of every ball are saved: drain in that window and the machine serves you another. And if a ball ever stops registering switches, the machine runs a ball search — shakes it loose, and if that fails, serves a fresh one rather than sitting there.

The match

After the last ball the machine rolls two digits against the end of your score. Hit it and you get the Match Award.

Mystery

Light all four top lanes and, besides the bonus multiplier and the kickback, the machine spins a MYSTERY award on the display (at most once every eighteen seconds). The slot can land on points, BONUS X +1, a ball save, 2X SCORING for twenty seconds, a big bonus, the kickback, ADD-A-BALL during multiball, a rare extra ball, or this machine's own prizes: TIKI LIT (lights the tiki, or 15,000 in a mode) and SURF SPOTTED.

Add-a-ball

In multiball, the second super jackpot of the mode puts another ball in play (once a mode, never more than four balls on the glass).

High scores, replays and the Grand Champion

The machine keeps its own high-score table in your browser, a Grand Champion (1,500,000 to start) and four more, seeded with house scores until you beat them. Make the table and you enter your initials on the glass: the flipper keys or the sides of the glass pick a letter, Space or the middle of the glass locks it in, or just type them. Pass the #3 score (600,000 to start) and you win a REPLAY, a free extra ball. Passing the Grand Champion mid-game gets a callout of its own, and the attract screen cycles the table.

GALLERY

The attract screen at last light.
The attract screen at last light.
The printed board on the phone-shaped field: the banded sun, the bay, the beach, the palms and the tiki with the scoop for a mouth.
The printed board on the phone-shaped field: the banded sun, the bay, the beach, the palms and the tiki with the scoop for a mouth.
Luau multiball, GI dipped, the flashing lane chasing toward the jackpot.
Luau multiball, GI dipped, the flashing lane chasing toward the jackpot.

SHOT VALUES

Before multipliers.

ShotBaseNotes
Coconut bumper150600 in Luau
S-U-R-F target340Four spells SURF
Surf's Up3,000+1x multiplier, wakes the tiki
Orbit2,0006,000 every third
Ramp1,8005,000 every third
Wave step1,100 x stepAlternate the two big shots
Tiki scoop800Starts Luau when lit
Spinner45Twenty spins light the kickback
Luau complete22,000-

HOUSE CABINET — SHARED BY EVERY PINBALL PETER MACHINE

Every table in the range is built on the same body. The board is 600 x 1040 units now — the shape of a phone screen — with a smaller ball and half the score display, so the field is a fifth wider and a tenth longer in ball-widths than it was, and it fills the width of a phone.

MeasurementValueIn ball widths
Playfield496 x 954 units20.7 wide x 39.8 long
A real table, for comparison20.25in x 42in19.1 wide x 39.5 long
Ball24 units across (was 28)1.00
Flipper75 units long, 22 wide3.1 long
Drain gap between flipper tips29.6 units1.23
Outlane channel~37 units1.5
Inlane channel~36 units1.5
Top lane channels48 units2.0
Score display56 units tall-
Board on an iPhone 13the full 390px width (was 332 with black bars)-
Balls per game3, plus extra balls-

THE SHOTS

Printed on the playfield as lanes and arrows radiating from the flippers. The aim line shows you which one a flip will take.

ShotFlipperWhat it does
Left orbit laneRight flipper, steep crossRips the tide spinner, loops the board and returns to the right inlane
S-U-R-F bankRight flipper, or the upper-left flipperThe angled bank up the left
Tiki scoopEither flipper, straight upLit, it starts Luau multiball
RampLeft flipperA flyover up the right that tips the ball into the jets
Right laneLeft flipper, steep crossThe orbit's return path, and the way back up to the top lanes

WHAT THE MACHINE REWARDS

Shared across the range, on top of each table's own rules.

AwardHowWorth
Skill shotPlunge into the one lit top lane8,000 + 4,000 per ball
ComboShot into shot within about three seconds900 x n squared, escalating
JackpotAny big shot during a mode3,000 + 600 a rung, twelve rungs
Super jackpotThe mode shot during a mode12,000 + 2,000 a rung
Bonus multiplierLight all four top lanes+1x, up to 5x
MatchThe two digits after your last ballA credit

VERSION HISTORY

VERSION AM2026-09-23
  • MYSTERY. Completing the top lanes now spins a mystery award on the display, with this machine's own prizes: TIKI LIT (lights the tiki, or 15,000 in a mode) and SURF SPOTTED.
  • ADD-A-BALL. The second super jackpot of a multiball adds another ball.
  • HIGH SCORES. The machine ships with its own high-score table scaled to its scoring (Grand Champion 1,500,000), takes your initials on the glass, and awards a replay at the #3 score (600,000).
  • Chase bulbs in the side rails, colour washes and flash storms on the big moments, and the score reel climbs in pitch with the size of the award.
  • A real thumbnail ripped from the machine replaces the placeholder card art. Screenshots re-captured.
VERSION AL2026-09-23
  • KEYBOARD FIXED. Last version paused the game whenever it lost focus. On the site, any click on the page (including its own Play big and EXIT buttons) takes focus from the game and sends the keys to the page, so the game paused and waited for a key that could never reach it: the keyboard looked dead. Losing focus no longer pauses (only a hidden tab does), the site now forwards keys to a running game whenever the page has focus (never while you type in a box), it hands focus back to the game when Play big opens or closes, and Escape closes Play big even while the game has focus.
VERSION AK2026-09-23
  • PAUSE. Switching tabs, clicking away from the game or the site pausing it now freezes the machine (ball, timers, ball save, music) under a PAUSED card; tap or press any key to play on, and that tap does not flip. P pauses on a keyboard. The ball used to carry on the instant you came back and drain before your hands were ready.
  • LANE CHANGE. Each fresh press of a flipper button shifts the lit top lanes one place that way, round the end, the way a real machine does, so you can steer the unlit lane under a ball falling out of the jets and finish the set for the bonus multiplier.
  • NEW HIGH SCORE. Passing your own best mid-game fires a NEW HIGH SCORE callout and the knocker, and the game-over card says so.
VERSION AJ2026-09-22
  • THE SURFER, a moving toy: a board that rides across the bay. It only pays inside the six seconds after an orbit or a ramp; paying every hit let a player who only flapped out-score aiming, because it rides the ball's return path. The music is a calypso: steel-pan arpeggios over a bass, with a kick and a lead in multiball.
  • FOUR RULE BUGS FIXED, found by re-auditing the engine. (1) THE MULTIBALL SAVE NEVER WORKED: every multiball armed eight seconds of ball save, but the save only fired with one ball in play, so a ball lost early in multiball was just lost. It is re-served now. (2) AN EXTRA BALL THREW YOUR BONUS AWAY: with shoot-again lit the machine served the next ball without counting the bonus. The bonus is always counted now, and the playfield multiplier resets for the new ball as it should. (3) A TILTED MACHINE KEPT SCORING: bumpers, lanes and targets kept paying and the table rules kept running with the flippers dead. A tilt now scores nothing, ends the mode, and turns off the ball save and kickback. (4) MULTIBALLS STACKED: starting one on top of a live one kept adding balls (seven and eight were seen); the field tops up to four and stops.
  • A standup is one switch closure per hit. A ball resting against one closed it every physics step and paid it sixty times a second.
  • MUSIC. Every machine plays its own procedural score, quietly, under the sound effects. It lifts its tempo and adds parts in a mode or multiball, ducks under the bonus count, and stops for a tilt, between balls and in attract. It mutes with everything else.
VERSION AI2026-09-18
  • BIG MODE WAS A JOKE, AND NOW IT IS NOT. The site's Play big enlarged the frame but the game kept drawing at its first size (measured: the frame went to 525x915 and the canvas stayed 455x793) because the engine pinned the canvas to an inline pixel size and then measured that. It re-measures against the stylesheet now, watches the document for size changes and checks every half second; big mode fills the screen's height (96vh, was 90) and the inline frame is a step taller too.
  • SHARP. The canvas render budget was a third of what a modern screen wants — a plain desktop was drawing below 1:1 and every label was a blur. The floor is 1:1 on every tier now and phones with 3x screens render at 3x.
  • READABLE. Every piece of text on the board was sized for the virtual board, not for pixels; some came out at four or five pixels on a desktop. The score strip is 56 units tall (was 48) with the score at dot 2.6 and the message row at 1.4; no lamp label is under 13 units; the apron legend, the launch panel, toasts, floaters and the attract subtitle all went up two to five sizes.
VERSION AH2026-09-18
  • THE WIZARD MODE: HURRICANE. Start two multiballs in one game and the next time the mode shot is lit it starts HURRICANE instead — three balls, every shot lane lit at once, and every ramp, scoop and target pays 8,000 (times your multiplier) for 45 seconds or fifteen shots, whichever comes first. Once a game. It is the thing to play for.
  • CLEANED UP. The two translucent plastics over the slingshots are gone (they hid the one part of the board you watch most), the LEFT FLIPPER / RIGHT FLIPPER cards on the apron are gone in favour of one quiet legend, and the shot arrows are a size larger so a lit lane reads from across the room.
  • The jets are spread a little wider apart so the ball has room to move between them instead of rattling.
VERSION AG2026-09-12
  • THE PLUNGER RATCHETS. Drawing the spring back clicks twelve times across the pull, rising in pitch, so you hear how much you have; the launch thump follows.
  • HAPTICS. A phone that can vibrate does, with the sound: the bat clacks in the hand (8ms), the pops thud (14ms), a scoop, a ramp and a launch have their own weight, a jackpot rumbles (60ms), multiball pulses three times. Never while the sound is muted; nothing on a device without a motor.
  • The score digits are a step larger on the display (dot 2.0, was 1.8) — the one thing on the strip that has to be readable at arm's length.
VERSION AF2026-09-10
  • THE BOARD IS THE SHAPE OF A PHONE. The old board was 1:2 and a phone's game frame is about 1:1.7, so on an iPhone it was drawn at 55% with a black bar down each side and everything felt small. The board is 600 x 1040 now: it fills the width of every phone we measured (iPhone 13, iPhone SE, Pixel 7) and is 15% larger on all of them. The score display is half its old height, the ball is r=12 instead of 14, and the flipper cluster was rebuilt around that ball — the field is 24% wider and 7% longer in ball-widths. Everything above the flippers is the measured geometry mapped down, so every clearance that was tested still holds.
  • THE PLUNGER IS ON THE GLASS. Hold anywhere (or any key) to pull, release to launch, with a big power bar in the middle of the field that also names the lit skill lane. The old bottom-edge strip sat under the site's EXIT button. The flippers are dead until the ball is away.
  • THE AIM LINE. A dotted trajectory draws where a flip would send a slow ball sitting on or rolling along a flipper, computed from the physics itself. The first real way to aim on these machines.
  • EACH MACHINE HAS ITS OWN SCORE DISPLAY: Tropical square amber pixels in a wood bezel, Creepypasta green phosphor with scanlines and a flicker, Static blue-white dots with a snow bar rolling through, Unicorn pastel dots under a glowing pink rim, Square black dots on cream.
  • THE FIVE MACHINES NO LONGER SHARE ONE RULE SHEET. Only Tropical keeps the drop bank, the centre scoop and the spell-to-light progression. The others each got their own centrepiece, their own multiplier and their own quest (see the mechanics above), and a quarter of the hardware came off every board: the outlane standups, the guard posts and the duplicate flashers are gone.
  • Tropical keeps the drop bank and the tiki scoop: it is the classic layout of the range. The two outlane shell standups and the two tiki guard posts are gone (the left post and the upper flipper's tip made a notch a ball sat in); the kickback lights off the tide spinner instead.
  • Flippers off the pivot end kick harder (420 at the base, the same 760 at the tip), so a backhand from a cradle reaches the mid-field on the shorter bat. The test suite's coordinates, its rules check (now one road to multiball per machine) and its element-kind count (a machine without a scoop or a bank is measured against what it has) moved with the board.
VERSION AE2026-09-10
  • AUDITED ON A PHONE AND A DESKTOP, in a real browser, on all five machines: tap to start; hold the bottom strip to plunge and release to fire; hold one flipper and tap the other on two fingers without a tilt warning; swipe to nudge; the grille mutes; a hidden tab releases held flippers; landscape letterboxes and centres; game over shows the card and PLAY AGAIN starts a clean game; on a keyboard the arrows, Z, space, N and M all do what the apron says; the mouse halves work. Every one passes, with no page errors.
  • THE GAMES WERE NOT TALKING TO THE SITE. All five loaded /sdk/arcade.js, which does not exist (the SDK is arcade-sdk.js), so they ran on the built-in stub: no score ever reached the leaderboard, no tokens, no achievements. Fixed; on the site's game page the SDK now reports connected.
  • RENDER COST CUT where it was real. The dot-matrix display was twelve hundred fillRects a frame — twelve milliseconds on a laptop; each glyph is baked once per size and colour now and blitted. Targets and slingshots ran a blur filter every frame; they cast a plain offset shadow. Five full-screen layer blits a frame became three, and the backbox's bezel and dot lattice are baked. Measured: a full frame from about thirty milliseconds to five in software rendering.
  • SOUND, REBUILT. Everything runs through one compressor so a jackpot on top of a pop on top of a flip never clips, and fanfares are scheduled on the audio clock rather than timers so they stay in time under load. The flipper is a solenoid clack (a filtered burst and a low thump); pops thock with a bright ping; slings snap; targets ding; ramps whoosh with a rising sweep and a chime at the top; the scoop clunks then rises; the plunger is a spring and the rail; a drain is a thud with a falling note. The ball ROLLS: a looped, filtered noise whose level follows the fastest ball on the board. The score reel ticks as it climbs; the end-of-ball bonus counts up in pitch. Jackpot, super jackpot, multiball and mode start each have their own fanfare; an extra ball and a match fire the KNOCKER, the solenoid that slams a real cabinet; a combo and a skill shot have their own chimes; game over has a three-note sign-off.
VERSION AD2026-09-10
  • ONE DE-CLUTTER PASS, DONE THE WAY A PLAYFIELD DESIGNER DOES IT: every element has to earn its place, and the hierarchy is shots, then hardware, then art, then words.
  • HARDWARE DRAWN AT ITS REAL WEIGHT. Guide rails are wire on a real machine — an eighth of an inch — and were drawn as heavy chrome bars with a black keyline. They are drawn a size under their physical width now with a thin rim; the top-lane vanes are wire; wall shadows are lighter. Nothing physical moved.
  • SCAFFOLDING REMOVED. The flyover ramp had a support post every hundred units — six pairs; a real one stands on two. The two posts at the top of each inlane were fourteen units from where the new lane floor ends, doing nothing; gone on all five. The two flashers at the bottom of the board sat on top of the slingshots and the lane floors; gone, and no rule ever fired them.
  • PLASTICS THAT COVER WHAT THEY COVER. The lower plastics were big slabs beside the slingshots (full rectangles on two machines). They are slim covers over the outlane channel now, at half opacity, and the top plastic is a little more see-through.
  • FEWER WORDS. The feature labels the hardware already states (COCONUTS, SKULLS, SETS, CLOUDS, GRID, and the bank names — the letters are on the lamps), the subtitle under the title, the second line on the apron cards and the maker line on the apron are gone. The board says its name once.
  • The two prints that crowded the flipper zone are quieter: Static keeps one scope trace at low alpha instead of three, and Square's grid is fainter, its lower black rule is gone and its upper one thinner.
VERSION AC2026-09-10
  • INSTANT LOSSES, MEASURED AND FIXED. A player with a human 180ms reaction lost 37 per cent of balls inside five seconds. Traced frame by frame, the two causes were not what they looked like.
  • ONE: a ball hugging the cabinet wall down a side lane sailed past the inward hook on the guide (the lane is two balls wide) and into the outlane, untouched. The lane now has a FLOOR from the wall, running under the guide's end and on inboard, so everything in the lane is delivered toward the slingshot; the outlane is entered from the slingshot side only, which is where a real machine's outlane is fed from. Balls draining untouched: 11 per cent to 2.
  • TWO: a shot caught on the rounded END CAP of the bat left at 27-29 degrees and full speed, straight across into the other flipper — and a held-up flipper had the dead 'cradle' restitution of 0.14 for every impact, so the ball died on it and dropped between the bats. 42-55 per cent of all drains were 'centre, off a bat'. A held bat is now only dead to a slow ball (a fast one meets rubber), and the ball leaves the bat no flatter than fifty degrees: the face is what throws it, and a glancing blow off the cap gets the same floor. The measured fan is 65-73 degrees across the strong half of the bat and 50 at the very end.
  • RESULT: single-ball life with the human-reaction player went from 6 seconds median to 17-33 depending on the machine, and balls lost inside five seconds from 37 per cent to 0-10. Games run about three minutes with 250 flips.
  • The slingshots throw a little more upward (their face normal is only 28 degrees above horizontal), and a bat contact re-arms them, so a ball flipped back into a sling gets a real kick instead of a dead one after six unbroken hits.
  • The lane floor is where a real machine's outlane plastic is; it is drawn as the lane's end under the guide. The spinner on the three machines that had one in the side lane moved up above the floor, and Unicorn's mini flipper moved above it too (its pivot sat exactly where the floor's hook now ends, and a ball rested against the cap).
  • TROPICAL SPECIFICALLY: the jets spotted a bank letter every six pops, the most generous in the range, and once the lane floors were delivering the ball to the flippers a player flapping both on a timer completed S-U-R-F in the pops and ran multiball as often as one timing shots — 32 wins in 63 paired games, a coin flip. It is twelve pops now (timing wins 37 of 63), and the outlane entrance is a touch wider than the range's so a good game still ends inside seven minutes.
  • A held flipper rebounds a fast ball at 0.30. Swept from 0.14 to 0.42 with the paired timing-versus-flapping player, the number barely moves the outcome; what moved it was where the ball is delivered. Measured over 63 paired games rather than 21, timing wins 59 to 67 per cent on the machines checked.
  • WHERE ON THE BAT NOW DECIDES THE SHOT. The fan across the strong half of the bat was 65 to 73 degrees — eight degrees, so a random flip made the ramp as often as a timed one (7.9 ramps a game flapping on a timer, 8.1 timing the flip). It is 75 degrees mid-bat to 50 at the very end now. A consistent contact point pays; a random one sprays.
  • MODES ARE COMPLETED BY SHOTS. During multiball every pop paid 1,800 and advanced the mode, so three balls rattling in the jets finished it without an aimed shot. A pop pays 600 and a quarter step now; the flashing-lane jackpot is three steps and the other lane one.
  • The test's timing player uses every flipper (the flapper's timer always did — they share a button) and takes the ball at three-quarters of the way out on the bat, which with the wider fan is the 67 degrees the range's ramps sit at; its verdict is 41 paired games with the line at 'timing must win more often than it loses'. Measured over 63 games: tropical 51, creepypasta 43, static 50, unicorn 37, square 56 wins.
VERSION AB2026-09-10
  • PLAYED IT WITH A PER-FRAME PLAYER AND WATCHED IT BE UNFUN. A three-ball game lasted 39 to 64 seconds with between one and seventeen flips in the whole game. The ball spent 15 to 46 per cent of its life above the top lanes and only 6 to 18 per cent within reach of a flipper. Three-quarters of ALL drains were outlanes (a real machine runs about a third) and a third of those had no flipper contact in the previous three seconds. Median ball life: six seconds.
  • THE CABINET WALL FUNNELLED EVERY WALL-HUGGING BALL INTO THE OUTLANE. The orbit guide stopped dead at the bottom of the lane, and below it the side wall angles inward — straight into the centre of the outlane mouth. A weak orbit shot rolled back down and out. The plunge rode the right lane from the top and out: every ball-save in one game was the identical path. The guide now curves inboard and ends above the inlane, the way a real lane guide does, so a rolling ball is delivered toward the slingshot and the outlane is only reached by dropping off the end of it.
  • EVERY FLIPPER SHOT LEFT THE BAT AT EXACTLY 1,690 UNITS A SECOND — the speed cap, about 1.6 m/s, half a real shot. There was no hard shot and no soft shot; the cap flattened the tip-weighting to one number, and the ball floated. The cap is out of the way (2,600), the incline is a real 6.5 degrees, and ramp travel is faster to match. Shot speed after a flip now runs from 1,100 to 2,600 depending on where you catch it.
  • THE ROOF IS CLOSED AT ITS LEFT END. A hard plunge flew the whole roof channel; on four machines the far-end bounce dropped it into lane one and on the fifth it escaped down the left lane and never touched a lane. A short diagonal from the arch's shoulder to the first vane turns it down into lane one everywhere, so the plunge is finally a skill shot with one mapping on every machine: full pull is lane one, softer pulls land further right, and a lazy pull comes down the right lane to the flipper.
  • SAME PLAYER AFTERWARDS: 77 to 190 flips a game instead of 3 to 17; games of about three minutes; centre drains 40 to 56 per cent of the total instead of 0 to 18; balls draining untouched under ten per cent; no stalls.
  • Tried and rejected, with numbers: an outlane guard post (doubled flips but combined with the guide it made four-minute games that would not finish), a narrower outlane mouth (stalls in the wedge), and a floor under the top-right corner to force the plunge into the lanes (a shelf the ball parks on: 700 to 850 stalls).
  • The DMD no longer scrolls PULL THE PLUNGER after the ball is in play.
VERSION AA2026-09-10
  • GROUND-UP REBUILD OF EVERYTHING YOU SEE AND FEEL. Engine v5. The physics core is the one thing kept from v4, because it is the one thing that was measured to work (timing a shot beats flapping in 62 to 81 per cent of paired games on every machine; every game ends; no stalls). The renderer, the printed art, the hardware, the DMD, the apron, the feedback and the way the machine tells you what to shoot are all new.
  • THE PRINT: a banded synthwave sun over a turquoise bay with the sun's road down it, clean wave curls, a cream beach with a wet tide line and foam, starfish and shells, two big inked palms in the corners, hibiscus at the lane mouths, and the tiki redrawn as a flat carved mask in orange with heavy carved lines, yellow eyes, a leaf crown and white teeth around the scoop.
  • THE LOOK IS BACKLIT ARCADE, NOT WASHED WOOD. There is no grain, no haze, no clear-coat mottle and no print-dot pass any more; every one of those muddied the board. The playfield is a bright, saturated printed graphic with bold shapes and ink keylines. Light comes from the lamps: jewel inserts that bloom when lit, a ring light in every pop bumper skirt, domed flashers with real halos, and a general-illumination dip under a mode so the flashers punch through.
  • THE HARDWARE IS GLOSSY PLASTIC AND CHROME. Rails are round chrome tubes with a dark rim and a hard specular. Pop bumpers have a skirt, a graded body, a domed cap with the white ring and centre disc every real one has, and they flash white and squash when hit. Slingshots are a rubber band on two posts with a lit plastic on top. Drop targets are glossy tiles that stand up out of a slot and drop into it; standups sit on a bracket. Spinners are a plate that foreshortens as it spins. Plastics are translucent sheets with a bevel and screws. Flippers are big glossy bats with a rubber, a tapered stripe, a chrome pivot cap, a shadow and motion-blur ghosts when they swing.
  • RAMPS ARE SOLID. A flyover is a translucent plastic channel with two bright rails, a hinged steel flap at the mouth and posts to the board, not two hairlines. When you make it the whole channel lights and the ball leaves a streak up it.
  • THE BALL IS THE HERO. A chrome sphere with a specular, the board reflected in its lower half, an ink rim, a soft contact shadow, and a speed streak when it is moving fast.
  • THE MACHINE TELLS YOU WHAT TO SHOOT. Every big shot carries a stack of arrow inserts along its lane, and the table lights them as a chase toward the shot that matters: the scoop when the mode is lit, and during multiball the FLASHING LANE. The jackpot now MOVES: the lit lane pays it and lights the other one, and the unlit lane pays a consolation and tells you where to look. The DMD names the objective at all times.
  • A REAL BACKBOX. The dot-matrix display is larger, its lit dots glow, the score is the biggest thing on it, the ball number and the multipliers sit above it and the objective or the scrolling message below, with the ball-save countdown shown while it runs. Callouts are a full-width banner across the middle of the board with a scale-in; a mode start gets its own band naming it. The apron covers the trough so the ball vanishes into it, carries two instruction cards, and has BALL SAVE and SHOOT AGAIN lamps that actually light.
  • A STALL FIXED IN THE PHYSICS. After six unbroken slingshot hits the kick fades to nothing, and the speed cap that goes with it faded to nothing too, so a slow ball touching a dead sling had its velocity scaled to zero and crept down the rubber at eight units a second: a four-second stall, found by the unattended sim. The cap has a floor now. Also: a particle burst now draws the same random numbers on every quality tier, so the potato tier plays the identical game.
  • The whole test suite passes against the new engine: 45 checks, including cabinet geometry, unattended games ending, skill paying, games being independent, quality tiers being bit-identical, and every achievement declared.
VERSION Z2026-09-08
  • A SECOND GAME WAS NOT A SECOND GAME. Every table keeps its rules state in a module-scoped object, and the engine's reset handler cleared four of its counters by hand and left the rest. resetState() existed and was only ever called by the PLAY AGAIN button, so a game started any other way inherited the last one's progress.
  • WHAT IT COST: the extra ball is awarded on exactly the second bank completion, so once that counter had walked past two it could never be earned again. Measured across twenty-five games on every machine, the extra ball fired in exactly ONE of them. It is the biggest reward in pinball and it was dead content. It now lands in 11 to 15 games in 25 on four of the five machines.
  • It also quietly corrupted scoring in both directions: the same seed played three times running went 478,099 then 311,598 then 125,990 on one machine, and 123,893 then 1,200,283 then 898,167 on another. Your second game was a different game from your first for no reason you could see.
  • The invariant that catches the whole class is now a test: the same table, the same seed, played twice in a row, has to be the same game. Reverting the fix on any machine fails it.
  • CHECKED AND HEALTHY, so nobody has to wonder: multiball fires in 18 to 24 games in 25; modes are completed in a third to a half; super jackpots land in 13 to 19; and the end-of-ball bonus is a real 14 to 25 per cent of the score with the multiplier reaching 3 to 5. The big shots are properly hard, too — per flip, timing the shot hits a scoop or a ramp 46 to 107 times more often than flapping does.
VERSION Y2026-09-08
  • PROVED IT PLAYS. There is now a test that asks the only question that separates a pinball machine from a slot machine: does timing the shot beat flapping both flippers? Each table is played twice on the SAME random seed — once firing when the ball has rolled out to the strong part of the bat, once just flapping — and what counts is how often timing wins.
  • It wins on every machine: tropical 15/21 paired games (1.7x the points), creepypasta 12/21 (1.6x), square 15/21 (4.5x), static-static 16/21 (5.2x), happy-girl 13/21 (1.5x). Every game ends.
  • THE STATISTIC HAD TO BE PAIRED AND IT NEEDED SAMPLES. A ratio of median scores over nine seeds swung between 0.46x and 2.11x on the same machine and the same code — pure noise. Twenty-one paired seeds is stable.
  • MY OWN TEST HARNESS WAS WRONG, and it had been wrong for every measurement in the previous round. startGame() refuses to run unless attractMode is still TRUE, and create() leaves it false — so clearing it first, which is the obvious thing to write, silently skipped reset() and the gameStart event and the table never got to set up its first ball. Fixed, and the reason is written down where the next person will hit it.
  • SQUARE NEVER TOLD YOU WHICH WALL WAS LIT. showSide() is what puts the LIT SIDE lamp up and names the wall to shoot, and it was only called when a ball was served — so ball one never got it, and the end of a mode then pinned the status to one generic sentence for the rest of the game. Measured over a full game: the machine said exactly one thing, 100 per cent of the time, and never lit more than 5 of its 18 lamps while the other four reached all 18.
  • FOUR THINGS I SUSPECTED AND DISPROVED, recorded so nobody chases them again: plunges do not bypass the playfield (0 of 120 on every machine); the outlane drain clustering is just what happens when flips work; the ball is never hidden under a pop bumper cap (0.0 per cent of the game); and a ball down the middle does drain — my first test was reading the wrong thing and a new ball had already been served in the same tick.
  • The dead time is not a fault either. Gravity works out to about 1.15 m/s squared, which is a real 6.5-degree playfield, and across eight games of 160 seconds there were only one to three stalls over half a second. The ball being out of reach most of the time is what pinball is.
VERSION X2026-09-08
  • PLAYED IT PROPERLY THIS TIME. The previous player drove the game through a browser bridge at about 25Hz and kept missing the flipper window, so it measured its own latency more than the game. This one sees every frame and flips when the ball is genuinely on the bat — and immediately found two faults that no weak player can reach.
  • THE COMBO LADDER WAS UNBOUNDED AND QUADRATIC: 900 x combo squared, with nothing capping the combo. Watched live it climbs +110, +3,820, +8,320, +14,730, +27,830... and by a chain of forty it is paying over a MILLION per shot. The chain still counts as high as you can take it, because watching '43X COMBO' go up is the whole point of a combo. What it PAYS now tops out at eight, the same way the jackpot ladder already did.
  • STATIC-STATIC WAS A PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE. Its two orbits each had a mouth sitting beside the flipper that shoots it, and each returned the ball to the OTHER flipper, whose own mouth was right there — so the loop cost nothing and never broke. Measured: 49 per cent of every flip entered an orbit, against 6 to 12 per cent on the machines with one; 57 loops a game; and the game never finished inside three minutes because the ball never came back down to be lost. Median score 115,000,000 against 50k-107k on the other four.
  • Looping is still what this machine is about — it has two orbits and no flyover on purpose. It just has to be a SHOT now: the mouths are tighter and the ball has to arrive with real speed, so a loose flip goes past the way it does on every other table. Orbit entries are back to 0.12 a flip, in line with the rest, and every game finishes.
  • AND THE REASON NEITHER WAS FOUND EARLIER: the balance bot strokes the flippers on a timer and cannot loop a shot twice, so it reported static-static at a comfortable median of 130k while a competent player was scoring a thousand times that. There is a new check in the suite that plays each machine with a bot that sees every frame, and fails if a game cannot be finished in 150 seconds or if a median score runs an order of magnitude past a good game. Reverting either fix makes it fail.
  • STILL WRONG, MEASURED, NOT YET FIXED: the ball is only within reach of a flipper 8 to 11 per cent of the time, with a median wait of about three seconds between chances and a ninetieth percentile over seven. Most of a game is spent watching.
VERSION W2026-09-08
  • PLAYED IT. A closed-loop player was built that sends real touch events and reacts to where the ball actually is, rather than the balance bot poking the engine — and it found things no amount of looking at the board would have.
  • THE BALL SAVE COULD NEVER BE USED UP. It was granted every time the ball drained while the timer ran and was never consumed, so inside one window the ball came back over and over. Measured in play: SIX drains in ninety seconds and the ball was never actually lost, with the saver still showing time left at the end. A save you cannot spend is not a safety net, it is the game refusing to end. One save per window now, and there is a regression test that fails if that ever comes back.
  • THE TWO SLINGSHOTS WERE AIMED AT EACH OTHER. The kick ran straight down the face normal, and the left sling's normal points across the board at the right one — so a ball that fell into the pocket between them bounced back and forth while the player held two dead flippers. Measured in play: unbroken chains of THIRTEEN and FOURTEEN sling hits with nothing else in between. The rubber now returns less on each hit of an unbroken run and nothing at all after six, so the chain dies and the ball drops to the flippers. The suite's own per-table counts show it: static-static went from 34 sling hits a game to 3.
  • KNOWN AND NOT FIXED — THE PLUNGER IS A DECORATION. Its usable range is SIX PER CENT: maxKick is 2050, the global speed cap is 1700, and the floor needed just to climb the shooter lane is 0.78 of the kick, so every launch lands between 1600 and 1700 and the cap clips most of even that. Measured across eleven pull strengths, the ball arrived at the top lanes at an identical 936u/s and entered a lane exactly once. The comments in the engine describing a roof channel, five vanes and a soft-plunge skill shot describe something that has never worked.
  • A fix was built and reverted. Giving the shooter lane its own speed cap and a corner that turns the ball into the roof channel makes the plunge monotonic (743 to 1448u/s) and gives tropical and square a real soft-lane / hard-orbit mapping — and it sends every ball on creepypasta round the orbit into an outlane, turning a three-ball game into sixteen seconds with no flipper contact at all. The top-lane geometry needs reworking per arch before that can land, so it was left out rather than shipped broken on one machine in five. The measurements are recorded in the engine where the next person will hit them.
VERSION V2026-09-08
  • A DEPTH PASS. Everything on the board that was flat now has height in it, and the height is expressed the same way on every object: a soft shadow thrown in the board's one light direction, and the parts underneath peeking out on the shadow side.
  • POP BUMPERS were three flat coins lying on the wood with no shadow at all. A jet is an ASSEMBLY: a base ring bolted through the playfield with three visible screws, a black skirt just above it that the ball actually strikes, a rod, and a translucent cap forty millimetres up with a lamp burning inside it. The cap is now blitted AFTER the ball, because the ball passes underneath it, and it dips when it fires.
  • TARGETS were pills painted on the board. A drop target now sits in a milled slot you can see in the wood, a standup stands on a dark bracket, and both throw a shadow and are lifted clear of their own feet.
  • ROLLOVERS were 16%-white discs — invisible on a light board, a hole on a dark one. They are star rollovers now: a chrome star set into a milled recess with a lamp under it.
  • RAMPS. A habitrail stands fifty millimetres off the wood and it was drawn as two hairlines with a 13% shadow tucked under them, which is why the biggest structure on the board read as a scribble over the art. Real shadow, thicker round-steel wires each with their own specular, and the STRUTS that carry it — a post from the wire down to its own foot, which is the clearest way of saying this is up in the air.
  • PLASTICS had a shadow under them and nothing holding them up, so they hovered. They stand on chrome posts with feet now.
  • ONE METAL PER MACHINE. Rails, ramp wireforms, the struts under them, the posts under the plastics and the flipper pivots are all the same metal on a real machine and were not here: the haunted board's guide rails went dark iron while its wireforms stayed bright chrome and became the brightest thing on the table. They all read from one place now.
  • INSERT LEGENDS are screened in white paint with a keyline, so an unlit insert still tells you what the shot is. They were drawn in the lens's own colour at half strength, which on every board came out unreadable.
  • The coconut cap had three pores spread round it over a curved line, which made a smiley face. The pores cluster at the top now and the husk fibre runs down the nut the way it grows.
VERSION U2026-09-08
  • A LOOK-AT-IT PASS, NOT A THEORY PASS. Rendering the boards at playing size and actually reading them turned up a stack of plain defects that no amount of new art was going to fix.
  • PLASTICS WERE SELECTION RECTANGLES. Drawn as a 22%-alpha fill with a white keyline — see-through, with the board showing through them. They are opaque screen-printed sheets now: art screened on, a polished bevel round the cut edge, a screw hole at each mounting point, and a real shadow because they stand proud of the wood.
  • THE PLASTICS WERE ALSO IDENTICAL ON ALL FIVE MACHINES — the same three sheets in the same three places. Each machine has its own shapes now.
  • THEY WERE ALSO LAID FLAT OVER THE SLINGSHOTS, so both slings on every board vanished underneath. Routing the sling out of the sheet was tried first and was wrong — the plastic is the same size as the sling, so the cut left two slivers. They are mounted outboard over the outlane instead, where a machine actually puts them.
  • AND THEY WERE COVERING THE POP BUMPERS on four of the five machines. Measured against each machine's own bumper positions and pulled clear.
  • HARDWARE AND ART WERE THE SAME COLOUR. Guide rails were tinted to the theme, which on tropical meant beige rails on beige sand over a beige idol — you could not tell the furniture from the picture. A guide rail is STEEL on every machine ever built; the machines are told apart by the shape of the metal, which is real, not by painting it to match the wood. Only 'candy' stays coloured, because that one is plastic.
  • THE BALL WAS DISAPPEARING on light boards — a pale sphere on pale sand. It has a proper contact shadow and a dark keyline now, so it separates from any background whatever the machine is painted.
  • THE FLIPPERS HAD NO SHADOW, which is why an upper flipper out on its own read as a stick lying on the picture. Every bat casts one now, and turns on a visible pivot boss. Every casting also got a hard ink outline so the thing you are steering with never sinks into the board behind it.
  • SHOOT AGAIN was white at 13% on the wood — invisible on a light playfield, which meant the one thing telling you the ball is saved could not be read. It is a screened legend with a keyline now, readable lit or unlit, and an unlit insert carries its printed outline so you can see the shot before you light it.
  • THE S-U-R-F BANK RAN STRAIGHT THROUGH THE IDOL'S LEFT EYE. Two of its four targets and two of its letter lamps sat on the face. The bank is a column up the left lane now — clear of the art, and measurably easier to complete for it (1.00 to 1.88 banks a game).
VERSION T2026-09-07
  • WEAK, LITERALLY. The art was painted in translucent washes at 20-60% alpha, the lit inserts were composited so that they DARKENED the board they sat on, and there was no single thing on any board big enough to look at. Three separate reasons the machines read as faint.
  • LIT INSERTS ARE THE BRIGHTEST THING ON A PINBALL MACHINE, and they were drawn in source-over — which means every glow sat on the board like a sticker and muted whatever it covered, the exact opposite of light. Everything is additive now: the spill lands on the wood, the lens is driven past its own colour, and the bulb burns a hole through the middle. The filament stays TIGHT on purpose; wide, and every lamp goes white and loses the colour that tells you what it means.
  • The whole lit lamp is baked into one sprite and blitted once. Drawn live it was six draws each, so a lamp show — the moment the machine should look its best — cost 18fps. Measured on one page: every lamp lit used to take it from 45fps to 27; it now runs 42 against 43 with the board dark, which is to say free.
  • The bulb strips down the rails are additive too, with a black bezel round each bulb so they read as fittings rather than dots.
  • INK STRENGTH: the finished art is composited over itself in overlay, which deepens the shadows, lifts the lights and pulls the colour up at once. That is why a screen-printed board reads richer than the same picture drawn at 40% alpha, and it is the difference between a washed board and a printed one.
  • A HERO: THE TIKI. Three feet of carved hardwood in the middle of the board, and the scoop is its open mouth — you are feeding the ball to the idol. Carved brow, sunken eye sockets with lit pupils, a wedge nose, teeth top and bottom round the shot, chevrons cut into the cheeks and crown, and fire licking up over the chin.
VERSION S2026-09-07
  • IT LOOKED DRAWN, BECAUSE IT WAS DRAWN THE WAY A PROGRAM DRAWS. Every shape on the board was a flat fill or a smooth gradient, nothing had a line around it, nothing cast a shadow, and no two highlights agreed about where the light was. This is the pass that fixes the craft rather than the colours.
  • SURFACE: the board is plywood now. Grain runs the length of the table, there is a poured clear coat with mottle in it, a screen-print dot at one dot per screen pixel, and the far end hazes cool while the near end falls into shadow under the apron. Baked into the art layer once, so the entire treatment costs nothing per frame.
  • ONE LIGHT. A machine is lit from the backbox, so every shadow falls the same way: down the table and slightly right, soft, and longer for a taller object. Rails and posts used to each carry their own hard offset copy of themselves at their own angle, which is why nothing looked like it was sitting on the wood. That is now a single blurred pass in one direction.
  • RAILS: a round steel guide rail carries a TIGHT specular streak, not a wide grey one. Each style now gets a dark underside, a broad roll of sheen and that hard thin line — chrome, matte pitted iron, twin wires each with their own highlight, glossy plastic with a bounce light off the board, and milled square section whose sheen stops dead at the arris.
  • ILLUSTRATION TOOLKIT: form() gives a shape a graded body, a contact shadow in its foot, a rim light on the lit edge and an ink keyline; tex() puts hatching, rock strata, stipple or grit inside it; edge() draws the darker line where one printed shape overlaps another.
  • ART: the sun is a hard disc with cut bands and a halo, not a blur. The volcano has bedded strata, a sunlit western face, a crater glow, lava with a dark channel under it and smoke off the cone. The sea carries the sun's road in glinting wavelets. The beach has a drawn tide line with breaking foam and two colours of stipple in the sand. The palms have inked tapering trunks with ring detail, fronds with a spine and leaflets, and coconuts in the crown.
VERSION R2026-09-07
  • THE PLASTICS ARE DIFFERENT SHAPES NOW, NOT DIFFERENT TINTS. The flipper bats, the slingshot bodies and the target faces were one casting each, drawn identically on all five machines and recoloured. Every one of those three is now cut per machine, which is what actually tells two pinball machines apart from across a room.
  • FLIPPERS: the house casting — a tapered bat wearing a rubber sleeve, with a cream ring around the tip instead of the white dot every machine used to have.
  • SLINGSHOTS: a palm frond. The back edge scallops out into two lobes instead of running straight to a point, and the plastic is tinted deep lagoon rather than the navy every machine shared.
  • TARGETS: rounded bars with a lit top edge.
  • The bat is now baked once per shape and blitted rotated, which also removed two gradients that were being rebuilt every single frame.
VERSION Q2026-09-07
  • THE OUTLINE OF THE BOARD IS DIFFERENT ON EVERY MACHINE NOW. The top arch was one shape on all five, and it was labelled in the code as 'the silhouette shared by every machine in the range' — which is exactly the problem, because the outline of a board is the first thing you recognise about it, before the colour, before the art, before a single shot.
  • TROPICAL keeps the CLASSIC arch — the flat-topped, round-shouldered outline the range started from.
  • Every arch has to end at the same point on the right, and that is not a stylistic choice: the gate the plunged ball enters through spans a narrow band of the shooter lane, and an arch that ends inside it walls the ball out of the playfield completely.
  • The squarer outlines keep the ball alive noticeably longer, so two machines had to be rebalanced after the change — a board's shape is not decoration, it is how long your ball lasts.
VERSION P2026-09-06
  • THE LOOSE WIRES ARE GONE. Measured, THIRTY-FOUR of the eighty-six guide-rail ends on every one of these machines simply stopped dead in mid-air — the funnel guides under the scoop, the pocket deflectors, the feet of the orbit rails, both ends of all five top-lane dividers. A rail on a real playfield never does that: it ends in a capped post, runs into another rail, or runs off the edge of the board. Every one of those ends now carries a metal cap, in that machine's own metal — brass, black iron, pale wire, pink candy, milled steel.
  • They are DRAWN, not simulated, and that distinction was learned the hard way. Capping them with real physical posts was the first attempt and it was wrong: a post is a solid object, and two dozen of them dropped onto five boards whose furniture now sits somewhere different on each one pinched lanes shut all over the place — seventy-five failures, balls wedged in a dozen new pockets. Three attempts to make the placement adaptive made it worse each time. The complaint was that the boards looked unfinished, so the fix belongs in the drawing and nowhere near the physics.
  • One genuine connection bug came out of it: the cap that turns the plunged ball out of the shooter lane sits fourteen units clear of the arch it appears to continue, and it has to stay that way. The gate the ball enters through spans that gap — close it up and the ball can never reach the playfield at all.
VERSION O2026-09-06
  • FIVE DIFFERENT MACHINES, NOT ONE MACHINE FIVE TIMES. Every table in this range had the same two flippers in the same place at the bottom of the same board, and everything done since — the colours, the layouts, the painted scenes, the metal — was paint on one skeleton. A flipper somewhere new changes which shots exist at all, so the engine no longer assumes there are exactly two of them: a machine can mount as many bats as it likes, wherever it likes, and each one names the button that drives it.
  • TROPICAL has THREE flippers: a third bat up the LEFT, firing off the same left button as the lower one, and it is the clean way at the volcano ramp from a ball coming round the orbit.
  • Every one of the new bats stalled the ball on the first attempt, all in the same way: the tip parked against the house funnel guides and the ball sat in the pocket between them. The one that did not was the one mounted high and clear, which is what told me where the rest belonged. All five now run ten games apiece with nothing stalling anywhere.
  • More flippers means far more game: bank completions went from 0.4-1.4 a game across the range to 0.8-3.4, and modes from 0.5-1.3 to 0.9-2.9.
  • The renderer was allocating about TWENTY canvas gradients every frame — for the ball, each bumper, the scoop, the ramp mouths and the light wash — and the glass was a full-playfield image resampled to fit on every single frame. All baked now.
VERSION N2026-09-06
  • THE RAILS WERE THE PROBLEM ALL ALONG. Every machine drew its guide rails, its arch and its posts in the same hardcoded chrome — the theme's own rail colour was read exactly nowhere in the renderer — and the rails are the single biggest thing on any playfield. Five different paint jobs behind one identical silver skeleton still read as one machine, which is exactly what they did.
  • The metal is per machine now, and not tinted: DRAWN differently, with its own shadow, its own highlight and its own section.
  • TROPICAL is built out of warm BRASS — polished, gold, the colour of sun on metal.
  • AND THE ART WAS PAINTED AS A WASH, NOT AS ART. The scenes were going down at five to fifteen percent opacity underneath all that hardware, which is backwards: on a real playfield the art is a printed picture and the chrome is thin lines laid over the top of it. The test card, the Bauhaus blocks, the rainbow, the sand and the moon are all painted at proper strength now.
  • The posts take their metal from the same setting, so the furniture matches the rails on every board.
VERSION M2026-09-06
  • THE ART IS DRAWN NOW. Every machine had about twenty lines of it — a colour wash, a couple of shapes and a faint word — which is why the five read as one table in five colours however far apart the layouts were moved. Each board is now a painted, animated scene of its own, and the printed shot lanes are drawn per machine instead of the same five lines stencilled onto all of them.
  • TROPICAL is a sunset. A banded sun sitting low over the water, a headland on the left, and a VOLCANO up the right where the flyover climbs — with lava on its near face and a crater that glows harder the moment the tiki wakes up. Three bands of surf roll up the beach, the smoke plume drifts, and the printed shot lanes are breaking waves rather than straight lines.
  • It is also the FRIENDLY machine: softest coils but a pinched outlane and a twelve-second ball save.
  • Everything animated is built to be free: the one thing that actually cost frames was a radial gradient being rebuilt sixty times a second for a glow with three possible states. Cached, it went from 36fps back to 45 — so every per-frame gradient in the new art is cached, and the heavier layers drop out on the lower quality tiers.
  • The machines also differ PHYSICALLY now, not just visually: ball save runs from six and a half seconds to fourteen, flipper coils from 0.90x to 1.12x, and the outlane mouth from 33 units to 46.
VERSION L2026-09-06
  • PLAYED THEM, INSTEAD OF ONLY TESTING THEM. Fourteen games a machine, measuring the things that decide whether a table is fun rather than whether it works: how long a ball lasts, how much of that time you can actually reach the ball, how often nothing at all is scoring, which shot dominates, and how you die. Three of the answers were bad.
  • MOST BALLS NEVER REACHED A FLIPPER. The outlane mouth opened 66 units wide at the top — 2.4 ball widths, WIDER than the inlane beside it — so a ball coming down either side of the board was a coin flip between the inlane and the drain. Measured, 61% of everything crossing the flipper line on one machine came down the right outlane, and the player got about two seconds of flipper time a ball. The mouth is 40 units now. The channel below it is untouched, so the outlane is still a real gap the ball fits down — it is just no longer the likeliest way to lose the ball. Flipper time went up two and a half times.
  • THE POP BUMPERS OWNED THE GAME. The ball was spending 38-56% of its life up in the jets and only 12-19% within reach of a flipper: half the game was happening where you could not touch it. A real nest is open at the bottom and the incline walks the ball out; ours fired at full power in whatever direction the ball arrived from, forever. Now a long run in the pops ends with the nest spitting the ball back downfield. (Weakening the pops was tried first and made it WORSE — a soft pop just leaves the ball in there.)
  • THE MULTIBALL WAS ARRIVING TOO LATE TO ENJOY. First mode averaged 28-37 seconds, which with a fifteen-second ball meant most games saw it on the last ball or never. One visit to the scoop lights it now instead of two. Modes per game went from 0.25-1.5 across the range to 0.56-1.25 on every machine, and tropical's went from 0.38 to 1.25.
  • And a balance pass on top: the two runaway machines came down and the two quiet ones came up, so the range now pays 48k to 143k instead of 43k to 172k. They are still deliberately different — creepypasta's hurry-up is the big earner, square's box is the precision machine — just no longer three times apart.
VERSION K2026-09-06
  • FIVE RULESETS, NOT ONE. The layouts were made distinct last time; the RULES were not. Measured with the words and numbers stripped out so only the logic remained, the five machines were 98.9-100% the SAME ruleset — knock the bank down, light the scoop, start the multiball, five times over with different nouns. Every machine now has a signature mechanic that no other machine in the range has, and it is built around that machine's own layout.
  • THE WAVE. Alternate the orbit and the ramp and the wave builds, each swap worth more than the last, up to x8. Take the same shot twice running and it breaks back to nothing. The classic layout gets the flow ruleset — this machine rewards keeping the ball moving between the two big shots.
  • There is an achievement for it: 'wave_master'.
  • A NEW CLASS OF STUCK BALL, found by playing 24 games a table and watching for anything that stopped moving. Rebuilding the playfields put lone posts into places they had never been -- the corridor between the scoop and the bank, the pocket between the outer drop target and the outlane guard -- and each of those leaves a gap too narrow for the ball to pass but exactly wide enough for it to wedge in. Three machines had one. All five now run 24 games with nothing stalling anywhere.
  • The gap check that guards this now understands that everything solid on the board is a capsule -- a post is a short one, a jet a fat one, a drop target a long thin one -- and any two of them closer together than the ball is wide is a wall the ball will find. It knows the two deliberate exceptions: targets in a bank stand shoulder to shoulder, and a bank built AROUND a scoop is supposed to be shut until you knock a side down.
  • CREEPYPASTA'S JETS were sitting directly on top of its in-line bank and intercepting every ball before it could reach a target -- the bank completed 0.06 times a game. Its flyover is the left one and it tips the ball out to the RIGHT, so the jets belong on the right too. The bank completes 1.25 times a game now.
VERSION J2026-09-06
  • FIVE MACHINES, FIVE PLAYFIELDS. They were one playfield with five paint jobs. Measured element for element, creepypasta, static static and tropical were 100% IDENTICAL — every target, jet, scoop, spinner and ramp mouth in exactly the same place — and the other two were 82-84% the same. The engine handed every machine the same left orbit and the same right flyover, and that one helper was doing it.
  • There are five shot topologies now: left orbit + right flyover, right orbit + left flyover, two orbits and no flyover, two flyovers and no orbit, and the box. Element overlap across the range is down from 82-100% to 43-56%, and what is left is the CHASSIS — the top lanes, the inlane rollovers, the outlane guards, the flippers and the shooter lane. That part is meant to be shared: a real manufacturer builds one cabinet and a different playfield on top of it, which is exactly why the flippers answer the same on all five.
  • TROPICAL keeps the classic shot: the orbit up the LEFT and a raised flyover up the RIGHT, with the S-U-R-F bank on the diagonal and the jets tucked in a tight triangle behind the arch.
  • A SEALED WALL OF JETS. Two of the new layouts shipped with pop bumpers spaced 72 units apart with a 26-unit radius — 20 units of daylight for a 28-unit ball. The ball physically could not pass between them, so the top of the board became a nest it could never leave and nothing ever reached the flippers. This is the same bug that made the v3 chassis unplayable, in a new place, and it is now a permanent test: any two round obstacles closer together than the ball is wide fail the build, because that is a wall, not a gap.
  • THE SHOT ARROWS WERE POINTING AT THE WRONG SHOTS. Move the orbit to the other side of the board and the lit arrow that names it does not follow by itself. Every arrow, and the word printed under it, now sits at the mouth of the shot it actually names.
  • The whole layout audit still passes on all five: not one lamp lens, legend, drop target, post, bumper, scoop, spinner or printed word overlaps another anywhere on any of the boards.
  • The machines also play differently now, not just look different. Bank completions per game run from 0.44 to 1.38 and modes from 0.44 to 1.50 across the range, where before they were four flavours of the same curve.
VERSION I2026-09-06
  • YOU CAN CRADLE THE BALL NOW, and cradling is most of pinball. Catch it on a raised flipper and it settles into the crook of the bat and sits there, dead still, while you look at the board and pick your shot. It used to roll straight off the end and drain: the bat rolls a resting ball downhill, and downhill was hardcoded as toward the TIP — right when the flipper is relaxed, exactly backwards when it is raised. Every shot had to be taken on the fly.
  • That same roll was a flat velocity kick applied dozens of times a second, so even pointing the right way a 'resting' ball buzzed against the bat between 19 and 107 units a second. It is an acceleration now. A cradled ball measures 13 and does not move.
  • BALL SEARCH used to treat a cradle as a stuck ball and shake the machine every four seconds, throwing away the shot you were lining up. A ball on a held flipper is under your control: it no longer triggers a search, and it no longer hides a second ball that really is stuck.
  • THE DEAD BOUNCE EXISTS. A flipper is three different surfaces depending on what you are doing with it — swinging (alive, throws the ball), held up (dead, so you can catch it), and relaxed (rubber, which bounces). Only the first two existed, so a ball dropped on a flipper you were not holding just died. Now it pops across to the other one, which is a real technique and a real save.
  • The aimable spread off one flipper measures 76 degrees, and where on the bat you catch the ball is the whole difference between them.
  • DROP TARGETS take energy with them on the way down instead of rebounding off you like a wall.
  • THE SCOOP IS A HOLE. The most important shot on every machine was drawn as a flat black disc with a coloured outline. It has a throat you can see down, a stainless collar bolted round the mouth, a lit ring and a halo on the wood when the shot is on, and you can see the ball sitting in it.
  • THE BALL IS MADE OF STEEL and now behaves like it: roll it past a lit insert or a firing flasher and it catches that colour down the near side.
  • THE RAMP LIGHTS UP UNDER YOUR BALL as it rides round, so you can follow it instead of watching it vanish into a dark band and reappear somewhere else. A ball up on the wireform throws its shadow further and softer, because it is a good inch above the wood.
  • The measurement that proves all this had to be fixed first. The harness that plays these machines held the flipper button down for the entire ball — which looked harmless only while a held bat could not hold a ball. It strokes the flipper now, like a person, and with that fixed the new physics is better on every table: modes went from 0.19-0.31 a game to 0.31-0.44, medians from 26-53k to 35-66k.
VERSION H2026-09-05
  • EVERY PRINTED THING ON THE BOARD WAS MEASURED AGAINST EVERY OTHER ONE, and nineteen collisions came back. They had been fixed one at a time, whenever one happened to be noticed in a screenshot, which is no way to find them.
  • THE MAIN INSERT — the lamp that tells you the centre shot is lit — was half-buried under the scoop on ALL FIVE MACHINES. The lens is 30 units across and 17 of them were behind the hole.
  • THE ORBIT ARROW had the orbit's own guide rail running straight across its lens, on all five, with its legend printed underneath the rail as well. The arrow now sits in the lane it points up, with ORBIT printed clear beneath it.
  • THE KICK LEGEND was printed on top of the outlane's outer guide. The lamp was hard against that rail; it is centred in the outlane channel now.
  • THE LETTER INSERTS that spell the drop-bank word sat wherever they had landed — one under a post, one under the centre flasher dome. They are seated in an even row directly below the targets they spell.
  • SQUARE had five collisions of its own: CORE printed across the top drop target, and then, once moved, across the S Q U A R E wordmark, so the board read CORE UARE. Its centre column has been re-spaced from the jets down to the box.
  • HAPPY GIRL UNICORN squeezed FIVE drop targets into the four-target envelope the other machines use, so the drawn caps merged into one another and the bank read as a single bar. Five real targets now, with the same gaps as the rest of the range, in the same footprint.
  • None of this is a matter of taste any more: the suite measures it. Every lamp lens, every legend, every drop target, post, bumper, scoop, spinner and printed word on all five playfields is checked against every other one, and against the guide rails, on every run. A legend under a rail, a lens under a post, two words on the same spot, or anything printed outside the playfield now fails the build.
VERSION G2026-09-05
  • THE NUDGE NO LONGER TILTS THE MACHINE FOR PLAYING IT PROPERLY. Two fingers on the glass was the nudge — and cradling on one flipper while you shoot with the other puts two fingers on the glass every single time. On a phone the machine tilted itself out of the ball within seconds of real two-handed play. The nudge is a SWIPE now, which holding a flipper cannot produce.
  • AND IT GOES WHERE YOU AIM IT. The old shove picked its direction from the combo counter, so it was a coin flip whether it saved the ball or fed the outlane. Swipe left and the ball goes left; flick up and it lifts off the drain.
  • THE TILT BOB SETTLES. Warnings used to be permanent — three across a whole three-ball game and the machine was dead, so the safe play was never to touch it. Hold it steady for about eleven seconds and a warning is forgiven, like a real bob swinging back to centre.
  • THE PLUNGER WAS UPSIDE DOWN. It was drawn from the top of the lane downward, so the rod and its spring ran straight through the waiting ball and the knob floated a third of the table above it — the one piece of hardware on the machine assembled backwards. It now sits below the ball, tip cup under it, spring and knob down into the apron, and the tip snaps past its rest and rings when you let go.
  • A LIT 'SHOOT AGAIN' INSERT between the flippers, which is where every real machine puts it and where you are already looking when the ball is heading down. It blinks faster as the save runs out. The ball saver used to be a 13-pixel ring in the corner of the apron, half of it hidden behind the apron edge.
  • THE PRINTED PLAYFIELD IS SHARP ON A PHONE. Every baked layer — the board art, the rails and posts, the plastics, the glass — was baked at one resolution and stretched, so the printed art was visibly soft against the lamps drawn live beside it. They now bake at the resolution they are actually shown at, and every one of them is rebuilt when you rotate the phone rather than a couple of them.
  • LEAVING THE PAGE RELEASES THE FLIPPERS. iOS fires no blur event when you swipe to the home screen, so a held flipper stayed welded up until you came back and pressed it again.
  • The launch strip had two thresholds that disagreed about where it started, and the KICK lamp's legend was printed underneath the outlane guide that covers it.
  • The suite now dispatches real touch events at the real engine — six cradle-and-shoot cycles with no tilt, the correct bat for each half of the screen, a swipe shoving the ball the way it was swiped, the bob settling, and a held flipper released when the page is hidden. None of the input code had ever been under test.
VERSION F2026-09-05
  • THE BANK NOW HAS THREE WAYS IN. It used to want clean target shots and nothing else, so the whole progression behind it — the multiplier, the lit scoop, the multiball — went unseen in most games. The jets spot a target every eight pops, all four top lanes spot one, and every sixth standup spots one. Measured over sixteen games a table, the bank completes two to three times more often than it did.
  • COMPLETING THE BANK LATE IN A BALL NO LONGER THROWS THE REWARD AWAY. Serving the next ball was clearing the lit scoop, so if you finished the bank and then drained, the machine quietly took the multiball back. The lit scoop now survives the ball that earned it, and the lamp is still blinking when you plunge.
  • THE EXTRA BALL IS REACHABLE. Completing the bank a second time in a game awards it. Over the whole test suite the old machine awarded exactly none.
  • THE SUPER JACKPOT HAS TO BE RE-LIT. It was payable on every trip to the scoop, and a mode spent shooting nothing else was worth more than twenty ordinary games — one run reached 1.24 million against a 50,000 median. Three jackpots re-light it, and the ladder is capped at twelve rungs. Jackpots are 3,000 + 600 a rung, supers 12,000 + 2,000.
  • SPOTTED TARGETS ARE CAPPED AT THREE A BALL. A ball that settles in the jets during a long multiball was farming the bank on repeat, walking the multiplier to 8x on its own.
  • GAME LOGIC RUNS ON THE GAME CLOCK, NOT THE BROWSER'S. The bank's reset was on a browser timer, which a phone throttles the moment you switch tabs and which keeps counting while the machine is paused. Every table now schedules on the machine's own clock, so a paused table is genuinely stopped and a backgrounded one resumes where it left off.
  • HIGH SCORE reads from your saved best instead of showing 0 on the attract display until you had finished a game.
  • The lamp SWEEP show worked only after the first frame had been drawn, which is exactly when it is least likely to be running. Halos now drop out on the lowest quality tier as they were always meant to.
  • The suite that guards these machines now measures BALANCE as well as mechanics — median payout, how often the bank completes, how often a mode starts, how often the skill shot lands, and whether every points achievement the machine advertises is actually attainable. A table that drifts into being unreachable, or into giving points away, fails the build.
VERSION E2026-09-05
  • SKILL SHOT. One top lane is lit for each ball; land the plunge in it for an award that grows with the ball number. The plunger had a full power meter and, until now, nothing to aim at — any plunge that reached the playfield was as good as any other.
  • A saucer was capturing a SECOND ball during multiball. Both sat at the exact same point, reading as one ball on the board and paying the award twice. A saucer holds one ball now; the next rolls over it.
  • The score REEL climbs to its total with a tick instead of snapping, so a 25,000 jackpot and a 250 bumper no longer look identical.
  • Starting a mode takes the table over for a moment: a full-width band with running chevrons, the mode name, and what it wants you to shoot.
  • Shock rings off every bumper, sling, target and saucer, sized to the hit. The ball visibly ROLLS — a band of reflection that turns with distance travelled. Losing it dims the board and floods it red. The flippers glow as they fire, and the board sweeps its lamps while the bonus counts up.
  • The attract display has a ball bouncing across it, because a dark backbox reads as broken.
  • Performance: the cabinet backdrop was being redrawn every frame, including a playfield-sized fillRect under a 26px shadowBlur — that one layer cost 13fps on a phone, more than every lamp on the board combined. It is baked now, along with the walls, posts, gates and plastics. 54fps on a phone under multiball with every lamp blinking; 60fps at 1:1 on desktop.
VERSION D2026-09-05
  • The whole game was gated by a roof channel eight units narrower than the ball. Every plunge bounced off a top-lane vane, rode the outside of the board and drained, hitting one standup on the way — three balls, no jets, no lanes, no shots, the identical path every time. Widening it turned a flat 10k every game into a board that is actually played.
  • The inlane guide dropped the returning ball BEHIND the flipper pivot — measured at 0.43 of a flipper-length behind it — so a flip caught it on the wrong side and knocked it downward. The guide hooks inboard onto the bat now.
  • The slingshots fired even when the ball was travelling AWAY from them, so a clean shot leaving the flipper took a full kick in the side and became a horizontal rocket. They also handed back the ball's whole incoming speed. Slings now fire only on a real strike, and kick out at their own speed.
  • Flipper aim now depends on WHERE on the bat you catch the ball, which is the whole skill of pinball. Every shot used to leave within nine degrees of every other, so only one shot on the board was reachable; the cone is about 60 degrees now.
  • The centre scoop had a window of roughly three degrees and was hit well under once a game, so the modes behind it never started. It sits in a funnel of lane guides now, like a real saucer.
  • Two combo counters were double-counting: pop-bumper rattle drove the same counter the combo award paid out on, and one bumper hit was once worth 864,900 points. A combo is consecutive shots, never rattle.
  • Game over could fire twice, and the engine submitted the score as well as the table — every game was being reported twice.
  • LAMPS. Inserts blink and flicker to show you where to shoot; chase, strobe, sweep and alternate light shows run across the whole board on mode starts, jackpots, multiball and in attract; bulb strips line the rails and the arch; and the general illumination dips under a mode so the flashers punch through.
  • COMBOS, JACKPOTS and SUPER JACKPOTS that grow through a mode, plus a KICKBACK in the left outlane that throws a lost ball back up the board.
  • A second, slower route into the mode, so a player who cannot yet hit the drop bank still gets to see multiball.
  • Performance: 25fps to 60fps. The DMD was redrawing about 2,200 dot rects per frame, the under-glass lighting rebuilt two full-playfield gradients per frame, and each table repainted its entire printed board every frame — all now baked once and blitted. Adaptive quality mirrors lib/adaptive-quality.ts: four tiers on a pixel budget, and a tier may only change what is DRAWN, never the simulation.
VERSION C2026-09-05
  • Rebuilt the chassis at real playfield proportions. The board was 600x960 — 17.7 ball-widths across but only 30.1 long, against a real table's 19.1 x 39.5. At 76% of a real machine's length everything was crowded into one band across the middle with dead space above the flippers. It is 600x1200 now: 17.7 x 36.6.
  • 2:1 also matches a phone almost exactly, so the letterbox that used to eat a quarter of the screen is nearly gone.
  • A real FIVE-SHOT FAN instead of one ramp: left orbit lane, drop bank, centre scoop, ramp, right lane — printed on the board as lanes radiating from the flippers so you can see where to aim mid-ball.
  • Orbit rails down both sides turn the outside of the board into lanes you shoot along, instead of undifferentiated space.
  • Top lane vanes with a roll-across channel above them: a plunged ball is now caught and dropped through the top lanes into the jets, and how hard you plunge chooses the lane.
  • The drop bank moved off the centre and became an angled bank in the upper left, so the scoop is a clean shot straight up the middle rather than something hidden behind a wall of targets.
  • The jets moved up into a pocket behind the orbit rails, where they feed the shot lanes instead of owning the middle of the board.
  • An orbit is drawn as a lane now, not a raised habitrail. Drawing a wireform over a lane that already has rails put a second set of walls on top of the first and caged the playfield.
  • The ramp is a contained flyover on the right that tips into the jets. Its old return wireform ran back down the middle of the board and cut the playfield in half.
  • The plunger was far too weak for the taller cabinet — most plunges could not even clear the lane, and a ball that rolled back just sat there until ball search bailed it out. The spring is stronger, its range now spans 'just clears' to 'all the way round', and a ball that rolls back re-arms the plunger so you can simply shoot again.
VERSION B2026-09-05
  • The coconut jets were so dark against the blue board they were hard to see; repainted.
  • Extra ball for the third completed SURF; waves build toward Wave Rider.
  • Rebuilt on the shared house cabinet. The drain gap is now 1.22 ball widths, so the ball drains down the middle when you miss — as it must. On the old chassis it physically could not fit between the flippers and parked on the tips forever.
  • Attract mode with a PRESS START screen and an instruction card; a game now begins when you ask for one.
  • End-of-ball bonus count-up, bonus multiplier from the inlane rollovers, extra ball on the third completed bank, tilt warnings before the tilt, and the match after the last ball.
  • New playfield hardware: rubber-sleeved posts, plastics that sit above the ball and cast shadows, and flasher domes that pop on every scoring event.
  • Inserts are now shaped lenses — round, bar and arrow — that light through the printed board.
  • The plunger is real hardware in the shooter lane instead of a dark slab that used to cover both flippers on every ball.
  • The scoop now kicks out at an angle. It used to fire straight up and drop the ball back down its own throat, scoring in a loop no player could break.
  • Touch rebuilt: whole-screen flipper zones tracked per finger, hold-and-release plunger, two-finger nudge.
  • The whole screen is the cabinet now: stained body, chrome side rails, and on a phone a lit backbox head carrying the machine's name.
  • On a tall screen the playfield is pushed down into the slack so the flippers sit where your thumbs actually rest, instead of halfway up the display.
  • Marked phone-verified after a real phone-viewport playtest of controls and fit.
VERSION A2026-06-27
  • Original catalogued build.
  • Unplayable: the shared chassis had a drain gap of 0.30 ball widths, so the ball could not fit between the flippers. It wedged on the two tips and the game could never end.