360 - Bug Funhouse. 464m. Ball one. No balls inplay or by plunger. Call attendant not working.

[pezpunk]

that's a ton of work, and would have to be re-done to apply the solution to any other tables, and involves manually manipulating the emulated state of the game, which is something farsight programmers correctly want to avoid doing at all costs.

 

[Sean DonCarlos]

I have NEVER had this happen.

But here's how i'd implement a more forceful call attendent.

1) ten second delay
2) assuming fun with bonus isn't happening, freeze physics, and snapshot the state of all switches.
3) clear ALL switches that are not places where the ball can be trapped.
4) count balls on such switches.
5) Destroy all balls, and place one on every trap switch that was occupied. Leave those switches DOWN whiel doing this
6) We should find that we are short one ball. place it on the plunger. Game unconfused.

This won't work on any table that has physical locks that register a lock when the ball passes a certain switch but do not actually have a switch in the lock area itself (like Cirqus Voltaire's Highwire lock and Twilight Zone's lock). The ROMs for these tables assume that once a ball is in a lock, it doesn't leave the lock until the ROM tells the table to release it. If you destroy all balls, you will be unable to replace them in step 5, because the balls in these locks are not being registered by any switch. So when multiball starts, the ROM will direct the lock to release the ball(s) that it thinks should be in there, but they will not be there. Confusion will ensue.

 

[Zaphod77]

in that case, there should be virtual switches in the lock area that while aren't checked by the rom, they ARE checked by the physics engine.

If the game somehow misses a lock, a ball search should eventually release something from it, because it thinks the lock should be empty.

If all balls are accounted for, yet the software doesn't seem to see a ball, then the engine can probably fix things by tripping the lock entrance switch.

In any case the physics engine should be able to account for all balls, and virtual switches should be added (even when a physical one is impossible) to help it do so.

If a ball is not accounted for, we can assume it's lost, destroy it and place it in the plunger lane. If it is, we have to conclude the emulation engine missed a switch. Note the in many premiere tables there's only one trough switch, which trips when ALL balls have drained. SO when a ball is locked, it's conceivable a drain could be missed. Pretty much all other tables use at least one trough switch per ball so it's never an issue. In this case if a lock switch was missed. call attendant can have a feature to trip it, which should unconfuse the game.

Also, i just checked the twilight zone manual. there ARE switches for the lock. perhaps you meant the gumball machine, which does only check balls in and out, as well as detecting the action of dispensing a ball. Honestly this is not that difficult. There's only so many ways emulation can lose track, just need a bit of ingenuity.