When we brought up our new system, it was quickly brought to our attention that our new system did not save shopping carts for very long.  This was fixed in Monday night’s update. When you are logged in, your cart is now automatically saved to your profile indefinitely until you clear it or place an order.  We know many of you like to build up carts over time, so the return of this feature should help you on your projects. We have great ideas on enhancing the saved cart functionality in the future, so stay tuned!  

Ben Kuchera hits the nail on the head:  ”Pinball is a sport in the same way that poker is a sport: It’s only based on luck if you’re terrible at it.” Making Pinball into a spectator sport is going to be one of the key ingredients that propels the pinball revival well into the next decade.  If you organize or are otherwise involved with tournaments and/or leagues, strongly consider investing in a pinball vision system! More details: PAPA Pinball tournaments

Historically, the most common miniature incandescent lamp/light bulbs used in pinball machines are the venerable #44 and #47 bayonet-style miniature lamps. While many collectors are putting LEDs in their machines, purists still prefer miniature lamps for the classic look, color temperature, and color-rendering of miniature lamps. The #44 lamp is often the preferred lamp from the manufacturer – the main benefit being that it’s brighter than its #47 cousin.  Never forget that a pinball machine’s first and foremost purpose is a commerical piece of equipment designed to attract casual users, so many design decisions are made pursuant to this goal.  When a read more…

Steve Kordek designed 100 pinball machines during his illustrious career. He passed away this morning at a phenomenal 100 years old. We’ll miss Steve and his enormous contribution to pinball. You can show your support on Steve Kordek’s Facebook Page. You can see a list of Steve’s games over at the Internet Pinball Database. National Public Radio’s tribute to Steve Kordek Chicago Tribune obituary Washington Post obituary

Pinball’s somewhat sketchy past is still haunting some present-day operators. Despite a Toronto Life report that Toronto’s first Pinball Cafe had its business license revoked, owner Jason Hazzard confirms that no such recall ever took place. Not everything, however, is peachy keen at the cafe. While the retro hub remains up and running, Toronto’s war against fun, it would seem, has reared its head. http://www.blogto.com/eat_drink/2012/02/torontos_war_on_fun_rears_its_head_at_the_pinball_cafe/

Nice local piece on Orange County folks Paul Anderson, Ron Burkard, and the Orange County Pinball League. http://www.ocregister.com/articles/pinball-340541-says-belsito.html    

For our European and some Canadian customers, we had a bug in our cart that was showing what can only be described as “unusual” pricing in the iGlobal cart.  The problem was caused by a bug that mis-interpreted prices displayed in the European price format ($35,00).  The problem has been fixed and is now live on the production site.  We also made adjustments to the checkout process to make the international checkout process more clear.  Thanks for your continued feedback as we work to make marcospec.com the best place on the internet for Everything Pinball.  

All we can say on this is that we can’t confirm Whether Branca is one of our customers. From the article: Early on, Jackson called him and said, “John, we have  to talk about something very serious.” Branca grabbed a pen and pad to take notes. Jackson told him, “My pinball machine isn’t working.’  Full Forbes Article We’re going to speculate that this was the same pinball machine that surfaced on eBay a few years ago. The game itself was a customized Pepsi game based on a Data East Lazer War.  At the time, it was one of the early read more…

We’ve received an overwhelmingly positive response on the new site. We’re glad to see that our last few years of hard work are beginning to pay of for us and the pinball community.  A few customers have  commented on the lack of some data available on the new system, namely order history and shopping cart data. We had to make a very difficult call when it came to migrating the order data over to the new system.  We did some extensive analysis and found that rate of usage of order history and shopping cart data wasn’t high enough to justify read more…

There are a wide variety of pinball technical help communities on the internet. rgparchive.com is an easy-to-use portal for the venerable rec.games.pinball USENET group. pinside.com is a user-friendly forum pinrepair.com has a lot of well-regarded repair guides pinwiki.com has a number of repair guides.