WELCOME! I'm Sal. I'm 44, I drive a delivery route, and I have played pinball since I was tall enough to reach the flippers at the bowling alley on Route 9. In 1994 I bought my first machine from a guy who was closing a bar, put it in the basement, and told my wife Donna it was the only one. She has never let me forget that sentence.

There are now four down there, plus one that is being trucked in from two states away next month, and the basement is officially the DiMarco Family Arcade, admission free, no quarters required (I put them all on free play). This page is for anybody who has ever thought "I would love to have one of those in my house." You can. It's cheaper than you think and harder than you think, and it's the best thing I've ever spent money on that wasn't my kids.

Donna has asked me not to put the exact titles on the Internet, on the theory that it's like posting a list of what's in your house with the address underneath. She's probably right. So here they are by the numbers instead. Anybody who comes by can see for themselves.

If you want to know what the big names of the '90s are, ask anybody who was in an arcade: The Addams Family is the one everybody has heard of and the one that sold more than any other machine ever made; Twilight Zone is the one the serious players talk about; Medieval Madness and Attack from Mars are the new-ish ones the kids ask for by name. Whether any of those are in my basement is between me, Donna and the people who've been down there.

Machine #5 is a late-'70s early solid-state game, the generation right after the EMs: the first pinballs with digital scoring displays (glowing orange numbers) and electronic sounds, but still a plain playfield with no ramps. I bought it from a fellow in Ohio who answered my ad in a collectors' newsletter, and it's coming on a freight truck the second week of October, strapped to a pallet, wrapped in about nine blankets. It "mostly works" which in this hobby means it doesn't work. I am happy about this. That is what winter is for.

Where it goes: the corner where the water heater used to be. Donna's position on machine #5 is covered under The Wife's Rules, section 3.

Where they come from.

• Operators. The companies that put machines in bars, arcades and bowling alleys ("routes"). Every couple of years they sell off the older games to make room for new ones. Find the name on the sticker on the side of any machine in a bar and call. Route games have been played to death and are usually filthy, but the operator kept them running, and they're often the cheapest way in. Be friendly; the operator's shop is also where you'll get parts and advice later.
• Coin-op auctions. Big auction houses run them a few times a year in a hotel ballroom or a warehouse: rows and rows of pinballs, video games, jukeboxes. You get one look and a few minutes to try the game, and everything is as-is. Great prices if you know what you're doing, disasters if you don't. Bring a flashlight, look under the playfield, and check the backbox for burned boards and the cabinet for water damage. Sit on your hands until you've seen a few things sell.
• Private sellers through the classifieds and collectors' newsletters. Usually well cared for, usually more money.
• Distributors sell new machines and take trade-ins. New ones are a lot of money; a good used one is not.

What to check. Play it. Does every flipper snap? Do all the displays light and all the digits work? Turn it off and look at the playfield with a flashlight at a low angle for worn paint, especially in front of the pop bumpers and around the ball drain. Look at the cabinet bottom and the legs for rust and rot. Open the backbox and look for burnt spots on the circuit boards and corroded batteries (the battery pack that saves the high scores leaks, and when it does it eats the board; this is the number one thing that kills a solid-state game). Ask when the machine was last on a route and where it has been since. A machine that sat in a garage for six years is going to have surprises.

What they cost. I won't quote prices because they change and because I don't want Donna to add it up. I'll say that a rough EM is the cost of a used washing machine, a nice '90s game with a dot-matrix display is the cost of a good used car's down payment, and the famous titles are more. Moving one is two strong friends, a furniture dolly, straps, and a van. Take the legs off. Take the backbox down if it hinges. Never, ever move one alone. Ask my back.

I am not an electronics guy. I own a multimeter and a soldering iron and I have learned enough to be dangerous. Here is the stuff any owner can do, in order of how likely it is to be your problem. Unplug the machine first. Solid-state games have high voltage on the display boards, and the big capacitors hold a charge even when it's off.

1. Fuses. Something dead? Flippers dead, but the lights work? Sounds gone? Nine times out of ten it's a fuse. There are fuse holders in the backbox and under the playfield, and the fuse chart is printed inside the cabinet or in the manual. Pull each one and check it with the meter (a blown fuse doesn't always look blown). Replace it with exactly the same rating — same amps, slow-blow or fast-blow as marked. Putting in a bigger fuse to "fix" a fuse that keeps blowing is how you turn a $2 problem into a $200 board. If it blows again, something is drawing too much current, usually a stuck coil, and that's the real problem.
2. Rubbers. The rubber rings around the posts and slingshots and the flipper rubbers dry out, crack, and turn the machine from bouncy to dead. A full ring kit costs a few dollars and comes sized for your game; you lift the playfield, pull the old ones off the posts (some you have to remove a post or a plastic to get at) and stretch the new ones on. Do this first on any used machine. It's like new tires.
3. Bulbs. Hundreds of little #44 and #47 lamps, and a few flashers. They burn out one at a time forever. Buy them by the box of 100 and keep a spare box. A dark spot on a lit playfield is usually just a bulb, but sometimes it's a socket with a bad contact; scrape the socket with a small screwdriver.
4. Cleaning the playfield. Lift the playfield, take off the balls (and replace them, new balls are cheap and old scratched balls chew up the paint). Take off the plastics if you're doing it right. Wipe down the playfield with a mild cleaner made for plastics and playfields, or a barely-damp cloth, never anything with ammonia. When it's clean and dry, a coat of a good carnauba paste wax and buff it. The ball will fly. Clean the rubbers with the same cleaner while you're in there. On a route game, expect the cloth to come out black. Twice.
5. Flippers. If a flipper is weak or lazy, it's usually the end-of-stroke switch out of adjustment, a worn coil sleeve, or worn parts in the flipper assembly. The rebuild kits come with everything and instructions; it's an hour a flipper the first time and twenty minutes after that. A dead flipper on both sides at once: fuse.
6. The batteries. On any solid-state game, find the battery pack on the main board and replace the batteries every year, and look for white crust. Some folks move the battery holder off the board with wires so a leak can't reach it. Do that.
7. Switches and coils. A target or bumper that doesn't register is usually a switch that needs its contacts cleaned (a business card pulled between the contacts works) or its gap adjusted. Beyond that, and anything with the circuit boards themselves, I call a man named Ernie who fixed these for a living for thirty years and charges me in coffee and sandwiches. Find your own Ernie. Every town has one.

Two rules I live by: keep the manual (most machines came with a schematic and a parts list; if yours didn't, the reprints are available from the parts suppliers), and change one thing at a time, so that when it works you know why.

Posted on the basement door in Donna's handwriting. Reproduced here with her permission and one edit from her.

Current as of Sept. 21, 1999. Grand champion on each machine. Initials as entered. Challengers welcome any Saturday afternoon.

Yes, the '90s machines score in the billions and the '70s machine scores in the thousands. It's a different game. A hundred and forty thousand on the Old Man is about forty minutes of work with no ramps, no multiball and flippers the size of your thumb. You try it.

Coming this winter: a page on the #5 project with the whole sad story of what's wrong with it, and a page on the difference between EM and solid-state for people who want the details. As soon as I figure out how to get the pictures off the camera and into the computer, which my son says is easy and I say is not.

• The Board Game Closet — Walt runs the ring I'm on. Quieter hobby. Fewer fuses.
• The Atari 2600 Shrine — Ron's 211 cartridges. He plays a mean Warlords.
• Starlight Lanes — a bowling alley on GeoCities.us, which reminds me of where this all started.
• Quake II Clan [DUST] — the other kind of arcade.
• Restoring a 1965 Ford F-100 — Luis, a few stops back on the ring, understands about projects that "mostly work."