Miscellaneous Firepower Items

From time to time I come by interesting tidbits or advice regarding Firepower machines.  There is no order to these, but they make interesting reading for the Firepower fan:

From the "Uncle Willy" archives....

Question: On the Firepower pinball, it when switches were hit faster than it could score them with a sound effect, it would queue up the scores and sounds. Sometimes, the queue could get fairly long and the game would spend some time in "catching up" to a bunch of switch hits. What happens if the ball drains while the catching up is occurring? Do all of the pending points get scored?

Answer: Uncle Willy checked with Steve Ritchie and Eugene Jarvis, the designer and software programmer, respectively, for Firepower, to find out the answer to this question. Since Firepower was one of the earlier solid-state pinballs, electromechanical pinballs were still much in everyone's memories. One of the complaints of electromechanical games was that they would not rack up every switch closure while the games were busy scoring. This was simply a limitation of the mechanical means of scoring. The Firepower design team wanted to emphasize that EVERY switch closure was logged and scored on their game. The result was that the points were queued up and scored sequentially. Steve Ritchie notes that the design team even considered putting the text "Every Point is Scored" on the bottom arch of Firepower. According to both Steve and Eugene, the queue is emptied when the ball drains, and the player is credited for each point scored. Eugene notes that tilting clears the queue, and those points in the queue are forfeited.