Random Thoughts & Pictures
I acquired this game on Sunday, August 11, 2024. The game came from a Pinside seller near the picturesque area of Davis, West Virginia. It was a long drive, but worth the great scenery along the way.
Ousler is my favored game designer (just look at the rest of my collection). However, I had somewhat dismissed Jokerz! as "just another Ousler game". I already had prize wheels in Cyclone and Bad Cats. I already had an upper mini-playfield in Space Station. I already had a motorized ramp in Fire! And I already had a collection of goofy, whimsical Ousler/Anghelo themes in Bad Cats, Grand Lizard, Pin*bot and Cyclone. But then I realized that Jokerz! is exactly what I like in pinball. So, if it's a bit redundant, who cares?
This Jokerz! was in pretty good shape aside from needing to be cleaned up and maybe some mechanism renewal. Everything worked. No wiring or connector hacks. The original plasma display looked great. All of the boards were matched except for the CPU, which was from a different Jokerz! (567 191761) and the aux power driver board, which was from yet another different Jokerz! (mangled, partially unreadable SN sticker). The playfield had full Mylar, which held up well. The plastics were near perfect. The upper mini-playfield was yellowed and cracked and might be worth replacing. The ramps had some chips at the entrances, but were otherwise clear and probably good enough. The translite was pretty good with a few small scratches and rubs. The most annoying negative was the half-assed cabinet touch-ups. The blue isn't right and the application was too heavy-handed. Yet there is some wear, so it must have been touched up long ago. Nevertheless, in a dimly lit gameroom it looks okay.
The game did not have the infamous Jokerz! noise problem (aside from a loud screech on power-up). And the CPU did not appear to have had the U3 modification. It made noise for sure, but not worse than my other system 11 games, and certainly not worse than my worst system 11, Grand Lizard.
The five bell inserts between the slingshots are spec'd as blue, but have mostly faded to pink/clear. I call this the "Xenon Effect". For what ever reason, my left-most or 1-bell has remained blue.
New versus old Xenon posts; the "Xenon Effect".
The 1-bell is still blue?
For the first time in ten years I bought a game that hadn't already been "LEDed" by a previous owner. What a pleasure to not have to undo that mess. In fact, I used my big box of discarded LEDs as part of the purchase on this game. So I guess they're good for something. I enjoy starting with a less-than-perfect game and cleaning it up and renewing what needs to be renewed. What I don't enjoy is removing the unnecessary custom crap that so many pinheads slather on their games these days. So aside from the off-blue, dipshit cabinet touch-ups, this game was a good original starting point.
Also, I like to coin my games and this game included a pair of functioning coin mechs. All I had to do was turn OFF free play.
Jokerz! joints the system 11 herd.
I get a little nervous when buying a game with a unique feature that won't be easily replaced. In the case of Jokerz!, that would be the D-12238 sound board. People obstinately refer to it as "stereo". It's not. The panel speakers are connected together in parallel like any other system 11. It's the cabinet speaker that's driven separately. To my untrained ear the game sounded no better or worse than any other system 11 game I had.
The D-12238 is physically larger than the typical D-11581 and has a different connector layout. The panel speakers have their own connector at J6 in the upper right corner. Below that, the cabinet speaker and volume conductors occupy J5. Volume control is by way of two discrete conductors as opposed to the typical two-conductor shielded cable. None of this is reflected in the manual's cabinet wiring diagram, which looks to have been just copied and pasted from another game.
Adding to the confusion is the two-pin connector for the panel speakers. It swaps the trace wire from one side to the other. So, the trace wires at the panel speakers are ground. Perhaps that was just an assembly line boo boo. According to my other system 11 games, the trace wire should continue through the flat side of the connector and the solid wire at the speakers is ground as expected.
Speaker and volume control connections.
Volume control.
Panel speakers connector (swapped trace wire).
To get to the bottom of this sound board thing, I made up a temporary headphone adapter from a stereo headphone jack and some alligator clips. I carefully clipped the jack to the speakers and used headphones to hear what I could hear. Signals from the panel speakers went to my right ear. Signals from the cabinet speaker went to my left ear. I could discern no difference. Music, sound effects and speech all sounded the same to me. I thought I might at least detect some tonal difference between the two channels, but nope. So I'm still not seeing (or should I say hearing) the purpose of the D-12238 sound board. Perhaps Williams agreed as the D-12238 was not used again in another game.
Temporary headphone jack.
Anomaly: I initially thought this game had factory Mylar. Aside from some dinginess, it was the nicest, flattest Mylar I had seen. No curled edges, no bubbles, no raised or sunk inserts. Then I shopped the game and clearly the Mylar isn't factory. It's thicker, the edges are hand-cut in places and there was little color fade between the Mylar and non-Mylar areas. What was bizarre were the non-Mylar, under plastics, mostly hidden areas that were scraped or somehow worn to the wood and painted flat white. Flat white instead of the gloss, slightly-yellowed white of the original finish. Why? At first I thought these areas were puddles of dried wax. But no, the playfield finish is gone. How would one go about removing the playfield finish right up to the edge of the Mylar? Based on the accumulated layers of crud, I'd say this all happened long ago. In any event, there were only two such significant areas and they were mostly hidden when the game was assembled. So it was still a pretty good looking game and the casual player probably wouldn't notice. The warm glow of incandescent bulbs did a good job of blending the different whites. Yet another good reason to scorn LEDs.
Example problem area under the right ramp.
The motorized ramp mechanism is completely different from Fire!, Ousler's previous game to include a motorized ramp.
Motorized ramp mechanism.
DOUBLE YER SCORE - AND SO MUCH MORE - WITH JOKERZ
Jokerz! was my eleventh system 11. Two features I found fairly unique were the ball lock save and the bidirectional lane change. A locked ball is saved from game to game. I had never heard of this feature until I acquired my RollerGames a few years prior. It's less important on Jokerz! because the lock is easier and it's only two-ball Multiball. Nevertheless, I like the idea. If I were a quarter-starved kid back in the day, I'd definitely be on the lookout for games that already had a ball locked.
Next was the bidirectional lane change. I was unaware that this feature predated WPC. Every other system 11 game I owned, that is, every other lane change game I had, moved only left to right. I am so in the habit of tapping both flipper buttons for quick shifts to the right that I don't think I will ever become accustomed to the Jokerz! scheme.
Jokerz! enjoyed a decent production run, so the title isn't difficult to come by. I played it numerous times over the years. The most memorable occasion was in 2014 at an obscure KOA campground near Enfield, North Carolina. They had a gameroom with one pinball machine, the nicest Jokerz! I had ever seen. It was the first time I played a Jokerz! where the flippers were still strong enough to get the ball back up to the mini-playfield. I burned through my emergency roll of quarters and never did manage to get the jackpot.
Enfield KOA.
Playfield detail.
There's been a lot of complaining about the infamous Williams thread lock compound, especially with the under-playfield T-nuts. I found it amusing that the game flyer (below) cites this as a "feature". Tech tip: Use a soldering iron on the underside of the T-nut. The heat will often break the thread lock.
Shown above is the two-side promotional flyer for Jokerz! Click image for larger picture.