Bug Machine keeps launching two balls after LITZ

9u1d0

New member
Jan 7, 2013
310
0
Just was playing for the current tournament, and after finishing the fifth LITZ the balls were not returned to the Gumball machine. The display showed 'player one is up', but the table did not go to plunger camera. After 30 seconds I was able to plunge two balls, one was the powerball one a normal ball.
When one ball drained I could play with the other one, but I did loose a ball. Then while playing with the remaining ball the machine launched a new, second ball, this continued to happen till all balls drained. With every draining ball I lost a ball, so the game was finished pretty fast.
Too bad, over 9 billion, but could not play the four remaining extra balls the normal way. :(
 

vikingerik

Active member
Nov 6, 2013
1,205
0
This happened to me too on the Steam/Windows version. I even got three balls in the plunger lane not just two.

The trick to recover was to put all the balls in play and drain them all together (make sure they all drain during the bonus count, before the next ball is served to the plunger.) Then the game started reloading the gumball and things got back to normal.
 

vikingerik

Active member
Nov 6, 2013
1,205
0
Just had a doozy of a glitchfest cascading off this. It was the same root cause, but here's some of the fun you can have with it. :cool:

I was nearing the end of an awesome game - over 50 billion, but on ball 2 and out of extra balls. Had reached LITZ about 15 times. Then on one particular LITZ, the game didn't reload the gumball and served two balls to the manual plunger.

Load Gumball was lit, so I shot one ball up there and it stayed in the gumball machine. That only happened once though - repeated shots to Load Gumball kept resulting in cycling that one ball out of the gumball and not reloading it. But this got the ROM satisfied that only one ball was in play, so I didn't have the usual problem of trying to play with two balls without draining either and could explore glitchworld further.

After several gumball loads, Powerball Mania started even while the real Powerball was still in the trough. (I think this is actually normal compensation by the ROM.) And sure enough, the Powerball appeared in the plunger lane and now I had Powerball Mania with a Powerball on the playfield. :)

Eventually I got the Powerball back into the gumball machine. Now even better, with only one gumball, every gumball load released the Powerball letting me restart Powerball Mania. :D

Anyway, the important bit: It was clear the game had decided the automatic plunger gate was broken. Every ball released from the trough went into the manual plunger lane. This kept occuring through all three types of multiballs - regular, Fast Lock, and Powerball Mania. I could play each of those as a monoball mode with two more waiting in the plunger lane. I bet this is actually the root cause, the game didn't reload the gumball because it thought it wouldn't be able to.

During all of this, the camera stayed in its multiball position. It would not zoom to the Powerfield in normal single ball play, and would not go to the plunger even for a Super Skill Shot. It seemed the program continued to think there was always a multiball going.

I really wanted to reach LITZ again to see what would happen, but failed about five door panels short. I had Powerball Mania with two balls in play (both had launched on the same plunge), and lost the game when both were on the Powerfield, dropped to the bumpers, and found outlanes. :(

I never thought to try calling the attendant, wish I had.

This glitch could actually be seriously good for scoring, with the monoball multiballs. I wonder if those top 96B and 99B leaderboard games ran into this. It seems inevitable if you keep playing and LITZing long enough.
 

nuclearkevin

New member
Nov 11, 2013
26
0
I've never managed to benefit yet when it loads two balls to the plunger. It's happened to me during my best games; both from the ball hanging up when loading the gumball and also after LITZ like you guys have mentioned. For some reason on the ps3 one ball appears MUCH larger when it loads two balls to the plunger, until you launch one. :confused:

Calling the attendant has never helped me. Nudging to the point of tilting has never freed the ball when the first ball hangs up while dropping into the gumball. I always hope loading the next ball will knock the first ball free and they both will drop in the gumball, but not yet for me... Then it loads two balls into the plunger :(

At least it has never completely frozen like STTNG did on me during Final Frontier. Just froze solid with the music playing and that was it... It was my best game by far... I let it sit a long time before I finally told it to quit game :(

I think these guys at Farsight did a great job recreating these tables and I bet they will get these bugs worked out :)
 

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