Running a Pingolf event this weekend, and came up with a creative objective task of starting SNAKE multiball on our Metallica Pro. Game has been on V1.18 code for 6 years now.
It was observed once during a play test round, and then several times during the kick-off of the event where the snake behavior was not as designed. We pulled the game from this challenge, and replaced it with another objective.
1.) We observed at least 4 instances where an unlit snake was hit, and NO snake shots were lit on the playfield. (3 random shots should be illuminated).
2.) We observed one instance where a LIT snake was hit, and no snake letters were awarded.
Before the question is asked, this was all in single ball play, with nothing else going. Standard snake behavior expected where lit snake = S-N-A-K-E letter, unlit snake = 3 spotted snake inserts, and hitting lit snake inserts shots re-light the snake.
In 100% of success and “failure” cases, the ball was properly ejected onto the playfield (i.e. not via ball search). There’s only a single micro-switch in the snake, and switch tests show no obvious signs of any problem.
The one thing (need to re-check) we thought we noticed is that normally when you hit the snake, you get the “hiss” sound for a second or two followed by the ball eject (and whatever display sequence pairs with the jaw hit). We THINK that in the failure cases, the ball was immediately ejected with NO hiss sound – I’ll need to verify this later.
Settings: I went through all the game settings and don’t see anything that’s non-factory related to any game features, and not the snake.
Thanks for any ideas/help. We are stumped. Admittedly, what made this objective fun is that we typically don’t actively go for SNAKE (most people go Sparky, Graveyard, Crank It Up, and let the other things happen naturally), so we are like is there some unique rule case that we’re missing. However, the rules are pretty clearly spelled out.
Evan