Happy to announce that I have cracked the Secret mania bug. You are gonna love this one. Strictly I should say, cracked some bugs.
First let me explain the trafic lights in Secret mania (rev. L-5). They are designed to be a way of lighting the extra ball. Make all nine shots before timeout.
As the indicators are to be reused for a different purpose, their state at mode-start is copied to a backup and then reset. And at mode-end, their state is restored.
Great. Expect for two minor issues…
If you tilt during Secret mania, the trafic lights are not restored.
And the bug players are mostly experiencing. The mode is activated by two fast in succession pull of the gear lever during the 3-cars DMD sequence. The catch is, that for any of these fast-in-succession pulls, the prep Secret mania procedure is run. But only for the first run, are the trafic lights state backed up correctly. After this, the backup is overwritten by the now new state of all nine indicators being off.
So if you really want to. Stick with two hits and you’ll be fine.
The best software fix is to remove this sub-feature from Secret mania.