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How did electromechanical pinball keeped score during multiball

Arqade Asked on January 10, 2021

Electromechanical pinball scoring system is based on wheels with numbers printed on them, an electromagnet that moves the wheel to the next number when activated and a mechanical device that turns the next (on the left) wheel when the current one goes to 0 in order to manage tens, hundreds and so on.

This means that the scoring has a sort of "cooldown": when an actuator is already working it cannot receive a new impulse.

All the switches, targets and so on when hit send one or more impulses to one of the wheels in order to update the score, some of them also send a different impulse to activate bonuses or other features.

Having just one ball in play makes things easier: it is possible to design the table so that the ball cannot hit 2 targets at the same time and use actuators fast enough to keep score counting correct even with a fast moving ball.

Introducing multiball things get much more complex.
One of the first (if not the first) pinballs with multiball is Circus with the amazing ability to have 9 balls in play at the same time.
The probability of having different balls hitting different switches in a tiny fraction of second is quite high, and it is fully electromechanical, so there are no microcontrollers or such to keep a queue of impulses to be sent to the actuators.

So my question is, how did the EM pinball machines managed to have multiball? Maybe the designers accepted the risk to "miss" some score if the actuators where not fast enough to keep up with the multiple balls hitting different targets at the same time?

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