Comments by "EebstertheGreat" (@EebstertheGreat) on "Old pinball machines are amazingly complex" video.

  1. These inflated scores always kind of annoyed me tbh. When I was very young, I noticed that some video and arcade games always had scores that were multiples of 10, or 50, or 100, or whatever, depending on the game. Even some card games have that property, like bridge. That seemed silly to me then, and it still seems silly to me now. When I started to learn how numbers were stored, I realized that these multipliers probably were never stored explicitly. So like, if a video game has scores that are all multiples of 10, it probably just stores score/10, then prints a 0 character after the score. And indeed, it turns out that's what they do. So it doesn't surprise me one bit that pinball machines do the same thing. I assume in the case of bridge, this originally had something to do with gambling, though idk what. Nowadays, people tend to gamble a specific amount of money per 100 points, and it seems that has been the case for ages. So why not divide all scores by 10 and gamble that same amount per 10 points? I don't know. There seems to be no satisfying explanation. It's just one of those dumb things out there like tennis scoring.
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