Hello First Pachinko - Some Questions

[Jaelus]

I am a long time candy cab (Super Neo 29, Hyper Neo 29, 2x Q25s, Blast City, AWSD)/US cab (various) owner but I recently acquired a couple pachinkos. I am handy with cab maintenance and I'm pretty sure I've figured out how everything works and what the components do, and have taken apart, cleaned, and reassembled this first pachinko:

9 Drums Gladiator:
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The game plays well, and I've got around 1000 balls (came with the two pachinkos), but I find I have to keep going into the ball return to dump balls back into the front tray, and I'm looking for a better way to manage the balls for home use.

It looks to have a credit display on the front here, and on the back on the lower right hand side there is a serial port with nothing connected to it. I've seen some threads here referring to a Daverob dongle that from what I gather connects to this port and emulates being connected to a card/credit system for letting you cash in credits for balls dispensed from the reward hopper. Is this worthwhile, or does it really just deplete the reward hopper quickly and create its own problem? I would imagine to get real value out of it you need to have a lifter to recycle the balls from the ball return into the reward hopper. This seems like an expensive option.

I was considering as an alternative cheaper option, building a platform to mount the pachinko to that adds a stable base and also lifts the machine high enough to put a long tray under. The idea being that the tray would reach all the way to the back to catch the balls coming out of the return, and be tilted slightly so that these balls would roll to the front of the machine so that you could easily grab them and dump them back into play.

Is this just a matter of preference? What do you guys think? Would I also just benefit from another 500-1000 balls in general? What have you all done and found gave you the best result for home play?

Also, I have this pedestal that I'd like to keep the pachinko on. It lights up on the inside to illuminate the back glass, has a built in power strip inside to run the power cord for a slot (or whatever), and has a side drink holder, so I have no interest in wall mounting the pachinko. I'm not opposed to building an enclosure for it though to make the base look nicer.

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