Just wanted to note that the Rainbow master ball that is being sold on eBay (German) is closing today and the price is "only" at about 12 US Dollars.

The user eventually did post an actual image of his masterball and it does appear that it has blue colors in it.

http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1650645652

It says he ships only to Germany only but I'm sure the seller could be talked out of it...

I saw a different picture of a Masterball on Jaap's terrific website:

http://www.org2.com/jaap/puzzles/master.htm

The colors of that Masterball include two shades that are almost black in that dark picture. Interestingly enough the little Java Masterball at the bottom of his page does have the 8 colors that I have seen the most around my neck of the woods (west cost U.S.A.). At least when shops still sold them.

I spent some Time last night taking pictures of most of my puzzles minus a couple that are floating around somewhere. I'll have to post them on my web page by the end of the week.

As far as I know, the rainbow masterball has only one colour scheme. It has the colours yellow, orange, red, purple, dark blue, light blue (cyan), light green, dark green. The colours I used in my javascript thingy at the bottom of my page is fairly representative. There are other colour schemes, but they are not at all rainbow like.

I agree the picture on my site is not very good. I should try take a picture myself, but I only have a flatbed scanner, and that doesn't always give good results.

Jaap

Anybody know what his alternative email address is?
I would like to ask him whether he has another Masterball to sell as a friend of mine wants one too?
I dunno whether he speaks English (in the first place) or not, and it seems that his email server keeps returning the previous mails I tried to send to him.
Anybody had any luck contacting him during this whole thing? THANX!!!

I contacted him to give him the image of the Masterball I had in my museum, but I too noticed the email problem. It eventually went through though.

I wrote to him in German using the free language translator at http://world.altavista.com/ but then found he spoke perfect English.

Exactly what is the URL of your web site?

Yes, I agree with you, but there is a picture on Hendrik Haak's website that appears to use a different color scheme:

http://www.puzzle-shop.de/rainbow-master.html

It could be that it's just a bad picture, but for many it's the only one they have seen.

My Rainbow Master is much like yours. I don't know about your pic, but I can tell you the picture I took almost exactly matches the colors on my Masterball.

Does anyone know if there is a specific order to the colors on a rainbow masterball? Do they all come from the factory with the same color order?

Here's a real puzzle for everyone....
Are all combinations of color orders possible on the rainbow masterball or are some orders impossible with an unaltered (never taken apart and reassembled) masterball?

Doug.

TQ for the info but my mailmaster might just return my unsent mail tomorrow, well guess that life..weird
Also, the wsd homepage isn't selling the masterball anymore I guess
Anybody know where to get some of those weird looking colorful balls? Or anyone selling them?
THANX!

Ive never seen one of these. But it is generated by moves which include 8-cycles (moves which swap 8 pieces cyclically) and so odd permutations are possible. In fact even if they couldnt be done, due to the fact that there are different pieces which look the same, you could still make it look like you had done an odd permutation. The puzzl looks like it is transitive enough that its symmetry group is all of sym(16) for the middle pieces and all of sym(16) for the pole pieces.

So any possible position is achievable - in particular you could arrange the 8 different colours in any way you want.

Judging from past messages by people I think most of you guys would have understood that. If not, just believe me that you can do anything on a master ball.