ïŧŋð Pinball repairs are delayed today due to it raining cats!
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ð Getaway is out at a conference hire for the weekend! Adding to the retro look of an impressive conference stand. Amusement games are the best way to attract attention to your stand in a crowded room full of lame freebies and bad coffee. If you give attendees something interesting to do that breaks the boredom of the conference, they'll spend longer at your stand and maybe you'll make a sale. Simple!
So next time you organise an expo stand for your company, you will have two choices.
- Hire a pinball or arcade machine and make your stand the coolest in the exhibition hall! ð
- Go with the classic "two dickheads and a trestle table" approach and give away free pens. Yawn! ðĨą
Choose wisely!
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Repair logs are quick summaries of workshop and on-site repairs. If your machine needs a service, ðŽ Contact Us to discuss how we can help!
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ðĢ Who doesn't love Fish Tales? It's one of my favourite games to play, and one of my favourite to work on as well! This one started off as a service call to install new rubber rings, but turned into a bigger service to fix much more than that.
First, a playfield teardown to get to all of the old rubbers and give everything a good clean. Plenty of broken lamps to replace while we're at it, too. This took a fair while due to the disassembly, but once it was back together it was looking much better!
A cursory check of the backbox as the game was not retaining memory. The batteries expired in 2015, so that's no surprise! The original battery holder was still on the CPU board with a bit of corrosion on the lower terminals. Thankfully, no damage to the board itself, so a new lithium battery holder was installed.
It was impossible to drop the volume down, or do much within the test menus, as one of the diagnostic switches wasn't working. No problem with the connectors or CPU board; the switch itself had died. Replaced it.
Playtesting revealed a few more issues. The flap at the top of the playfield was taped in the up position. That's a weird mod! This gate is controlled by a coil which opens the gate on ball launch, and also when shooting the right orbit when long cast is lit. Otherwise it is meant to block balls so you can enter the pop bumpers from a right orbit shot. It appeared to be propped open because balls were not making it around the orbit on launch. But this was nothing to do with the gate. The balls were bouncing off the ball guide at the very top edge of the playfield, losing momentum, and falling into the LIE lanes. This was caused by the metal ball guide at the top right of the playfield. It needed bending to guide the ball properly towards the orbit lane. A very fiddly adjustment which needed multiple bends to get right.
Next: the drop target was not working correctly. It has a secondary coil which pushes the target down to open the shot to the Caster's Club. This coil wasn't working. Taking a look at the assembly, I noticed the armature which pushes on the drop target to drop it was totally missing. Found it lying in the bottom of the cab. It needed a new extension spring and brass armature. Both were installed and the assembly was working as intended again.
Lucky last. Balls landing in the eject hole at the top of the playfield were not coming back out. I could hear the coil trying to activate, but there was no movement at all in the assembly. I noticed the nylon link was broken. This is surely it! Nope, even with a new link it wouldn't move. I took it apart and realised the plunger was way too long; long enough that it was hitting the coil stop when at rest. Absolutely no space for movement of the plunger, and therefore no action from the mechanism. Replaced it with the correct size plunger and it came back to life.
Back to catching fish and telling tales! ðĪĨ
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Repair logs are quick summaries of workshop and on-site repairs. If your machine needs a service, ðŽ Contact Us to discuss how we can help!
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ðŽ Ugh, System 80 games. A pain to repair sometimes. But if people gave up every time pinball repair got hard, pinball just wouldn't exist anymore. One of the very reasons I do what I do. Because if I don't, nobody will!
This Raven had been pulled out of storage so it could be sold. A few issues presented. First, it wouldn't start up. Nothing except for a few lamps on the playfield. Gottlieb made things hard by not installing any indicator LEDs (or any form of visual output for that matter) on any of their circuit boards. So the first step is figuring out if you even have power. The CPU only needs 5 volts to run, and this was getting to the board, so the basics were definitely OK. System 80b games have a "reset board" attached the CPU board which helps detect a CPU lock-up. This was the issue, and was preventing the CPU from starting up. Left this one disconnected for now, as you only need these reset boards if the game is to be left unattended for an extended time.
Although it was now booting up, it was having issues staying or and working normally. The game would crash occasionally, the displays and lamps were acting a bit weird, and some of the solenoids would turn on and off during attract mode. Whenever you have weird oddness on a System 1 or System 80 game, think grounding. None of the ground mods had been done to this game yet, and I discovered that one of the ground straps connecting the backbox to the main cab wasn't even connected. So, let's fix that. I attached a new ground wire to each of the boards in the backbox, and connected them to a single grounding point. With the ground mods installed, the game seemed to boot and stay powered up fairly reliably, plus the sound board began to boot and work as well. Bonus!
As soon as the game powered up, the ramp lifted up. This is not normal behaviour; it should only raise when a game is started. The coil itself tested fine in terms of resistance. Next item up the chain is the driving transistor. This is one of the coils which is driven by a lamp output, with an under-playfield transistor being the last step before the coil. This transistor had failed, with a short between the collector and emitter. New transistor (MJ2955 is a reasonable replacement) was installed. Ramp fixed!
Let's set the game to free play. There is no native way to do this on a System 80 game. Instead, you can "hack" one of the initial buttons on the front of the cabinet to work as a credit button as well. Easiest way to do this is to install a jumper between the two switches on the diode board in the cabinet. Done!
Getting some random slam tilts occurring during gameplay. On any other game system I would investigate this further, but slam tilts are such a nuisance on System 1/80 games, I just disable them. Easily accomplished by adding a small jumper above Z26 on the CPU board. Problem solved!
Getting there. The left bottom "sniper" drop target would not drop properly. These sniper targets are a cool feature, and are meant to go up and down at set intervals. This one wasn't dropping. The coils which trip these targets are tiny coils mounted to the top of the drop target assembly. You need to remove the assembly to get to them. In this case, the steel plate actuator on top of the trip coil was adjusted to make it a easier for the tiny coil to pull it in, therefore pushing the drop target off its ledge. Working consistently now.
Suddenly noticed that the speaker in the backbox wasn't producing any sound. Weird. Wiggling the wires at the speaker got the sound to cut in and out. The terminals were pretty crusty and corroded, so they were re-pinned with new crimp terminals. Sound is nice and crisp now!
One last issue. After a few minutes powered up, the display would exhibit a fault. All of the top segments of each character would lock on, which made it difficult to read the scores. This was a problem with the display itself; one of the caps on the display board was starting to fail under load. New capacitors in and display is working well again.
Phew! A day-long session to get this one up and going but now it's ready to go. Most people dismiss Raven as a cheesy attempt to capitalise on the Rambo franchise without paying the licencing fees. But the sniper target feature is quite cool, and implemented well. Plus, it's basically a budget Firepower in terms of the playfield layout, so it's quite fun to shoot! ðŦ
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Repair logs are quick summaries of workshop and on-site repairs. If your machine needs a service, ðŽ Contact Us to discuss how we can help!
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This game had sat for several years without being played, so there were a few issues to fix up. First, the display was garbled and you couldn't make anything out. The text could actually be read if you knew what it was trying to display, but only some parts of the characters were being lit. This pointed to a data issue; the ribbon cable turned out to be faulty. New ribbon cable in and the display worked fine.
Next, balls weren't getting kicked out of the trough. The armature which pushes them out of the trough was bent at a weird angle. Bent it to make better contact when striking the ball, and it started working consistently again.
A couple of switches were being dodgy on the coin door. Specifically, the diagnostic switches. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't. A quick look at the schematics. These switches are all directly connected to the CPU board rather than going through the matrix. And they are all controlled by U16 on the CPU board. Surprise, surprise, U16 had been nuked by battery corrosion. Refurbed CPU board was swapped in, and the switches responded normally.
Captain B-Zarr is a cool feature on Party Zone. But on this game, he wasn't "talking". His mouth is meant to move up and down in sync with the speech effects. Took the assembly apart and found the wire that connects the mouth solenoid to the mouth flap was broken. Fashioned a new one out of heavy gauge wire and he was back to his chatty self.
Finally, a good clean of the playfield with new rubber rings to replace the broken ones. Night and day difference! Ready to party again! ððš
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Repair logs are quick summaries of workshop and on-site repairs. If your machine needs a service, ðŽ Contact Us to discuss how we can help!
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A service call on this Star Wars resulted in a few board repairs to get it up and running again! May the fix be with you! ð
First issue: game did not appear to be booting. Voltages and fuses were all OK. But there was no display, no playfield lamps... nothing! A check of the LEDs on the CPU board confirmed that the game was, indeed, booting up. It just seemed to be getting stuck.
The problem here was the batteries on the CPU board. Totally flat. And with no battery backup power on a Data East CPU, the game will not finish its boot up sequence unless you open the coin door. Once I opened the door, the boot sequence finished. This took a little while to figure out because normally the display will show an "open the door!" message to indicate this exact scenario... but that doesn't happen when the display is dead too! ðĪŠ
Now to fix the display. Voltages going to it were a little odd... the two high voltages are meant to be around ~110 and ~98 volts. On this display, they were both measuring ~98 volts. There should always be a potential of about 12-13 volts between these two rails. Hmm. Looks like a power supply issue, so out it came for closer inspection. There is one main component which controls this voltage potential, a 13v zener diode at D10. I measured it and it was shorted. That will certainly stop it from working correctly! This diode seems to fail a lot when the high voltage components become marginal. So, I rebuilt the whole high voltage section. New resistors, new diodes, new transistors, new caps. Display is nice and bright again. While I was at it, I also abated some corrosion on the power supply from leaking capacitors.
Next, some lamp issues to deal with. Specifically, backbox general illumination lamps not working. This is usually because of a failed connector on the power supply, and indeed it was in this case. Connector was replaced and the terminals were all re-crimped. This helped, but the backbox lamps were still a bit dicey. They flickered on and off sometimes. Further investigation needed!
Lamp power is also distributed to the playfield power board, fused, and then sent out to the rest of the machine. The flickering issue originated here. The original connector on the board had been destroyed, so somebody bypassed it with a larger Molex-style connector soldered to the back of the board. Not necessarily a bad hack, but the pins within the connector were failing, and were not staying in place in the housing. Time to fix this properly. I replaced the header pins on the board, as well as the pins and connector housing. Back to stock, and working as intended!
Couple of minor things to finish up. New rubbers on the slingshots and flippers. Replaced a few burned-out lamps. Gave the machine a check-over, and all seemed fine! I'm no Jedi but I'm pretty good at fixing stuff! ð
