Repair logs are quick summaries of workshop and on-site repairs. If your machine needs a service, 📬 Contact Us to discuss how we can help!



😬 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! 🔫

Repair logs are quick summaries of workshop and on-site repairs. If your machine needs a service, 📬 Contact Us to discuss how we can help!



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! 💃🕺

Repair logs are quick summaries of workshop and on-site repairs. If your machine needs a service, 📬 Contact Us to discuss how we can help!



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! 🌌

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! 🤪

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! 😄

A mate of mine sent me this photo of some bulk waste on the side of the road for council pickup 🚚 A full arcade cabinet included! This might seem nuts, but the machine wasn't in working condition... it had been partially parted-out already. Plus, it was a very basic ticket redemption machine. In no way was it a valuable machine to start with. But the more retro equipment you repair, the more you realise how wasteful we are as a society when we just throw these things onto the kerb 🗑️

Of course I headed out there to check it out, at midnight of course. Most of the "valuable" parts had already been taken (display, coin door parts). However there were still a bunch of circuit boards, transformers, wiring, etc. left behind. I grabbed the transformer, speakers, a bunch of bulbs, CPU board, sound board, lamp driver boards, amplifier board, and the entire wiring harness 🔌

The transformer is useful on its own. The CPU board runs a Z80 processor. These were discontinued a couple of years ago and will soon be impossible to find. There's a perfectly usable 6264 RAM, as well as some EPROMs. Plenty of lamp driver triacs, amps, and other bits and pieces on the other boards, too. I'm always rebuilding wiring harnesses so the wiring will come in handy as well.

So, think about this next time you throw something out onto the kerb. Should it go straight into the garbage truck crusher? Or do you know somebody batshit crazy who works on vintage electronics from 50 years ago who may be able to use it? 🤪

🤖 This machine had sat broken and unused for over thirty years! The owner wanted to get it up and running again so he and his grandkids could enjoy it. I love helping parents and grandparents introduce their kids to pinball!

Lots of board work needed on this one. The MPU was rooted with battery fluid all over it, so this was stripped, treated and rebuilt. The CPU and one of the PIAs also broke apart when removing them from the sockets. The ROM sockets were also flaky, so the ROMs got combined into a single 2764 with a fresh socket.

The solenoid driver board was also shot. Two of the high voltage transistors had failed, sending unfiltered 240v to the displays. Yuck! The entire section got rebuilt with new caps, resistors, pots and trannies. But that wasn't the end of it. All of the coils locked on when powered up. The driving IC at U2 was dead, so that got replaced as well.

Most of the displays appeared dead, or had missing digits. Reflowing the header pins got some going again. Replacing the 100k ohm resistors got a couple more going. Only one was DOA, so a new one was put in. I dialled the display voltage down to extend their life. Oh, the sound board got recapped, too.

Fun electrical hacks on some parts of this game, too. Plenty of wire used to bypass fuses on the rectifier as well as the main playfield solenoid fuse. Luckily, these didn't appear to be hiding any serious issues. A new rectifier board was installed so all of the mess was cleaned up in one go.

The disappearing post assembly was a disaster. Most of the parts were missing, so it didn't actually work. Looks like the down solenoid caught fire and was removed. Sourced all of the required parts and reinstalled them. Wired both of the solenoids back in. Working well now.

Phew! Almost there. Boards back in and game was now booting up. Fresh rubbers installed, lots of new lamps, and a good check over. Drop targets needed a good service as they weren't resetting. Saucer kick out was also gummed up. Plenty of switches needed adjustment. Two pop bumper bodies were toast, so new bodies and wafers went in. New legs, new leg levellers and new leg bolts as well. New pop bumper caps to replace the old faded ones, too.

The stand out issue in this repair was a real weird one. The tilt would register each time the left outlane was hit. Seems like a typical switch matrix diode issue, right? Wrong! After changing a few diodes and checking wiring, nothing was any better. The problem turned out to be residual moisture in the timber mounting panel for the tilt mechanism (the machine was kept in a very damp room). There was enough moisture in the timber to conduct current between the tilt bob itself and the tilt bob surround (high resistance even when the tilt contacts were apart). The MPU detected this when the outlane switch was closed for some reason, and triggered a tilt. Insulating the tilt mechanism parts from the timber backing was enough to fix the issue. This has got to be one of those one-in-a-million occurrences which I don't think I'll ever see again during my lifetime. Touch wood (lol)!

Machine is back up and running for the first time in a long time... at full bionic power! 🦾

Repair logs are quick summaries of workshop and on-site repairs. If your machine needs a service, 📬 Contact Us to discuss how we can help!

Scared Stiff was in for a general service after a few years of storage. After an initial check-over and first boot, the game came to life with a factory settings restored message. Lovely! This means memory is no longer being kept by the CPU board. Sure enough, the batteries had leaked. 🔋 Last replaced in 2011! Thankfully, only minor damage to the battery holder, which was replaced with a button cell.

Now we could start a game and give things a bit more of a test. Gameplay was a bit wonky. Sometimes a switch would register in gameplay that shouldn't have. Sometimes the game would display errors about switch ground shorts. Didn't seem to be much of a pattern, until I realised that all of the affected switches were optos. Jiggling connectors on the MPU board didn't have any effect. So next port of call was the opto board under the playfield. Scared Stiff uses a lot of optos, so this is a 16 opto board. This board was RAGGED ☢️ The 470 uf capacitor had spilled it guts everywhere. First time I've actually seen electrolyte bubbling out of the capacitor when it is under load. Cool! 😎 These boards are available to buy but I was impatient and wanted it done today, so I just rebuilt it. About half of the board components removed, chemical treatment, sanding, and new components installed. All optos working as intended now!

There were some odd display artefacts and sound effects that played when they shouldn't. Sometimes lines would appear on the display. Sometimes the display fonts would change. Totally whacky behaviour. 🤪 Since there were issues with the sound and the display, first suspect was the audio/visual board. Things checked out OK here visually, and the ROMs were good. Fiddling around with the ribbon cables revealed the problem was at the I/O connector between the CPU and the audio/visual board. Jiggling around got the display to do all kinds of weird stuff. New ribbon cable and reflowed solder on the header pins. All displaying and sounding normal now.

Finished off with the basics. Playfield cleaned. New rubber rings. Globes replaced. Switches adjusted. Coil assemblies checked. Ready to scare again! 😱