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    Repair log: The Party Zone (Bally, 1991)

    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!

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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! 💃🕚


  • Published on

    Repair log: Star Wars (Data East, 1992)

    1992 Data East Repair log star wars

    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!

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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! 🌌


    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! ðŸĪŠ


    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! 😄


  • Published on

    Insanity log: Stop the Clock (Leisure & Allied Industries, ~2000s)

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    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 🗑ïļ


    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? ðŸĪŠ