Data East - A&F Pinball Restorations

Published on: 5 August 2026

Repair log: Star Wars (Data East, 1992)

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! 😄

Published on: 12 July 2026

Repair log: Checkpoint (Data East, 1991)

This callout was initially to fix a non-booting issue. Simple enough; no 5 volts getting to the CPU. A connector on the power supply was dodgy. However in assessing this I noticed that the CPU board batteries had been moved to a remote battery holder. The batteries had leaked, so the holder had to go. But the CPU board was also covered in battery corrosion. It was still working, for now, but needed repair before it got much worse.

Took the CPU board, stripped the components off (⚰️ RIP to another CPU), treated the alkali, recoated the board, and repopulated with new components and a button cell battery. Working well now.

With the game now booting and working properly I could focus on the issues on the playfield. Switch in the upkicker was not responding. The actuator wire had broken off. These early Data East VUKs use very thin actuators on the switches which break all the time. Replaced with a thicker wire one.

Right flipper switch was also being weird. High resistance even when closed. Internal switch contacts had given up the ghost. New switch installed.

Replaced a few lamps, checked all switches and coils, and cleaned the playfield down to finish off. A fast, fun game to play. Love the speed check ramp feature! 🏎️

Published on: 11 June 2026

Repair log: Last Action Hero (Data East, 1993)

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!

🐀 It's been a while since I've had to repair a insect and rodent sanctuary. The cabinet and backbox of this game were full of wasp nests and rat poop. So this game needed a pretty deep clean before I could tackle anything else! The primary issue was the game would not boot. A combination of destroyed fuse clips and leaking capacitors on the power supply were the culprits in this case.

Once the game booted up, I could focus on the many other issues. Unfortunately the rat poop was not the only evidence they left behind; they also chewed through a bunch of wiring at the base of the cabinet as well as in the backbox. This resulted in a lot of game features not working including some lamps, flashers, the shaker motor, and a couple of switches. Those little teeth sure do a lot of damage!

A few small issues to round out the repair. The balls were getting stuck in the trough. The trough was very rusty, and the balls were getting caught on the rust spots. Some rust converter and a clean made things nice and smooth again.

Most of the insert lamps above the flippers were out. Bulbs, sockets and connectors were eliminated as the cause. Turns out, these lamps are all in the same column, driven by Q70 on the MPU board. Q70 had failed. Once replaced, the lamps were turning on again.

A bunch of other parts needed replacing. New drop target. Couple of new switches. New balls. New rubber rings. New lamps.

Machine is almost at 100% now bar a couple of minor issues, and is fully playable, which is much better than it was before I turned up. Ready for "action"! 🎬

Published on: 22 November 2024

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #2 (Prototype Conversion!)

We've been here before! Last time I wrote about repairs to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT, Data East, 1991), I was discussing a restoration I performed for a customer. This machine was a little different. I bought it after doing some repairs for its previous owner. They decided to move and didn't want to move the game with them, so they sold it to me instead. It's a weird experience to start repairing a game for somebody and then finish repairing it for yourself. Suddenly you're not constrained by time frames or repair budgets, and you can really take the time to make sure the game is playing as well as it can be. You can also take the time to make any improvements or modifications that you want. And with all of the extra features I planned to install, I needed a lot more time than most people can justify in a regular service call. But what "extra features" am I referring to?

Jurassic Park (Data East)

I haven't had to do a full restoration on a Data East machine in a little while, so it was about time one came around. Enter Jurassic Park! This machine came from a customer who had this machine sitting in their garage. They had just moved house and wanted the machine brought back into playing condition so they could play it in their new house. As expected, the Jurassic Park was much older than the house, and was also in much poorer condition. The game did start up and enter attract mode, but a lot of playfield features did not work and a lot of parts were broken. This was going to be a full-on restoration, and I wanted to add a few little touches to really bring the machine back to its former glory. So, if this pinball machine was 65 million years in the making, then I was in it for the long haul with this restoration.

Guns N' Roses

Many people consider Guns N' Roses (Data East, 1994) to be one of Data East's best pinball machines. One of the few rock music machines from the 1990s, it is a really cool game with some interesting design decisions incorporated into it. While a lot of people prefer the more modern music themed games such as AC/DC or Aerosmith or Metallica, I still prefer the older games, so Guns N' Roses scratches that rock theme itch perfectly.

This will be a shorter blog post as this was not a full restoration by any stretch. There was limited disassembly performed and pictures were only taken of the issues I was tasked with fixing. My customer had pulled the machine out of his warehouse for the first time in years and wanted it to brought back to working condition. No cosmetic fixes and no fancy stuff. I just needed to get it back up and playing. So, I won't bother with the standard descriptions of the machine's condition or nitpick the defects. However, I performed some interesting repairs on this machine which warranted writing some of them up. So, let's jump right into the repairs!