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!

Minor service on a Transformers (Combo LE). A very popular theme but with only 500 of these LEs made, you don't see them very much!

Slingshot rubbers were gone so they were replaced first up. Left slingshot was still not firing. Coil was working OK in test mode but the switch wasn't registering at all, so time to look at the assembly under the playfield. A broken diode on the switch was the cause.

Next: ball hang-ups in Megatron. This is a common problem that was partially solved by code updates. Sometimes, a ball shot into the trough under Megatron won't be recognised. This trough is an odd design with only one entry and exit point, yet it must also be able to stack multiple balls for multiball. The fix here was to increase the pitch of the game a little so gravity helps the balls fall into line a little better. You can also put washers under the assembly to give it some more angle. In most cases the software should compensate by firing the trough coil weakly to "dislodge" any stuck balls. An odd mechanism design!

The captive ball has a toy Bumblebee car in it instead of the captive ball. However the car was getting stuck halfway up the lane and would not roll down nicely. The main cause of this appeared to be the design of the car. The base has a Bumblebee design embossed into it, which creates ridges that bind on the switch actuator in this lane. Some tape over the base of the car helped smooth it out somewhat, but replacing it with a different car would be the best approach. Unfortunately I don't carry extra Bumblebees in my toolbox!

Balls were occasionally getting stuck on the top of the left ramp. This is a poor ramp design with a huge lip on the metal ramp that doesn't quite fit into the "slot" on the plastics it joins with. I couldn't create any more space here so some Mylar over the lip was the best solution.

Of course this is only the first Transformers machine made by Stern. They've just released another one (More than Meets the Eye). Hopefully it will be a while until I have to feature one of those on this blog!

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!



🎣 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! 🤥

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! 😄

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! 😱

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 Franky was an amputee! One of his arms had broken off. A shame, because his ball throw is the best part of the game, and he certainly can't do that without his arms! The shaft that his arm bolts to has a thread for a nut to secure the arm. The threaded section was sheared off. With some creative welding of a spare bolt to the shaft, the threaded section was back!

With the arm back on, there was still a lot of adjustment to be done. First, the rest position of the arms needs to be adjusted so the hands sit just below the ramp exit points, otherwise the ball will get hung up, or it will fall off the hands. There is a "stop bracket" next to the arm shaft which you can use to fine-tune this. You can raise or lower the ramp slightly if you need more room.

With the arms fixed, I moved onto the various lamp issues. None of the general illumination lamps on the playfield were working except for ONE! Some of them were blown, but most were still intact. However they weren't lighting up due to a lack of power. A dodgy lamp connector on the power supply was the problem. Some of the crimp terminals were making poor contact, and the solder on the rear side of the board had dried up and cracked. New connector, new crimps, reflowed solder, and the lamps were back.

Then I moved onto the insert lamps. Most of these were not working, too, but this was just because most of them had blown. About 40 lamps later, they were all shining bright again. One lamp was troublesome, which was the red lamp above the shooter lane. This one has a connector adjacent to the ball trough which gets pulled quite tight. One of the wires had come loose from the connector, and needed to be reinserted to get this lamp working again.

Another issue was the ball launch switch. It wasn't working. The launcher on Franky is a giant lever, which actuates a microswitch in the cabinet. The actuator on this switch was a little bent, so the switch wasn't being triggered when the lever was pulled. Bent it back with a switch adjuster and it was working fine again.

The coin mechanism wasn't always accepting coins, either. The small solenoid that pulls inwards to direct coins to the "accept" path was puling in too slowly. This was a power issue; there was a poor connection in the screw terminal that supplied the credit board with power. This game had a weird credit board, too. Not an original Data East one. Never seen one of these before!

A couple more switch adjustments and a good playfield clean and this machine was "alive" 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!



🔋 Had a few service calls relating to power issues on Jersey Jack games recently. The newest patient is Guns N' Roses (Jersey Jack). Primary symptom was no activity on power up. No lights, no sounds, nothing except for a very slight hum. Few things checked first including the main line fuse, power switch, and power cord. These were all good. Into the backbox we go! Here there was no activity whatsoever from the main computer. No fan spin. This is a pretty typical indicator of battery failure. Indeed, the battery was completely flat at 0.5 volts.

Put a new one in, but still no joy when turning the game on. At this point you need to "jump start" the motherboard by connecting two terminal pins on the motherboard. This is a fiddly procedure but there are videos that guide you through the process on JJP's website in the support section. Once that was done, the game booted back up. It had lost its BIOS settings due to the battery going flat, so a keyboard was needed to set the time and confirm the BIOS settings before it could fully boot into the operating system and a game could actually start.

Gave the playfield a clean and checked all of the coils and switches. Found a funny switch issue on the left ramp. The switch actuator wire was back-to-front, meaning it was never actually triggering the switch when a ball went up the ramp. It had been this way from the factory. Must have been a Friday afternoon job! A couple of other switches needed adjusting, too. The action button had come loose from its mount, too. 

One complaint from the owner was that the flipper buttons kept falling out of the cabinet. This is a common problem when the plastic rim that keeps them in place wears down a little. A simple fix is to add a circlip (or similar device) to the end of the button so it can't be pushed through the hole. 

Levelled the game, gave it a play test, and it was good to go. 👍