✈️ Always loved the backglass on this machine. Perfectly captures "the magic of flight" at a time when the Concorde had just entered service and the world still seemed like a big place...
Anyway. Where were we? Few things to fix on this Supersonic. Game booted up and played OK... except for the total lack of playfield solenoids. Sure enough, playfield fuse was blown. Replaced it and powered up again. Fuse held until the very end of the boot sequence and blew again. I could tell that it was blowing the instant the drop target reset coil was firing. The coil was very crispy, and measured only 2 ohms. It should be about 10. Clearly this one was fried. Hard to find a replacement for these big drop target reset coils (24-1400). However, most of the large size coils will work. I found a 26-1900 which fit, and worked a treat.
A few displays were wonky. Two were missing some digits, one was flickering. Reflowing the header pins on these and replacing the six 100k ohm resistors solved these issues. But still couldn't get the last display to light a hundreds digit. No problem... here's a sneaky trick. The ball in play and credit display don't need a hundreds unit, so whack the display into that slot and nobody will ever know! 🤫
During testing I realised some of the switches weren't registering nicely. Cleaned their contacts which certainly helped, but some were still hard to register. Took a closer look and realised that someone had cut the capacitor off every single switch on the playfield. Sigh. These are needed for the CPU to read switch closures properly, so don't cut them. Soldered them all back on and switches were all good. Someone had also cut the playfield tilt switch out of circuit too. Savages!
Lots of lamps needed replacement/adjustment. Playfield got a good clean. Checked the backbox and noted a bit of corrosion on the CPU board, but we will deal with that another time. Sound board also needs a rebuild as some of the sounds are a bit scratchy and out of tune, so we'll do that at some point, too. But for now it plays nice and fast like it should!
