What fixed your game today / general repair log

the snake cliffy protector on Stern Metallica (2013) took many years of abuse and was getting the ball hung up. my pinball spiritual advisor said they can be straightened so I took it out and did exactly that with my hands. does this count?

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the snake cliffy protector on Stern Metallica (2013) took many years of abuse and was getting the ball hung up. my pinball spiritual advisor said they can be straightened so I took it out and did exactly that with my hands. does this count?

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It counts. I deem it so!
 
So my Arena pin had a bulb out (the P that spells PIT on the playfield). I replaced the bulb with the machine off, and hit the bulb with a very light splash of contact cleaner prior to install. Also waited for it to dry before power up.

On power up, lost all of the controlled lights on the PF. Further research from the manual, and @Todd Tuckey, helped me figure out fuse F5 powers the controlled lamps. In the holder it looked fine. Pulling it and checking it with a DMM revealed it was no Bueno.

New 8a fuse at F5 brought the playfield lights back (YAY!!). Only problem is, the P bulb now stays on non stop (BOOO!!). Ah well, better than all dark!!
 
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So my Arena pin had a bulb out (the P that spells PIT on the playfield). I replaced the bulb with the machine off, and hit the bulb with a very light splash of contact cleaner prior to install. Also waited for it to dry before power up.

On power up, lost all of the controlled lights on the PF. Further research from the manual, and @Todd Tuckey, helped me figure out fuse F5 powers the controlled lamps. In the holder it looked fine. Pulling it and checking it with a DMM revealed it was no Bueno.

New 8a fuse at F5 brought the playfield lights back (YAY!!). Only problem is, the P bulb now stays on non stop (BOOO!!). Ah well, better than all dark!!
Looking at the manual, the "P" rollover light is L45, driven off of a flip flop at Z12 (pin 7) through R46 and Q46 (an MPS-U45, probably your issue) on the driver board (A3). Got a feeling Q46 is shorted.
 
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Thank you so much for that! I swapped out the orig driver board with a Rottendog one, so maybe need to see what location that translates to. But thank you so much!!
 
Fixed a Pole Position 2 boardset today. Was waiting for a pcbjunkie PP jamma adapter to arrive since they are really cool and can emulate a steering wheel, so perfect for hooking up PP to a test bench.

I had to think back if I had ever fixed a Pole Position boardset before, and I didn't think I had. Looked at a few repair logs while waiting for the adapter to arrive.

Board had a leaking battery on it. It also had an Eldorado Games repair sticker from 2011, so I guess that battery wasn't leaking then or got changed out with a new one. In any case, nothing lasts forever, and this one starting leaking sometime in the past 14 years or so.

Cut the battery off, washed up the corrosion and fixed a couple of broken traces.

Board would boot with a screen filled with F characters, so per some repair logs, possibly caused by the PAL at 7C failing. Saw someone mention using a NOP generator to make sure all the PAL outputs worked properly. Great, I'll finally get to use the Z80 NOP generator I bought form VectorCollector a while back. Popped out the Z80, stuck in the NOP generator, and some of the outputs looked dead. Burned a replacement GAL, stuck it in and the outputs were still dead. Huh.

Probed around and noticed that the NOP generator isn't hooking up the /RD or /WR pins, which the PAL needs. Shorting /RD to ground did the trick and I could now see activity on all the 7C output pins. Popped the original PAL back in, and it was working fine.

Pulled the Namco customs out, cleaned the legs with Tarn-X. Didn't help, but at least I eliminated that as a possible issue.

Pulled out the FlukeEmu and a Z80 probe. Roms read fine. Ram at $3000-37ff tested fine. OK, I guess I did repair the broken traces properly.

Can't write to the ram at $4000-47ff. That's odd. Find old post on KLOV where someone confirms the main Z80 should be able to read/write to there.

Start looking at more pages of the schematic to try and figure out what's going on. The $4000 ram are the 8 2114 rams on the "Motion Object Video Memory" page of the schematics. Set the fluke to loop writing to $4000, poke around the 2114s, the /WE signal is high...well, that's not right. The /WE signal and Chip Selects come from the "Video RAM Address Decoders" page, and the CPU boards addresses them with CKH and CKL. The main Z80 can only handle CKL, and that is generated on the "Brake and Gas Pedal Input" page, (which I had been skipping over for about a half hour, how intuitive that it would be on that page...). CKL looks good coming out of the CPU board....but wait a sec, CKL is stuck high on the Video board. Test near the edge connector for the interconnect board. Shit, no continuity, and there's a pull up on the Video board. Pull off the interconnect board, edge connector is filthy. Clean it up with a scratch pen, spray some Deoxit into the interconnect board.

Board boots to a working game.
 
Game pcb: PC10 single monitor PCB
Symptoms: Not booting, handful of small boxes on the screen
Troubleshooting steps: all I did was a visual inspection of the board. It had been a parts unit, so I wanted to go over it. I noticed it had a little bit of damage. I found one broken trace
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Solution: fixed broken trace with small wire.
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Another playchoice board!
Game PCB: Playchoice 10 dual monitor pcb
Symptoms: Nothing on screen, LED light comes on and disappears immediately
Troubleshooting Steps: After confirming the CPU and PPU were working on my playchoice single, I moved to the Z80 section. I hooked up my Fluke 9010 to do basic RAM and ROM tests. The problem was that no matter what I did bit 1 on the data bus would always read as 0. I could write just fine to RAM but could never read back exactly what I needed. Because I was having issues with both RAM and ROM, I started poking 6Z as it is a bidirectional buffer on the Z80 databus.

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I pulled the IC because it looked odd on the oscilloscope. Turns out this ended up being the problem.
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Replacing the buffer brought back everything on the databus. I was able to have all RAM tests pass. Now I have to do the work on the rest of the cabinet to make it nice and ready for play.

Solution: Bad 74LS245 at 6Z
 
Here is a couple miscellaneous logs from work today

Game: Williams Flintstones pinball
Symptoms: limp lower flippers, popping fuses on fliptronic board
Troubleshooting steps: Looking at the the coil, I could see that it was rebuilt with new coils, so I assumed those were fine. I triple checked the wiring though to make sure it was hooked up correctly. Checked out fine. This was a WPC system, so end of stroke switches show up in the switch test, so I wanted to make sure that they were showing up in there. I noticed that when I pressed the buttons, the box for the flipper buttons were going nuts. So what was happening because it was going nuts, it was sending pulses, kind of like a PWM signal. So it would inherently be weaker. Solder joints were good so I tried cleaning the optos. When cleaning the optos didn't help, I just replaced the optos. That resolved my issues. For some reason it seems like I always have trouble with optos.
Solution: Replaced bad optos on flipper button boards

Game: Rocky and Bullwinkle pinball
Symptoms: GI lights and garbage on the DMD, but not much else was happening.
Troubleshooting steps: This SCREAMED power supply problems. Data east power supplies were built from hot garbage and wet tissue paper. Checking the voltages, I was missing both 12V Unreg and 5V. Checking out the fuses, one of the 7A fuses for the bridge rectifier was popped, indicating that the bridge rectifier was probably trashed. Testing it, one diode going to the positive terminal was shorted, the other was blown open. Examining the rest of the board, I noticed several blown out caps. Those IC branded capacitors of the era are dogshit and are always bad on these data east supplies so I just replaced them. I checked the fuse holders as well, but those were solid. Replacing all this brought back my missing voltage rails.
Solution: Bad bridge rectifier and several bad capacitors on power supply board.
 
Game: Midway's The Grid x 2
Problem: One board not linking at all, the other links on one port only.
Solution:
FireWire ports fixed up and IBM FireWire PHY chips replaced on both

 
Omega Race upright spinner lost the left 180 degrees of rotation. after a lot of trying to figure out how to open it (you pull those metal clip gimmicks out of the sides) I got to the center of the earth. the pins that go to that encoder board gimmick are what are touched by the wheel and that makes you turn in the game. I cleaned the wheel with alcohol, deoxit, then alcohol again, dried it, then pencil eraser. the flapper portions of the pins got deoxit. I could tell the top half of the wheel (the bottom is pictured) had poor contact with the flappers, so I gave those a subtle bend. now the spinner has friction! and 360 degrees of rotation. it'll probably die soon. there's apparently an @ArcadeJason replacement.

I hope to never take this thing apart ever again. also be mindful of which side is up on the wheel, it might get mad if you put it in upside down.
 

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Omega Race upright spinner lost the left 180 degrees of rotation. after a lot of trying to figure out how to open it (you pull those metal clip gimmicks out of the sides) I got to the center of the earth. the pins that go to that encoder board gimmick are what are touched by the wheel and that makes you turn in the game. I cleaned the wheel with alcohol, deoxit, then alcohol again, dried it, then pencil eraser. the flapper portions of the pins got deoxit. I could tell the top half of the wheel (the bottom is pictured) had poor contact with the flappers, so I gave those a subtle bend. now the spinner has friction! and 360 degrees of rotation. it'll probably die soon. there's apparently an @ArcadeJason replacement.

I hope to never take this thing apart ever again. also be mindful of which side is up on the wheel, it might get mad if you put it in upside down.
i made new pcb disks a few years back. (not that the original pcb goes bad) i also took one of these apart and thought while its apart i might as well . i love the smooth feel of the modern encoder replacement but i have yet to permanently install one on any of my omega races yet.
 
i made new pcb disks a few years back. (not that the original pcb goes bad) i also took one of these apart and thought while its apart i might as well . i love the smooth feel of the modern encoder replacement but i have yet to permanently install one on any of my omega races yet.
we got a mini with your multi game board. some interesting stuff in there. all the Cinematronics games the button controls (thrust/fire) are backwards however
 
all the Cinematronics games like Star Castle, Armor Attack?
these are not cinematronics games you speak of by the way . they are vectrex games. the vectrex controller is just numbered 1 2 3 4. i will be testing another run of omega race multi boards at some time soon i can have inputs swapped.
edit: better yet we should add major havoc to the next build
 
these are not cinematronics games you speak of by the way . they are vectrex games. the vectrex controller is just numbered 1 2 3 4. i will be testing another run of omega race multi boards at some time soon i can have inputs swapped.
that explains why they're a little different. truthfully, the only arcade games of those I've ever seen were on blown out tubes where it's barely visible so I wouldn't know the difference anyway lol

I guess that's where all those GCE games are from then?
 
that explains why they're a little different. truthfully, the only arcade games of those I've ever seen were on blown out tubes where it's barely visible so I wouldn't know the difference anyway lol

I guess that's where all those GCE games are from then?
yeah we already had a vectrex emulator from the masteroids project so we added as many games as possible. some of which were hacked by Chris binary star to work with a quadrature signal which have another layer on top to convert from 6 bit gray code.
 
yeah we already had a vectrex emulator from the masteroids project so we added as many games as possible. some of which were hacked by Chris binary star to work with a quadrature signal which have another layer on top to convert from 6 bit gray code.
that Hexa whatever game is cool where it spins and you have to rotate to avoid hitting the walls.
 
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