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About this blog

This is just a blog for me to store my repair logs. I think it would be useful to others here if I post them as I am doing more arcade and pinball repairs.

Entries in this blog

Black Knight Pinball - Trashed Drop Target Coil

Symptom: Lower left drop targets not resetting when all three are knocked down. Troubleshooting Steps: The first thing that I do whenever I deal with a non-functional coil is I check the coil itself. On a pinball machine, it is super easy to do this typically. The first thing you would do is remove the lock bar and playfield glass. Next, be sure to remove the balls themselves. This is an important step, as when you are lifting up the playfield, they can free themselves from the trough, potenti

Laser War Pinball - Some Flashers Stuck On

This was a quick fix as I've seen this issue before. So I was working on a Data East Laser war pinball machine, and some of the flashers were stuck on. This pinball machine just had all of its bulbs replaced with LEDs, so realistically there shouldn't have been a problem. There were also several stuck on so it was more than just a bad socket or a wiring issue. I identified the bulbs as the following:   Flashers are driven by the solenoid circuits, so it seemed odd that the flasher

Street Fighter 2 Pinball - No Sound

Something a bit different from the usual arcade repairs, recently I picked up a Street Fighter 2 pinball machine (my first pin). It was a wild ride fixing up that, but that's a writeup for another day. As the title states, the big problem at hand was that the table was not putting out any valid sound, there was buzzing but none of Guile's theme or whatnot.  So in Street Fighter 2, it utilized the Gottlieb System 3 boardset. This utilized two different sound boards, a large main sound board

Laser War Pinball - Random Resetting

Symptoms Random reset, sometimes resetting rapidly Solution Steps Looking at the schematics, reset is controlled using a Power On Reset (POR) IC. Basically how it works is that it sends a reset pulse to the CPU whenever a threshold voltage is reached, somewhere in the 4V range. With that knowledge, I had to monitor the reset line. In this image, the reset line is yellow and the +5V rail is in blue. What I wanted to do was see if there was maybe a short or if there was excessive noise g

Williams Corvette Pinball - DMD Blotchy

Game: Williams Corvette Pinball Symptoms: DMD display characters was a little blotchy Troubleshooting Steps:  Looking at the display, I could see that it didn't look like, it almost looks like the characters were blotchy and distorted. You could see dots around the characters, it was super visible in person as well. The first thing that I did was checked was the voltages that the DMD was getting. One thing that I noticed was that the -125V line was rather out of spec, I was measuring -

Kiss Pinball/Early Bally Solid State - Stuck Display Segments

This is probably one of the more common issues that I've seen on these old Ballys. The way these work is each display is it's own module capible of displaying a score or whatnot. Sometimes what can happen is that segments can get stuck or not light up at all. This one is from a Kiss pinball. Essentially, the way that these modules are driven can be split into two parts: digit driver and segment driver. If a certian digit is not lighting up or is stuck (many times 8 because of all the

SNESNESCUBE64

SNESNESCUBE64 in Pinball Repair

Williams Pinbot - Missing Characters and Segments on Displays

Seems like I am doing a lot of display repairs as of late. This time it was for Pinbot by Williams. In this instance, it was missing the middle character for player 2 and player 4. This one is fairly easy to handle looking at the schematics. The other issue is that the credit digits are missing segments 'B' and 'D'. The first thing to tackle is the missing segments. each display unit uses it's own driver IC for turning on the digits. So it would be just finding out what is in common.

SNESNESCUBE64

SNESNESCUBE64 in Pinball Repair

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