SNESNESCUBE64

The thing about these is that many are just a job disguised as a video game. Games like Destiny 2, just to name one, are constantly adding in content but the game overall feels like one big grindfest. In order to get the new weapons and whatnot, you gotta grind through boring missions for a chance to get it. These types of games also like doing limited of time types of content to invoke a fear of missing out kind of feeling in order to get you to play the game or purchase their content. Overall I think it is fine to extend the life of a game if you are adding engaging content. It is much more expensive now for these AAA game titles to start from scratch. I guess it's an eye of the beholder kinda deal. It's dependent on whether or not it feels like it's being dragged out. Several years is too long in my opinion to complete the story.

Blind Gaurdian is one of those bands I would love to see but have to travel. I am super jealous that you get to go see em.

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 -140V, where as other DMDs at the shop were measuring closer to -116V to -120V This difference can cause some biasing issues, which could cause display issues. With that in mind, I had to troubleshoot how the -125V rail was being generated. The -125V rail is ultimately generated by Q6, a MJE15031. Checking everything else in the circuit, everything seemed like it was working just fine. I did notice that the voltage Q6 was generating was pretty close to BR2, which implies that maybe it was shorted. So I went ahead and replaced it. After doing that, it resolved the issue with the blotched characters went away. Solution: Bad Q6 (MJE15031) on the display driver board

The purpose of this is to put logs that I don't think need a proper writeup. It should be updated periodically. Date: November 26th, 2021 Game: Williams Earthshaker Symptoms: Left flippers not working, fuse F6 popping after holding down left flipper button Solution: End of stroke switch for upper flipper was not aligned and disabling one of the windings on the flipper coil. Adjusting it fixed the issue. Date: June 12th, 2023 Game: Demolition Man Symptoms: garbage on lower half of the display regardless of what DMD unit I use. Solution: Bad 6264 (don't remember the designator) on the display driver board. Date: July 8th, 2023 Game: Gottlieb Buck Rogers Pinball Symptoms: no displays despite repro boardset being in the unit Troubleshooting steps: Noticed HV light for the displays was out. Checking the fuse, I could see that it was out. Replaced fuse, still popped once. Checked harness connections and one of the pins was pushed in. Replaced pushed pin and fuse didn't pop. Solution: replaced display fuse due to bad harness connections and replaced probable cause for popped fuse. Date: September 9th, 2023 Game: Bally Strikes & Spares Symptoms: Sticking Flippers Solution: Used oil in the coils, that is a no-no. Cleaned up oil and replaced sleeves. Date: September 23th, 2023 Game: Williams Terminator 2: Judgement Day Symptoms: Cannon not homing, missing some General Illumination Solution: Cannon not homing issue resolved by re-aligned the switch. General illumination, like with many games of this time, had burnt connectors that needed replacement. Date: November 18th, 2023 Game: Rocky and Bullwinkle Symptoms: Right Flipper not working Solution: Bushing that held the piston to the rest of the flipper assembly no longer held the link. So the piston wouldn't actually flip the flipper Date: December 2nd, 2023 Game: Williams Gorgar Symptoms: Both flippers weak Solution: End of stroke switches were not very well adjusted. Adjusting them properly increased the flipper's power to acceptable levels. Date: December 9th, 2023 Game: Williams Black Out Symptoms: Player 1 score display flickering Solution: Display tube was gassing. Replacing the tube solved the issue. Date: December 9th, 2023 Game: Williams Twilight Zone Symptoms: Balls sometimes getting lost in the gumball machine area Solution: This was a goofy one. It ended up being a combination of slightly dirty optos and the fact that the far left trough switch had it's actuator replaced with a home made one. The problem was is that it would sometimes hold up the left trough switch so that it wouldn't register. I believe that's where the ball becoming lost came into play but I am not sure. It worked after all of that. Date: December 10th, 2023 Game: Bally Bobby Orr pinball Symptoms: Something was just off about the lights. They weren't making sense Solution: One of the light driver connectors was offset by one pin, meaning that the wrong things were lighting up. Date: December 10th, 2023 Game: Bally Popeye Saves the Earth Symptoms: Bottom right flipper not working Solution: Flipper fuse blown for bottom right flipper on driver board. Cause of fault was because the end of stroke switches for the flippers were trashed. Date: December 17th, 2023 Game: Williams Flash Symptoms: Game not starting Solution: This was a really weird one. It was struggling to recognize switches with column one. Every time you would hit any switch in that column, it would trigger every switch in the row. So the game wouldn't start unless you held down the start button as a result. The solution ended up being to replace the 13N10L at Q81 (Rottendog board) with an IRL540 as the 13N10L was no longer manufactured and the IRL540 is what I had on hand.

This entry is meant for simple fixes that aren't worth going in-depth about the repair. It will be updated periodically to add new entries. I only have one to start but should have more later. Date: June 12th, 2023 Game: VS Super Mario Bros Symptoms: Low scratchy sound on sub side Solution: replaced bad LM3900 at 3N Date: September 4th, 2023 Game: VS Super Mario Bros Symptoms: monitor (20ez) experiencing weird issues, small screen and low/unadjustable B+. Solution: replaced bad flyback Date: September 23rd, 2023 Game: NFL Blitz 2000 Symptoms: Random game resets Solution: Reseated video card, adjusted voltage to 5V Date: December 2nd, 2023 Game: Ms. Pacman Symptoms: Random game resets when the game warms up. Solution: repaired damage game board card edge. HASL tarnishing made a poor connection that resulted in it getting burnt Date: December 10th, 2023 Game: Crusin USA Symptoms: Game not holding calibration Solution: Replaced battery. Date: December 16th, 2023 Game: Ms. Pacman Symptoms: No boot, loud humming noise Solution: Bad game board fuse block/blown out incorrect fuses. Date: December 16th, 2023 Game: Punch-out Symptoms: Game not freezing on the title screen Solution: Reseated program ROMs on the game board.

Yeah I saw yesterday and was the first thing I said. They showed us Yoester but not fat yoshi, those cowards.

Monitor: Vision Pro MTG-2901 Symptoms: Completely dead, clicking when powered on Troubleshooting steps: Like with any monitor, the first thing I do is make a capacitor kit and replace all the capacitors on the chassis. Arcade monitors work long hours and have exceeded their life in many cases. This is especially important with these Happ and Vision Pro monitors, of which have terrible capacitors. Replacing the capacitors in this instance had no real effect on the issue. Upon inspection, I noticed that R812 got hot, although it tested good. It is involved in driving the switch mode power supply (SMPS). Looking at the circuit, it is involved with Q801, a 2SC2073 used in driving the SMPS. It looked like that got hot as well. It's safe to say, if this isn't working, the SMPS won't be able to operate correctly. Replacing it ended up solving the issue, I also replaced the resistor because I didn't want to return this with a burnt resistor. Solution: Replaced Q801 (2SC2073) and R812 (68ohm 1/2W)

I'm workin because I don't get the day off. Maybe next time. If I had the day off I'd be cleaning and doing housework.

Thanks, but I should be good for a while. When the time comes I will source a manual, although I don't forsee myself working on any in the near future. Mostly Bally, Data East, and Williams pins for me :).

No doubt their stock is big. Their partnership (or ownership, not sure what the deal is) with Gottlieb is actually a source of frustration for me. They are the only source for Gottlieb manuals as Gottlieb is very litigious over the rights to the manuals. For context, most manuals are available on ipdb.org, but not Gottlieb manuals. It makes it much more difficult to service games, especially solid state ones, because of this. The only place to get them as far as I am aware is pinball resource who makes new copies for a fee. Not sure if these shinanigans are connected, but it's part of the reason of why I don't work on those machines as much. It actively makes my job harder and hurts people who want to keep these Gottlieb machines going. Granted they are my least favorite machines to work on due to the hardware they used (I can rant for hours about that one), but the blocking of public information is really annoying. Pinball resources is an interesting remnant of the past, they are more like an old catalog as you have to mail a check and order form, no online payments. I'm sure I'd use them if I needed a part I can only get through them. Glad they are still making parts though, it's good to have resources.

Neat. I've never ordered from Steve personally. My goto is Marco Pinball if the shop I work for on the weekend doesn't have what I need. They have been awesome. Very cool that they can make their own coils though, it is super important that folk still make em.

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, potentially causing damage to the plastics or if you are REALLY unlucky, the back glass. After the balls are removed, lift up the playfield and secure it on the kickstand (or whatever means that particular unit has for doing such. For Black Knight, it has a kickstand so that makes it easy. Upon visual inspection of the coil, I could see that it is super burnt, meaning that it was constantly engaged for way too long. You should be able to move the piston that solenoid pushes with your hand under normal circumstances and it should move smoothly. This one however was seized, indicating that the coil or sleeve needed to be replaced. This case was a bit extreme, so the coil is just going to be replaced. This happens for a few reasons: return side of the coil is shorted, the switch telling the mainboard to engage it was stuck, or something in the drive circuit was damaged. The drive transistor is typically the first place I check if there are no visible shorts, as those fail pretty often as they are hard working. Looking at the manual, it was really easy to identify which part of the circuit to look at. You can typically find pinball manuals online on websites like ipdb.org. Each manual is different, but manuals by Williams typically were comprehensive. Table 2 and 4 told me the solenoid number (02), what coil to replace it with, and which drive transistors were involved. With the transistor in question identified, I could easily take a look at the board. The only problem, is that Williams did NOT use silkscreen on the gameboards during this time, so you have to refer to the component layout diagram in the manual. You can also double check the schematics to make sure there wasn't a mistake, as well see the rest of the circuit to inspect. So now looking at the board, I could see little balls of solder on the cooling mount tab and discoloration, a strong indicator that it got pretty hot. At this point, I was fairly confident that this was the issue. The 2N4401 that drives the drive transistor could also have failed, but that happens a lot less than the drive transistor itself as it is working with a lot less. The 7408 could also fail, but many times you would see multiple coils having issues. So I decided to just replace the drive transistor at Q17 with a TIP102. After replacing the drive transistor, the coil performed as it should. In order to avoid excessive coil damage like this, make sure that your solenoid fuse is the correct value (the manual has that information and there is typically a fuse chart in the back box) and if you see or hear a solenoid fire and get stuck, it is a good idea to turn off the game and investigate. Coils are still made but are more expensive than a simple switch adjustment, just replacing the drive transistor or coil sleeve, and fuses are cheap so use the right value. Solution: Replace bad solenoid and Q17 (TIP102)

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 going on that went below the threshold. To my surprise, it periodically dipped a lot lower than expected, causing the reset. We definitely have a power supply issue at this point. Looking at the power supply circuit for +5V, there isn't a whole lot going on here. How it works, is that an AC line from set of taps directly from the transformer gets rectified and filtered. This makes a unregulated +/- 12V DC. From there, the +12V DC circuit is regulated to 5V using a 2N6057 and MC1723 circuit. Looking at it, my initial guess was the rectifier as these fails often. So I test it in circuit, and suprisingly one of the diodes in it was shorted, specifically on the ones creating the +12VDC line. So if it was failing, it could explain the dip in 5V. What was super interesting was that it didn't pop the fuse. Normally when one of these fails, they take out the fuse. Replacing the rectifier fixed the issue and it hasn't improperly reset since I replaced it with a new one. Solution Bad power supply bridge rectifier at DB1.

So a few months ago, I bought a Nintendo arcade board on Yahoo Auctions Japan called Head On N. It is a Nintendo counterpart of Head On by Sega. Unfortunately I don't know the story behind this one, but I figure it was just licensed to Nintendo by Sega. The main difference between the two games is that the Nintendo version is meant for a vertically oriented screen where as the Sega one is for a horizontally oriented one. Anyway, I got this thing as a converted mess. Someone had converted it to play (according to the listing) Heiankyo Alien, even modding the sound section with a weird hand built daughter card. Unfortunately I could not confirm this though, since all of the ROMs were missing on the back. So basically I had to remove everything and fix all the cut traces (there were plenty on the front and back). This was also used as a parts board at some point as well, as it was missing a lot. I did document the hacks, but I have to do a proper writeup on that. After populating everything in the sound section, I ran into the issue of ROMs. They use 2708 tri-voltage eproms, which are hard to program with modern hardware. My solution was actually to design a PCB to condense all 8 ROMs into one 2764 ROM, mapped with a 74LS148 encoder IC. It just fits into the original sockets. From there, it was time to fix the boardset, I was having graphics issues, but fortunately that was a fairly quick fix. You can read more about it on my repair log: The TLDR is that the chip that serializes graphics was faulty. After getting that replaced, I was able to actually see the game. Head On N, like with other Nintendo arcade boards, does indeed output inverted video. For this I just used a Sanyo 20EZ. It seems to be working just fine. The next step for me now is to do two things: Make a proper reset circuit and test the audio. Unfortunately I don't have a power supply in my test setup that does the -12V that it requires. I also have to hook up controls so I can actually play it. One down the road thing that I would like to do is modify the ROMs so it can just be used on an upright cabinet. It seems that it is meant to be used in a cocktail table, as it will flip the screen. It's been a fun project so far, I hope to do a custom cabinet for it one day, but that is down the road. I have to just get this board fully working first.

I got a pretty interesting board on the bench this time: Head On N, released by Nintendo, Licensed (Or stolen) from Sega. This is an interesting boardset, as this is for the most part a clone of Sega Vic Dual hardware, except they spread it across two boards and included the sound board on the CPU board. I had already done a deal of work deconverting the board, unfortunately this thing was missing a lot of parts and was modded to play an unknown game (the roms weren't included). On to the issue. The problem at hand is that there is no detail, just blocks moving around on the screen. First thing I did was hook it up to my Fluke 9010A to do RAM and ROM checks. The RAM had been previously desoldered by someone else, so I socketed it (4027 DRAM fail pretty often) and fixed some damage traces done by the previous owner. Everything came back as good, so I figured that the issue was after the RAM, since graphics and system RAM are shared. There are no schematics, but since this is so similar to Sega Head On hardware, I just used schematics for that (I actually used the schematics for Tranquilizer Gun, since Head On used a custom IC for video stuff). Looking at it, the first thing that happens is the graphics data gets serialized. From there, it get's processed with sync and color gets overlayed. Also note that on Head On N, the 74ls166 was sometimes substituted with a 74ls198 (as other Nintendo games like Space Fever used that IC at the time). Looking at the 74ls166 (found at 3C) with my oscilloscope. Looking at all the signals, everything except for the output looked correct. Output was stuck high. I decided to hook it up on my logic analyzer just to make sure that it wasn't some weird timing. However, it just seems that the output was always high despite not supposed to be. Notice that it gets loaded, but the output doesn't change despite being enabled. Pulling the 74ls166 out of circuit to test in my ABI chipmaster, the chip tested bad! After replacing the 74LS166, the graphics were back to normal. Next step is going to be testing sound!

I always eat the fries first. They never reheat at home well if for some reason there are leftovers, burgers however reheat just fine.

I don't have a whole lot of books these days and most of them are in boxes as I don't have a real bookshelf, and even so they are just kinda thrown on top of my parts shelving (grouping similar books). I would sort by category then alphabetically, which is how I sort my electronic parts. I do this form of sorting of all my physical copies of arcade manuals and schematics.

It is a very OK kind of game. If you like puzzle games you might like this one. Tetris Attack is a much better Yoshi themed puzzle game.

Oh wow I am sorry for being so late, but I have fixed this issue several times for work. There are two versions of this cabinet, the full upright and home version (you can tell by whether or not the coin door is just a sticker). Both suffer from similar problems but the full upright can have additional issues. Before you check anything, try adjusting red drive on the monitor, typically found on the neckboard. Be sure to remember where it was. Tubes wear out, especially if the cabinet is on location. Odds are it is not a gameboard issue here, but rather a monitor issue. So if you are uncomfortable working on monitors with high voltage or do not know alsafe practices, perhaps find someone local to help out. First things first, check your connections. Validate that the video signal is actually getting to the monitor (no broken wiring and whatnot). Secondly, wiggle the video connector. Cold solder joints are super common on the monitors used in there (going off memory WG K7200 for the home use, WG K7400 for the full upright). If you partially get your red back or there is flickering of the red color, you have bad solder joints, easy fix. If that is not the issue and you know the gameboard is working, I would try replacing the drive transistor on for red on the neckboard if it is the larger wells gardner monitor. Drive transistors ran REALLY hot on the K7400, U2000, and U5000 monitors by wells gardner, so they are a VERY common failure.

They were custom as far as I am aware. In the past when I needed something like that I always took parts from third party controllers. You might be able to find the pins, but I don't know the measurements. I do know you can buy the console end on ebay...

Forgot this title screen

I'd love the beta yoshi one. It's my favorite out of the batch.

Glad that it helped you out. Those capacitors are all terrible in there, so perhaps that is causing your horizontal lines issues. @dewisp02 Can my name be removed from the list? I sold my kiosk (for sale link below) to the user Anthony on this site.

IDK, about that. Zeldafreak I think is better than me at this point. Wish I coulda joined but unfortunately I had saturday night plans for some reason.

Haven't done them. If you have questions shoot me a PM.