Are early 1980s Ballys the easiest/chheapest cabs to fix?

[Antray84]

I am a newbie, picking up a cheap MR MRs Pac Man as it was the only machine I could realistically afford at the time.

There have been options to trade up to some other (more advanced) machines. However these are Data East games and from what I can see the maintenance required is likely to be more, the parts less available and more expensive. Am I right here?

My Pac Man is full of Alltek boards and has a very simple playfield - I have a Geeotech Pac Maze and there seems a lot less that could go seriously wrong. Right now I don't have the cash to buy a cab that could then cost me another £500 to get a new MPU etc. It appears these are a lot harder to find for Data East games and more expensive. Gotlieb seems to be the same deal.

It seems to me that there is this golden generation of 1980s Bally games like Flash Gordon, Fathom, Centur, EBD etc that have been made very easy to keep going through Alltek. A luxury that other groups of games don't seem to have. For a newbie like myself I am inclined to stay in my lane for a while, unless someone has better info.

 

[Pick Holder]

When you say cabs to fix - do you mean the cabinet itself (the woodwork) or the game boards ????

If you have not done it before then any pinball is hard to fix.

Alltek stuff is great. Rock solid.

I would upgrade the transformer board in the base of the game.

Be careful with that - has over 240v DC power which will grab you if you touch the wrong thing.....

I would not call 80s a golden age. If it was then games like Pacman would be £3K.

DMD is probably the golden classic age. System 11 is catching up.

Pinball is like food - you like what you like.

I would point a newbie to a DMD bally/Williams if they can afford it. So much information is around on how to repair these.

I do see on my rounds alot of problems with pins and connectors on this era game. I have just had a Mr & Mrs Pacman in and the connectors were terrible..... there was a lot of work carried out. This was sold 'fully working' on here !

 

[8bit-1up]

I would highly recommend starting out with early Bally or classic Stern SS pins if it’s your first time restoring a pinball machine. You can usually pickup a project Bally for between £500-700. The boards are fairly inexpensive and easy to get your head around also.

I run a retro arcade in Bristol and I have 4 pins set to freeplay, my classic Stern Galaxy from 1980 has been by far the most reliable. Once you have rebuilt the flippers and serviced the boards early Bally/Sterns are very reliable.

 

[Jagspete]

Don’t believe the DE hype, they’re just as easy to maintain and source parts for, maybe the earlier pre DMD models where difficult but I’ve found all mine reliable enough and great games, yes , even Rocky & Bullwinkle and Hook.

 

[AlanJ]

I would say the bally SS games ARE the easiest and cheapest games to maintain. There are plenty of spares, both original, alltek and also the fabulous weebly boards. https://nvram.weebly.com/

The boardset was used in so many games over a 15 year period, so are always going to be available, and, they are well documented and pretty easy to fix.

The williams and gotts of the same era are much more complicated, and the board sets changes much more often.

 

[David_Vi]

What Alan says

I started with WPC games, data east and even Zaccaria before I got our first 1980 Bally, and it was a dog, so I jumped in deep.

Even without my previous experience on other games the Bally was so easy to work on. The boards are easy to find and cheaper in general.
Lamp driver boards are in abundance and extremely easy to repair (unless totally trashed).

I've had around 4 Bally/Sterns since (Stern Electronics use the same boards and are interchangable even if the design/layout can be different).

The main issues with games of that era is lamp sockets are a pain, literally painful sometimes as they can have sharp edges. Plus they are typically corroded so lamps flicker.
Easy to clean up with a Dremel or replace so not a Biggie.

Any switch issues are often just a wire off or the .47uf capacitor has died. Cheap as chips to replace.

The playfields lack ramps and mechs so stripping and reassembling them can be done in a few hours if that!

If you like classics you can't go wrong with classic Ballys

 

[Crewey]

What Alan says

I started with WPC games, data east and even Zaccaria before I got our first 1980 Bally, and it was a dog, so I jumped in deep.

Even without my previous experience on other games the Bally was so easy to work on. The boards are easy to find and cheaper in general.
Lamp driver boards are in abundance and extremely easy to repair (unless totally trashed).

I've had around 4 Bally/Sterns since (Stern Electronics use the same boards and are interchangable even if the design/layout can be different).

The main issues with games of that era is lamp sockets are a pain, literally painful sometimes as they can have sharp edges. Plus they are typically corroded so lamps flicker.
Easy to clean up with a Dremel or replace so not a Biggie.

Any switch issues are often just a wire off or the .47uf capacitor has died. Cheap as chips to replace.

The playfields lack ramps and mechs so stripping and reassembling them can be done in a few hours if that!

If you like classics you can't go wrong with classic Ballys

Agree with everything above, especially:
The main issues with games of that era is lamp sockets are a pain, literally painful sometimes as they can have sharp edges. Plus they are typically corroded so lamps flicker.

That alone drove me insane to the point of selling the game, I couldn't have a few games without an insert or GI bulb deciding not to work. I know yoppsicle led sticks or bars would have resolved this permanently but was too large an undertaking for me personally both in terms of skill and patience.

 

[Sgt GrizZ]

Agree with everything above, especially:
The main issues with games of that era is lamp sockets are a pain, literally painful sometimes as they can have sharp edges. Plus they are typically corroded so lamps flicker.

That alone drove me insane to the point of selling the game, I couldn't have a few games without an insert or GI bulb deciding not to work. I know yoppsicle led sticks or bars would have resolved this permanently but was too large an undertaking for me personally both in terms of skill and patience.

Yeah they can be a pain . And with non dmd games you need those insert lamps working and communicating with you for full enjoyment . Cleaning corrosion and crap off the inside of the socket can help . Or better still fire up the soldering iron and fix them permanently. Cheaper and less faff than replacing with new sockets .

 

[Jay Walker]

Stern Electronics use the same boards and are interchangeable even if the design/layout can be different).

They are to quite an extent, except for audio; Bally followed Williams in having a separate processor on the audio circuit board, but Stern used an 'expansion card' audio board, connected to and controlled by* the main Mpu via the otherwise largely redundant 'J5' connector at the top of the Mpu board. Bally games only used this for specialised test 'AID' devices. Similarly with speech, Stern games had another circuit board for this, tagged onto the normal audio board.

Stern's later 'Mpu 200' board differs slightly from the long-serving Bally Mpu, both in having two obsolete, vulnerable and costly Cmos Ram chips, and the program memory arrangement. I'm certainly not an expert about memory addressing, but I recall someone who was (the late Bob Thomson) describing how he'd got a Bally game running on an Mpu 200 by writing the program into four chips to suit, rather than two as Bally intended. But the Alltek brand already mentioned has got around all that, in any case, it can run just about all Bally and Stern games, without anything from the original Mpu boards.

* leading to occasional tasking problems, such as the jangly 'replay' effect on Flight 2000, which didn't have a proper knocker (the solenoid assignment was fully occupied). If there was a lot going on at the moment a scoring replay or Special was achieved, the effect could end up shortened or even missed altogether

 

[David_Vi]

They are to quite an extent, except for audio; Bally followed Williams in having a separate cpu on the audio circuit board, but Stern used an 'expansion card' audio board, connected to and controlled by the main Mpu via the otherwise largely redundant 'J5' connector at the top of the Mpu board. Bally games only used this for specialised test 'AID' devices. Similarly with speech, Stern games had another circuit board for this, tagged onto the normal audio board.

The soundboards are the main sticking point for me so far. They changed the design so many times that each soundboard is only used by a handful of games. Most of them far too complex for me to repair, but we have great people in the community who can diagnose and repair these if needed

 

[Jay Walker]

You mean Bally, I take it. I can recall three different audio boards for that era. The one that replaced chimes (and needed the Mpu board memory size doubled to a whopping 8K), the short-lived Vocaliser, used for Xenon and some Flash Gordons, then Squawk & Talk, with optional reverb add-on (for Centaur/II). Whereas Stern used SB 100 with Mpu 100, and SB 300 with Mpu 200.

 

[stevebm1]

the only thing with the mr and mrs pacman cab is the poor design,the wiring inside where the score displays/head is can be a bit of a mess,as the space is a lot tighter than a standard backbox