There I was, feeling a bit smug as I had gradually got all of the lights working, resoldered here, new lamp holder there, etc.. One of the pop bumpers coil melted, replaced and took the opportunity to strip down all pop bumpers and clean/replace skirts and lamp holders, etc.
took the coin door off and hammered out a few dents (someone had obviously tried to open the door with a screwdriver or jemmy.
it was after this that I noticed that some of the lamp that were previously working were now not working and some were on all of the time. I didn’t know if the pop bumper issue had caused more damage.
Checking in the back box there were a couple of connectors with scorch marks on them so I repinned them (in fact, I went on to repin all of the connectors in the back box, that’s a tedious job). At this point I also noticed that display for player two was mimicking the credit/ball in play display.
Troubleshooting switching off, disconnecting J1, J2 and J3 from the lamp driver board, using a known good lamp pin, dabbed onto each of the pins on the connector - all lamps lit as expected (Good, problem is upstream then). Did the same tes for each of the pins on the board and ended up with 38 pins not working.
getting a little concerned at this point, maybe one of the boards is faulty? Well the lamp driver is a new, replaced with old one and had same results. Started trying to collate missing pins on schematic, they are the result of 4 bcd decoders, I thought if I track back each of them to see what address lines, etc. were used maybe it would show up something common (I’m retired, 40 years in IT, got all the time in the world, so I started a spreadsheet starting at the lamp, logging each point in the chain, you know the sort of thing - lamp name, type, wire colour to board, connector, pin, transistor, resistor, decoder, output pin). I did get to thinking that a database might work better but wanted to get something down.
I decided to have another game even though the lights weren’t working properly, I noticed that sometimes the vibration would make the off lights flicker. Sure enough, it was apparently all down to a diode shorting on the coin door. Sometimes the simplest of fixes...
All this has given me an appetite to continue documenting the game using spreadsheet/database And see what I end up with.
took the coin door off and hammered out a few dents (someone had obviously tried to open the door with a screwdriver or jemmy.
it was after this that I noticed that some of the lamp that were previously working were now not working and some were on all of the time. I didn’t know if the pop bumper issue had caused more damage.
Checking in the back box there were a couple of connectors with scorch marks on them so I repinned them (in fact, I went on to repin all of the connectors in the back box, that’s a tedious job). At this point I also noticed that display for player two was mimicking the credit/ball in play display.
Troubleshooting switching off, disconnecting J1, J2 and J3 from the lamp driver board, using a known good lamp pin, dabbed onto each of the pins on the connector - all lamps lit as expected (Good, problem is upstream then). Did the same tes for each of the pins on the board and ended up with 38 pins not working.
getting a little concerned at this point, maybe one of the boards is faulty? Well the lamp driver is a new, replaced with old one and had same results. Started trying to collate missing pins on schematic, they are the result of 4 bcd decoders, I thought if I track back each of them to see what address lines, etc. were used maybe it would show up something common (I’m retired, 40 years in IT, got all the time in the world, so I started a spreadsheet starting at the lamp, logging each point in the chain, you know the sort of thing - lamp name, type, wire colour to board, connector, pin, transistor, resistor, decoder, output pin). I did get to thinking that a database might work better but wanted to get something down.
I decided to have another game even though the lights weren’t working properly, I noticed that sometimes the vibration would make the off lights flicker. Sure enough, it was apparently all down to a diode shorting on the coin door. Sometimes the simplest of fixes...
All this has given me an appetite to continue documenting the game using spreadsheet/database And see what I end up with.
