I bought my TZ about a year ago. The previous owner had undertaken a deep refurb of the game including replacing three of the original Bally boards with new Rottendog ones - Clock, Fliptronics and Main Driver Board. He felt that new boards would make the game more reliable and luckily he gave me the original Bally boards that he had replaced.
Clock board - in my opinion the optos on the Rottendog board do not protrude far enough through the clock face to reliably register the minute hand's passing at the quarter hour points. Testing them manually shows that they work. But I think the "play" in the TZ clock mechanism (even after I replaced all the gears with brand new ones), when operated at its fast speed, means the minute hand does not always reliably break the opto beam. Then you get the dreaded "the clock is broken" message.
Fliptronics - the board failed mid game. It was replaced free of charge by the original vendor as it was only a few months old. I put the original Bally board in the game and it worked, and has never missed a beat since. So the replacement Rottendog board remains boxed up
Main Driver Board - I have had two periodic episodes of the low 5v, game reboot issue when you fire all the flippers at once. It may be that this is down to frailties elsewhere in the game, I do not know. But repinning connectors, improving the earth grounding etc seems to have cured this, for now. But I suspect that the Rottendog is my real problem here, especially as the website says ...
"NEW
With version 4 of this board, you will never get +5V resets!
We have swaped out the +5V Regulator with a 92% efficient switching regulator"
http://rottendog.us/WDB089.html
Now I am delighted that rottendog produces replacement boards to help keep old games alive, but my TZ has given me far more board related troubles than my other two wpc games, TAF and TS. Over the relevant period TAF and TS have given me zero board faults using the original dusty ones. Having successfully returned the original Fliptronics board to TZ, I am going to try the original main driver board in it too.
Clock board - in my opinion the optos on the Rottendog board do not protrude far enough through the clock face to reliably register the minute hand's passing at the quarter hour points. Testing them manually shows that they work. But I think the "play" in the TZ clock mechanism (even after I replaced all the gears with brand new ones), when operated at its fast speed, means the minute hand does not always reliably break the opto beam. Then you get the dreaded "the clock is broken" message.
Fliptronics - the board failed mid game. It was replaced free of charge by the original vendor as it was only a few months old. I put the original Bally board in the game and it worked, and has never missed a beat since. So the replacement Rottendog board remains boxed up
Main Driver Board - I have had two periodic episodes of the low 5v, game reboot issue when you fire all the flippers at once. It may be that this is down to frailties elsewhere in the game, I do not know. But repinning connectors, improving the earth grounding etc seems to have cured this, for now. But I suspect that the Rottendog is my real problem here, especially as the website says ...
"NEW
With version 4 of this board, you will never get +5V resets!
We have swaped out the +5V Regulator with a 92% efficient switching regulator"
http://rottendog.us/WDB089.html
Now I am delighted that rottendog produces replacement boards to help keep old games alive, but my TZ has given me far more board related troubles than my other two wpc games, TAF and TS. Over the relevant period TAF and TS have given me zero board faults using the original dusty ones. Having successfully returned the original Fliptronics board to TZ, I am going to try the original main driver board in it too.