What's new
Pinball info

Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

Rottendog Boards

DRD

Registered
Joined
Oct 26, 2014
Messages
5,421
Location
Newark
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.
 
I would much rather keep original boards where possible, I seem to read loads about those boards failing where as the originals have stood the test of time, and when they do fail there is loads of info about repairing them

Ronnie
 
X-Pin are working on a WPC driver board and I think given time they will do them all. I personally won't us RD boards anymore and thats why I spent over £10k to become X Pin distributor because I like the quality.
 
The problem is quite simple with replacement boards - cost. A quality board using quality components costs more to make and design than a cheap one using fake/low quality parts from china. Plate through parts are more reliable than surface mount parts when used in a pinball machines where there are vibration, noise and often temperature factors, but as you guessed it they cost more. A large bom board like the WPC driver board increases these factors greatly, so it will be interesting to see what alternatives are made in the years to come and what their track record is like.
 
Back
Top Bottom