Weird Centaur problem - always serves up ball 1 twice, single or multi player

[AlanJ]

I visited a friend today with a Bally Centaur that I've got working and fixed up for her. One of the drop targets broke, so I went to fix that. She reported that the machine is doing something strange, and I saw this for myself:

Start a game, single player, play ball 1, score some points, drain ball 1 - it does the usual end of ball routine, counting up the bonus earned onto the players score, it then ejects a new ball, but the ball in play stays at 1 rather than incrementing to 2.
Balls 2-5 all play as normal.

On a multi player game, the same happens for all player, i.e. player 1 gets 2 balls "1"'s and then it moves onto player 2 who also gets two ball "1"'s, then onto player 3 - same etc. Again balls 2-5 all play as normal.

Everything else on the game is working perfectly.

Anyone ever experienced this, or any ideas what it could be please?

I'm really scratching my head on this one!

 

[DAD]

Is it set to give an extra ball at a very low score? (might have been set to give a replay at a low score so there are always games on, and the setting has been changed from replay to extra ball)

 

[AlanJ]

Ooh yes it sounds plausible. there is no knocker in tgat machine so i may not have noticed. i’ll talk the owner through the self test settings and report back. thanks David.

 

[Chilpin]

Maybe is the ram?

 

[stevebm1]

Yes I thought the same thing. So I did some simple calculations since the coin counters were installed. So one counter. (The counter on the right) was connected to coin chute 2 set up for 50p for six games. (This we could tell from the original cpu dip switch settings). Unusual as normally set to 7 plays for 50p.
The other counter is for chute one, 10p per play.
Counter left reads 8690. Counter right reads 7219.
Simple maths gives us the following information. (Since counter installation).
Total plays. 52,004
Total takings £4,478.50.
Geektastic

Is it set to give an extra ball at a very low score? (might have been set to give a replay at a low score so there are always games on, and the setting has been changed from replay to extra ball)

surely same player shoots again would light if that was the case?,unless the bulbs blown and you would not notice it

 

[astyy]

I guess, see what happens if you drain the first ball scoring below the min award threshold (10,000 I think)

 

[DAD]

surely same player shoots again would light if that was the case?,unless the bulbs blown and you would not notice it

IIRC the shoot again light on Centaur is only in the backglass and not very obvious

 

[AlanJ]

It was it! the second replay value was at 1,980. looks like the ram got corrupted as a few other settings were a bit wayward too. the settings 16 and 17 which determine if it should award extraball or replay were both at 06 which is an impossible value to set, sound be 00-03, so we corrected those too.

thanks @DAD

 

[DAD]

Glad to help [emoji846]