I’ve been wanting to tell this set of stories for awhile. This is just my opinion and my personal experience.
For those interested, here’s the video I did 10 years ago after Keith Johnson refused to let me, an IFPA tournament director using one of his games in the state championships, know of an exploited vulnerability in one of his games before I ran the tournament. I had to figure this out for myself, and I exposed it to the whole community, forcing an immediate patch:
Today I’m testing some new LED displays that come from Australia.
These new LEDs are a drop in replacement for the standard high voltage displays, but use less power and look almost identical to the original displays.
They’re produced by Wayne Hamilton out of Australia. Here is where you can find his products:
eBay: https://www.ebay.com.au/usr/omfug1190
GeekPCBs: https://geekpcbs.au/
In this video I dive into diagnosing an error condition with a 48v node board for Stern’s Spike 2 pinball system. In this case, I have a Jaws Pro where most of the switches went out and a lot of coils stopped working. The machine says “Node 9 not found” so we’re going to take a look at what the problem is.
The fin up kicker coil was fried and shorted.
Here is the damaged Node board 9 – there’s a driver transistor that exploded and isn’t there in the middle
On the underside of the node board, there was a bunch of corrosion. The problem is, there’s no indication of where this came from? It’s at the top of the playfield underneath the playfield, not near any area where any cleaning solvents could lead, and I didn’t use any cleaning solvents on the playfield. It must have come this way from the factory.
In this episode I hilight some issues you might experience with Stern’s Deadpool pinball game. In this case, the Katana ball lock may eventually fail due to a part that can wear out or break.
Here is an update with more information on how I’m “bullet-proofing” this mech so it doesn’t break again.
The woofers that Stern puts in their games are pretty flimsy. If you accidentally drop the playfield on them – ooops, you can dent the frame and make the speaker sound like crap. So now I have to replace this speaker but you can find far better quality replacements on Amazon that will drop right in. Here’s a quick video on how to do that without having to spend $100+