This is part of the ongoing series of restoring a 1982 Gottlieb “Haunted House” pinball. From crazy wiring problems to system upgrades, I’m taking you along with me on this scary ride.
In this next series, I tackle one of the most intimidating problems: a huge mess of hacked wiring. Can we untangle this mess? Will the game actually work? Let’s find out!
You can see the previous parts here.
I’ve had this game now for many years. It’s always been on my list to get it working but life has a way of creating lots of distractions. I finally decided the best approach was to move the game from my shop to the living room in my house, so it will hover over me and remind me of my failure to get it working… eventually that strategy started to work and I am diving in to getting the game working. First an initial look…
Gottlieb’s Haunted House is an amazing engineering achievement: 8 flippers, three separate playfields, four different flipper buttons. Pop bumpers everywhere. The bill of materials of this game must have been quite substantive. But what’s even cooler is how well engineered the game is despite having so many different levels. Usually multi-level playfields are a real pain to service, but each level can be gotten to without having to remove hardly any parts.
In the second video of the series, I show how to access the lower playfield, and cover the work I’ve done to the power supply/rectifier section:
In part 3, I continue my work, fixing stuff, replacing rubbers, minor wiring issues and how to access the upper playfield:
Here are some more images of the work in progress:
This is a series of three videos covering before, during and after, demonstrating problems with Gottlieb System 80 pop bumper driver boards. There are some basic things you want to do to make them work better and more reliably.
Summary of Pop bumper board mods:
This is a common problem that happens with old electro-mechanical pinball machines. One minute it’s playing fine, then the next there’s a loud buzz and/or the scoring runs continuously or doesn’t score properly. What’s the deal with that? I’m going to show you one of the most common causes.
It was a nice day, so I decided to take a pinball backplane, bottom board and bring it outside and dissect the basic components there and discuss how they work.
Yay… we got the game working again…. let’s go over the basic gameplay and see how it plays shall we?
Ok, that’s a mouthful huh? This is a continuation of a previous series of videos I’ve done on fixing deep ruleset issues in EM games, and now that we’ve found what’s wrong, let’s fix it!
First, here’s a video on how to replace the latch relay – there’s another post where I demonstrate how to remove the backplane from the game so it’s easier to work on.
And in this next video, if you don’t have a replacement part, I show how with a little ingenuity and a #4 tap, you can fabricate your own roller for the articulating arm.
Now that it’s fixed… let’s see how the game plays!
