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:
Here is a short update on the progress with my 1979 Bally Paragon pinball machine with custom rules and sound. The game is close to being complete. Take a look!
I’m now at the point where I’m getting various feedback from players about the content. Most people like it, but some seem to think the music is a little too “mellow” given the theme? I can see that. I wanted to do something a little more stylized and different. You’d probably expect some kind of dramatic orchestral score with the game, and not a kind of funky prog-rock type of music. So I’m torn on whether I should keep it or change it? I’m going to talk with the artist and see if he has any ideas — maybe we might record something specific for the machine? I don’t know, but I do like the idea of using a real band that we’ve actually recorded – so every sound in the game was completely created. Let me know what you think?
Anybody messing with pinball machines will undoubtedly encounter problems with flippers. Often they seem to get “stuck”, will stay up and not go back down or behave weird. We often instantly go to the flipper mechanism to look for a problem, but sometimes it’s not there.
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On many pinball machines like early solid state Bally and Stern games, you’ll often see little capacitors on most of the playfield switches. Sometimes they’re there but a leg is cut off. Why are they there? What do they do? And are they important? We’ll talk about that.
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What are these capacitors? Originally they were 0.047 uf 50v. There are various versions you can use. I will sometimes replace them with a 0.1uf and it works fine.
Any .05 or .047 uf at 50 volts or higher mylar or ceramic disc type is fine. Here’s a sample link: https://www.newark.com/vishay/1c10z5u473m050b/cap-0-047-f-50v-20-z5u/dp/57AC4650?st=0.047uf
I’m excited to release this video because it finally shows a relatively functional example of a re-programmed 1979 Bally Paragon using all new code and all new sound. Check it out: