Tag Archives: em

A most unusual glitch in an “A-List” EM game

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I’ve been very excited about one of my latest acquisitions. A much-coveted Bally 4 Million BC pinball machine that I drove almost 1200 miles to acquire. The game is in great condition but was having a very unusual problem whereby it would kick out extra balls into play constantly. After going after the most obvious places and cleaning relays, then looking at the schematics and expanding my search, then finally going through every relay in the machine and cleaning contacts, the problem still persisted.

Here’s a description of the issue:

Then finally, it dawned on me. How obvious the solution was! But a very rare thing to see in an EM: a glitch that was the result of the logic design of the game and me being careless when I went to wax the playfield!

EM game gets stuck on one ball and does not advance? How to fix it.

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Today I finally got a chance to set up a game I purchased last year and brought back from Houston. A 1976 Williams “Space Mission” EM game, the theme centers around the Apollo-Soyuz link-up in 1975. This game exhibited a somewhat common problem, of the ball not advancing and being stuck on “ball one” over and over, so the game would never end. In this series of videos, I illustrate what causes this and how to fix it.

How to level inserts in old pinball machine playfields

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Nowadays, it’s hard to find any pinball machine made before 1980 that don’t have certain issues with the plastic inserts in the playfield, shrinking and becoming concave and affecting gameplay. Almost all electro-mechanical games suffer from this, as the forces of time, heat and other factors have caused the plastic inserts to change shape. In this series of videos I go over a process of fixing this to make your playfield level and play like new. In this case working with a Gottlieb Jet Spin (aka “Super Spin”)

First step is safely removing the inserts:

Now that they’re out, let’s go over what’s involved in getting them smoothed over:

While the inserts are out, now is the time to touch up parts of the playfield and the black rings around the inserts:

Now we are ready to put the inserts back in the playfield:

And here’s a look at the end result:

First Look: Gottlieb “Top Score” (300) EM pinball

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And here we go with another acquisition. This was a game I initially turned down, but then the owner dropped his price into the area where it was worth the hassle for me to get. At first I wasn’t that excited about it, but like most Gottliebs, they are more fun and interesting that it appears at first glance. Here’s a “first look” fresh from a some guy’s house. The game was not working properly when I picked it up so it’s going to need some work to get running.

Since this is a “First Look” on this machine, I’m embedding a playlist which will be continually updated with all the work I do on this machine. You can watch the first few, or keep watching to see more work done on the machine (at least as far as I’ve filmed and published so far).

Thanks for watching!

– Mike

 

EM Tech: Setting credit/extra ball award levels on Gottlieb machines

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Here’s a quick little video on how to change settings on older Gottlieb electro-mechanical pinball games.  If you want to change the threshold at which a credit or extra ball is awarded based on points, there’s a plug in the head of the machine where you move pins to indicate score levels to set awards.

A quick look at three 70s era classic EM pinball games

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Here’s a look at playing the vintage 1976 Williams EM pinball game, “Space Odyssey”.  This is a classic Williams electro-mechanical game that featured a sweeping stationary target across the middle, and ball kickers on each side of the flipper.  It’s especially exciting when you can get the timing just right so the kicker fires the ball into the moving target.  This is the 2-player version of the same game, “Space Mission”.  There were 4,300 of these produced.

And as a bonus here’s a quick look at a vintage 1975 Gottlieb “Fast Draw”, the 2-player version of “Quick Draw” – another classic EM:

But Wait! There’s more… here’s a look at the 1977 Gottlieb classic “wedgehead” EM game, “Centigrade 37”: