In today’s episode, I go over some standard, recommended modifications to the Bally-35 series solenoid driver board. There are over 60 popular pinball games that use this hardware setup and these quick modifications will help make the game run better and more-reliably. They involve adding three jumpers to the board. Whenever I have a chance to work on one of these boards, I do these mods.
Here are some front and back pictures of both Bally and Stern Solenoid driver boards. The black wires are the mods. The other colored wires are done by operators having to do with the coil lockout relay.
I’m very excited to bring this video to you all because I managed to pick up a game I’ve been trying to get for several years and finally found a very nice example. So check out the amazing, fun, gorgeous Bally “Wizard!”
I was having an issue with a Bally “Supersonic” pinball machine randomly resetting/rebooting. The problem was traced to irregular power coming off the driver board. In this video series I go over a necessary process to bring these old boards back “up to spec” as well as a few improvements that make the game overall more reliable.
Today’s I’m looking at a 1978 Bally “Supersonic” pinball machine. A friend had this in storage for a long time. While the game was in pretty good shape for its age, the original MPU board still had the battery on it, and the electrolyte from it leaked all over and damaged many components. Here’s a first look at the game.
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!
This is another one of those video series where I thought to myself, “If I were smart I would edit this.” But then I thought, I can’t be the ultimate pinball repair guru and I’m not really trying. If I have some kind of “angle” it’s that I’m doing a FPS (First-Person-Shooter) perspective to the hobby, collecting and restoring. And often times when you’re in an FPS, you poke your head down the wrong hall and get fragged. This is kind of how this video series starts off but it takes part 3 to realize the plot twist…
Ok I’ll get off confusing metaphors and back to pinball repair..
The problem I had was when I got this Bally Mystic, one of the targets was broken. I had ordered replacement targets. I opted for the same style as the side targets even though on many Bally Mystics, for some reason, the front targets are bullseyes and the side targets have explosion graphics on them. Go figure? Anyway, after replacing the targets I discovered that two of them would often get stuck in the “up” position and would often not retract when hit. I knew the springs on some of the targets were old and had “lost their zest” (that’s an official technical term by the way). So I thought I’d make a video on replacing the springs, showing an alternate source for some of the components as well as a trick to make an old spring kinda new. Along the way I discovered the real reason why the drop targets weren’t resetting…
In taking an initial look at the latest game I picked up, this Bally “Mystic”, as always my main concern is checking to make sure there’s no significant battery damage on the game. What’s interesting is when I looked at the game, there was no battery on the MPU board. The owners insisted the game saved the high scores, but I didn’t see how? Was there a battery on the underside of the board? I had to pull the MPU out to see.
What I saw was a board that someone had repaired, that had leaking batteries on it. They simply pulled the board and replaced a few damaged components and did not put a battery back in. But they created another issue by not fully-cleaning the board, and as a result, the damage from the leaking battery, even though it was long gone, continued…
