I’ve encountered an odd problem with this Stern Walking Dead pinball game. The sound completely went out. But there is not a dedicated sound board. So what do you do? It’s a lot scarier than one would think…. This is part one describing what’s going on and what I’m doing about it…
In this video, I am testing a technique that some have been talking about, using a special gel that will cure under UV light to fix playfield damage. I’m using what’s called “Bondic.”
Note I say “infrared” but I obviously mean “ultraviolet.”
What’s your experience with this product?
I’m very excited I was able to pick up one of my grail games – an early 80s Bally Embryon. Here is some of my progress.
In the next video, I begin to go over what’s wrong with the game and work on it. First order of business is dealing with flippers – on these Bally games, there are some issues with EOS switches.
Next we move onto dealing with drop targets.
A place that’s been on my bucket list to check out, is a business in Houston, TX called “Electronics Parts Outlet” – located in an otherwise demure strip mall on the west side of Houston, this place is one of the premiere surplus electronics stores in the country. It also has a vibrant maker community around it. Come with me as we explore the isles and the many wonders you can find.
I’m finally getting around to fixing my Bally Theater of Magic pinball. In this case, as is typical, the trunk stopped working. The trunk is not working at all, so let’s find out what’s wrong and I’ll also go into replacing the trunk opto board with a new and improved, German-made board. Will this fix all the problems? Watch and see….
Part 2: Work continues on the Bally Theater of Magic pinball – in this case, we’ve figured out why the trucnk wasn’t working even after installing a brand new, improved, aftermarket trunk board. The motor driver controller was shot! Now, while we’re bulletproofing the game, this is a good time to install the special Cliffy Protectors around the trunk to make sure there’s no damage to the plafield. In this video I go over how to lift the trunk out to be able to do this, among other things.
We finally got everything working on the Theater of Magic pinball – here’s a summary of everything that’s been done, along with an odd problem I had with an aftermarket proximity sensor.
An odd assortment of things are wrong on this TSPP pinball machine. Are they related? Let’s look into what’s wrong and where we should look to fix things?
This has now turned into a multi-part series where I also discover some other issues:
So here’s the take-away from the first 5 parts of this series.
Everything was basically inter-related (except I believe the slingshot and pop bumper coils were separate failures). The trouble with the ball trough opto led to the failure of the shooter lane coil. When the ball trough opto started failing, it signaled false switch closings, tricking the game into thinking balls were moving through the trough and causing the VUK to try to clear a problem, which caused multiple balls to go into the shooter lane. This happened faster than the auto-plunger could handle and once X number of balls went in there, the plunger could not clear them, and eventually the MPU sent too many “fire-the-coil” signals and blew the driver transistor — interesting that it blew the driver transistor before it melted the coil — I suspect either (or both) can happen in this circumstance.
What’s interesting about this, is that this problem could be compensated for by software. It’s also possible the other coil failures are the result of a similar characteristic: Not having a certain timeout or duty-cycle enforced on coils. Meaning… the software could check to make sure that if a coil is firing too much (say x amount of times in y time), that it knows there’s some kind or problem and then put the game into some sort of error state rather than blow the coil or the drivers. I know in some later games this happens… when errors are encountered, the game just stops trying to fire coils rather than blow them.
This obviously isn’t the case in some of these 2000-era Stern games. I’ve noticed this on several titles including WPT and NBA as well.
Unfortunately, there’s not likely to be a software fix available, so what is important is to keep an eye on game behavior and try to catch switch malfunctions before they blow things. Had I been told about the shooter lane situation earlier, I could have fixed the opto before it blew the driver transistor on the SDB.
In this video designer Stephen Silver shows us the inner workings of the P3 system. It’s a very interesting and efficient design that makes the game surprisingly easy to service, with lots of features not found in typical pinball machines.