Tag Archives: top score

Fixing multi-player game problems on 70s era Gottlieb EM Pinball Machines

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The other day one of my games stopped working.. A Gottlieb “300” 4-player EM game. What was happening was it would only do 1-player games and not any 2-3-4 player games. I don’t know if it had been not doing it for awhile since I usually play just one-player games but it wasn’t working. I checked various things and ended up being stumped. Clay gave me a few suggestions and eventually we narrowed the issue down to a stepper unit near the front that ratcheted from 1-2-3-4 players. Duh! This video series is pretty embarrassing, but hey, that’s the way it goes… at least I fixed it…

You’ll notice in the first video in the playlist, I’m basically describing the problem, and then for the second, I’m already well into tearing the culprit stepper motor apart. I don’t remember if I lost part of the video series, or (more likely) I felt like I should have caught this myself and not needed help so I quickly dived into it before I realized some others might benefit from my trials and tribulations.

Changing Ball Settings On Gottlieb EM Pinball Games

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I’m slowly catching up on the maintenance of various games and working my way down the EM row. One thing I wanted to do was switch one of the games from 5-ball to 3-ball. I feel some of these games are a little long on 5-ball and since they’re on free-play and there’s dozens of other games around, a shorter game time is recommended. In the video below I go over how to make changes to game settings on EMs like this…

Working with Gottlieb EMs: Fixing Scoring Problems & Score Reels

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I had a chance to spend some time with a 70s era Gottlieb EM machine I recently picked up. This game came to me in non-working condition, mostly complete. For the complete video series with the early “first look” footage see this article.

In this series I spend most of my time diagnosing issues that are relating to the score reels.  I also take some time cleaning various contacts and relays which end up solving a variety of problems from games that never end to problems properly scoring shots and bonuses.   I hope you enjoy as I dive into this game getting it back to playing condition and learning along the way.

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