![]() Although the NiCad battery looked ok and looked like it had been replaced relatively recently, there was a lot of corrosion on the CPU board. This machine sat neglected prior to the current owner purchasing it. Symptoms: Wouldn’t boot, rubber rings crumbling. In this case, it worked! Posted in Pinball, Repairs | Tagged Whirlwind, Williams | Leave a reply Gold Ball Pinball Machine (Bally, 1983) ![]() Sometimes I can flush the switches out with contact cleaner, and get them working again. Unfortunately, since they are totally enclosed they can’t be easily cleaned. The microswitches were probably dirty and worn inside. The reason the computer was delivering two balls to the shooter lane is that it wasn’t sensing the first ball had actually made it to the shooter lane, so it would try again.īoth of these problems weren’t consistent which led me to the intermittent switch idea. So it would keep trying 4 or 5 times before giving up. In the case of the ramp, it tries to lower the ramp because it hasn’t sensed that it has been lowered. Sometimes when a machine acts weird like this, you have to think about what the firmware is attempting to do. Symptoms: Ramps tries to lower even though it’s already down delivers two balls into shooter lane.Īfter checking the mechanical operation of the ramp and running switch tests, I concluded (or guessed) that the microswitches on the ramp and ball trough were acting intermittently. Posted in Pinball, Repairs | Tagged Atari, Superman | Leave a reply Whirlwind Pinball Machine (Williams, 1990) The owner let me borrow the complete set of schematics of this machine for scanning and will be available on the Internet Pinball Database (has not been approved as of this date). It’s the first time I played Superman and it seems like a fun game. Perhaps I’ll run across one at some point, or maybe I’ll take a rectangular target and cut the corners off.Īside from the target switch, it’s working great. One of them is broken (and remains that way for now). The target switches are hexagonal white, which nobody sells anymore. The ball was also rusting, so I replaced that, too. So I replaced all of the rubbers, about 20 burned out lamps, and cleaned the playfield. Needless to say, with the lack of service on this machine, all of the rubber pieces were dry, cracking and brittle. It was a bit confusing at first because unlike other pinball machines which use NPN transistors to drive the solenoids, these drive transistors are PNP. I replaced the transistor it the coils started acting normally. So basically every time another playfield coil was activated, the center drop targets would reset. In this case there was a shorted transistor driving the drop target reset coil. The Atari system has a coil protection circuit that is supposed to shut down the coil power if it detects a shorted coil, in order to protect the drive transistors. ![]() The flipper coil was badly damaged by something hitting it. Once I got it to boot, I discovered the left flipper didn’t work. ![]() (Unfortunately, the AnyPin NVRAM module will not work with Atari machines.) So the first task was to get that cleaned up and locate a remote battery pack off of the board. The owner thought they probably hadn’t been replaced since the 1980’s. This machine had not worked for a long while while it sat in a basement. Superman is one of two games made with the 2nd generation pinball system. Symptoms: Wouldn’t boot, flipper not working, drop target reset short, + moreĪtari made a hand full of pinball machines before they closed that division to focus solely on video games.
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