Tracking Down Problems On A Bally Baby Pac Man Pinball Machine!

[00:00:00]Ladies and gentlemen, this is Joe's Classic Video Games back with another cool arcade game repair video for you this evening.

[00:00:10]Well, we're getting pretty backed up here.

[00:00:15]We got stuff everywhere we're working on.

[00:00:23]I don't even know where to begin.

[00:00:26]But anyway, we're kind of they bring them by faster than we can fix them. So, in my opinion, we're just too cheap. I guess we're too cheap. The prices are going to have to go up. We got to make that money. But anyway, today we're going to try to figure out this baby Pac-Man.

[00:00:47]Little baby Pac-Man.

[00:00:51]Look at it.

[00:00:57]This one appears to be in pretty good shape. The cabinet's pretty solid.

[00:01:03]These usually get pretty bad water damage on the bottom.

[00:01:09]The guy has already done the playfield.

[00:01:14]It's got all new boards in the back of it.

[00:01:19]So, he bought all new boards for it. He redid the playfield. Got everything looking good.

[00:01:24]But guess what?

[00:01:28]It still broke. Okay, so we had to bring it by here. And if you've been following along, I really haven't had the best track record with these baby Pac-Mans.

[00:01:40]The first one I worked on a few months back caught on fire when I plugged it in, so that was nice. And then the last one I worked on had rat and mice poop all over the playfield.

[00:01:56]So I got the hav virus when I was cleaning it all. [laughter] But maybe maybe we'll get lucky on this one. Okay. Maybe this one will be an easy one. I doubt it, but we'll see.

[00:02:09]So, to be honest with you, you know, I'm not really all that great at working on the baby Pac-Man's. They're kind of complicated.

[00:02:20]They got the play, they got the pinball, they've got the arcade part. They got to work together.

[00:02:28]They got tons of little connectors on them. And I'm mostly more of an arcade guy, you know, monitor, board, power supply. Monitor, board, power supply.

[00:02:39]Well, this thing has got all kinds of crap in it. And uh it's more of a pinball machine than an arcade game, really. It's It's a pinball machine, but it's got a monitor, but it's a pinball machine.

[00:02:55]And uh most of you probably know Ronnie does most of the pinballs.

[00:03:00]He's just he's got a lot more patience than I do at working on stuff.

[00:03:07]I mean, looking at all look at all this crap in here.

[00:03:16]This is a Mars Trek he's working on.

[00:03:20]He's also been working on this Captain Fantastic. It's It's got a lot of little issues that even [clears throat] he's having a hard time figuring out. It just it takes a lot of time because sometimes you got to think about it, you know, do some research, try this, try that, think about it some more. It's not just like, oh, it's not doing this.

[00:03:43]Oh, that's the problem. You You got to track down the wires and check all this.

[00:03:47]It's very time consuming, but I think he's almost got it.

[00:03:52]Uh, he's working on this Batman here.

[00:03:55]This one, the playfield's in bad shape. Somebody left it out in the sun. We told the guy there wasn't going to be much we can do about it. Look at the myar.

[00:04:06]Look at that.

[00:04:11]The whole thing's like that. So, ain't much we can do with that. So, he's going to get it working. I'm going to put some rubber new rubber rings on it and that's going to be about all we can do.

[00:04:23]So, he's kind of working on three right now. that one, the Captain Fantastic, the Batman, and the Mars trick. So, I'm going to try to see if I can knock out this uh baby Pac-Man. I don't know.

[00:04:33]We'll see. So, I'm going to get it out.

[00:04:36]We'll open up the back door, see what we're working with, plug it in, and hopefully it doesn't catch on fire this time.

[00:04:44]All right. Well, I lied. It does not have all new boards because you mean you can't get a new Vidiot board. It does have a new MPU board, though.

[00:04:55]So, this is the MPU board.

[00:04:59]This is the solenoid/driver board.

[00:05:02]And this is what they call the Vidiot board.

[00:05:06]And it pretty much talks between the pinball and the arcade part. So, it kind of it's got to communicate back and forth. Vidiot. You get it? Nvidi.

[00:05:18]All right. We got a power supply down there.

[00:05:22]with a bunch of fuses and all that stuff. But I figured out on the last one that it doesn't even use most of those voltages. That's just they put that in there because they used it on a lot of their other pinball machines, but a lot of that it doesn't even use on a Baby Pac-Man.

[00:05:40]We've got a 4900 monitor.

[00:05:44]He was telling me it's already been recapped. It does look that way.

[00:05:52]Everything seems to be pretty good.

[00:05:56]I've already got I've not plugged it in before now. I've got it plugged in, but I knew it wasn't going to come on because I've got the interlock switch.

[00:06:05]So, I've not turned it on.

[00:06:08]So, I'm going to turn it on now.

[00:06:11]Everybody be ready. I'm hoping it doesn't smoke or catch on fire or anything like that.

[00:06:19]Please don't catch on fire.

[00:06:21]Please. All right.

[00:06:34]Okay.

[00:06:36]Are we going to be okay? Can I go around to the front?

[00:06:42]All right. Nothing appears to be smoking.

[00:06:51]Okay. Well, fix that one. Put the money in my hand.

[00:06:58]No, it must got I don't know what. I'm sure it's got some kind of issue. He He brought it down here. He said it was broke. Oh, it won't. Well, let's see. It won't Okay. Well, I think the one player start buttons broke.

[00:07:24]His monitor doesn't look all that great.

[00:07:28]Look, you can't even see it hardly. in the green.

[00:07:51]Hm.

[00:08:00]It seems pretty good other than the monitor.

[00:08:04]He did say that the monitor I thought he meant the monitor was broke, but apparently the monitor is just ugly.

[00:08:18]The only thing I found wrong so far is the one player start button don't work and the monitor you it's supposed to have text and stuff there. You can't even see it.

[00:08:39]And that ghost there you can't see. Uh, I can't describe [laughter] it, but there was a ghost there that you couldn't even see.

[00:08:50]See him in the middle?

[00:08:52]Uh, there he goes. He's right there.

[00:08:59]That ain't right.

[00:09:07]Can't even see where he goes. Yeah, there he is. All right. [sighs] So, I'm going to get the tripod, I guess, and I'll try to play around with the adjustments to see if I can get that any better.

[00:09:22]Maybe his tube is weak.

[00:09:26]Maybe there's a bad connection on the monitor. Maybe it just needs adjusting.

[00:09:31]Or I think there's a chip down on the video board that controls controls the color. I vaguely remember that one from the last time. Maybe. But I mean, it it came on. It worked. It's just just ugly looking.

[00:09:48]All right, we'll try to adjust it.

[00:09:51]You see how orangey it orange everything is?

[00:10:08]All right. So, let's see what we got.

[00:10:21]There's my blue.

[00:10:26]There's my green.

[00:10:30]There's my red.

[00:10:52]There's my sub brightness.

[00:11:15]More red.

[00:11:21]What's that do for us?

[00:11:29]All right. [sighs and gasps] Still pretty dingy looking.

[00:11:38]You can see more of it though. I think I need more blue.

[00:11:58]Oh yeah. You know what I just remembered?

[00:12:02]There's color pots on the main board.

[00:12:09]That's probably going to be it hopefully.

[00:12:21]Yeah, there's a I forgot about that.

[00:12:28]It takes a while to get it just right cuz they got to work together. So, I've got the monitor somewhat adjusted, but there's uh colors down here, too. Where are they?

[00:12:44]So, here's my green.

[00:12:47]There's my red. There's my blue. And that's my sink. And on the last one I worked on, I had to replace those. But maybe he's just got them misadjusted.

[00:13:01]So, I think we still need more blue. But this is going to be kind of hard to film and adjust and think about what I need at the same time.

[00:13:21]Still looks like it needs more blue.

[00:13:39]Yeah, buddy. Yeah, buddy.

[00:13:45]Yeah, buddy. That looks a heck of a lot better.

[00:13:49]You know what that means?

[00:13:53]It's still slightly too bright, but I think we might be getting there now.

[00:13:58]Can you tell by the tone of my voice?

[00:14:01]We're going to make that money is what we going to do. We're going to make that money today.

[00:14:07]David, get the money. Ready?

[00:14:19]All right.

[00:14:21]Got to turn down the brightness a smidge. Just a smidge.

[00:14:41]All right. You can see all the ghosts now. That's good.

[00:14:52]And see how the see all the uh the pellets are actually white now. They weren't white before. I don't think you can read the text.

[00:15:37]There's a little bit of interference sometimes when I hit something. So, might have to check that out. I don't know what that could be.

[00:15:54][laughter] If you've ever played this, this is a really tough game.

[00:16:22]I just realized I had you guys up on the monitor the whole time and you probably haven't even been watching me play the pinball part, but I don't know what to tell you. Okay, wow.

[00:16:53]So basically the whole problem was he didn't I don't think he knew about the adjustments on the on the uh [laughter] on the video board.

[00:17:03]So I adjust the monitor pretty good bit.

[00:17:06]Added some more blue with the controls on the video board and it seems to be working just fine.

[00:17:17]Other than the one player start button all the lights are even working it looks like.

[00:17:37]No, I've got a A out.

[00:17:42]Two A's.

[00:17:57]Yep. That A and that A is out. I don't see any other ones out. Does anybody else see any more bulbs? The E. Nobody was going to tell me about the E.

[00:18:12]What we got going on over here?

[00:18:19]All right. And then play again. I'm not so sure that lights up in a track, though.

[00:18:28]Well, that monitor looks good now. Look at that.

[00:18:39]Mhm.

[00:18:41]Yeah, buddy.

[00:18:45]Marquee up top's working.

[00:18:48]Monitor looks good.

[00:18:51]We've got three light bulbs out, I think.

[00:18:56]And I don't know what's going on with that interference whenever I hit certain things on the playfield. So, I'll have to research that a little bit.

[00:19:07]Might be some kind of ground issue.

[00:19:17]But anyway, I think I fixed this one.

[00:19:21][snorts] I'll be back when I figure out something with that interference. I'm not sure what the heck's going on with that. And I want to look at those bulbs. One thing I thought was cool is it's got the original key.

[00:19:33]That never happens.

[00:19:35]Got the original back door key and the original playfield key.

[00:19:42]If that if you lose this key, it's pretty tough to drill that one out because it's got this weird mechanism in there.

[00:19:50]It's a pain in the butt to get to.

[00:19:56]And then uh this playfield just glass just [snorts] comes right out.

[00:20:06]And then the playfield just lifts up just like a regular uh pinball machine.

[00:20:17]Just like that right there.

[00:20:21]So, I'm going to mess around with some of these light bulbs and uh see if I can figure out anything with that interference. I didn't really like that.

[00:20:28]Maybe they all do that, but I don't remember seeing that before.

[00:20:33]But I'll be back with you when I get further along.

[00:20:36]Well, the two letters in here, what were they? The A's. Those are just bad bulbs.

[00:20:44]And this one over here, the socket was messed up on.

[00:20:48]Uh, let's see. See, loosey goosey. But look, if you hold it, it'll work.

[00:21:00]So, the socket needs a little solder there. Solder them two together.

[00:21:08]Well, actually, I might have to replace the socket.

[00:21:22]Oh, yeah. See, the diode broke.

[00:21:29]Let's see.

[00:21:36]diode broke in half there. Probably because they probably set it down and it hit the rails.

[00:21:44]Anyway, I'll get that taken care of. And uh got to mess with this one player start button a little bit. I probably got another one I can swap into there for them because ain't much you really can do with these these old style cherry switches like that.

[00:22:07]All right. So, be back later. Well, I put a new end on the power cable hoping that would fix it cuz there was no ground before. But it's still doing it.

[00:22:20]when I hit the flipper.

[00:22:26]Not quite right. It's not quite right.

[00:22:31]Some kind of interference ground issue.

[00:22:36]I'm going to keep messing with it.

[00:22:40]Might be some caps in the power supply section.

[00:22:44]Maybe the filter cap or something.

[00:22:48]It ain't quite right.

[00:22:51]So, I'm going to keep messing with it, see what we can figure out.

[00:22:56]Well, I got the solenoid board out and I was actually changing the filter capacitor.

[00:23:03]And while I had it out, I [clears throat] wanted to reflow some of these pins.

[00:23:09]And look how bad this one is.

[00:23:13]All these are really bad.

[00:23:16]That's not going to be our problem, though. But either way, it still needed to be fixed. So, these are these small ones are for lights and switches. That's not going to have anything to do with our interference, I don't think. But either way, still needs to be done. So, I'm refflowing all of these, all of these, all of these, all the way around, anywhere the connectors are.

[00:23:39]So, we'll do that. Put it back in there and see if that fixed anything with the filter cap.

[00:23:45]Well, that did absolutely nothing.

[00:23:48]But at least I fixed some of the bad solder joints, I guess. So, now we're going to move on to the power supply on the video board. Remember what that hippie said? Power supply. Power supply.

[00:24:00]Power supply. So, I'm going to change these caps in the power supply section, especially this filter cap, cuz it's it's spinning. I don't think it should do that.

[00:24:14]But whatever, we're going to keep capping.

[00:24:19]Okay, folks. So, we're trying to figure out the video interference whenever you hit the flippers. I looked at an old video of another Baby Pac-Man we did recently, uh, where I filmed me playing it along with the monitor, and it didn't do that on that one. So, it's not just a byproduct of all of them. It's completely possible to have one that doesn't do that. Um, so what I've done is I've went through this board and replaced all of those tantelum capacitors.

[00:24:43]um these little 4.7 microfarad tanthylim capacitors. These things are bad about shorting and just they're longterm they are not great. So I've replaced those with just regular electrolytics.

[00:25:00]There's one here left in the reset section. I left it for now. Um a couple of those or several of those were in the power supply section. This power supply actually does provide the power for the video section. Um, usually whenever you've got a interference problem, it's going to be a bad ground or it's going to be a cap's bad somewhere where it's supposed to filter that out and doesn't. Um, so you can see here on the board, it has these two caps stacked up. It's not supposed to be like that. You're supposed to just have one here. That's a 4700, but this is two two00.

[00:25:36]So, it's 4,400. That ought to be close enough. Um, and apparently at some point somebody upgraded that or upgraded, downgraded, however you want to consider it. I'll tell you another thing that's interesting about these is when the when the the way the board is designed, there is a earth ground and a logic ground.

[00:26:01]So, the earth ground, how does this work? I can't remember all the details. Basically, the earth ground and the logic ground are separated on the board for I guess FCC reasons or something. Um, but if you get over here to the actual video section, this is the output. blue, red, green sink, and it all goes out through these, right? If you look really close here, that is the ground. And they jumper it across.

[00:26:37]Whoop, sorry. They jump across and run a separate ground out. Well, what I did on the last one that I worked on was I just joined the two together because this thing has some just a kind of strange video setup. So, that is the ground from the video going out. So, I just tie it to the plane um that goes around the board and gets fastened to the u um to the ground strap in the back of the cabinet.

[00:27:04]Now, the screws are also missing out of the board. So, without the screws in it, it doesn't really have a good ground either. Um so, the earth ground comes in here and the logic ground comes in here, which means that it it travels all the way back and the grounds connect at the power supply. Well, that flipper connects at the the the flipper ground connects at the power supply and then the this logic ground connects at the power supply, but it has to go through a couple pins and all the way back through some wiring and blah blah blah blah. If you combine and at the power supply, the logic ground and the earth ground are combined. And so for all kinds of reasons, they designed it like that.

[00:27:43]This is just a valley thing. The pinballs the the other pinballs are like that too. So, I have just essentially connected the logic ground to the earth ground on this board. Um, and we'll see if that gets rid of that interference. Um, and the way I did it again was by that one little solder jumper that I put in it. But I also replaced all of these little tantelums.

[00:28:05]If one of those was borderline in the power supply, it might have caused that.

[00:28:10]There were a couple on the ROMs here.

[00:28:12]Uh, there were a couple up here. There's just a bunch of them.

[00:28:17]So, I think Joey had already reflowed all of the connectors. So, we'll go from there and see if that got rid of that interference issue. Okay, that did not fix it. So, the new capacitors on the Vidiot board um I cleaned up some of the the damage that was on it um didn't fix a thing. It's still doing it. So, what I've done is I started the game. I cradled the ball once it started in the pinball section and then I put a um I put a stapler on top of the button so that I'm holding it up, right? Then I unplug the video from the monitor. So the point of all that is I'm trying to figure out is the problem in the video or is the problem in the power. So let's see. So I'm just going to hit the right flipper.

[00:29:05]Yeah. So there is no issue in the actual power. The problem is in the video. So it's it's somehow in the video signal. We'll try playing it without the stapler.

[00:29:23]You tell me if you see it.

[00:29:26]Yeah, it's definitely it's definitely not in the video. It's I mean it's not in the power. It's something in the video signal going to the monitor. So that helps us know that we're actually on the right place looking on the video board uh for a way that that could be happening.

[00:29:41]>> Okay. By power too I meant the AC power of the monitor. Obviously the power there's something going on with the power to the DC video section of the video board. So where does that come from? Well on this it comes from the the unregulated 12vt on this power supply.

[00:29:56]So there is a 12volt DC supply that runs through these four diodes and this fuse.

[00:30:04]and then runs out and is used in the u the solenoid board.

[00:30:10]We probably I'm going to look and see what it does on the solenoid board. Uh and it also runs over to the video board. And then once it's on the idiot board, it gets filtered by that double capacitor we were looking at. Might look at that, too. If you think about it, it's a little under. It's supposed to be 47, but it's 44. So, I might see if I've got something to replace that with.

[00:30:30]Um and then um uh it's turned into 5volt and that's what the video um logic chips and stuff use to run. So this the the source of that power train is right here.

[00:30:45]The transformer plugs in here and then gets rectified um I think it's 12 or 14 volts or something like that. And then once once it gets to the board that it turns it into 5 volts. So, since we've already looked at that and replaced all those little capacitors, I'm actually going to replace these four diodes.

[00:31:03]These are known for getting leaky. Now, I don't know if they're leaking if that will cause this problem. Um, but Clay at pinrepair.com has talked about how these diodes will start shifting on you and letting AC through into that signal. I don't know if that would cause our problem, but might as well do it as an upgrade uh and get it done with. So, these are 6 amp rectifier fuse uh diodes. I use 6A4 usually. I've got a whole bunch of those. Um so, we'll replace these four with four 6A4 dodes.

[00:31:34]Clean up this um the connectors on this fuse.

[00:31:39]Clean off the rest of the board and uh see if that gets us anywhere. Okay, so there's our new four fuse uh diodes. Um, and whenever you do that, always put them above the board a little bit because they get hot and if they're right on the board, they get even hotter. Um, so I swap those. I cleaned all the fuses and checked and they're all correct. Now on baby Pac-Man, some of these voltages aren't used. Like this high voltage isn't used because this is used for the displays in something like xenon. Um, it uses this same power board, I believe. I think that's right. Um, uh, so this isn't even used. You could even take that fuse out if you wanted to. um that voltage will still be there but it you well actually it may not be depending on the transformer. I don't know if they use the same windings on the transformer but so you don't need that voltage and also the voltage for the uh the 5 volts that is used for the lamps usually isn't used. They do a different thing with this. They use like a a switched just a weird um A and B zero crossing AC voltage to run all the lamps. That's these two fuses. Um, so there's a couple voltages that aren't used. Uh, this is the one that's the um 5 volts. This the whole bridge rectifier could be missing and it would still play the same. Uh, this is the one for the solenoids.

[00:32:58]And uh, we could replace that. There's really not much there. It's just a bridge rectifier. Those can be leaky as well, but I just don't think it would work the same way. So, basically, if you hit the flipper, you're making a short.

[00:33:10]It's going to draw a bunch of current through here. Well, if that was leaky, so basically if the AC voltage is getting through the bridge rectifier to the flippers, that wouldn't have anything to do with our problem. So my the theory is is that when you hit the bridge, whenever you hit the flippers, it creates a short, it draws a bunch of amperage, you know, uh and when it does that it slightly lowers the voltage coming out of the transformer or whatever that there's some kind of power ripple that goes through things and then it runs through these four diodes, a little bit of the AC, well, you know, these are DC, but a little bit of the voltage, whatever gets through here causes a problem on the screen ultimately whenever gets it into the power trail. So, I'm going to try it like this. And then if that didn't fix anything, we're going to try replacing that 4400 microfarad capacitor on the Vidiot board and see if that changes anything. All right, folks. So, we can't figure it out. I mean, it's it still does it.

[00:34:08]There's a little bit of interference whenever you hit the flippers, which I guess isn't that big of a deal because you can't see it. It's a lot better than it was. So, something we did helped, I guess.

[00:34:18]I mean, you can see see it a little bit, but not a lot. So, I don't know. So, what we did I didn't realize that Joey was who had put those filter caps on there. I didn't watch the beginning of the video.

[00:34:32]I I hadn't watched it yet, so I just watched it and that's it. Now, that should be a lesson to all of you. If you missed the video, go back and watch it.

[00:34:39]That's what I did. [laughter] I also replaced the power connector. Um, I put the screws in like it's supposed to have. We worked on the power board.

[00:34:48]Um, it's not in the monitor because you saw if we if we disconnect the video from the monitor, it no longer does it.

[00:34:54]So, it's not like whenever you hit it, it's causing some kind of power spike in the monitor. So, I don't know. It may just be a flaw of some of these games. I don't know. I I uh I looked at some videos of some older ones that we had and I couldn't see it on the videos, but I also wasn't so aggressively trying to make it trigger. I would just hit the flipper button, you know, whenever I needed to hit the flipper button. If you're going clack- clack clack clack clack clack clack, you can see it's pretty obvious. So, I don't know. It could be a red herring. We're just chasing something that's not really broken. Um, so there's that. However, we do have something that is definitely broken. The one player start switch doesn't work. And there's some other things, too, but this switch, nothing.

[00:35:33]Dead. The two-player one works fine. Uh, so we got to figure out why this switch doesn't work. Um, I'm going to guess it's a bad connection on this Vidiot board. But let's track it down with the schematic.

[00:35:46]>> Okay, so here is the switch matrix listed on the in the Baby Pac-Man manual. And it shows all of the switches and they're they're put together in a matrix, which makes it a little bit tougher, but you can figure it out. So here you see it says start game for two.

[00:36:00]This says right flipper, this says 10point rebound, and this says start game for one.

[00:36:07]Um, so this is our problem here. Now, if you'll notice, the right spinner, the left spinner, the 10-point rebound, the start game for two, and the right flipper, which is the switch on the right flipper that launches the ball.

[00:36:22]You don't even need it. There's two versions of the ROMs on this. There's an earlier version where you had to hit the right flipper to launch the ball. But apparently people couldn't do that or it took too long or the game would just sit there locked up. So, they made the a newer version of the ROM where it just auto kicks the ball. Um, and so this one has those ROMs that just auto kicks the ball. So you don't even need that right flipper button. That's not the button that fires the right flipper. It's a button on the flipper that makes the ball shoot out. It's all it's used for.

[00:36:51]Um, uh, I should say a switch on the flipper that makes the ball shoot out. I mean that tells Yeah, that makes the ball shoot out. Okay. So uh, this line is strobe zero. And so since it goes to all those and all the other ones work, uh, there shouldn't be a problem. If you look on the start game for two, the second player start button, the wire directly connects over to the start game for one. So if this one's working, that one ought to be I mean, if this one's working, this one ought to be working.

[00:37:22]It actually connects to this one first.

[00:37:23]And I checked continuity, and it is definitely connected. So that this wire is not the problem. Now, you notice that it connects to a diode on each of those. So, maybe the diode is bad. So, I tested the diode. The diode is not bad.

[00:37:40]So, that leads me to believe that the problem is on this line here, the other line that goes to it. And so, you see the other line just directly connects to the switch. It doesn't use a diode. It's only on the one side. But, it also does the left inside out lane and the out hole saucer which are on both on the playfield. This is on the control panel.

[00:37:59]So, it's got a different wiring harness to do both of these, right? So, this this doesn't immediately connect to this, although it is electronically connected to this, but you don't you uh the start button is not on the playfield. It has to run all the way through the cabinet to get to there. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to check continuity from this side of the start button to this side. And it's a 56, which is white.

[00:38:29]And let's see if it says on this one.

[00:38:35]There is a little chart somewhere that tells you what the colors mean.

[00:38:41]Don't get dizzy. Don't get dizzy, folks.

[00:38:43]We'll find it. Don't worry. There it is.

[00:38:47]White is five, brown is six. So, it's a white and brown wire. So, the white and brown wire, we need to see if it's connected from the uh first player start button all the way to the left inside out lane and the out hole saucer. So, there's a white and brown wire on the out hole saucer and it connects over to this left in lane. And if we check the between the two, they are connected. It's.3 ohms resistance between the two of them.

[00:39:17]However, I'll leave that just where it was. And I check down to this white and brown wire.

[00:39:26]It's not connected or it's connected slightly. There's a 17meg resistance.

[00:39:31]It's now up to 20. Now, the reason that those raise like that is because somewhere in the loop there's a capacitor that it's charging. It's probably this is connected through the switch, maybe to this slightly or something, and it's just feeding back through it. But anyway, this is definitely not three like we are on the other two. So, this switch is not connected to the harness somehow. So, the um Joey swapped that switch earlier and it didn't fix it um because there's some kind of connection problem somewhere. Uh so, let me see what I can find. Okay, so this this game uses these insulation displacement connectors which aren't the greatest. Um but apparently, so we're still connected to the playfield. Apparently, it runs all the way back to this pin.

[00:40:22]And it's8 from the playfield to here. Now it doesn't get if you see there's two wires. So one goes in and then one goes back out. So there are two wires in this bundle running all the way back. So it the one that goes back goes through here goes through here goes through here goes all the way across and goes to that connector there.

[00:40:53]Um if I check that connector there it's not connected.

[00:41:02]So from here to there, there is some kind of problem, but there's no connector in between. There's a connector here, that's the playfield to that harness. So that connection's fine.

[00:41:14]Like if I check from the playfield to here and the other side of that, it's all connected. But once it gets to here and turns back around, it's not connected. So it could be that the wire is split right there, although it doesn't look like it. Um, or it could be that maybe it daisy chains down into the coin door for some reason and then goes back and there's a problem there. So, I'm gonna check over.

[00:41:34]>> Okay, so I cut the two wires loose that loop through that part.

[00:41:38]So, one of them is connected to the playfield. That's this one. And it's still connected. It was directly connected to the This is the same wire actually. It's just looped through, right? This is the other part of the wire. This is the part that then runs back and runs up to that connector.

[00:41:55]Somewhere between here and there, there's some kind of break. So, I'm just simply going to pull the wire out all the way through until I find somewhere where it's broke. And if it's not, if I can find somewhere that it's broke, we'll just put a new wire. [laughter] But, um, that's really the only, uh, that's the only way to handle it.

[00:42:13]Now, it could be right here because remember this is where the battery was on the previous board. It would have been it would have sat uh right here and then dripped down. You can see where it damaged the top of the board right there. So, the battery would have dripped right through here. So, it could be that when I get right here, when I find that piece of the wire, it's eaten up or something. I don't know. We'll see. Okay. So, I have tracked it down. So, on um J3, one set of them is connected to pin 14.

[00:42:46]See the i5? It's return five.

[00:42:50]That's the playfield. I mean the cabinet. That's the one that we're having a problem with. It's this connection. And one of them is connected to pin 13 on a different connector. Now they they should be connected together.

[00:43:02]Uh if you check it the way that we checked it, but they weren't. Um since we know the Playfield ones were working. This switch, this uh wire that I cut right here uh was working fine.

[00:43:15]the loop that comes off of it goes to the video board so that the the uh video part can know what the switches are doing on the control panel. Makes complete sense. Okay. But the start button connects over to here. Um so it should run through a resistor that's 110 ohms apparently.

[00:43:39]And then it should be connected here and connected to the other one through a different resistor. That's 1.2K. So it should be 100 it should be 1.3K resistance between the two of them. 1300 ohms. And we were nowhere near that cuz it's not connected. And we already know that cuz the start button's not working.

[00:43:57]But it seems like it's a pretty easy issue. It's probably this connector. So the connector on J3 needs to be replaced. And since I cut this one, I'm going to go ahead and connect the one on J2 as well. So, we need to do both of those switch, both of those connectors, and that should get it all connected back together.

[00:44:14]Brand new connectors. So, this one is just the start button.

[00:44:24]This one, one of these is the playfield and one of them goes down to the video board so that they can talk back and forth. So, I just turned it back on after doing that.

[00:44:33]Let's see if the game is up and running.

[00:44:35]It looks like it is. Now, if you screw that up, the connections to the video board, the video won't work. Okay, so let's point it up again.

[00:44:46]We got the sound turned down. And any luck.

[00:44:54]I've got it unplugged. I've got it unplugged, people. It won't work being unplugged. All right, I plugged it back in. Isn't it nice to see one without rat uh mess all over it like the one we had?

[00:45:04]All right. So, we got the control panel plugged back in. Any luck?

[00:45:09]Holy moly.

[00:45:12]All right. So, that fixed that. So, we've got this the switch fixed. The interference in the monitor. We've decided not to worry too much about Oh, I didn't mention, but uh what actually seemed to help the most with the interference was cleaning the flipper switches and cleaning the end of stroke switches. My theory was, you know, I tried everything else and it didn't fix it. So, I thought, well, maybe uh it's not making good contact and the the inner stroke switches are dirty. So, whenever the juice runs through them, it has to pull extra juice or to make do what it's doing or there's resistance there and and it did seem to kind of calm it down a little bit. So, that kind that might have been the best uh thing that I attempted. Okay. So, uh I saw a couple things on the playfield that I want to address and then we're about done with this. So, I believe Joey has all of the lights working. Maybe not that one.

[00:46:06]There's always one for everybody to complain about. Um, so we'll mess with that one socket. But we've got an issue back here. I don't think Joey did this.

[00:46:15]Uh, so I don't know. I guess the gentleman did it that owns it. But there's a problem. He put double rings on this and that won't work because see how the bottom one is out farther because it's not in the spot that that makes it stick out far enough that this ball won't fall down to where you can hit it with another ball. You're supposed to be able to hit that and knock it around to the other side.

[00:46:42]So, one of those has to come off. So, let's see if we can just do it real quick.

[00:46:53]That was easy.

[00:46:55]So, we'll put them back.

[00:46:58]And then this one needs to be up a little bit so it's in the little things where it goes.

[00:47:06]And I believe that will do it. The The problem is too with both of them on there, sometimes these targets would brick. You'd hit them really good and they wouldn't fall because they were on both of those rings. So, I'm going to pull one of them off. If he doesn't like it, he can put it back. But um we got to make sure that that ball is hitable. Let's see if it's hitable.

[00:47:34]Is hitable. Okay.

[00:47:39]Kind of.

[00:47:52]All right. So, yeah. So, now if you hit it just right, it will in fact knock it around to the other side.

[00:48:03]Okay. So, that's how it should be. Um, let me look on a Let me look in the manual just to make sure that's how it should be cuz see the little indention there for the ring. If you put one below it, you saw how it was. does it makes it where it sticks back too far and the ball won't actually hit it because the the ball sits back about like that. So whenever I hit it, I'm way up here. I can't actually touch uh the pinball like that.

[00:48:32]Okay. So there's that. Uh I think we fixed that just now. And that that also, like I said, I think is going to fix the deal with the with the the um them bricking. And then we need to see about that light. But uh yeah, then we need to clean it up a little bit. Other than that, it's about ready to go.

[00:48:50]Okay. So, B is designating the uh the rubber that goes there. And if you look over here, it says one and a half inch diameter. And it does say that there's supposed to be two of them. So, I looked at some old pictures that I have, and I did have two on mine. Now, with that said, I think the problem is the the ring that's on there is a 2 in instead of a 1 and 12 in. I looked at it. The one we took off is a 2 in. So, because of that, it's a little fatter. If it was if it was tighter, it would thin out a little bit and the ball would be able to go beside it. Um, but the we talked to the customer whatever he dropped it off and he didn't want us to do the playfield. He did the play field and is is capable of working on that stuff. He just wanted us to get the electronics going. So, we'll we'll mention to him whenever he picks it up that, you know, it's got the wrong size ring on it. But with the one ring on it, it should be fine for how it is. If he wants to swap it out for a couple one and a half inches, he can do that on his own. Um, but the mystery has been solved.

[00:49:46]I gotta say, what whatever you think about this game, I don't think anybody can deny that it's one of the best looking games ever. It's one of the best looking arcade games of all time. Has a unique shape, has lights all over it, has the pinball thing going, the cool thing about a pinball machine, and it's got the cool thing about a video game.

[00:50:03]It just looks great.

[00:50:08]So, you got to play it up top first.

[00:50:15]And then when you get tired of that, you go down to play the pinball. Now it automatically launches the ball. You see how it says use right flipper to put ball in play? That's because that's the video uh board is making it say that.

[00:50:28]The video board, the pinball MPU can't make it say that. But what they've done is they've upgraded the ROM at some point BI so that it automatically launches the ball. But they didn't upgrade the video board ROM that that puts the text on the screen. It's so um that's why it just automatically launches. Okay, so you saw once we went back up, I couldn't go back down cuz they block off the entrances.

[00:50:59]This is an incredibly tough game, which is fine.

[00:51:09]Oh.

[00:51:10]Um, the ghosts are actually faster than you.

[00:51:21]If you watch, they they can actually catch you. And I can't really go anywhere anywhere way because see how they trap you. They will trap you and you can't on the original Pac-Man and Miss Pac-Man, you can kind of jive them. You know, you can kind of go back and forth and make them lose you or one of them will turn around or something. Doesn't work like that on this one. If they're on you, they are on you. So, how do you get the the goodies that you want? Well, you got to do it here on the playfield.

[00:51:54]See how I hit the ball? That was good.

[00:51:57]Um, so if you Man, I was trying to go up. If you um Look at that. I'm one, two, three, four.

[00:52:31]I'm sixth place now.

[00:52:37]So, it's a it's a very tough game as far as the the behavior of the ghosts like that, I'm screwed. You know, if you if you get one on each side of you, you're not going to do that well.

[00:52:53]Now, you could say, "Well, just run for the run down here." Well, you can do that, but you you need to you need to earn uh some uh something to make that worth your while.

[00:53:12]Or or whenever you go back up, you won't have that as an escape route.

[00:53:20]And the game is sitting crooked right now.

[00:53:26]We're just making sure everything works right.

[00:53:31]You might notice too that the flippers sag. That's on purpose. Um the reason they do that is because the playfield is so short that for you to make those outside loop shots, you kind of need the flippers angled slightly different than usual. Look at that.

[00:53:51]There's there may be a pattern where you can um get out of their way a little better.

[00:54:01]I' I've had some success in like, you know, turning away from them, but I'm just I'm not very good at it.

[00:54:11]Now, with that said, if you own this game in your house, do you really want it to be easy? You know, you kind of want it to be hard, don't you?

[00:54:21]There's a sweet spot. Obviously, you don't want it to be too hard, but I've noticed that too. See how the ball rebounds back to the other side sometimes.

[00:55:18]Now, we had all the lights working, but there's a couple here I'm not so sure about. Let's see. Yep, I see one burn out.

[00:55:28]One burn out immediately. What's up with that?

[00:55:31]They usually they're not actually burn out. They're just not making good contact in their uh socket.

[00:55:40]Okay, let's play it one more time.

[00:55:48]So there there's Damn, see him right on me. Just came to me immediately. I was trying to make that little loop.

[00:56:11]Nice little popcorn help there.

[00:56:20]I think those little rubber pieces that hold that top plastic on might be the wrong type because it um I think that's going to get knocked off.

[00:56:31]So you can get away from it just a little bit.

[00:56:35]But like what was my option there?

[00:57:01]So, if you spell tunnel, obviously it's going to open up a tunnel for you whenever you go back up.

[00:57:15]And these do the p the pellets.

[00:57:19]We didn't quite get it that them though.

[00:57:25]Who is on me?

[00:57:36]All right, this might be our last guy.

[00:57:39]Our last baby Pac-Man.

[00:57:45]A Come on. Come on.

[00:57:49]They cheated. Really? If you think about it, they cheated. These ghosts, they're cheating.

[00:57:57]Look at them.

[00:58:01]Oh, that red one is quick. Did you see that?

[00:58:05]Look at them catching me. Did you see that?

[00:58:09]So, I suppose what happens is if you're going straight, they can get they can get you, but if you're turning, they can't get you. Pretty wild. All right, folks. So, there you go. I think it's working pretty good. I got two light bulbs I need to mess with. and uh it's ready to go back to the customer.