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Tips and Tricks with Frank Lindenmuth

Pintastic New England·video·48m 40s·analyzed·Feb 7, 2025
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.029

TL;DR

Frank Lindenmuth teaches systematic pinball repair diagnostics through real case studies.

Summary

Frank Lindenmuth, an experienced pinball technician, shares diagnostic and repair techniques during a Pintastic New England event, emphasizing systematic troubleshooting over part-replacement guessing. He uses real-world case studies (Centipede board with bad capacitor, F-14 Tomcat blanking circuit trace damage, Spy Hunter credit issue) to illustrate how technicians must think diagnostically, verify switch/coil function before buying parts, and understand electrical principles like flyback diodes and blanking circuits. The talk stresses methodical isolation testing, checking power supplies, using test ROMs, and communicating findings clearly to customers.

Key Claims

  • A shorted capacitor on a switch line was the entire problem with a Centipede board where a tech had replaced every single chip.

    high confidence · Frank directly describes this repair experience he personally conducted, explaining the tech overlooked the debouncing capacitor.

  • A bad diode on a magnet control board near the 30C was causing random resets on a WPC game during magnet test sequences.

    high confidence · Frank describes methodically isolating the magnet control board section and identifying the failed diode through systematic coil test isolation.

  • An LED socket in a Congo machine was leaning over and touching a switch line, preventing the start button from working in attract mode but functioning in test mode.

    high confidence · Frank explains the root cause: the computer doesn't pulse the lamp matrix in test mode, so there's no interference.

  • Diodes on pinball coils exist to prevent flyback voltage spikes that would otherwise damage transistors or board traces, similar to spark plug ignition coils in cars.

    high confidence · Frank provides technical explanation with automotive analogy and discusses placement differences between System 11, PPB board, and WPC architectures.

  • A Stern Star Wars machine refused code updates due to a network cable failure, not the node board itself, discovered only after swapping the network cable from Guardians of the Galaxy.

    high confidence · Frank describes a two-month troubleshooting saga where Stern tech support blamed the node board; swapping the network cable resolved the update issue.

Notable Quotes

  • “somewhere between what the customer tells you and what's wrong with the game is the truth”

    Frank Lindenmuth@ 0:35 — Sets the tone for why systematic diagnosis is essential; customers often don't know what they did or what's actually broken.

  • “experience knows no substitute”

    Frank Lindenmuth@ 20:32 — Core philosophy: you can read books and forums, but hands-on practice is the only way to truly learn pinball repair.

  • “I know what the problem was. I didn't even have to look at the board”

    Frank Lindenmuth@ 4:13 — Demonstrates how deep technical knowledge allows experienced techs to diagnose from context clues before physical inspection.

  • “before you buy any parts, you want to check and see if the game's not seeing the ball sit there, or it is seeing it sit there and it can't do anything about it”

    Frank Lindenmuth@ 19:25 — Key diagnostic framework: isolate whether the problem is sensor recognition or actuator response before purchasing anything.

  • “I didn't write this for you. I wrote this for the guy that doesn't know about Pinwiki. Pinside, who doesn't know anything about it.”

    Frank Lindenmuth@ 23:51 — Explains his philosophy of creating beginner-friendly content rather than catering to experienced technicians who already know advanced resources.

Entities

Frank LindenmuthpersonToddpersonLeon BorépersonJohnny PinballpersonStern PinballcompanyCentipedegameSpy HuntergameF-14 Tomcatgame

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Frank Lindenmuth actively shares repair knowledge through Facebook (No Quarters Arcade page), tech articles, and in-person events, tailoring content for beginners rather than experienced technicians.

    high · Frank states: 'I wrote this for the guy that doesn't know about Pinwiki. Pinside, who doesn't know anything about it' and encourages audience members to follow his Facebook page for ongoing support.

  • ?

    community_signal: Frank demonstrates commitment to helping newer technicians and hobby players through education, real-time troubleshooting assistance, and accessible documentation.

    high · Frank offers to message audience member about Valley's Truck Stop findings on Facebook, walks through diagnostic process step-by-step, emphasizes that experience comes from hands-on learning.

  • ?

    product_concern: Multiple case studies demonstrate poor repair quality from previous technicians: replacing all chips instead of diagnosing a capacitor, damaging board traces during repair, using cheap sockets with bad contacts. Frank emphasizes systematic approach as solution.

    high · Centipede case where tech replaced every chip; F-14 Tomcat where tech damaged blanking circuit trace; diner situation where tech used cheap socket causing contact issues.

  • ?

    technology_signal: Stern Spike network cable failures and node board diagnostics reveal either inadequate support protocols or misdiagnosis by manufacturer tech support. Two-month troubleshooting saga suggests either poor documentation or communication.

    high · Star Wars case study: Stern blamed node board, refused warranty replacement, provided no intermediate update versions, and didn't acknowledge network cable as potential failure point. Frank discovered root cause only through systematic swapping.

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.146

0:00
Talk about some repair information that's beyond the basic stuff, coils, switches, flipper stuff. Disclaimer, do with this information, you know, use it at your own discretion, be careful.
0:13
It is not meant to treat, cure, or prevent any diseases, so always follow the advice of your friendly local pinball repair professional. So anybody here fix games for people? Like, do you go out and do repairs other than you?
0:26
You guys actually, like, just help your friends, or do you go out and do service for people? that'll randomly need help. So you'll kind of understand that a lot of times when you're fixing a game, somewhere between what the customer tells you and what's wrong with the game is the truth. A lot of times you're going to have a situation where somebody else tried to do a repair, and that's usually the worst-case scenario because you don't really know what happened. Did somebody just throw parts at the game randomly? Did they cause any damage, maybe damage a trace on a board, bridge two lines together with a blob of solder? first. So basically rather than get into a bunch of theory, I'm just going to talk about some situations I've encountered over the years and what I found when I made the repair. I don't know if Todd will remember this because Todd likes to do everything last minute. We had a centipede. We needed to go out for a rental. It was about 9.30 at night. We pulled it out of the warehouse and it didn't work. So we pulled the board out. We had a couple of other boards on the shelf. They didn't work. One worked. And as soon as you turned it on, it would start a two-player game. Okay, should be an easy fix. I pull the board out, I look at it, look at the switch section, somebody replaced every single chip on the board. Do you remember that, Todd? That was a while ago. So somebody replaced all the chips and it's easy to get, this is where you get trapped with what Dave was talking about. You kind of get focused, you think, oh, it's got to be a chip. This thing connects to this chip on here, this is bad. You replace that chip, well, maybe it's the one next to it. A couple of hours later and a bunch of parts wasted. You don't fix it, it goes on the shelf and usually ends up becoming a parts board. Does anybody understand how switches work? Does anybody know what switch debouncing is?
Congo
game
Guardians of the Galaxygame
Star Warsgame
Valley's Truck Stopgame
High Speedgame
Whirlwindgame
Geniegame
No Quarters Arcadeorganization
Pinwikiorganization
System 11product
WPCproduct
Spikeproduct
2:02
Anybody know what switch bounce is? So there's a tiny little capacitor that goes on each switch line. And the tech overlooked that altogether. It just was a shorted capacitor. And you just have to kind of look beyond, okay, well, it isn't just this chip. You have to kind of expand your view out of just one thing. And that's really all it was, was just a 10-cent capacitor. And the board could have ended up being scrapped for parts. but I was able to save it and get the game out for the rental that had to go out in about 10 hours from when,
2:32
oh, shit, this game has to go out for a rental, and it doesn't work. What are we going to do? Just play two-player games. Yeah, that's it pretty much.
2:47
How about when somebody messes with their games? And they say, oh, I don't know. It just stopped working. This mechanism doesn't work. Anybody encounter that? You guys that do the service work? Never really had that? Guy tells you he didn't do anything and you lift the play field up and there's plier marks all over the nuts and bolts? I don't know what happened.
3:09
Yeah, you'll encounter that. You really have to look beyond what they're telling you because they're not always going to tell you. They don't know or they have a, don't want to admit that they were messing around with it. I actually had the same problem with a spy hunter. A guy had a spy hunter cockpit would randomly just ring up credits. It makes that boom sound when you drop a coin in or hit the credit button. And it was just a capacitor. And he thought the game was no good. He was ready to trade it in. And it's just a stupid little part.
3:37
Here's another previous repair. I did a video on this. Anybody remember seeing the video I did on the F-14 Tomcat board? I posted it about a year ago. A guy, a tech worked on it. He repaired the special solenoid section. And then he comes up to me. This was one of Jimmy's boards. And he says, I repaired the special solenoid section. Now the displays don't work. I'm thinking to myself, I was in the middle of something, just set the board aside and I'll deal with it later. And he's an older guy, his vision's not great. And I said, did you mess the board up? He said, yeah, I messed up a few traces, but I fixed them and I got the special solenoids working. So I set the board down, I'm going about what I'm doing and I'm thinking about it for a while. I was like, I know what the problem was. I didn't even have to look at the board, I know what the problem was. Anybody have an idea what the problem could have been? Everything worked, special solenoids, he replaced the chip. Now the displays don't work. Anybody have any idea? Think about it. What about a trace? Well, it was a trace, but what part of the game? You, with the blue hat. You didn't unplug it and plug it back in. No, you did that. That didn't work. Anybody know what the blanking circuit is?
4:43
It's all blank. Everybody's blank. Yeah, it's all blank. Come on, man. I thought you guys were techs. Anyway, so the blanking circuit is part of the safety protection on the game. But what it does is it prevents outputs from working. It's like a watchdog. It's a timer that counts down, and the processor has to keep resetting it. If it doesn't get reset, it locks out the coils, it locks out the lamps, it locks out the displays. And that's what happened. He damaged the trace for the blanking circuit, threw the meter on it. I had to run a jumper wire, which I hate doing. If you've followed any of my work, I hate running jumper wires for things.
5:15
And that's what it was. And I had a similar situation with a diner. I had a customer at a diner. had a section of flash lamps and coils were locking on.
5:25
I go out to this guy. That guy lived like an hour away. Go out to his house. He had a bunch of games. And it was a diner, and yet another game was a whirlwind or something that had the auxiliary power board, and the relay wasn't working right. And I pull the PPB board out of the other game, put it in. It's working fine. I'm like, all right, great. It's the PPB board. Ordering one up. A week later, it comes in. Go back out. Everything's working great. And all of a sudden, the Boris light's locking on. Coils are locking on. I'm thinking, what the hell is going on with this thing? So I swapped out the logic board with the other game. Worked fine. Put it back in. Worked okay. Then it started acting up again. Took the board home. Had it on the bench. And I'm looking at it, and I'm trying to figure out what's going on. And if you're familiar with the System 11 boards, right above all the transistors, there's a couple of chips. They're 7408s. That's what they are. That's part of your blanking circuit. It's like an AND gate. It allows two things have to happen for the coils to work. So if you have a table lamp in your living room that works on a wall switch, the wall switch has to be on and the lamp switch has to be on or else the light's not going to work. So if that chip doesn't see the signal from the blanking circuit and then the signal from the processor to fire the coil, it's not going to work. Well, if you take that chip out, everything's going to lock on. And that was another previous repair. Tech used a lousy socket, and it just wasn't making good contact. But all that time, all that mess because somebody else just used the cheap part, and you have to go over what everybody did. It's the other thing, too, is that somebody could use a part, put a replacement part in that's bad off the shelf. It's rare, but it happens. I've had it happen many times. I've actually blown up a part. I had a transistor. I had it in my hand. I dropped it, which I was going to put on the bench, and I reached down to touch the floor. Static shock, and I picked it up. I'm like, you know, I'm going to throw a meter on this thing. I threw the meter on it, and it was blown up. So you don't know what other people are doing when they're working on the, when they're trying to fix a problem.
7:12
Had a similar situation. Well, this wasn't a previous repair, but I had a guy with an Adams. I mean, you ever try to find a problem with your game online? They'll say, Adams family resets. Problem solved. You see this whole big pin thread.
7:25
And it doesn't. You look at their solution. You try it. It doesn't work. You ever encounter that before?
7:31
You try to find a problem, and he's like, well, what do you do now? So this guy, it wouldn't always reset. If you're familiar with WPC games, if the bridge rectifiers are bad or the power connector on the driver board from the transformer is bad, it's going to reset. It usually happens when you're banging on the flippers.
7:45
So this game, it wouldn't always reset, but during gameplay, it would randomly just restart. So what would you do? What would you guys think you would do if you were to try to solve this problem on a random reset? You know, it's not the bridges. It's not the typical things.
8:00
The power is good. Connectors are good. It's only intermittently happening. It's not happening every time you play the game. Well, I would read the voltage from the power coming into the game.
8:13
Well, we know power is good. Okay. It's 115 volts. And the ground is good. We actually did try. Yeah, we actually did try. Just for giggles, we did try another receptacle in the house, and I did check that, but that wasn't it. What do you think? Anybody?
8:26
The interconnect cable between the logic and the driver. Yeah. No, it wasn't that either. So what we did was we put it into a coil test, and we ran through the coils. And then it would get so far, and it would stop. It would reset. But the problem is it happened so fast, I couldn't see on the display where it was stopping. So I got my camera out, and I recorded the screen as it happened. And it would do it, and I couldn't see where. I could see what the last test it passed, and then it would go on to the test where it failed. So then I had to disconnect power, pull the interlock switch out, step through it, and so it was failing on the magnet test.
9:02
One of the magnets was causing it to reset. Well, something in the magnet section. So at that point in time, what you really need to do, I mean, you can unplug all the magnets, or you've got to isolate things. I isolated the magnet control board that's up on the upper left side of the play field, and then it wouldn't reset, and it ended up just being a bad diode on the board next to the 30C. Anybody know why there's diodes on the coils?
9:24
Why do they put a diode on the coil? Well, diodes will only allow current to flow in one direction, but there's a reason why. I know Dave knows, but we're not going to know.
9:37
Come on, anybody? Take a guess. Is there a flyback voltage going the other way? You're thinking along the right path.
9:49
It's like the computer. Right. See what happens. Anybody here work on cars? Anybody know about cars?
9:57
You ever wonder how your car generates that high voltage spark for the spark plug? It's basically what it is. It's a coil, and power gets applied and taken away. So every time the power gets taken away, you get this big magnetic field. That's what makes your plunger move. When you take that magnetic field away, it's got to go somewhere. So it collapses, and it creates a high-voltage spike. And if that diode wasn't there, it's going to eventually go back to the board and either blow up the transistor or go further back. So if you had a friend with an old car, you just put a diode across his ignition coil, and his car won't start.
10:29
You're talking old cars, like 60s and 70s cars. But it's the same thing. the magnets are coils too, and they're going to create that same magnetic field. So if you look at newer games, like the newer System 11 games that have the PPB board, you'll see that there's no diode on the coil. That's because it's up on the PPB board.
10:46
And WPC and later games, they're all in there because the power comes in on the same side to the power on the ground side. It's there so you can get away with that. But when you have power coming from a completely separate board going down to the coil, then you need to have the diode on the coil.
11:00
So here's another guy, the guy with the Congo. go, this game wouldn't start. Start button worked in test, but it wouldn't start a game. It wasn't credits, it wasn't a wiring problem obviously, it wasn't a ball stuck or missing. Anybody have any ideas? So the game wouldn't start a game, not a credit issue, not a missing ball issue, start button worked in test, but it wouldn't work in attract mode. Now, we put LEDs in the game and one socket was leaning over just enough to touch one of the switches on that same line. And it would work in test because the computer is not pulsing the lamp matrix. So there's nothing to interfere. There's nothing to interfere with it there at all. Another situation when you're trying to fix, say, a dead logic board or a game that's not really running right, it's easy to get focused on that board. I had a 6803 game I forget what it was It doesn really matter And anybody do any kind of board repairs like getting into fixing dead boards or boards that are locked up
12:15
Guys usually just try another board and hope for the best. So I don't know if you're familiar with who, there's a guy named Leon, what's his name, Leon Boré, the guy who makes these test ROMs. Yeah, French guy. He's got a great product, it's free, you just can download it, you can burn the ROMs on the website and it'll help you. I really like them for the System 11 games because if you have a locked-up PIA, the game program won't run, but Leon's program will. So you can figure out which one of your PIAs is bad. Because sometimes it will flash a code for a PIA, but it might not even be the PIA. That's another thing you have to do. Always make sure you have good power. Make sure your power supplies are good, especially in those older games. Recap them or try another one because I've had that happen several times. You pull a board out, throw it on the bench, and it's fine. Rebuild the power supply. And then you can sit in there, and if you've ever replaced a 40-pin PIA, you can do a lot of damage if you're not careful, because the newer boards get, the more delicate they are, and it's easier to screw something up. And I actually read in an Atari service manual years ago, they actually recommend you cut a chip out. You cut all the legs off, take it out, and then go by and remove all of the pins and then use a desoldering tool. But if it's hard to come by chip or you're not sure and you just want to test, you need to make sure you're not damaging the board and wasting components because PIAs are on about $10, $12 a piece now. You don't want to potentially throw away a good one.
13:40
But I had this 6803 game, and it wouldn't work. I put the test ROM on it. The thing's fine. I checked some of the ROMs. I mean, that's something simple you can do. If you can get a ROM burner, they're only about $130 for it to GQ 4x4 or something on Amazon. I think you can even get it with an eraser, and it's only like $175. It's a good investment. You can download the ROMs online. So even if you don't have them, to compare them, you can always check some. Because I've had ROMs cause all kinds of problems, even when they check good. A ROM can check good and cause all kinds of issues.
14:16
You see that a lot with the shuffle alleys, the System 11 shuffle alleys, especially sound problems. They've caused all kinds of screeching problems, and you'd think the amplifier is bad, you'd think the DAC is bad, and sometimes just burning a couple of fresh ROMs. So before you really get into changing components on the board, you really want to look at all the other easier, low-hanging fruit first. And sometimes the problem is going to be something where you wouldn't think it would be, like a simple capacitor on your switch line, your debouncing capacitor.
14:45
So if you have a board that seems to be running okay on the bench, you can try it in another game. if you have one, or you can start isolating it, isolate it from the soundboard. In this case, it was the displays. The display was bad, and it was dragging down the whole board.
14:58
And so we just switched the display. It was a player two side, so I just switched the one and two, so you could play the game. But, you know, they could have spent hours and hours and hours changing parts, causing damage for nothing.
15:11
And that's why it's really important. You kind of, before you start getting into the complicated stuff, make sure you've covered all your bases. A lot of times when you're fixing things, you're going to be swapping a suspected bad part with a known good one. You're going to be figuring out mainly what isn't the problem more than what it is before you actually get to what the problem is.
15:31
I mean, I can talk a little bit about fixing some dead logic boards. Is anybody interested in any of that? Does anybody have any questions?
15:38
Any issues or something that you're having a problem with? Something you might be stuck on? So the guy with the switch problem. Let's go back to your... So you said to me yesterday the ball doesn't kick over, and you wanted to know where to get a switch from. Correct. And so let's go through the process. Why do you think that the switch itself is bad? Is it a leaf switch or is it a micro switch? I'm not as experienced as you guys. That's fine. We're going to get you experienced. So it's the switch that the ball rolls over and comes down the drain, and it sends the information to the kicker. The kicker kicks it up. Right.
16:18
In other words, the one that senses that the ball has hit the ball. It's in the drain. Correct. Okay. But do you know what? Did you lift up the play field and look underneath at the switch itself? Is it two metal blades? Is it a little black box with a paper clip wire? It's one blade, and it has a little dip in it at the end. So you're talking about the part that the ball sits on. Right, but I'm talking about underneath. Oh, no. See, you didn't really look at it. See, because if it's a micro switch, which is a little black box, and it'll have a little paper clip thing on it that'll attach to that, you know, what the ball sits on, usually if you hear them click, sometimes you can spray them a little bit of contact cleaner, but that switch might not be the problem. Really, what you need to do is, what game is it?
17:06
Valley's Truck Stop. So you might just have, you'd have to put it into a test. Do you have a manual for the game?
17:13
No. So you can download it. It might happen. Yeah. So before you buy parts, you need to put it into a switch test. And you need to see, is the game seeing the switch? And you can push it with your finger, and it might show that it is. Sometimes you put the ball in it, because your finger might push it down enough for it to read, but the ball might not sit on it enough. You might have to bend that little wire that you see, that little loop that you see sticking up. That's really the first thing you need to do. And then if it doesn't read it, what you can do is you can short a little paper clip or jumper wire across the switch, you know, the green and white wires and see if it'll read. Because you might, it might be the switch itself. It might be the diode. Look at the diode. There's a diode on there. Make sure that that's not broken. Make sure, you know, pull it a little bit. If it breaks, if it breaks in your fingers, it was going to break anyway. It's not, you're not going to really hurt it just given a little bit of a wiggle or a tug. And then your switches are all in a matrix. So you have columns and rows, and they're all chained together. So you might have a wire broken further down the play field. You might have targets that aren't working. Johnny, we had that problem with your high speed. Do you remember that?
18:23
We had a – the ball was getting stuck in the hideout. But what we didn't – nobody – I didn't realize it at the moment, and Johnny didn't realize it, is that several other switches weren't – So pop bumpers weren't scoring, and I think it wasn't making the rev sound on the left flipper, if I remember. And that ended up being a little blown transistor on the switch line on the board. So the problem could go all the way back. And we're going to talk more about that, Todd and I, tomorrow. Yo, wake up.
18:52
We're going to talk about some different things you can do, little tips and tricks for how to figure that out, you know, go down the line. So you're going to have to look at it. That's if the game doesn't see it. If you press on that switch, it could be the coil's not firing too. You can put it into a coil test. So the game might see the ball's sitting there, but it can't do anything about it. Maybe the wire broke off the coil. Maybe the transistor went bad. Maybe the wire pulled out of the connector on the board. Maybe there's an interconnect plug somewhere between the play field and the cabinet, and a pin could have just pulled out.
19:25
So before you buy any parts, you want to check and see if the game's not seeing the ball sit there, or it is seeing it sit there and it can't do anything about it for whatever reason. The coil itself could be bad. It doesn't happen often, but a lot of times the wire can break. It's a little red wire. It connects to one pin, and then it winds around and connects to the other one. That can break off. Sometimes you can get away with just unwinding it one ravel, scraping some of the coating off and re-soldering it. Sometimes it's just easier to get another coil, spend the $20 or whatever it is. But you need to go through the process of figuring out where the problem is before you go out and buy any parts. and then this way then you'll know. Is that the only game you have?
20:07
No, I have a few. Yeah, I have a few. I have Genie that I need to do. I just started trying to revert.
20:18
No, that's fine. That's cool. Well, there was a day we all looked at the bottom of a play field and figured what the hell is all of this? We've all been there. I was there. Todd was there. Everybody.
20:29
But you've got to get in there and do it. If you ever watch any of my videos, I'll put a little blurb at the end. And it says, experience knows no substitute. And that's the truth. You just got to get in and do it. You can go to seminars. You can read books. You can read pin-side threads. You can go through everything. But until you get in there and do it, you're not really going to learn it. Yeah, until you pull that play field up and move it in there. It helps to clean it out and all that stuff, too, because they're pretty dusty where they came from. Yeah. So cleaning the whole, like, room of things here, does that help trust in the energy of your home? Yeah, I'm not sure if that uses, that might be a leaf switch. You don't know offhand, do you Dave, if that might be a leaf switch? Truck stop? No, truck stop. That's that late 60 or 6803. Is that a late 6803? Yeah. That might still be leaf switches. So if that's just a leaf switch, it's the two little metal blades, you just take a business card, push the two together and clean it a really, really fine piece of like, you know, grid sandpaper, just very gently, you know, pull the contacts, you know, push them together, pull some paper through a few times, and then that might be all it is. Another thing, too, is it could be gummed up. It could be a mechanical reason that it's not kicking the ball over. It could be a broken plunger or something, or it could be, one thing you see people do is they'll oil, or they'll put WD-40 on the coils. There's no lubrication anywhere because it just turns it into a paste and it just gums everything up and you can clean the coils, which is not worth it. You're better off just replacing them.
22:05
I think that that leads to a more general idea of would your instinct be to suspect mechanical type issues first because the ball weighs enough that you can push things around and you can't spin on certain actuators and stuff. I would look at the switch first. That's the first, that's the simplest thing to do. Like the switch test? Yeah, put in the switch test and then, you know, just mechanically, you know, push it. Reach your finger down or drop the ball down in there. I don't know if that has, I'm not real familiar with the play field in that game. It was drop targets. If there's any drop targets, make sure they're all reset. If there's a spinner, make sure it's not. Because if you have drop targets that are down or a spinner that's sitting at an angle, you're going to just have all these switches keep popping up and you're not going to,
22:50
you just want nothing, no switches closed except for that. so this way you're not having to wait for it to cycle through a bunch of different switches that are closed for you to finally get to the one that you're looking for.
23:00
And then, I don't know, do you follow my page on Facebook, No Quarters Arcade? No. So you can follow it, because I'm just curious. I want to know how you make out. So follow my page when you get home, and then message me.
23:14
Let me know what you find, and then if you have any issues, I'll message you back and see if I can walk you through getting it fixed. It's going to be a simple problem.
23:23
Yeah, it's going to be fun. I'm excited. Well, you're going to learn something. I'm trying. That's really what it is. Like, I haven't posted in a while, but when I do my Facebook and my tech articles, I try to show you, I don't want to say this is what it was, this is what the problem was, and this is what the solution was, because we understand how I think about it. And it's funny, because I get some people, and they mean well, and they'll post a screenshot of PinWiki, oh, we knew about this, and I'm thinking to myself, I didn't write this for you. I wrote this for the guy that doesn't know about PinWiki. I wrote this for the guy that doesn't know about Pinside, who doesn't know anything about it. Just, hey, I just got this game. My neighbor had it. He was going to give it to me for a hundred bucks. He's moving. I took it and it doesn't work. I want to get it going again. And you don't know anything. You're new to the hobby and you're learning. So it's important to know how you got to the solution. And usually I won let anything beat me I had a guy with a Star Wars comic was a pro And he had he has that he has the Guardians of the Galaxy and he has an original Black Knight And I'd been out to his house a few times and went out. And just, you know, he just wanted me to come out like once a year and clean everything up. And his games didn't have any updates. He had the original updates and I'm there. So I update the Guardians, everything's fine.
24:39
Go to update the Star Wars, goes through and does the node boards and then stops at the cabinet node board. Now, this thing had the original code in it, so it was like 1.06 going to 2.78 or whatever it was with the insider connected stuff on it. So it wouldn't take the update. I tried it a few times. I thought maybe I could try a different USB stick. I tried a different download. It wouldn't work. I couldn't stay there any longer. I said, all right, well, let me reach out to Stern. So I emailed Stern's tech support and they said, I need to see pictures of the LEDs on the boards. pictures of the LEDs on the logic board, LEDs on the node board, the cabinet node board, and a video of the startup. He says, the node board's bad. I'm like, okay, well, the guy's had the game for like maybe two years. He's had no warranty. Can you send me a node board? We can't do it. It's out of warranty. Okay. I can't tell this guy he's got to spend $200 on a node board when this game basically worked. And he says, oh, maybe you were pushing too many updates through. I'm like, okay, well, can you give me maybe an older update? You maybe something that's halfway between what's current and what it came with, and I can burn it to an SD card and start afresh. We don't have any of that stuff.
25:46
So I went back to his house, and I swapped the node board from the Star Wars to the Guardians of the Galaxy, and it took the update, and everything worked fine. So I know the node board's not bad.
25:57
So let me try maybe the SD card, because if the SD cards fail, it's not often, but they happen. The SD card can get corrupted. Even if you re-burn a new one, the card itself goes bad. I couldn't download the update for like a month. Like it just wouldn't download. So I emailed them back. I said, oh, nobody else has any problems? They said, well, I don't know. I mean, I'm able to download a four gigabyte Jersey Jack Delta update with no problems.
26:18
Well, when somebody says to you, well, nobody else has ever had that problem, you know it's just not going to end well.
26:24
So I waited, and I was finally actually able to get the update. Got a new SD card, put the update on it, went to his house, did its thing. Son of a bitch, it wouldn't update the node board. So at this point, I'm just pissed off. I'm pissed off. I said, all right, you know what? I'm going to grab the network cable out of the Guardians. I pulled the network cable out, put it into the Star Wars. It updated. Everything was fine. It was nice and happy. But that doesn't make sense. Why would the game work with a bad network card but just not take updates? It took me two months. But the guy, he's calling me up. He's like, man, it's been a while. I said, listen, I'm not going to give up. I said, we're going to fix this thing, damn it. I'm going to fix it. I don't care how long it takes, we're going to get this figured out. So it ended up being an $8 network cable. He actually had to have one extra in his house. I popped it in and he was good to go. But whatever the problem is, it's going to be something. It's going to be right there. And you're going to just have to figure out what it is. And it's nice when you have a second game that you can test things with, especially if it's in the guy's house. Like the guy with the diner, when I had to borrow his PPB and logic board from his earthshaker. It's nice when you have that. You don't always have that and that's where it gets a little bit more complicated where You have to do some more research. You have to do more troubleshooting.
27:40
You know, so that's just some of the things. I can talk a little bit about fixing some dead logic boards. Is anybody interested in that?
27:48
Anybody have any more questions? What's your opinion on, like, an aftermarket board, like a rotten dog, or if you can't fix a board anymore, you have to do it again? I don't. All right. I don't want to impugn on anybody's work. I don't like Rotten Dog Boards.
28:06
I've used, there's a guy, Kohout or something, he's made some sound boards, PPP boards, the Williams Auxiliary Driver Boards. They seem to be really well made. The only reason I don't like Rotten Dog Boards is because the guy that designs the Rotten Dog Boards takes design liberties, meaning he just changes things. We had a Gottlieb System 1 Driver Board. You familiar with them? It's a little skinny board. It's got a big TO3 transistor, and it's got a bunch of little MPSA-03s to drive the lights.
28:37
And it's a bunch of these little individual transistors. Well, he decided to take ULN-2803, which is the switch chip. Todd, have you ever watched Todd's videos? He calls it the fuse that we socket on the WPC boards. And all it is is just a transistor array. It's just eight transistors. So the Rotten Dog guy put those ULN-2803As in place of the MPSA. I mean, it's great, but it doesn't work. the game doesn't like it. Some will like it. Others don't. So because there's no documentation, we had a problem with one of his WPC logic boards was draining the battery.
29:13
There's no schematics and he changed the design from the original. So anybody that sticks to the original design, and there's times that you have to do it. I mean, especially with newer stuff now, Marco has a new WPC logic board. It's black. I don't know who makes it, but I've actually used a couple of them. They work well. You just got to switch over your ASIC, your ROM, and I think maybe the 6809 processor. I mean, there's times you have to do it. I mean, it's when they change things like there was a guy making a DMD controller, WP, and he has an FPGA on there. I mean, it's nice, but, you know, me coming from a perspective of fixing things, if I can't fix it, what are you going to do with it? So as long as they stay true to the original design, use the original components, then yeah. I mean, it's right at that point now where you have to do it. You have games that are battery damaged or a transistor went subcritical and blew a hole in the board. Yeah. Just be careful which board you buy. I have a Cyclone and I put a Rotten Dog in it. The other one was trashed. And now if If I hit two flippers together while the ball is in the, I guess, end of ball mode, it tilts. And it'll only tilt when it's there. As soon as it goes back into the, you know, into the plunger, everything works fine. But if you hit both flippers together while it's in rest, it will tilt. And it works that way even through test mode. If I hit both flippers together in test, it'll say, it'll go through, it'll say left flipper, right flipper, tilt. Yeah, something's... So it's recognizing it. Yeah, something's cross-talking. Now, one thing I like about the System 11 Rotten Dog boards is he eliminated a lot of the components in the lamp circuit and in the coil drive circuit. So, those big resistors and all those other components, he's got one transistor and two resistors because he uses MOSFETs that are 100 volt. The problem is he put them in the switch line. So, those little 2134 or 3408s or whatever, 3904s, he has 100 volt transistors in there. It's nice. It's beefy. But what's going to happen if you send coil voltage to a switch line? Instead of just blowing up that little transistor, it's going to go further back into a PIA or even further than that.
31:23
So one of the biggest issues I've had with the Rotten Dog System 11 boards is sound. Some games, the sound, well, they just, it won't work. Like I've had them in shuffle alleys. Some won't work. We've put them in other games. I've used them in 11C games just because I couldn't get the sound to work. And I don't really know why. and there's no documentation. It changes things from the original design.
31:48
You know, it's just going to... I would look... Well, did it do that before you changed the... Because I really don't... I mean, it's possible.
31:59
You can look on the board, see if something... Maybe a leg is just touching something on the PI, one of the lines.
32:06
Just go over your... Look at... Are they on the same... The tilt? Does that... What does that have? End of stroke? It is in line with the flippers. Okay. I just, when I put in tests, that's why I'm confused, because everything checks out during tests. Are they on the same column or the same row? Same row.
32:24
Yeah. Did the PIA socket it on that? I think he socketed everything. Swap the PIA with another one, just for the hell of it,
32:31
and just see what it does. And you can reach out to me, too, and then let me know what you find. And if you can get your hands on an original board or maybe a different aftermarket board. There's a guy, I've seen them here on the project pinball table, a guy, he goes by Dumbass. I'm not on pin side much. But he's got a really nice looking System 11 board. I've never worked with it, I don't know. But I don't know what they cost. I don't know who else is really making them. I want to make one of my own eventually. I figured I'll do that sometime between midnight and 6 a.m. during my spare time. Eventually I will do it. Just, you know, yeah, I want to have them for sale, but I have some of my own customers that I've gone into people's houses and just want to cry. You know, you look, you open it up, and the batteries, the board's just totally shot. I actually had an F-14 Tomcat back on Monday, and a guy said he had it for 20 years. He said, did you change the batteries? He said, it doesn't take batteries. You plug it in. That tells you everything you need to know. And I opened it up, and there was a little bit of battery damage right on the terminal of the battery holder, and that was it. And I said, you know, I'll go buy a lottery ticket. And if you're ever going to use regular batteries, never use Duracell. I've seen them leak in like six weeks if you want to keep using regular AA batteries.
33:47
Yeah, it's a shame because there's so many games. I mean, figure how many games got trashed just because of battery damage.
33:54
But there are people making the boards. And I know with everything being expensive, I know you're probably looking at about $500 to $600.
34:01
But if you can get your hands, even if you can borrow a board from somebody and just swap your ROMs over and see what it does.
34:09
It's been nothing but problems. Yeah. Yeah, see, I don't think he really changed a whole lot. Maybe in the sound section, but I think the rest of the logic is pretty true to the original.
34:21
Well, I was originally, I had music, but I didn't have speech. Eventually, then he sent me a little bridge that I had to put over one of the connectors on the board. I forget what the exact was now. And that fixed my speech. Yeah. I had no voice. Yeah. No call-outs. Yeah, does anybody know, does he still support them? Or somebody bought that guy out? I don't know the story behind the Rotten Dog guy. Can you even still get them? You can on Marco. Marco does. They're technical. I mean, they'll email you back immediately. They'll try. It's not like they kind of, they don't try to blow you off. Yeah. But eventually they just say, you know, this is all we know.
34:59
And System One got leaves my one for it all day long. I had a guy that he lives like two hours from me and he has Sinbad or Buck Rogers or something. And I'm like, I'm just bringing power supply and logic board every time and the Internet connect interconnect cable between the logic and the driver. So there was times, yeah, you just want to use new boards. Don't even bother messing with those. They use power supplies like back to the future. Don't even bother. I don't even bother rebuilding them anymore because the caps, whatever caps they bought leak almost every single time they've leaked. They damage the traces in the eyelets, and it's just not worth fixing them. I don't know why.
35:37
When the guy's brother-in-law's owned the company that sold the capacitors, the guy that designed it, he got the deal to sell them, but it's just not really worth it. It's a judgment call. I mean, you know, you've got people. It's not a 63 split-window Corvette where you need matching numbers on your engines and transmission.
35:56
Is anybody going to give you more money if it has the original boards over new ones? Some people like new ones, you know. Most people aren't going to care if you don't play the game. Frank, remember we had the Rotten Dog WPC board, and it wouldn't work in the getaway, but it worked fine in the Strikemaster shuffle. We had that with a Gilligan's Island, too. So we found that sometimes you have to try it in a different game. That board just decides it doesn't like that game. We had a Gilligan Island It was all done We had to go out the next morning and we just play testing it We We actually think we getting ready to do a video on it And it just was losing track of the ball It was just ringing up random points. It would end the ball. I mean, it just had no end. We just put a regular board in it. It was fine. So, yeah, you can't deviate from the original design too much. Anybody else have any other questions? Something that's...
36:55
Sure. X-Men? Right. You mean the big black chip with the caps on it? You got to take the caps off. I actually, I thought I posted that maybe a year or so ago. I don't know you did. Yeah, I took pictures of that and I posted it. The cap values and the orientation, you just take electrolytics, you got to cut the leads real short, bend them over. The problem is getting that black coating off. I found if you heat it, you just got to... I was hoping maybe there was some kind of replacement. I mean, like you said, aftermarket's not awesome, but there used to be one available. Somebody was making it, but it didn't have the custom chip that's mounted underneath of that? Ah, okay. Because I know you've got to pull that chip apart to get to some of the stuff. And that's open. Yeah. You just got to be, you know what you do, make sure you have nothing to do for the next five or six hours and just sit down. Pull the board up. Yeah. Have your bench ready to go. Make a cup of coffee or something or have a beer or whatever and just plan on being there for a while. And you've got to very gently, because what happens if you're too aggressive in trying to take that coating off, you're going to rip the caps off. And then you're going to rip those little traces off. Ask me how I know. And then you've got to run little jumper wires. I did that. I'm like, oh, it's working great, but there was one channel missing, so I had to go. I had two boards. I got them in a set, and the guy just gave me the whole set up. He's like, I'm not going to use this anymore. You want this too? And I'm like, I'm not going to say no to spare parts. The other one is like that. There's traces coming off of it, and it's not going to work at all. And I'm like, well, I'm not going to be able to fix this. It's going to be a little bit of a replacement. Now, the traces on the top for the caps really aren't that complicated. And if you have a working one, if you have one that works and you can actually measure it all out and see, I mean, it might be worth... If the rest of the board works, I would try to save it. Oh, the rest of the board works fine. It works great. Just no audio. Yeah. So for that one that's been hacked up... Yeah, that's not what you're going to do. Yeah. But, yeah, okay. Yeah. You'll have to do slow and steady. It's a good answer. Yeah. And try, you know, and experiment with the non-working, with the board that's been hacked first. Because I forget. It's been a while since I last did it. I don't work on video games a whole lot.
39:23
Yeah, no, no, it's fine because I have dealt with it, so I can give you a real answer on that. But the problem is just that coding. I mean, it's going to take the right amount of heat. Get yourself a decent heat gun. Heat it up a little bit because if you heat it too much, you're going to pull the caps up too. You might not necessarily want to do that if you don't have that chart handy that has the values. Maybe they use that someplace else and you guys talk to someone. It works, doesn't it? Yeah. I figured out how to ask. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
39:51
Anything else? I've got a little bit more. Yes. Craig, what is your Facebook page? It's NoQuartersArcade.
39:57
And I have one for Instagram, too, but I don't really do a whole lot with it. And your website, too? NoQuartersArcade.com. Right. Yeah, this past year I haven't really been doing well with keeping up with my tech articles, just with stuff going on with my driving the bus, and I don't have the time. I used to be able to have some time between my runs, between schools, and I could, you know, bang out a post a few minutes here and there, and by the end of the day have something ready to publish, and I just haven't. I mean, poor Johnny. I did his, last summer we did his Funhouse Playfield.
40:28
Has anybody seen it? Well, I guess most of you guys don't really follow my page, but we did it, spent a week. No, we did it like three days.
40:36
A Funhouse Playfield spot. I get there on Friday. I get there on Friday night. The following Wednesday night, at midnight, Crystal and I are working and I'm shitting myself because I'm leaving Saturday thinking we ain't going to get this thing done, but we got it done. We got it done. Yeah, we did a 2.0 kit too. Anybody mess with that with the Funhouse 2.0 kits?
41:00
No, it's neat. I like it. The extra... It wasn't exactly fucking flat. No, in updating, it's not very easy either because the updates are handled on the sound board and you've got to get the little tiny SD card out. It's not like you can just plug in a USB stick and do it like the newer games. You've got to get it out, you've got to download the file, you've got to image it. And it's not easy to get to and I think it actually sits on the back side of the board. So you've got to be careful when you put it back in. We had a problem because it wouldn't kick the ball out of the trough into the shooter lane. We know it was the 2.0 because the regular version worked fine. And then they actually had posted that there was a problem with the trough logic. So it would try a couple times to kick the ball out and then it would just stop. It just wouldn't do anything. It wouldn't keep trying. It would just not do anything. So we did the update and it helped. And I think it gave it a little bit more power to the coil. And I guess it looked at that switch more than just once or twice to make sure that the ball was actually in the shooter lane. But yeah, we did that fun. That was an experience, huh? Yeah, play fields are a lot of fun.
42:08
Anything else? Any other questions? We've got about another 17 minutes or so. We can talk a little bit more about troubleshooting dead logic board. You want to hear about that?
42:19
So I was talking about Leon's ROMs. If you already know that your power is good, you already know your ROMs are good,
42:27
you put your test ROM in and see if the test ROM. So he has an LED. want you to put on one of the address lines on the processor. You don't have to do it because the relay will click if everything is working okay. But sometimes the test program doesn't run. And the test program won't always check all of the address lines. You have 16 address lines. You have eight data lines. Some of those address lines are used for chip selection. And the program won't always look for everything. So that's where you have to take the ROM out and you have to get a little bit more into it because now your standard tools aren't going to solve the problem. So then you have to, if you take all the program ROMs out, the processor is going to look through all of the addresses for instructions. That's all it's going to do and it will do that forever. So then you take that time and look at all the address lines. Something, if all 16 of them are pulsing, then you might have a problem because you have other chips on there to decode the chip selection where it looks for different PIAs, different RAMs, different ROMs, whatever. And sometimes too, I did a post a while back on fixing a fliptronics board. It was locking up the logic board, and there's a couple... I never understood the fliptronics board. I think it's a lot of crap to just make a flip or flip, but whatever, it's part of the thing. You've got to deal with it. But it had a chip. I had done a post before about how to check the little 74-series chips. You can take your meter on diode test. You put the red lead on ground, and you can probe the pins. And you just make sure that one's not meant to be grounded. You have to look at your schematic or look at the board. And you can usually find a bad chip that way. I had two chips that were reading bad. So rather than replace them both, I had one chip that was just showing one leg is bad, and the other one was showing two. So I threw a dart and threw it at the two because I figured, well, they're not going to be both chips. And since the other one was showing bad, so the point of that whole thing is that if you have ten different things on one line and you measure it at this chip and say, oh, this chip is reading bad, it could be one of the other nine things on there. So you have to get into it. You have to isolate that line. Some people, some tech articles will tell you to cut the trace on the board, to isolate it. I don't like doing that. It's a real pain in the ass, but if you desolder the leg, you can kind of lift it out. If you're careful, you don't damage it, and you can isolate it that way. It's not an easy thing to do. It's not really hard. It's just more of a pain in the ass than anything. But if you have a board that's dead, and it's not battery damaged or hacked or blown up, you know, blown up, it's worth fixing it. It's worth, you know, you want to keep it alive. Because as you see, you know, these original boards are coming harder and harder to come by. And back in the day, when it wasn't such an issue, we would just throw it on the shelf and use it for parts. That's locked up. It doesn't work.
44:59
Chip sockets are another thing. You've got to look at them. Older games. Bally games. Old Bally games. I don't even bother changing them anymore. I just put an old tech board in. And I've done this. You try to figure out why it's not working. You replace a chip. You replace another chip. You get pissed off and just replace them all. And it still doesn't work. And some of these boards, the traces themselves are real delicate. And it doesn't take much to cause a hairline fracture that you won't be able to see, but it'll keep the game from running. I had that problem. I had a change in sockets on a board, and we needed it for a game, and it was working, and it wouldn't work, and then I just threw it on the shelf and got another game, and I went back to it, and I had actually repaired a trace. I'm looking at it, and I'm back on the bench again, and I'm like, and I measured it, and that trace, even though I'd repaired it with some copper foil tape, it still was open. I put a jumper wire in the back, something I hate to do. I was just mad. I just wanted to get it done and fixed it. So if you're going to do sockets, do one at a time. on the System 3 through 7 Williams games. You can do them all. They're pretty beefy boards. System 11 boards, they're a little bit okay. WPC board, if you look at it wrong, it's not going to work. They're very delicate, so you've got to be real careful. There's just a lot of different things. I'm trying to give you some ideas, things to look at, without getting too technical or without being too much out of what you guys really understand or have dealt with before.
46:18
Yes, sir? What was his name? Leon? If you just look up Leon's test ROMs, it'll come up. It's on PinWiki, yeah.
46:28
And the only other thing with Leon's stuff is that he, I think he's French, so his stuff's translated from French, and it can be a little bit hard to understand what he's saying. I just started dabbling with Gottlieb System 80 boards, and he's got a test ROM for that. But the problem with that is, well, if you know the Gottlieb System 80, you have three different variations, and some of them have the two prongs that are soldered to the board. And he has some procedure for modifying the board so it doesn't address those chips. And I was like, I don't really want to mess with that because if you're fixing one board, you're just going to do these mods, it's fine. But when you're fixing a bunch of boards, so he had plans to make a test fixture, which I actually made one by hand, and I tested it, and it worked. So I might actually produce them and put them out there if somebody wants them because those System 80 boards are really pretty simple, and you can keep them going too.
47:22
There was Fred Schwimmer, I think. Anybody know who Fred Schwimmer was? He had a really nice system. You know Fred, right, who Fred was? You know who Fred Schwimmer was? He made really nice. He had a really nice replacement 68-3 board, and he had Gottlieb System 80 series boards. He ate beetroots. He's the only person who could eat beetroots. Yeah. And he had a really nice setup. He passed away, though, unfortunately. So I don't know if anybody got the rights to his stuff or any of his things. It would be nice if somebody could keep making them. The only thing I didn't like is he used something called a zip socket. It's a socket with a lever. You use them. Yeah, I mean, it's good for prototyping or for testing. But for a game that's going to be vibrating and you're going to be tilting it and banging on it, it's not good for production. but otherwise it was a beautiful board and they worked great. He put a lot of LEDs on there. He wanted to light up. He had them on the back of the – To light up his name. Yeah, yeah. And I think the System 80 board had a tic-tac-toe and he lit up one or two.
48:19
Anything else? All right. Well, I guess we'll wrap it up. All right. We'll wrap it up. Thank you. Thank you for coming out. Thank you.
48:29
And like I said, if you need help, you can always just reach out to me on my Facebook page and anything I can do to help you, I will.