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Exploring the Spike 2 System with Kyle Spiteri and The Pinball Pirate

Marco Pinball·video·1h 0m·analyzed·May 29, 2025
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.030

TL;DR

Stern technical experts detail Spike 2 hardware architecture, node systems, and troubleshooting.

Summary

Kyle Spiteri and Chris Koontz from Stern Pinball provide a comprehensive technical deep-dive into the Spike 2 hardware platform, covering the centralized CPU architecture, decentralized node-based playfield control system, power distribution, troubleshooting methodologies, and practical maintenance techniques. The presentation emphasizes the system's modularity, reduced wiring compared to legacy systems, and diagnostic approaches for identifying common issues.

Key Claims

  • Spike 2 debuted in 2016 with Batman or Aerosmith as the first Spike 2 game

    medium confidence · Kyle Spiteri, noted as uncertain which game was actually first

  • All Spike 2 games run on a single 48-volt DC output from the power supply, with 115 volts AC input isolated in a corner metal box for safety

    high confidence · Kyle Spiteri, detailed technical explanation with Chris Koontz validation

  • Every Spike 2 game has two core nodes (Node 8 and Node 9) at minimum, with Node 8 typically handling lower playfield and Node 9 handling upper playfield

    high confidence · Kyle Spiteri, with corroborating diagram review

  • Spike 2 node boards have built-in overcurrent protection circuits instead of traditional fuses, allowing the game to detect and shut down excessive current draw

    high confidence · Kyle Spiteri, explained as safety feature eliminating need for replaceable fuses

  • Spike 2 eliminates switch and lamp matrices entirely, replacing them with individual inputs and parallel addressing via DIP switches on each node

    high confidence · Kyle Spiteri, contrasted with older Harry Williams and Data East systems

  • SD card (micro SD) on the CPU is required for Insider Connected functionality, not strictly necessary for offline play, and batteries only maintain time/date when not connected to internet

    high confidence · Kyle Spiteri and Chris Koontz, discussing CPU connectivity requirements

  • Spike 2 games draw approximately 4 amps versus 8 amps for WPC games, allowing multiple Spike 2 machines on a single 20-amp circuit

    medium confidence · Kyle Spiteri, comparing power consumption to legacy systems

  • Flipper buttons connect directly to Node 8 rather than the cabinet distribution board, bypassing the normal data bus to ensure functionality if distribution board fails

    high confidence · Kyle Spiteri, explaining circuit architecture with Chris Koontz agreement

Notable Quotes

  • “Chris gave me a job in pinball and taught me basically everything I know. So if it wasn't for him, I would not be in the position I am now.”

    Kyle Spiteri@ 0:09 — Personal acknowledgment of mentorship relationship; establishes context for Kyle's expertise

  • “System 11 board. It's this enormous silicone pizza that has a computer. It has hardware to drive lamps, to drive coils, to do switches, all on one giant board. It is laughably inefficient by modern standards.”

    Kyle Spiteri@ 1:23 — Vivid characterization of legacy hardware inefficiency, establishes contrast with Spike 2 architecture

  • “These games run on one voltage. There is 115 volts coming into the game, and it outputs 48 volts DC. Everything in the game runs on 48 volts.”

    Kyle Spiteri@ 2:36 — Core technical specification of Spike 2 power distribution

  • “Since it is a decentralized control architecture, it hurts itself. It generally only hurts one board or itself.”

    Kyle Spiteri@ 10:10 — Key safety advantage: isolated failures don't cascade across system

  • “If you move one of these upstairs, it's a joy if you've moved, like, a Harry Williams 90s game upstairs. The elimination of the transformer, the system that eliminates pounds and pounds of wire, and the fact that the head is steel on three sides makes these where it's a delight to go up a flight of stairs with one.”

    Kyle Spiteri@ 16:00 — Practical operator advantage highlighting reduced weight and wiring versus legacy systems

  • “I'm an operator and I'm cheap, I don't want to spend any money if I don't have to. So instead of buying a board and see if that's it, let's see if we can prove whether it's the board or not.”

Entities

Kyle SpiteripersonChris KoontzpersonStern PinballcompanySpike 2productBatmangameAerosmithgameGhostbustersgameGame of Thronesgame

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Public technical education through informal video format with hands-on machine demonstration, real-world troubleshooting examples, and operator cost-saving tips indicates outreach to maintenance community

    high · Chris Koontz's operator perspective and cost-focused troubleshooting methodology; Kyle's detailed manual-based diagnostics guidance

  • ?

    community_signal: Stern Pinball technical staff (Kyle Spiteri and Chris Koontz) conducting educational public presentation on Spike 2 hardware for operator and enthusiast audience, demonstrating commitment to technical knowledge dissemination

    high · Detailed technical presentation with physical machine demonstration, troubleshooting examples, and practical operator guidance

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Stern's Spike 2 platform prioritizes modularity and expandability: only necessary node boards and auxiliary systems included per game requirements, avoiding tied-up resources on unused components

    high · Kyle describes modular architecture and gives examples of optional motor/servo driver boards

  • $

    market_signal: Spike 2 power consumption (~4 amps) versus WPC (~8 amps) allows operators to run multiple machines on single 20-amp circuit, reducing infrastructure costs and enabling higher machine density per location

    high · Kyle's specific comparison of amp draw and circuit capacity advantages

  • ?

    product_strategy: Spike 2 design includes safety improvements: isolated high-voltage (115V) to metal box corner for UL certification, power switch relocated under head, flipper buttons direct-wired to Node 8 to bypass distribution failure points

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.181

0:00
I'm Kyle. My name is Kyle Sveteri. This is Chris Koontz. I work at Stern Pinball, and Chris is the pinball pilot. He is the pinball pilot. Chris gave me a job in pinball and taught me basically everything I know. So if it wasn't for him, I would not be in the position I am now. So I owe so much to him. Thank you.
0:23
And, yeah, should we roll into this? Yes. Okay, let's start. Okay, Spike 2. This is a system that we, as Stern, debuted in 2016 with Batman or Aerosmith, whichever the first Spike 2 game was. So basically at the start of the LCD era, right? Before that, we had a similar system called Spike 1, which ran a dot matrix, very few games. Kiss, Game of Thrones, WrestleMania, Ghostbusters, but there's definitely some, there's also like different iterations of some of that hardware that became standardized and what we have now is Spike 2.
1:06
Spike 2 is different from some other traditional hardware systems you are more familiar with, So the way I kind of think about this is you have centralized computing and driving. So think about a System 11 board. It's this enormous silicone pizza that has a computer. It has hardware to drive lamps, to drive coils, to do switches, all on one giant board. It is laughably inefficient by modern standards. You feel the heat coming out of it when you open the back box. So this system is like what I would kind of call is like maybe like a decentralized system because the separate pieces are in different areas. Right. So we have we can start with the back box overview. So there is a computer, the computer in the center of the back box. Really, it does all the thinking. It runs the program and it sends instructions. There's not a lot of inputs on this, not a lot of outputs. It's also doing the display and all the sound. So it's your sound board, your keyboard, your computer.

  • Serial data chains on the playfield are addressed and pass-through, so if connection breaks downstream, all data after the break point is lost

    high confidence · Kyle Spiteri, illustrated with Jurassic Park T-Rex motor example

  • LED lamp boards are generally interchangeable if they have the same LED count, even across different games, for troubleshooting purposes

    high confidence · Chris Koontz, practical operator troubleshooting tip

    • Chris Koontz@ 28:06 — Reveals operator perspective and cost-driven diagnostic methodology

  • “These instructions coming off the board go to these satellite nodes to tell it, it's like, okay, this insert needs to light. That data, though, again, if it's not for that board, it passes along to the next one.”

    Kyle Spiteri@ 22:59 — Clarifies pass-through addressing mechanism in serial data chains

  • “The manual is super, super critical to figuring some of these things out.”

    Kyle Spiteri@ 26:54 — Emphasizes documentation importance for technical troubleshooting

  • “Reseat the whole chain. Put it back in there, lamp test. Does things start working again? They might.”

    Kyle Spiteri@ 27:00 — Practical first-step diagnostic for LED/data problems

  • “If I wanted to prove whether that was bad or not, and I didn't have another one, like, well, where am I going to get one? Well, these generally, these lamp boards, generally, it doesn't have to be the right one as long as it has the same number of LEDs on it.”

    Chris Koontz@ 28:26 — Cost-effective troubleshooting technique revealing system flexibility

    • Kissgame
    WrestleManiagame
    Jurassic Parkgame
    Guardians of the Galaxygame
    Foo Fightersgame
    Rushgame
    King Konggame
    Star Warsgame
    Marco Pinballperson/channel
    Spike 1product
    System 11product
    WPCproduct

    high · Kyle's explanation of safety architecture and UL certification requirements; Chris's validation of design choices

  • ?

    product_concern: Spike 2 systems subject to shipping damage (loose SD cards, connector misalignment) requiring customer education on reseat procedures as common first-step troubleshooting

    medium · Kyle's mention of 'FedEx is not gentle' causing loose SD cards; Chris's validation that reseating often fixes LED issues

  • ?

    technology_signal: Serial data chain architecture creates cascading failure risk: any break in connection line blocks all downstream data, affecting multiple LED boards and auxiliary devices simultaneously

    high · Kyle's detailed explanation of serial data pass-through; Jurassic Park example showing how single loose connection disables T-Rex motor

  • ?

    technology_signal: Spike 2 represents significant departure from legacy hardware through decentralized node-based architecture, elimination of lamp/switch matrices, reduced wiring (pounds of wire eliminated), and modular expandable design

    high · Direct comparisons to System 11, Harry Williams, Data East, and WPC architectures; Kyle describes transformation as 'laughably inefficient by modern standards' in legacy systems

    • 2:16
    And really, the computer is just this little thing in the middle. It's another thing about Spike 2. Well, let's keep right here. Sorry, I'm getting a little jumbled. I have a little bit of nerves.
    2:28
    The only things in the back box, right? You've got your power supply. It's a switching DC power supply. These games run on one voltage. There is 115 volts coming into the game, and it outputs 48 volts DC. Everything in the game runs on 48 volts. Each node board or anything else in the game regulates its own voltages. So the node board itself only has to receive 48 volts. And all of that 48 volts is spread around by the power distribution board, The number three here and what Chris is pointing to, that takes 48 volts from the power supply and splits it between a few locations. One being the head. The computer always needs 48 volts or any other accessories, maybe like your topper or speaker lights or whatever. And then there's another plug that brings the power down to the play field and another one that brings it down to the cabinet.
    3:33
    Here's power to the cabinet. plug here in case you maybe have a topper or something else. Another nice thing about this is your dangerous voltage, the 115 volts, the only place it is in the game is in this corner of this metal box. You've got your fuse and that's the voltage. That does require that the power switch be in a new location. It's up here under the head rather than the front. Which is, that's, another reason, right, is because that was for UL certification, right? It's keeping the actual high voltage, line voltage, away from where people can access it without a tool. So that is why that is all underneath that cover and why the power switch is underneath the head here now.
    4:15
    We'll get into some specifics about the CPU on this page. So the CPU has some status indicators that can be really telling. So I said we were talking about how the 48 volts comes into the CPU and it regulates everything. I'm sorry, yeah, regulates other voltages it needs. So on the CPU, we have status lights, one for 48 volts in, one for the CMOS logic, 3.3 volts, one for TTL logic, 5 volts, 12 volts, VA and BNB, voltage audio, so the voltage required to run the amplifiers, and then voltage node bus. There is voltage regulated on the CPU that travels through those CAT5 cables that actually power the node bus. About 10 volts, 9 volts. Yeah, 9 volts DC.
    5:05
    Then you've got on the CPU board itself, so the – those two guys right there, one of those is 5 volts to the CPU, and the other one is like a I'm thinking or I'm doing something light that blinks. And then right above your Cat5 or the RJ45 like data ports, then for the NodeBus on the bottom right, you have the NetBridge light. That means I am talking. If that is not lit, nothing is happening. Usually when that's not lit, you also won't have your node bus power.
    5:36
    So let's see. I need to see what the next slide is. Okay, let's talk about, like, what the output's on the CPU are. We'll just concentrate up here for a second before we get into some other stuff. Chris, pointed things. Yes. All right, I can do this if you like. Yeah. So we'll start here. This is the 48 volts coming in. It also receives a signal here to tell it whether the door is open. You might have noticed if I close the door, it turns power on. There were a few games made around 2017. They did some games that did not have the switch on the door. They're always live. There's a minor change on the power distribution board. We have some of the games made during that time.
    6:11
    So, yeah, it knows when the doors open or close. It puts a message on here telling you that you have no power to anything else but the computer. This is the video out on display here. It's LVDS. Okay, this is better. This up here is actual Ethernet, which you won't use as much in your home unless you want to go hardwired instead of using your Wi-Fi to connect. There's HDMI, which is not used in this game, but Star Wars uses it, for example, to run the little display on the play field. You have your SD card here with your software on it.
    6:44
    These are the switches coming from the coin door. They are currently the only switches in the game that are active. If I actually press buttons, you'll see it responds, because these are always live. They have a hotline directly from the door to the computer, whereas every other switch in the game gets power through a node board, and the node boards do not have power right now because the door is open.
    7:05
    These down here, while they are RJ45 connectors, they are not Ethernet. Don't plug an Ethernet thing in these. This is your data out to the rest of the game. These are all in parallel, so it doesn't matter which one you plug where. One is going to the play field, one is going to the cabinet, and we have a vacant one here in case you want to put in maybe speaker lights or a topper or whatever.
    7:25
    Down here, this is speakers out. There's your cabinet speaker. Here's the head speakers. And anything else? Other things I'll point out, this game has a battery on it. I think new games are shipping with no battery. Yeah, the battery, I've gotten questions about this, or people ask, it's like, oh, do I need to change the batteries on my Spike 2 game? No, the batteries don't do anything except for keep time and date. So if your game is connected to the internet, it pulls that from the server. the battery is not necessary on these games and to be honest like point cell batteries generally are not as dangerous as like that acid you know alkaline batteries rather so it's kind of if your game has it you don't yeah if you're online you can just remove that in fact I think the newest games are shipping without it so you can still add one if you like there's the SIM card plugs in here and you have a Wi-Fi dongle plugs in here so if you're if you're replacing the computer you need to transfer these three things to your new computer yeah So to expand on that a little bit, the small SD card, the micro SD card on the CPU carrier, that is used as a cache when you're downloading updates. It will download to that little card there so you can continue playing, and then it will install the update off of that. But it is required for Insider Connected to run. So if you ever get a message on your game that says it will identify what it might be missing for it to connect online, it'll either give you a message about the Wi-Fi adapter or that little SD card. You might have to reseat it, right? Like when games ship and FedEx is not gentle with them, sometimes those things come loose. So another thing about SD cards. Sorry, this is going to be kind of a bit of a brain dump because that's the only way I'm going to be able to convey this information.
    9:07
    If you ever boot your game up and let's go back a slide. Two lights on the bottom, VA, VNB. if those are not lit, your SD card might not be seated. That is a symptom of the SD card not being seated. And customers will call and say, it's not working. Okay, what lights do you have? I don't have these. Take the SD card out. Put it back in. Hey, it works now. All point out is it's normal for the first top, what, five or so, to come on immediately as soon as the power supply is live. VA, that's the audio voltage, and VNB, no bus voltage. They only come on after the CPU gets to a certain point in the boot up process. and then you'll see them come on a little further. And one other note about Ethernet, or I'm sorry, the data cables, right? RJ45 cables for Internet. It's also what we use to transfer data.
    9:52
    I've had people do this. It's happened at shows before when people plug the Ethernet cable from the router into the node bus and then the router smokes because you're introducing nine volts back into the router where it's not needed. Well, I don't care about the router. Did it hurt the game? No. No, that's awesome. Yeah. That's the nice thing about this system, we'll kind of get into, is that since it is a decentralized control architecture, it hurts itself. It generally only hurts one board or itself. There are instances where it could be other things, but we'll get into that later.
    10:29
    Okay. Any questions? I'm talking fast. No? Okay. Let's, you know, sorry. I have other notes I want to look at on my phone. I'm not ignoring you. I'm just reading some things here to make sure I'm covering everything.
    10:50
    Okay, yeah, let's move to the play field. So when we say it's like a decentralized system, it's also modular, right? So in theory, almost every single one of our games will be with two core nodes. Do you want to raise the play field? I'm going to. I'm going to remove the balls. Oh. So this is what we call a core node, right? So this is what drives everything on your play field.
    11:14
    Every single game will have two of these. In theory, there could be a lot of these in a game. It is modular and it is expandable.
    11:23
    So one thing that people always ask me is, like, why are there no fuses, right? So one interesting thing with these node boards here is that they have an overcurrent system, which we'll go into a little bit. There are circuits on these boards that will measure when too much current is being drawn from an application, like a fuse. That is what a fuse is. When too much current is being drawn, the fuse explodes, protecting everything else. these boards in a perfect scenario if something was drawing too much current the game would be able to sense that and shut that down thus protecting the device and the board that is why there are no fuses yeah so other right things on this first line they can drive nine core of nine coils each board can drive 64 LEDs off of itself not including the lamp boards that come off of the serial data chain, which we'll get into. It can control 32 switches and up to three separate general illumination strings. Let's see, there's other older boards, like the eight driver board or the four driver board. These are things that you would have seen more commonly in like spike one games, where this is a very common standard piece now, that's why we call it the core node. Some of your older games like Ghostbusters will use, I think Ghostbusters and Game of Thrones might be the only two Spike 1 games that use true core nodes like this. Other games will use eight or four drivers, which are just, they drive less points, right? And other things, right, as described on this slide here.
    13:06
    Let's see. The point is that the system is modular and you can put in just the nodes it needs. So if the game has however many switches and however many coils, you don't have to have unnecessary resources tied up doing nothing. If the game has a motor, we can have a little board that does a motor, and if it doesn't have it, we don't need that.
    13:25
    So on the node board itself, we'll have three status indicators, one being the I have 48 volts, one of them saying I have 6 volts or node bus voltage, and the other one says I'm thinking. the yellow one, the boot light.
    13:42
    So one thing you will notice here too, I think this gets into it a little bit later, but these games also do not have switch matrixes and they do not have lamp matrices. So in your older Williams games or Data East games or older system Stern games, right, you have a matrix that consists of a lot of wires going from point to point to point to point with a bunch of diodes and a lot of headaches. who here wanted to bang their head against the wall solving a lamp matrix issue. I saw a couple small nods, a couple hand raises. They can be tricky problems if you have a short in your switch matrix where the game thinks you're hitting switches that you're not because of a short. If you're familiar with video games, these are more wired that way where you just simply have an input, and if it connects to ground, then the computer says, oh, that switch is closed. So it's very simple. Every switch has a ground wire and then a wire that goes to a node. So there are still wires, the ground wires are still run in series, which means you've got, it starts at this board and then it runs to the first device. And then it runs from that device to the next device and that device to the next device. So you can have a broken wire problem still like you would in a switch matrix game. But there is good information in the manual, which is what I'm going to start showing you here soon, as to how we can kind of like find where that is. The vault?
    15:00
    Two core nodes Every single basically every game we ever made has two core nodes and then they will have more other auxiliary nodes like in Rush a stepper motor driver board or in King Kong, there's a servo driver board to drive the servo motors. Usually you have Node 8 does things on the lower half of the playfield. Node 9 down here will tend to do things on the upper half. They've also, helpfully, if you're looking for a broken wire problem, They give you some, rather than just make all the ground wires black, they will have stripes so the different groups have different stripe colors to help you find, oh, it's somewhere on the black-green thing. It would be kind of fun to have an older game here so you could see the, if you're not familiar, the massive amount of wire that has been taken out of most games. Because now that we aren't doing a whole matrix of switches, it cuts down the wire usage a lot. The best demonstration of this would be to move a game up a flight of stairs. Who here has moved a game up a flight of stairs? Right, okay. Yes. If you move one of these upstairs, it's a joy if you've moved, like, a Williams 90s game upstairs. The elimination of the transformer, the system that eliminates pounds and pounds of wire, and the fact that the head is steel on three sides makes these to where it's a delight to go up a flight of stairs with one.
    16:17
    It truly is. Oh, yeah, look, and we just touched on that. Yeah. The cabinet has nothing in it but a speaker, the cabinet node board, and some flipper buttons. That's about it. Let's talk about, okay, so the cabinet node board. That is mounted to the inside left of your cabinet.
    16:36
    Picture up there. This drives a few things. It drives the start button. It drives the action button. It accepts inputs from the coin door, but not the service buttons. The service buttons are only passed through on the cabinet node board. If you take a look, all those service buttons, they plug into one side of the cabinet node board and then they come out the other side and they go straight to the CPU. So in that way, like if the cabinet node board was failed for some reason, you could still use your menu buttons, right? If it wasn't powered and it needed to transmit that via the data bus, that would be bad. That would make it very hard to troubleshoot the games.
    17:14
    But yeah, they will, they will, again, your shaker motors are driven from here. They have some outputs, but for the most part, this is driving just the few things here on the front of the cabinet. The flipper buttons do not report to the cabinet node. The flipper buttons report to node eight. They have a separate disconnect down here since they're by themselves. You would think that everything would only, everything in the game should only have power and information, just those two plugs, but you have one extra plug with a playfield because the flipper buttons have to come from here up to there. I do get that a lot when people call in and they're, you know, they know enough to be dangerous, but they don't know the system well enough. And they're like, I can't find the flipper stuff on the cabinet node board because it's not there. But they go straight to node number eight. And that is why you have those disconnects down there. Again, we kind of keep a pretty similar nomenclature when it comes to status LEDs. So you're going to have, you know, red power. You're going to have a yellow, I'm thinking. And when this was done, it had a red 12 volt light that might not be the same on all boards i think we changed that color but it's not that important the you'll notice now these lights are lit right now and that's just because i have the door open if i pull the switch here they all light up and start thinking yeah so let's talk about again some of the the benefits of this system right so when you have a problem generally it will be located on one of those boards that drive the core nodes that drive the game right So again, you don't, we'll get into that part later, sorry. The rest of this, right, we've got no more transformer. These things are lighter. They don't take as much juice. You can plug way more of these into a 20 amp circuit than you could older WPC games. Like those things, what is that? An eight amp draw? It's an eight amp fuse. The amount they draw varies depending on how many lights are on. But yeah, it's like twice the current. You know, moving into the 21st century, lots of LEDs and switching power supplies. We're going to skip through some of these things. And I think what we'll do is now let's move into the manual a little bit so we can do some more demonstration with this game. So how do we read this map? This is important. Chris mentioned something about the node boards driving essentially the bottom half or the top half of the play field.
    19:32
    Let's take a look here at this diagram. Can I zoom in on this? Nope. I can hear. Oh, sorry. It's like I don't know how to use a computer.
    19:47
    Here's a diagram of the Foo Fighters Pro from the underside. Oh, there it goes. Sorry. So let's see how this is read. Right. So on the CPU, we had those two wires coming out from the data bus. One of them goes to the cabinet node board to communicate with that. The other one starts the data chain on the play field. So we've got these blue lines here. Right. One goes from the CPU, goes into node number nine. Then you've got an output on node number nine, and it goes up to node number eight.
    20:17
    Those are just in parallel. It doesn't really matter what order you physically plug them in, but they do it in the way that uses the least amount of wire usually. Yeah, it is correct. It doesn't matter where those go. People ask, it's like, well, does it go in CN4 or CN5? It doesn't matter. As long as they all find their way back to the computer. Yeah, part of the, it's what they do, right? in the simplest terms is the data from the CPU is sent to the node board and it isn't, there's something included with it. Like this data is for this address. This is for this. If it's not going to stay here, it moves it along. So that's why it doesn't matter where they go, because if the data is meant to stay there, it's going to stop at that board. So that's your data bus. You mentioned addresses. I was going to add to that. The node boards, I think we mentioned earlier that node eight and node nine, they're identical boards. And that raises the question, well, how does it know which one is talking to it? If the data is all in parallel. There are DIP switches on each node that gives it a unique identifier, a unique address. So if you get a new node board and you want to install it here, you need to set the DIP switches correctly for node 8. If you have two node boards, the DIP switch is set the same way, the computer will try to talk to both of them at once and things won't work right on the play field. It's a really easy troubleshooting tool in this system. So here's a little chart of all these dip addresses, but if you were to ever suspect,
    21:35
    do I have a node board problem? Answer is a lot of the time it's generally not, but if you ever wanted to prove that, you could swap the positions of node eight and nine. Well, with what Chris was saying, right? You've got the address is number eight, and you'll have four switches that you need to set correctly. So for node eight, it would be off, off, off, off. Node number nine would be off, off, on, off. If you needed to test that, right? Power off. Remove everything from node number 8, unscrew it from the playfield, set the dip switch to be node number 9. Remove node number 9, set the dip switches to be node number 8, and just swap them. If the problem follows the board, the problem's with the board. If it doesn't follow the board, the problem's somewhere in the playfield or somewhere in the wiring. That's one good way to get that out of the way really quick. Is my problem following this board or is it staying when I move it? Where was I on this? Oh, we were on the map. The other line that we saw on that map, I'm going the wrong direction, is serial data. This is a little over my head, but to put it simply, there are instructions given out and we have chains of serial data going into separate node boards. So let's look off of node number nine. This purple dotted line, this is a serial data cable that goes from node number nine to 9A, then into 9B. These are LED boards. These instructions coming off the board go to these satellite nodes to tell it, it's like, okay, this insert needs to light. That data, though, again, if it's not for that board, it passes along to the next one. What you'll see commonly with a lot of games i was talking to manu about guardians of the galaxy a pre-gold watch that game has like six satellite boards coming off of one of the core nodes if you have any break in your serial data so again a dirty pin a loose connection or something if that break started at again at 9a everything downstream from that is going to be affected does that make sense it's the the data is passed along in series, right? So if you have any break, it's going to be a break of instruction going forward. So to put this in, like,
    23:58
    let's make this make a little more sense. I can just point it out here if you like. Go ahead. Start pointing. Yeah, so here's node 8 up here, which everyone can see better. Coming out this end, you have a couple plugs with mostly purple, red, black, and maybe orange wires. And this is the serial data coming out. And we see one of them goes over to the trough. But anyway, the point, they will jump from here maybe to this one and then maybe to that one and then over to here. And if these lights don't work and these don't work, but these lights work, then, yeah, you almost certainly have a problem between here and here. And these plugs, you may have to cut a cable tie or two, but there's these harnesses, identical harnesses are all over the play field. They're different lengths, but you can always steal one from the upper half of the play field and test it between here and here if you need to. and you don't have to have anything special to do it with. I was wrong. The game I was thinking of is Jurassic Park. But let's look at something really complicated. Maybe I could give a little real-world example of how this works.
    25:02
    Actually, I don't remember what game I was thinking of. But let's use it as an example anyway. So let's say your dinosaur on Jurassic Park Premium is no longer moving up and down. Okay, so what could that be? That could be a power problem, right? That could be a bad motor, but it could also be bad data. So how would we test something like that? If you were to call me and tell me that, like, at first, let's do something easy. Let's reseat all the connectors. Let's make sure nothing has jiggled loose. What happened? Does that fix it? No. Okay, well, let's move on and parse it down into, like, separate assemblies. Is the motor good? How do we test that? This is a fun trick. Nine-volt battery. get a nine volt battery get some alligator clips and hook it to the motor make sure it's unplugged from the driver board first but if the motor spins the motor is good right so could it be the uh driver board perhaps this happens a lot especially with older jurassic parks is you're going to have a jiggled loose connection here at node 9a it's not showing what you're oh sorry so let's watch that chain again so that this part will make sense, right? 9A, data from 9 goes up into 9A. If it's not supposed to stay here, it needs to go instruct the driver board. It's going to go out and get back over here to the driver board. If you have a crummy connection there, that could be all that's causing that T-Rex to not move up and down anymore, right? And again, 9A is a board with a bunch of LEDs on it. If you go into lamp test or play the game and say, well, all those lights are working correctly, we know the data is getting at least that far, and is good up to that point. So a lot of the times when people are having LED problems, the number one thing I'll tell them to do is start by reseating the cables on the serial data harness. Start from the node board and just do all of them. Remove the serial data plug from here, replug it in, go on to the next board using your manual. The manual is super, super critical to figuring some of these things out. Plug it back in, unplug that, and just reseat the whole chain. Put it back in LampTest. Does things start working again? They might. the, let's see, moving on from that. Yeah.
    27:17
    Yeah. So, yeah, so if you had, so yeah, try that. You could put the game in LED test, like Chris mentioned. Do you have all the LEDs? If you are missing some, that could be part of what is triggering or that might be the key to solving right like do I have a serial data problem or not but again it's like the best way to troubleshoot these problems is starting at the simplest freest thing and then moving forward replacing a motor driver board that you think might be bad is going to cost you a lot of money but maybe you could have fixed it by just removing the plug and putting it back on and you know save yourself some money yeah as uh we've been fixing things, that's kind of the real thing for me, because I'm always in a hurry. I want to figure out the fastest way I can how to find a problem. Because I'm an operator and I'm cheap, I don't want to spend any money if I don't have to. So instead of buying a board and see if that's it, let's see if we can prove whether it's the board or not. For example, on these boards that just have LEDs on them, a lot of these are unique to a game. You look at this one, it's a very unique shape. That's because this particular playfield layout required a board that shape with those LEDs on it. If I wanted to prove whether that was bad or not, and I didn't have another Foo Fighters, like, well, where am I going to get one? Well, these generally, these lamp boards, generally, it doesn't have to be the right one as long as it has the same number of LEDs on it. The game won't know the difference. It'll simply say, turn on these, however many, 24 LEDs, and then send the data on to whatever's downstream. If you can find any other game you have that has a 24 LED board, you could plug it in and see whether they appear to act correctly or work, and that'll tell you without having to go buy something expensive that's unique.
    29:00
    No, I don't think I've seen one that isn't a multiple of eight. Computers love powers of two, so it's going to be eight or 24 or 32 or whatever. But, yeah, they're not always on the board, but they'll be able to drive that many. There'll be so many on the board, and then they'll have a few plugs where they can stick little onesies, twosies off the edge because it's not practical to make a unique board for every LED on the play field. So you get these outliers here that will plug onto that. But if you add them all up, it's going to be 16 or 24 or whatever. Some of the boards are smart, and they have drivers to drive lamps. So it gets the instruction, and then it will drive a lamp that is going to be a satellite to that satellite node. But some of them you'll just have, again, serial data coming in and nothing else. Can we put the screen back on really quick? Okay, JAWS. JAWS is a nightmare of serial data. Like, let's just look at this really quick. because this is something that I've had customers contact me for where like the motor is not working. The motor driver board is board 9G. Look at the path. It goes from nine to nine A and then to nine B and then the nine C and then the nine D and nine E and so on Right So if you have one bad connection between boards nine C and nine D nothing else downstream is going to work I just sorry this is kind of dumb to like pound in but this is really important to like troubleshooting on these games. So important. I'd also say it's fairly rare, at least given my experience, that you have a problem like that. It's pretty common with a game that has a lot going on, like Jaws, right? It's like, because again, you have to take in the factor of like the jostling and shipment and stuff you know it's like my motor doesn't work it's like you know it's new so it's going to work let's let's figure out where it's at i've seen this problem a bit just because there's a long path and one bad connection can cause some headaches yeah usually you don't see more than about three or four sub nodes coming off the main nodes but um okay let me see the rest of these slides here yeah let's let's concentrate on the manual now because i a lot of people don't know where to find this information in the manual so it can be handy. So this is the light switch and driver reference page. This one's going to help you demystify where the location of all that stuff is. Use that to figure out the pathing of the serial data coming from your boards. Here in section 3.1, this is going to be the part number and everything that, you know, is mounted under the play field when it comes to like electronics. So node zero is your computer. Node 1 is the coin door board.
    31:28
    The cabinet node board, node 4 is your QR scanner. Node number 8 is your lower playfield driver. Node 9 on this game is your back, the rear of the playfield. And node 12 is generally the topper.
    31:43
    So that's where that information is. Here's some driver information. So how do you read this? We're having a problem with our kicking target on foo fighters. So what can we learn from number 11 here? Number 11 is the ID and solenoid test. It's called the kicking target. This solenoid is driven off of node 9. The connector on that board is CN8. It's a unique like signal wire is pin 10 and that is an orange black wire. And then the voltage supplied to that coil is going to be on pins one to four and that's going to be a gray brown wire right then you've got some other coil information these charts are really handy it just looks like a lot of word soup but they are really really useful for helping you tack down where information is especially when it's coming to a switch problem so we know we've talked about how those wires are running series and a small break could cause something downstream from it not to So let's see, on our Foo Fighters, let's say the center loop switch isn't working. Okay, so what can we learn from the table here on number 53? Again, switch is number 53. It's called the center loop. It's driven off of node 9. It reports the connector CN11. Its unique signal wire is pin number 9, and it is a tan white wire. The ground, the common wire that's daisy chain is either on pin 10 or 11 or both, and it's a black-gray wire. So, okay, you look at that switch and everything's hooked up. It still doesn't work. Well, what else do we need to look at? Using this chart in the manual here, right, we can look and see what other switches are driven off of CN11 on node 9. that the overlord left, the overlord right, the overlord opto, the overlord hit target, the center spinner opto, if you were going to try to track down a potential common break, this is going to be the easiest way to figure it out, right? I know where these switches are now, and I need to follow that black green one. You go check all those things and see if you can find the break. So I had an opto switch in a Urex head that broke and it reported an entire node board 9 failure. Yeah. So why would that have purpose? Just saying the switch isn't connected. So the optos are unique because they require power, right? So an opto is taking 5 volts from the node board to power the LEDs. that is the same 5 volts that runs all the electronics on that node board. So if suddenly you are shorting 5 volts to the ground, that is going to drive the 5 volts on the node board down, and it's going to shut that off and protect itself. And since it doesn't have 5 volts, it can't think, and the node board is down. This is something I was going to bring up later if we got to it, but yeah, it's as good a time as any since you brought it up. Kyle mentioned earlier that they have the overcurrent protection, And the overcurrent protection is a signal that's essentially that every driven device can sense the overcurrent condition. So if a coil is drawing too much current, if I was to short this coil together and then drive it, whichever node drives this would sense within microseconds that something's very wrong and would shut down activity in that node and then quickly pulse everything to see which one is doing it and then not use whichever device is doing it. this is awesome, and it can tell where the problem is.
    35:26
    And it does that for LEDs, whether they're on boards or by themselves, and it does it for coils or any flash lamps that are driven. But the 5 volts on the Noteboard is not a driven device. It's just a power supply. And if that is short, the Noteboard can't know that that's a problem.
    35:44
    There's things it can't know because it doesn't have one of the voltages it needs. The firewall regulator is smart enough to shut down and not hurt anything. The node knows something is wrong, but that's a case where it can't tell you where it is. However, you could start unplugging anything that uses firewalls from that node, and one at a time, and you'd see like, oh, after a few games, you'd see, if I unplug this one, then everything works fine. But where does that go? Then you could go to your manual, open it up and see that, well, whatever it is, CN11 is, oh, that's the T-Rex jaw opto. OK, you could try unplugging just that opto. You could unplug the transmitter first, and then the receiver, and see which one it is. And you'd eventually conclude that, yes, I have a short somewhere on the T-Rex opto receiver, whatever it was. A lot of pit-ball troubleshooting, it's really easy with the spike system. It's a little harder on older systems. But it is sectionalizing things and removing things and seeing where the problem acts up or comes back. So yeah, like what Chris was saying, It's like, okay, my node board is reporting dead. That's not good. Unplug everything. Just have power and data. Everything. Just leave the power and the data on. Yeah, the power comes in on the, the power's usually a gray wire. Here's your 48 volts and ground, and here's the data coming in so the computer can talk to it. If you unplug every other thing from that, and it runs okay, and the computer says, oh, everything looks good to me, I mean, you're going to get whatever. It's going to complain that it can't see balls in the trough or it can't see what the T-Rex is doing, but it's not going to tell you it's broken. But if it's communicating back to the CPU, then you know the node port's good and the problem might be somewhere else. It will link the same as the other one. So let's keep on the overcurrent thing and maybe using the manual to troubleshoot again. A problem that we have all the time is a intermittent GI short. Has anyone ever had an intermittent GI short on a Spike 2 game? Only TJ. Okay, so a lot of the time what happens is, and Michael Madsen,
    37:40
    a lot of people, you'll get calls, I'm playing my game and I hit the flippers and then it goes dark and the flippers die and then it comes back
    37:48
    What's happening here is there is a if you have a small short on like a general illumination socket like this due to a teeny piece of wire finding its way inside the socket or something rotating stupid and now it's touching and you have a
    38:05
    Direct short, but it only happens under vibration the node board is going to shut itself down to protect itself and then say, and then it will reboot, and try to say, hey, where's the problem? But since it's intermittent, because it's vibration dependent, it's gonna boot up just fine. Oh, the short's gone, we can play again. And then you're gonna hit the flippers in just the right way, and that little wire is gonna wiggle around, and it's gonna short out the socket. It's gonna say, oh, I need to shut myself down, and do it over and over and over again. It's a real, real, real easy thing to solve. It's just kind of time consuming. So let's say it's usually node eight, right? Because you've got a lot of vibration down there, flippers a lot of the time it happens to be the bolts that are under the in lanes right your return guides they're close to the flippers and what you'll do is um okay if this we think this is the problem i'll tell someone um we're going to unplug uh unplug cn15 on node 8. that's your gi feed wire our feed connector uh does the do the flippers ever die again when you have cn15 unplug If no, you've taken away the possibility for it to detect that short, right? So it's going to work. It's never going to shut down. So now it's a matter of figuring out where and what holes it is. So we know that we have a short on node 8 on CN15. So we can come into our manual and find the general illumination that's driven on node 8. Here we have it. Bottom white GI, 14, driven on node 8. That's your CN15, blah, blah, blah. You kind of know how to read these now, I think. then we can take those numbers 2 1 1 2 1 2 and we can go back up to our handy dandy light map which is the other direction and you are presented with something kind of crazy but if we look in these positions right let me zoom in a little bit so it's a little easier to see you see 2 1 1 2 1 1 2 1 1 2 1 1 2 1 1 2 1 2 those are all the positions of all of those lights so now you kind of have the ammo right or the knowledge like where do i need to look and what i always suggest to people to do is like this is annoying this is a annoying thing to fix because you have to be thorough you what i always recommend people is like if possible you just remove every single socket remove a bowl with a good light look inside make sure there's no debris make sure there's no solder ball that's worked its way somewhere silly if you are thorough and look through and find uh or do find you home The reason you get this kind of problem is because these, unlike the LEDs, which are all surface mounted on the boards, well, these are LEDs as well, but the point is the general illumination uses a bayonet socket, and you've got two lugs, and they must not touch. So this lug here on the outside must not touch the barrel of the socket. That's a dead short. Now, they have shrink tube on here, et cetera, to try to prevent that, and it's about what will happen. Like, say you've got a stream of lights across the back top of the play field, and you wanted to put an arc blade. So you lift the play field out, and you didn't realize you tweaked one of the lamp sockets, and now the load's bent over, and you've created a short circuit. And it might even be intermittent. Another reason I'll see these is somebody soldering something and drips a blotter solder onto one. Or we had one on the socket that was loose. The whole hook connection that holds the socket together was loose, and so the two parts were able to touch. I had one, not in a spike game, but a customer brought in a 2mm 2 that had an air vent. And he had a nut in the socket under the bolt. No, I think it was a socket with no bolt in it, but it was a nut that had welded itself into the socket because of the short. Yeah. Yeah, so, and it's like, a lot of this is detective work that requires some patience and some ability to kind of understand, and how can I section this out? Some games break the rule of node 8 being the bottom and node 9 being the top. For some reason, sometimes node 8 is the left and node 9 is the right. So you'll have a weird problem where you can't, like Chris said, with a GI short on one of the back panel lights, if you think that's your problem, you've got a plug that you can disconnect the back panel from. So what I'm trying to drive into you is when you're troubleshooting something, with this system, you have the ability to really sectionalize and unplug and kind of pinpoint where these problems might be, then that is the best way to troubleshoot. Can you bring up the page with all the lights on it again? Something else I'll point out, if we're used to troubleshooting this type of problem on a WPC game or other games, we would put 18 ramps on a string of general elimination, whereas here they tend not to put more than about, I don't know, 8 or maybe 10 at most. So you can look at this and see all the 211s down there, and those are all the places you'll have to look. And if you were to unsightly say just the left ones, So now we know it's one of these four versus those four. If you have one side of these, then the problem goes away. So it's not nearly as many places they have to look. Yeah. Don't forget the ones under the . Yes. Yeah. Those ones can be a little more difficult to service, but it's possible. Not only in Patto, but sometimes over there.
    43:16
    Yeah. What are we doing on time? Hey, we probably got it done. Yeah. Can we, any more questions? I really like the question. Oh, thank goodness. Okay. Is there a reason why the CTO board can't detect which node board went down in the general execution short? Or at least a node board that could be causing the problem? So it can, but not in an intermittent short. If I have some alligator clips right now and I did an edge short on this and I held it there, the game would be able to tell me that check GI string 211 because it's constant, right? If it only happens when you get the flippers, sometimes that's, it doesn't store that data and systems people are aware of that. And hopefully in the future, there might be something to help with that, but I can't speak much more on it. But that's why that can be more frustrating. You kind of have to figure out where to look as opposed to a constant short, which will always be on. So things we'd like to see, error history, we can go back and say, a week ago that happened. And it was this particular string. Great question. Common failures, like if one were to stock some spares, what parts do you see going on? This is another great benefit, right, is if you have multiple strike two games, and a lot of people tend to, you have two boards that are the same every single game. You can stock a court note, right? Having a court note on hand is handy for troubleshooting. If you have something that is known good and you're having trouble with something, right, being able to swap it in place just to kind of check that off is pretty handy.
    44:55
    I mean, otherwise, it's like, of course, like, common parts, I mean, flipper parts, right? Everyone knows that. But when we do, like, specific spike-to-stuff, having a core node on hand is handy. Having a CPU on hand is handy. They are expensive and they can be budget... I say they handy but I wouldn recommend the average person have a spare It Off I just gonna bring that up yeah I don even recommend you having a spare core node because they don fail very often Because you can prove whether it bad or not by swapping the two and then spend the money if you have to. Well, that's the other thing, too. With multiple Spike 2 games in your collection, you could always, if you're having a problem with the Foo Fighters, you could take one from your Godzilla, put it in, and that would be a known working board. Does the problem follow the board? It doesn't stay when you install something. TJ mentioned Optos. that is something you can keep around. The opto consists of a transmitter and a receiver. There's one right here in this bracket. You've got an infrared LED that gets five volts, shines infrared light on the receiver, which sees the light, and the middle wire on that connector sends that information, whether the beam made it there or not, back to a node board. These disconnect with a single plug, and they've got a harness on them about a foot long, and they're inexpensive. So it helps to have some of those around just because, why not? They don't cost much and occasionally go bad. They are. They're just very useful for troubleshooting. TJ has helpfully provided one. You can see here. These do come in a few different flavors. This is the little surface mount one. Because sometimes there's just no room to sneak in the one with the plastic holder for the transmitter. This is all surface mount. So check your games to see which one you need. But almost every game uses the 515-0215-00 and 01, the transmitter and receiver. They're the ones that look similar to the ones Williams used with the black and the white little plastic thing These ones are kind of shaped like a popsicle stick, but they have a notch in them to help them, to keep them from rotating. So these are used in some places, like Chris said, where space is of a concern, but your game might use them and yet they're cheap. I don't know retail costs, but they're not expensive. They're like 10, maybe $12 for each side. Having those on hand would be really handy. The different types are also interchangeable for testing. You can plug this free pin into the other side of the free pin. Yeah, it won't mount, but electrically it'll still work for test purposes. Yeah. I always like to explain if you don't know what these are, it's like the garage door opener. So you don't like, you know, close it on your dog or something when you're trying to close the garage. It sends a beam and then it sees a beam. If the beam is broken, the game can translate that to something happening, right? So they're hard to troubleshoot. Another thing, actually, this is a good time to bring this up. There's a light on these that will change when you break the beam. That has nothing to do with what the actual circuitry that sends the signal to the computer sees, right? That's a separate circuit. So you're sitting there and saying, well, my light's going on and off, so it's not my off though. No, do not believe that all the time. What that tells you is that your transmitter's working at least because it was seeing light. It has seen the light that has been broken, but we don't know whether it was able to tell the light board that the light has been broken. But it's probably okay.
    48:04
    Some of the receiver lights on those, especially the smaller ones, will get dimmer or brighter as you adjust them, like on Elvira. So as you have a stronger transmitter, the received light will get brighter.
    48:20
    So that's worth keeping in mind. Interesting. Other questions? First, thank you for your textful videos on YouTube. Appreciate that. Thank you. I don't know if you can speak to it, but do you have any idea when the service menu updates, are you going to be starting to push out the other 5G games? No, but as you saw last week, we did two more titles, Metallica and Dungeons and Dragons. The reason it can't just be a push out immediately is it takes a lot of software support to get those set up. Have you seen the new venue at all? just on the videos. Like when we do those things, right? Like every, now that we have like descriptions of what all these adjustments actually do, right? Someone in software needs to go in and write a description and then they need to put that in and that's just time consuming, right? When you have games that have 200 plus feature adjustments, that's a lot of time. And you look at like King Kong, if you go to the gorilla test, you actually see the gorilla on the screen and like what he's doing and all that stuff. It's not just make this look different. They're adding a lot of stuff for each game. But they are coming in all spiking games, that is correct? Eventually. That is the plan, yeah.
    49:29
    I can't speak to that 100%, but I mean, that is the goal, right? Yeah. Yes, it is coming. Thank you. But it's going to take time. It's not going to all hit at once. That's what it is. Because it is a considerable amount of program for time. But you did a lot of it, right, Mike? I helped. Mark Monaco did the heavy lifting, but I helped design the look. The look and writing some of the descriptions. Yeah. Thanks, Mike. We appreciate it. . The new service menu brings these games into the 21st century with a whole graphical update of the GUI. If you're interested and you don't own one of those games, like I did do a video on YouTube that's pretty brief, but it goes over like what it looks like. So there's a lot of stuff that's moved. So it's gonna take a lot of getting used to kind of where to find some of these settings now, but the goal with it was to make it easier, to make it make more sense. Instead of having to go to feature adjustment 185 to adjust the up kicker strength for this coil, right? you go now to adjustments, machine settings, coil adjustments, and now you can adjust all the coils in one menu instead of going between a bunch of different adjustments. Yeah, pretty slow.
    50:55
    Anything else? It drives the same if you're used to doing things quickly and lightly. Except for pushing the service button seven times to get it to switch to answer. But, so you'll have to retrain your brain for that just a little bit, but it's fine. Yeah, did anyone learn anything? Yeah. It should be noted, like what you said about receding the SD cards, never do it with the power on, because you could break the car. Yeah, okay, let's talk about power on. Definitely don't do anything up here with the power on, but you know a cool trick? You said everything runs off the 48 volts, right? The interlock switch removes 48 volts from the entirety of the cabinet, you can work on the game with the interlock switch off. Don't unplug boards, right? But if you need to swap an assembly, or you need to, you've removed all power from this. Yeah, can you feel the cabinet node have no power at all right now? Not on all of them. Huh? Not on all of them. I mentioned a few earlier from like 2018, 2017, a few of them did not have the door switch. The interlock switch got added about halfway, or like really early on in Deadpool. So original run Deadpool. So your original Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Aerosmiths, Batmans won't have, and Guardians won't have interlock switches. So definitely put Power Up there. May of 2019. Thank you. I just got all the good information.
    52:25
    But yeah. I can talk about this for hours. So if you have more questions. I can mention three weird things I've seen. Real-world examples of 5-volt note bus shorts. One of which you ever brought up, okay, because it was Jurassic Park, dinosaur jaw opto, a screw can lose, the optos flopping around in there, and it was touching, wires touching ground. So 5-volt shorts to ground, the note shuts down, and we had to find it. The other two I had were, I had a customer with a rush. He plays it every so often, note 8 would shut down. This means you see the lower half of the playbook go dark momentarily, his flippers die, et cetera. It's very annoying. It makes the game no fun. So I had him unplug things. The problem was it was extremely intermittent. I was there for like two and a half hours where I'm plugging things. And we appeared to have it lowered down that it's down here somewhere. But then we plugged everything back in and it was still working. And we shrugged and said, well, I don't know. But then he called me a few days later and says, is it doing it again? Anyway, so I was like, OK, unplug all these things and he would play it for like a week. And then he would say, OK, now plug in this one. And we worked our way through that. and it comes down to where he said, okay, I think I got it. If I don't leave just this one unplugged, then it never happens. And what that one was, was the flash lamp on the right slingshot. And what had happened was the wire to the flash lamp, the five-volt wire, because it's an LED and it runs on five volts, you have the kicker switches here, which are these leaf switches, and they're fairly sharp. The wire had gotten moved at some point, and the sharp part of the switch blade had cut through the red wire, so that when the kicker would kick, Maybe they would touch, maybe they wouldn't. So it was very intermittent, but at some point he figured that out and then we were able to go out there and go, oh, well look, there it is, there's the problem right there. The other one was a man-made problem. This was on a Venom. Venom has locks on the left and right where they keep balls in escrow and they're read with optical switches. Optical switches have five volts to them. Somebody had said, oh, somebody online is selling little 3D printed covers to cover up the ugly board for the outdoors. They remove the nuts, they take the board off, or they take the nuts off, they put the cover on, they put the nuts back on, but they didn't notice that there were little spacers between the board and where it mounts, so now they've tightened their board down and it moves further this way than it was before, and the header pins are now touching like all these rails and stuff. That's fine, you now have five volts on that rail and this ramp, and this isn't the same game, but you know, this other ramp, and so you have five volts and all this stuff all the way up to the bell tower, which is still not a problem until you hit the target right here. And you have to hit hard because this switch has a ground on it. If you hit it hard enough, it would touch something so that you would get five volts short of the ground. He noticed this and his complaint was like, yeah, if I hit that target, everything goes dark. And I'm like, okay, well, let's look there. Eventually we figured it out. But that's the weird kind of things that could happen. But this was a man-made one where it was an own goal essentially, where somebody made a mistake and put it back together. That's insane. That's a, that does not happen very often, but that's, it's a goofy one. And it can't happen by itself, really. No, yeah, that could not happen by itself. That's, yeah, that's. So, yeah, things to take away. Use your manual.
    55:45
    Use the manual to figure out where things are and how to sectionalize it. That is really the best way to kind of navigate weird problems when you're trying to figure out why a switch isn't working, Why is my game flickering on and off when I hit the flippers? Those are the two most common things that new owners and most owners will experience. Because in my experience, and I think Chris' experience too, the site system is very reliable. There's not, unless you have fringe cases of certain things, there's not a lot other than wear and tear. A pinball is a game of throwing a steel ball on a wooden play field and things made of plastic. But electronically, these things are pretty robust. It's interesting to note that sometimes people are like, oh, I have some LEDs not working. Do you think the LEDs are bad? And the way to bet is no.
    56:39
    I used to be able to tell people, I have never, ever seen one of these surface-mounted LEDs on a board fail. I've now seen one fail where we could say, okay, that looks like it actually electrically failed. I've had two that were bad. The other one was one that somebody bumped and knocked it off the board. But only one that actually was like, well, that one went out. So this is after some hundreds and hundreds of games, and they each have hundreds and hundreds of LEDs. It's just very, very rare that they go bad. The other thing I'd like to point out, Kyle has mentioned all the things that are different about the system, but there's a lot that's the same as far as troubleshooting, in that you have a bunch of coils, they get positive voltage, and if you try it ground to the other side, they go, they fire. And the feature lamps, it's an LED, it's got five volts up here, and if you ground the other wire, it's going to light up. And you can use that for troubleshooting. All this stuff is grounded. You can get a jumper wire and jumper it. Just be sure you're on the right side of the lamp or whatever, but also rest easy in the knowledge that if you ground the five volts, the node's just going to shut it down and you won't hurt anything. So that's nice at least. It will protect itself. Yeah, an alligator clip is a really handy thing to troubleshoot the game. If you use your switch chart, again, is the problem with my board or is the problem with something else? For the switch, it's never the board. I've never seen a switch problem with a node board. You can always jumper switches, right? So if we needed to test the right in-lane switch on the node board, if you put an alligator clip on C and 11 between pin number 6 and pin 11 or 12, and it's in switch test, the game is going to say, hey, that switch closed, right? So it's a lot of the standard troubleshooting stuff, the stuff maybe you could take from other games, your Williams games, your Dade East games, Sega games, apply to this system. It's just more robust. If you could bring the screen back up. I wanted to point out that there are things like the left slingshot, right slingshot share common ground wire, which is the same color as the end of stroke switches and the shooter link switch, but they are on different input connectors, connector pins. So if you lose both of your slingshots, you probably have a bad pin or a broken wire just for that one. I've seen a bunch of the connectors older games will have pins correctly and you get an intermittent connection from that. Yeah, but knowing that even though they share the same color, they're different things. Okay. That's a good point. I actually never knew that. Thanks for teaching me another thing, TJ. And that's common. Those sets of switches, the slingshots and strokes and shooter lane, are common across all the games. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Any more questions? We're out of time. Okay. Great presentation, Kyle. Thank you. I'm not going to say anything, but I'm very happy that people showed up to this, and I hope that you learned something, and it wasn't just me blabbering. And I would love to do another seminar of some sort, or more demonstrations. I love to teach people about pinball, because the more people that know things about pinball means the more people that can fix their own games and have a good time, right? It's the funnest part of owning a game is figuring out why it's not working for you.