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Part 9: 1985 Pinstar Gamatron Project! The unhacking begins!

Pinball Shenanigans·video·29m 33s·analyzed·Sep 10, 2025
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.020

TL;DR

Gammatron restoration: grounding fixes, board install, J3 connector rewiring before Iceland trip.

Summary

Mike Dus continues restoration of his 1985 Pinstar Gammatron pinball machine, focusing on fixing grounding issues and installing circuit boards before leaving for Iceland. He secures a broken ground wire with an eyelet, tests voltages on the power supply, installs and modifies a solenoid driver board, replaces broken standoffs, and begins the tedious process of rewiring a J3 power connector by cross-referencing schematics with wire colors. Despite time constraints before his trip, he makes significant progress on the 'unhacking' of the machine.

Key Claims

  • Test point 1 voltage remains low despite grounding wire repair, likely causing dim inserts

    high confidence · Direct measurement and comparison to expected 3.5-4V range; acknowledged as non-critical issue to address later

  • Solenoid driver board has been previously refurbished with ground mods, C-23 capacitor replacement, and fuse mod in July 2025

    high confidence · Visual inspection of board showing documented modifications; notes visible on board itself

  • New 7-digit orange LED displays purchased for $300 CAD delivered, eliminating need for plasma displays and dummy zeros

    high confidence · Direct statement about deal with friend Mitch; specific pricing and specifications provided

  • The transformer has been modified for high-tap solenoid/flipper action per manual instructions (jumper moved from 5-7 to 9-11)

    high confidence · Visual inspection of transformer showing cut jumper and wire relocations matching manual specs

  • Bally and Stern System 1 schematics are essentially identical with minor pin labeling differences

    medium confidence · Cross-referencing schematics for J3 connector; some discrepancies noted (A2J3-18 vs blank, knocker pin differences)

Notable Quotes

  • “Do not stick it back in there. If so, you'll start blowing fuses and or possibly house breakers.”

    Cory @ ~07:00 — Cory's expert guidance on grounding wire prevents potential electrical hazard; shows reliance on experienced community member knowledge

  • “We are in business, boys and girls.”

    Mike Dus @ ~14:00 — Marker of successful voltage testing and readiness to proceed with board installation after extended troubleshooting

  • “I really got to share how much fun I'm having.”

    Mike Dus @ ~28:30 — Reflects enthusiasm despite tedious connector pin-matching work; characterizes restoration as enjoyable despite technical challenges

  • “Everything matched up almost identically except I'm missing brown green on pin 13 and then I'm missing brown green on pin 25. Wait, how can the same color be used?”

    Mike Dus @ ~32:00 — Shows detective work in solving schematic puzzle; realizes missing colors are jumper wires in connector itself

Entities

Mike DuspersonGammatrongameCorypersonMitchpersonJamiepersonPinball ShenanigansorganizationInternet Pinball DatabaseorganizationFlight 2000game

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Cory provides expert guidance on electrical/grounding modifications and component sourcing (standoffs, soundboards)

    high · Direct citation of Cory's advice preventing electrical hazard; noted as source of standoff parts; history of soundboard refurbishment collaboration

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Restoration philosophy involves 'unhacking' machines by reverting modifications and returning to original specifications where possible

    high · Episode title 'The unhacking begins'; references to restoring original knocker assembly and chime boxes; removing dummy components

  • $

    market_signal: Availability and repurposing of compatible boards from previous projects (Viper, Supersonic, Evil Knievel) suggests robust secondary market for pinball components

    medium · Multiple solenoid driver, lamp driver, and MPU boards available from previous restoration work; knocker assembly sourced from different game

  • ?

    technology_signal: J3 power connector missing on circuit board assembly, requiring reverse-engineering of connector pinout from schematic and physical wire matching

    high · Entire connector cut off from solenoid driver; required 1+ hour of schematic cross-referencing and wire color matching to restore correct connections

  • ?

    technology_signal: Reliance on Internet Pinball Database schematics for connector pinout and wire color identification in restoration

    high · Flight 2000 schematic cross-referenced for J3 connector; wire colors matched to pin numbers using database resources

Transcript

youtube_auto_sub · $0.000

0:04
I'm Mike Dus and this is Pinball Shenanigans. [Music] Okay, welcome back to another episode of Garbatron. Today, well, I literally have about a couple hours and then uh I'm going to Iceland. Yeah, it's a beautiful sunny warm day outside. There's Jay, the neighbor's house. I'm going to go to a land of rain and wind and cloud and cold. But it's going to be awesome. So Jamie and I are leaving in pretty much a couple hours. Got to hit the road to go to Toronto to fly out 5 and 1 half hour flight. And then we arrive at like 4:30 a.m. our time, which is 8:30 a.m. their time. And then we're going to do a full day and night, which is my birthday tomorrow, September 11th. So, pretty cool way to spend a birthday on a boat cruise on the I think North Atlantic Ocean. And uh you know, it's a a boat cruise that's supposed to hope to see the northern lights, but judging by the weather, that's not likely going to happen. But it'll still be pretty cool. Anyway, so I've got a couple hours before that happens. I'm all packed up, ready to go. So, in the last episode, I found that this wire was broken off of wherever it actually originally went, and that was causing me some grief. So, I have secured it there for now. That's just temporary. I want to put like an eyelet on this wire and secure it to the screw properly. And then I'll have proper grounding going to my transformer and power supply. And then uh measuring voltages like in the last video will actually work as they should. And think it's kind of important to have this whole thing getting proper ground. Um anyway, so once I do that, then I think it might be okay to start installing boards. I got me a good solenoid driver board somewhere. Brand new Weebly MPU. I'm sure I've got plenty of decent lamp driver boards. And then I just got to find a uh stern sound board. And then some soundboard ribbon cables to go from the soundboard to the MPU. I'm pretty sure that the Weebly MPU. Yeah. Here's lamp driver right here. What does it say? From Supersonic and is Okay. Boom. One board down. Here is my Weebly board. Brand new. There's the sound cable section right there.
3:16
I got to zoom in a little better with my camera and my eyeballs. MPU 200. Does it say? Um,
Quicksilver
game
Vipergame
Supersonicgame
Evil Knievelgame
  • ?

    technology_signal: Migration from plasma alphanumeric displays to 7-digit orange LED displays with front-mount design, eliminating dummy sockets

    high · New LED displays purchased for $300 CAD; described as eliminating need for high voltage test point 2 (180V) and dummy light sockets

    • 3:32
    well, I'll check the manual to find out which of these dip switches need to be on and off to program it for flight 2000. What is that? What is these dip switches? There's the game selection there. So, what are these dip switches? I forget. Oh, to make it. So, it's either Balley MPU 100 or Stern MPU 200. So, we're going stern. So, we need all of the DIP switches on slashin. And then check this out. This is stuff I haven't even like when I was dealing with uh my last project which was Viper. Um, this is all just stuff that I was dealing with, including, well, Sonic, I guess. Uh, supersonic. I didn't even like have to go digging for these boards. They're just all here. This is the old Viper board. And um, wait, no, that's not the one I wanted to use. I've got one upstairs somewhere. What is this one? That is just another one. I think I was testing in Viper.
    4:50
    That's not the one. So, I've got a solenoid driver upstairs that I refurbed and I know is tested and working. So, I'm going to grab that and uh we'll start with the solenoid driver board. Check its voltages. Actually, I'll start with this wire. I'll do the thing to that, then check these voltages, make sure they're good, and then pop in a solenoid driverboard. But this is going to be a bit of a hiccup here. Going have to figure out what that's all about. So, um, while editing the last video, I did learn and find out that these are almost certainly for the old knocker assembly, which was somewhere up here, I think. I don't see the holes for them. So maybe this metal was not installed in the exact same spot as it was before, but knocker goes here. And then I discovered also that these wires were for the original chime box. And you can see these are the brackets. There was two chime boxes. One which had three chimes, one which had one chime. And they were mounted right there. for the old Bobby Ore. And that's why this hole was cut in the bottom of the cabinet all wonky. It was not your most precise oval cut in the world, but they did that to match the speaker that they added. So, you know, starting to piece this whole thing together. I think I have a chime box here. Let's look for fun.
    6:38
    Uh yeah, that's not the same style chime box though. There's a different bracket, so can't demonstrate that, but it's good to know that I don't really need to address that. And then this is a ballet knocker assembly from an old evil conval which is probably the exact same knocker assembly that was in Bobby or see some holes that look like they'll line up perfectly to the knocker plate. Boom. Good find there. So, we'll have knockage. All right, I'm going to go find that board upstairs and uh be right back. The other thing I have to do is check all my standoffs. Make sure that they're standoffish. That one feels broken, but if not, I'm pretty sure I have some in stock. I think I ordered some not that long ago through Corey Cook. All right, I'll be back. Okay, let's start with selecting the perfect eyelet. Well, I picked a very small yellow one and then
    8:07
    I plucked off the plastic part of it. I'm left with that and a black spot on my thumb and finger, wherever that came from. Oh, this coil sleeve. You just brush against those and you get filthy. So then I squeezed the little nubs together.
    8:36
    And I'm going to twofold this guy. I'm going to squeeze the crap out of this more on the insulation. And then I'm going to solder the wire portion to the eyelet. So I have uh double duty. Okay, this thing is on there good. It's Squos. It's soldered. And that is not going anywhere forever. Now let's see if I can uh reattach this singlehandedly. Got to feed through three things here. Can I pull it off? How many shenaniganders does it take to install the screw?
    9:28
    Where did this wire go originally? I wonder. Doesn't really matter, but I'm kind of curious. At first I said, "Oh, Cory, I'm just assuming it goes into one of these. It popped out of one of these guys." He says, "Uh, do not stick it back in there. If so, you'll start blowing fuses and or possibly house breakers." So, I took his advice and I did not try to put it in one of those things. Um, but that should do the trick. So now for fun, we're going to go back to measuring the voltages the way I did the first time and see what happens and see if for some reason our test point one voltage is uh back up to snuff now. I doubt it, but I'm going to check it anyways. I can't remember if I mentioned that um I know the manual one of the steps it said to change some settings and some jumper wires and some wiring on the transformer itself to add like some extra ump to the solenoids. I don't know if I mentioned but it is definitely has been done. I think there was a jumper from log 5 to 7 that was cut. You can kind of see a little bit of the old jumper there. And then the wire was moved from five to 9. And then a jumper was added from 9 to 11. So that is what the manual is telling us to do when converting gamatron for extra flipper action and solenoid action in general. So it has in fact been done on this transformer. I'm wondering if I should undo it, put it back to normal. Like does it really need to be hight? like this sounds like, you know, hightapping a machine, but I only knew about doing that for the most part, I think, on electro EM machines, electromechanical style. But I don't know, maybe have I done it on system one games, got very possible. On the older games, it literally has a lug and a wire that says something like low tap, high tap. So, you move the wire just from one lug to the other. Boom, you're done. I've done that three or four times. I just assumed it was EM style though, but maybe solid state, but definitely not ever done this style high tapping before. Okay, so we're going to test using this ground that was failing me last video. Test point one we think should be about three and a half to four volts. Yeah, it's still the same. That's low. That's the one issue that I'm going to deal with at some point. Test point two should be high voltage. Oh, on a side note, that's good voltage, by the way. And it's working, by the way. Side note, I just made a deal with my buddy Mitch Ays and he is going to sell me brand new set of 7digit LED displays assembled for a reasonable price. So, I'm going all out, boys and girls. Seven digit displays. They are orange. So, I'm going to keep the red gels, but we're getting rid of all the dummy zeros. Actually, I don't even think there are any left on my back glass. Where did I even put mine? Oh, yeah. It's in the other room. So, new LED displays, 300 bucks, Canadian, shipped, delivered, all in. So, I thought that was reasonable. Um, they are front mount displays, which means they don't like there's like there's not two parts to it. There's not the display part and the PCB part. It's just all one display and it just mounts to the front. So, I can adjust for height. I imagine I'll be getting rid of these brackets all together. Then I can get rid of these stupid dummy light sockets. I'm excited about it. So, that's coming soon. Which means I don't really need my high voltage test point 2 180 volts anymore because I won't be using plasma displays. Test.3. What do we got?
    14:04
    I just got to hold it better. There we go. 14 volts. Beautiful. Test.5. Solenoid voltage 40. Um, we are in business, boys and girls. test point 4 AC voltage needs to be around seven. Boom. Okay. Other than test.1 voltage, we're good to go. Like I said in the last video, those are for that voltage is for controlled lamps. So, my inserts just might be a little more dim. That's going to be the symptom. But, uh, I can at least start trying to get more life out of the machine and deal with that at, uh, some other point in time. Okay, check this out. Here's the solenoid driver. I got some notes to myself. I did the following in July of 2025. refflowed the headers. Did the ground mods. A new C-23 cap. That's the gold one there. Fuse mod. So, you can use full size mod uh full size fuse instead of that little small one. And a new fuse. Uh I tied test point 3 to test.1 was in future spa and should be 100%. So, there's the ground mod there. Another ground mod there. That's well that's the test point one to test.3 mod. There's the other ground mod. So going to install that and test these voltages out. Okay. So one of the arms is broken off of that standoff. So we're going to do standoff surgery.
    15:55
    We're do break off the standoff. often times are just so brittle they just snap off. But this one's being a little more stubborn. Might need to There we go. Okay. So, here's a before and after. Here's the old guy. Here's the new guy. Makes you want to change them all almost, right? But, uh, here is the part number if you want to get you some standoffs, cuz most of the time several of them are broken. So, there we go. That guy's good. This guy's good. This guy's a little bit floppy. Uh, seems okay. So, I will see if um the board will be happy with that. Okay, the standoffs are happy and the board is happy to a certain degree, but remember this is a whole brand new back. So, when I went to screw in the board, the holes just didn't line up very well on these little brackets. So, what I did was uh remove the two screws from this bracket. So, it is now just like free floating. And then I screwed on the board in both corners. And now I'm going to put in uh screws into different holes. So you can see where that hole is just a little bit off. And that's just a little bit off. So I'll probably just use these other two holes and uh you know make sure it's comfortable because if I was trying to use the old holes, it just put too much strain on everything. So there is my solve for that. Okay, I drilled a new hole, put in a screw into that different location. And uh so you can see the difference in hole alignment for the new hole versus the old hole. And pop that guy in there. Switch hands cuz I'm a righty. Now we got to go righty tighty.
    18:21
    There we go. Board mount successful. I just couldn't use those old holes cuz it was kind of practically bowing the whole board. So, uh I'm happy with this. So, let's find out what's going on with this cuz uh that could be a problem. But I think this could be power to the board. So we could probably plug that in and test out these voltages. Okay, next roadblock is indeed what is going on here? I don't I I thought maybe perhaps this was just part of the uh conversion suggestions or requirements, but I've done some research and I there is some modification to like the solenoid driver wiring that is on the instructions, but it's definitely not cut off the entire connector for J3. This is the power coming from the transformer and you know we need that connector. So here in lies the fun. So this is where I'm at. Here are the schematics for flight 2000 on internet pinball database. This shows just what each of the wires are for and where they go on the J3 connector.
    20:01
    And I mean there is a schematic as well, but it's not really very clear. Is this it? Solenoid driver. That's for quick silver. So I mean this it's very close. And then there's some more information here as to J3 like let's see some crossover information here transformer you know uh we got some display stuff
    20:40
    and it does have some um wire colors here. So, I'm going to have to revert to that or refer to that. Basically, I got to add a connector and, you know, add the wires where they're supposed to go. But that's the trick. So, um, I compared every single one of these to this schematic, which is, uh, valley, but stern and valley are basically the same thing. So, I cross referenced everything here.
    21:16
    to everything here. And it's identical except for this pin 3 says A2 J3- blank. And here it says A2J3-18. So I'm assuming that's just missing. And here it says knocker, but on flight 2000 it doesn't say knocker, which is kind of weird. But the other thing is that there's no lettering here. Over here, all these numbers represent, well, not lettering, numbering. All these numbers represent the wire colors. So, can start with like pin one. Wait, no. Where's pin one? Not used key. So pin three is 5 0. We go over here. We see that five is white, zero is nothing. Remember this is the belly schematic. So there may be some color changes, but I'm expecting to see a white wire there. But let's look at one more just to see. So pin uh let's go to pin five. So that is 30. which means that should be yellow. So at pin three, it should be white. Pin five should be yellow. Let's go see if we've got a white and yellow wire in this bundle. Uh this looks like we got a white No, that's white brown. That is white blue. See yellow. Can you see this? How's my camera work? Yellow. Is that straight yellow? That looks like straight yellow.
    23:17
    And then there's a yellow, red down there, a white, orange, white, green,
    23:27
    white, brown. So that's what I got to do. I got to just play the deciphering game for an hour to uh figure out what goes where. Add a connector on. Now, here's another problem. Don't have a whole lot of slack. If I pull this out of here, plug this in here, and then if I remove that screw right here, will that give me enough play? I'm hoping so, cuz I really don't want to have to add wires to all of these if I don't have to. So, I guess I will uh find out. Okay, I got rid of that wire clip. And the screw clipped a couple of zip ties. And you know what? I think it's going to be tight, but I think I'm going to be able to pull it off. Definitely enough room from the top. It's just these bottom wires. If like any of those need to go right to the top of the connector, that may be a problem. I might have to kind of come out in front, which is Not really ideal.
    24:51
    Don't love that. So, if I had to add some wires just to these guys, it wouldn't be so bad. It's half the work. There's three, six, nine wires there. So, I wasn't really wanting to get into something that's going to take me an hour when I don't have that much time. So maybe I will um install the weebly board. Kind of get a little ahead of myself and or maybe I should just bite the bullet and start working on this. I don't know if I'll have time to finish, but let's go do some research. I really got to share how much fun I'm having. Uh at first I went to Quicksilver and took a photo of the connector and then realized well that is stern wiring and um this is an old Bobby or so that's bally wiring. So I should probably just stick to this. So here's what I've been doing. Where are we at about? So I think pin 22 maybe. So pin 22 of J3 is 82. So pin 22 is 82. 82 is black and blue. Black. Blue. 82 is black and blue for 22. And then you Oh my god. Almost dropped it. Black and blue. Then you go hunting. Oh, look. There's black and blue right there. Boom. So, that's the fun I've been having. Okay. Believe it or not, that was successful. Uh, there are no rogue wires, no colors that I couldn't find. Everything matched up almost identically except I'm like, I'm missing brown green on pin 13. And then I'm missing brown green on pin 25. Wait, how can the same color be used? And then I realized that is the jumper wire in the connector. There's the the jumper that little ground mod you do to jumper test point one to test point three or whatever it is that is um these two wires I believe. So uh there is that jumper in that connector and that is where these guys go. So I'll just add that. And I even found that the knocker, which is black, yellow, matches up right here. So, we can wire that back in. And uh yeah, hard work is done. Now, I'll just uh add on a connector. Well, depends on if I need to extend the wires or not, but times are ticking, so we'll see how far I can get. Okay, I went hunting for a new connector that was 25 pins long. I don't have new ones. They don't really come that long. Well, maybe they do. But I went digging and look what I found. That should do the trick. I just got to remove all these wires and give it a cleaning. Fun with connectors.
    28:41
    Oh, just a little bit of mud. Ain't a thing. We clean this up and um get rid of this little uh key here. That's probably not in the right spot. All right, check it out. Good as new. Got rid of the key, washed it up, played it like a harmonica to blow out all the water. This is a 28 pin and I need a 25 pin. So, I'm going to just cut it a few notches, but I really got to go and I kind of wanted to get this video out to you before I left and I have very, very little time to do so. So, I'm going to end this video, edit this like there's no tomorrow. Very minor editing. I'm just going to freaking cut and paste and get the hell out of dodge. So, short and sweet episode.