My father has been having a few issues here and there with his Gottlieb Big Hurt. It has recently started randomly awarding billions of points. It doesn't seem like it is a switch that is stuck because it will instantly award anywhere from 1 billion to 8 billion points. Is there any chance that it could be interference from the LEDs we put in the machine? It is MUCH, MUCH brighter than it was with stock lighting. Could the extra light cause the opto's to trip and freak out? Could it be bad roms, board?

Not very helpful, but funny

Bump

We will try it as the game is in tournament mode to get freeplay.

The only way my dad would buy a Cubs Triple Play would be to use it as firewood. Go Cards!

One isn't needed. Their fans aren't so bored at their games that they need a pinball machine to entertain them

All jokes aside, he has isolated the problem to the lights in the stadium section. There is either a short, or one of the flashers/LED's is tripping the optos up there. I think it is the former. He is still working on it.

It looks like my dad has gotten this problem fixed. We took the entire stadium section apart the other day and he soldered in two new optos on the left orbit. We also had the left and right gap optos switched, so he put them back and reassembled everything and it all seems to be working properly. It even solved the issue of the game autoplunging the first ball of each game. Now the only issue remaining is two of the relay/coils that kick down the drop targets are not working, only one of them is. The game still works fine without them working as the light in the playfield indicates which one you need to shoot on a base stealing attempt or skill shot, but it would be nice to have those working too.

Well....it looks like we were wrong.... While playing the game today I indeed noticed that the left orbit opto was not working/scoring. Well crap. So, I start taking a look around under the playfield and notice one of the leads on one of the resistors on the opto board is broken. Aha! I say. So, quickly repaired the broken lead.......still doesn't work. We begin taking the stadium section off AGAIN to get to the hardest to reach opto on the entire game (of course). My dad takes it and resolders optos just in case they were put in backwords. He brings it back in and it works! However.......all of the wacko scoring issues resume, with it scoring billions every other pass of the opto. Also, the coil that raises the shooter lane is kicking on at ball start and the ball kicker is again kicking as soon as you press the start button. But hold on, there is more! Now the coil that releases the ball into the shooter lane is no longer working. UGHHH!

So, we try all sorts of things INCLUDING unhooking the problematic opto on the left orbit and it is still the same. The game is going kind of wacky upon starting a game and that coil isn't kicking the ball out. We check the fuse on that coil and it is fine. We go into the coil test and the coil will work in the coil test.....?!>!>

As you can tell I am getting pretty frustrated with this machine. It is such a shame as my dad has made this thing BEAUTIFUL. Pity it worked fine before the teardown and now it is being a *$#&$&. We hooked everything else back up to just see if there was a problem with something being unhooked but it still acting strange like mentioned above. We ran a switch test and coil test and ALL coils and switches work in the test.......... What could we have done? Is it possible the rom is corrupted or something? Also, the driver boards, opto boards and mpu have been switched with working ones from his Stargate and the same problems persist.

We will have to try this it seems. Could a bad LED cause the symptoms we are seeing? I would hate to replace each LED, one at a time and testing to see if the game works.

bump.....

Well, we also swapped out the opto boards from the Stargate, which has not problems and we still experienced the same issues on the Big Hurt. I will check out the link. Thanks.

Well, some good news. I had a snow day today so I trekked out to my father's house and proceeded to sit and stare at the big hurt until something hit me......

That is not entirely true, I actually started poking and prodding around changing bulbs and looking for a bad socket etc. I went into the switch edge test again and noticed the shooter lane switch was sticking on. Well, that is probably the ball launch problem right? Yup. I felt like an idiot not checking it before. The contacts were not separating, so I adjusted it and boom, that problem was solved.

It did not however fix the billion point nonsense. I still thought it could be an opto problem and in the switch edge test the bottom right opto was working wierd and interment. We unhooked some of the otpos until the problem went away. Sure enough when the bottom right orbit opto was unhooked, the billion point problem went away. We didn't have any extra optos, so I just took it out and reflowed the solder on the optos. Put it back in and boom! Everything is working now. I made sure to run a bunch of tests to make sure it all is kosher and that seemed to fix it.

So, it ended up being two unrelated problems. And now the task of reinstalling all of the LED's which we took out.

Thanks for the help