The System 9 Troubleshooting guide says this, although I don't have specific experience with a 7 on the LED myself.

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There are also a lot of hits when searching Google groups (alt.rec.games.pinball) though regarding System 9 failures.

Good luck!

There will be a lot of damage. I have made this repair before and will never do it again. I would not touch it. Send it out. Most repair services will not accept this type of repair work if someone has already worked on it.

This is excellent advice. The amount of damage is likely extensive and it will only get worse in unskilled hands.

--
Rob Anthony
Pinball Classics
http://LockWhenLit.com
Quality Board Work - In Home Service
borygard at gmail dot com

yeah that is a BIG HUGE OPPS! i remember hearing horror stories of that before whether RGP or marvin 3m. You may want to try and contact Clay, he may have some good documentation or ideas.

i guess you can start by getting the schematics out and seeing what types of lines you crossed. I have a feeling it was some signal lines with power feeds. So you sent power into all the switch inputs.

Also, i remember reading that some games were built with the connector colors the same both black so you had to make sure the same wire colors were on both sides of the connectors.

Well a learning opportunity for sure, not an easy one lots of damage. it is like adjusting pop bumper score switches with power on and then shorting to the solenoid voltage bad things happen.

Not impossible by any means but likely took out several things. Good luck.

I believe what happens in that case is you send high voltage down the logic supply low voltage lines. I found a web site discussing this issue which mentioned these things:

"System 9 games did suffer from an aliment inherited from system3 to system7 games: the dreaded white and black playfield connectors. These can be accidentally mixed, causing severe damage to the CPU board (the game and sound ROMs will die, as will at least one PIA and some TTL chips like the 74154 at U9 display control - nearly any chip that is power sensitive)".

Now I can't say how accurate that is specifically but, yeah, I can easily believe that a lot of the logic could likely be damaged. You've likely got a fair amount of troubleshooting and component replacement in front of you.

I had read of this problem before I went and picked up my Black Knight, so I used a Sharpie to visually "key" the connectors with arrowheads whose points come together when plugged in correctly. That was helpful for me, because I was also in a hurry to get the machine reassembled and I could easily imagine myself making that mistake.

Good luck with the repairs!

For sure, one PIA will be dead, the Sound ROMs, the System ROMs, U9, and then a few random other chips depending on how long power was applied and how overfused the PS was......it's just another example of Williams "quality".

Even worse, sys3-7 games had the same problem, so Williams ignored an obvious chance to fix a severe design flaw during the transition to sys9.

You are going to need a ROM burner to do the repair, so unless that is something you own (or have at work), you are probably best served sending the boards out.

Someone who does board repair every day will have this back up and running in 1.5 hours because they will have all the parts on hand.

You will probably have to order the ROMs, buy parts, make a second order of parts for stuff you overlooked, buy a logic probe if you don't have one..... it's a big job and thus not to be taken lightly.

I'm assuming this is what happened with the game I picked up. In the case of the SYS9 board I have, just about EVERY SINGLE TTL logic IC was fried, 2 PIAs, both CPUs, EPROMs, RAM. I can only imagine that happening one way, and that is high voltage connected to the +5v rail. I have spent about 30+ hrs working on it and still have not gotten it to post anything other than "7". Major cascading failure. Obviously I labeled them when I got the game after looking into this so that I wouldn't do it myself, but this seems to be possible on all the SYS9 games as well as games like Black Knight.

It has been a couple of years, but if I remember correctly, after I replaced everything I thought needed replacing, it still didn't boot. Then I started replacing these little caps and bingo.

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w9note.JPG

Agreed. It's a big job.

Yup, I had to do that as well. A number of them were shorted/blown on mine.

Hey Vid -

I have recently made the same naive mistake on my Space Shuttle. I had my playfield out and luckily only crossed up one of the black/white connectors, making the assumption it wouldn't fit if it was in the wrong place. The opposite colors didn't set off a red flag in my mind, and my ego been taken down a few pegs.

The destruction you describe seems to have happened, although the machine does boot to "0" and plays. I know the flipper relay (K1) is dead, and have a replacement on the way. But other than what sounds like a soft, repeating electronic static, the sound is dead. The switch 2 test does produce the repeating string of speech tests, which makes me think the speech board and amplifier ICs are ok. But the sound ROM (U49) is probably toast, as you predict.

Are you saying U49 should be tossed and replaced, or could it be reprogrammed?

Thanks man.

Paul

they relay is probably not dead but the circuitry that controls it is The flipper relay works pretty much close to how a special solenoid works. PIA->TTL->2n4401-> relay coil.

Thanks so much Andrew. Took a bunch of readings and compared them to the same circuit on my known good High Speed and saw that the voltage at the base of Q86 on Space Shuttle was at 3.5v with a ball in play, and at the same point on HS it was .87v. (this is the high signal coming from the U7-10 NOR gate). I replaced Q86 and found the voltage at the base now matches HS at .87v. You were absolutely right -- the relay is fine, and now the flippers are back in service.

You saved me a shitload of time and wheel-spinning. I really appreciate it.

Now to figure out my sound problems. I have a GQ-4X4 and some one-time PROMS ordered. I'm hoping that will get me at least back to where I started from with this refurbishment. Dang

Update: I found both the 6810 (U12) and the 6208 sound MPU (U11) needed replacement. Both ICs were not original and looked shitty. Sound is now working. The also shitty looking EPROM was actually fine.