Looks like they have a ton of great features. Anybody used them.
I'm not using his boards but the guy is super friendly and helpful. We chatted on ytube a while back. He sent me the schematics to add an external speaker adapter tot he sound board to add a speaker or subwoofer to the sys80 games. Perdy sweet in my book!
Good amount of videos on Youtube and seems that he has been selling replacement boards for a number of years judging by old RGP posts on Swemmer Electronics. I haven't seen any negative comments about his products, from the looks of it they are higher quality replacements and some recent updates to the CPU include the NVRAM in place of the 5101 RAM (meaning no more batteries) which is a great bonus. His products just aren't as "mainstream" as the others because he's not having the boards assembled/manufactured in large volumes.. he's soldering them himself in his spare time. Seems to be a side-venture that's more out of love of the hobby & providing a quality replacement board.
I'm not sure how the board features compare.. some replacement Gottlieb boards allow multiple high scores to be entered/saved, advanced diagnostics, etc... but really not sure if his mpu does that or not. He uses a lot of led indicators on the boards which is kind of neat in a way but "novelty" to an extent. I think he even mentions in his videos how people love leds so why not
I haven't tried any of his products out but I'd certainly consider them. From the looks they are good quality. The difference between his boards and the other replacements is his designs are closer to the originals and he's using several obsolete ICs that he has a backstock of (as seen in his vids) as opposed to redesigning around those components. Seems he's into it for the love of electronics/hobby versus making a quick buck.. because some of the components he's using would likely be $8-10 each or more.. yet he keeps the overall cost of the product pretty reasonable. Just my 2 cents..
Couple vids..
(TNT Amusements promotes Swemmer Electronics)
Oh yeah, forgot about that guy. He's the dude that makes LED Christmas tree boards for System 80. IMHO, it's overkill.
Steve
I've contacted him on youtube not too long ago. You can also contact him through ebay as well. His ID is johan6685. I have his personal email too but the best way is ebay or ytube if you're lucky.
You can also directly contact him at [email protected]
(It's me)
'Acebathound' summed it up pretty good.
Indeed it is the people asking for the LED's on their boards.
Since I like them too I added a bunch, specially on the driver board.
Overkill to some, requested by others.
All these projects are hand builts, low in numbers but the best quality around.
All products are modifications of the basic Gottlieb designs.
This is not exactly a money making operation but the funds created by it are directly returned into new and existing projects to provide even more boards.
All requests are considered, most of the times even integrated into existing circuits.
The love for this hobby is the base to keep making boards, there's no big commercial intend at all.
Just this morning another batch of GTB SYS80 MPU's were ordered with some other features.
These boards will have an IDE connector ADDED where the cable harness is located between MPU and Driver boards. This setup/pinout has been made compatible with Ni-Wumpf's same idea on their driver and MPU boards.
i.e. the boards are interchangeable between different brands.
No more old, expensive(!) connectors/wire harnesses needed; just a regular 40pin IDE cable.
(You can still use your old interconnect if so preferred).
The new Christmas tree driver boards will have a receptacle connector also of course.
Side note;
out of 32 new MPU's only 1 returned from an unhappy customer who in the end figured out he had a faulty, existing interconnect cable.
I got a hold of a great batch of new (NOS) Votrax SC-01-A speech synthesizers and this will also mean another batch of SYS80 sound speech boards (with new amplifier section) are coming. These always sell out before I can complete building the order.
So contact me and sign up now . Thanks!
Here's some of the boards in action in a Haunted House:
http://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/my-speaking-gottlieb-haunted-house
I did the speech modification for it and works pretty neat.
I'll back that up he's a great guy and I've got one of his system 80 boards in my Mars machine. It's pretty awesome and very well built. I approve!
Thanks for the comments!!
I got MARS GoW Inner Back Glasses now too!!
Check here:
With mirror film, almost as good as original:
Have a great weekend
Are there any manuals for the system 8t, 8ta, 8tb cpu boards? My buddy Welby Bergum just bought one of these boards from K's Arcade and the only paperwork included was a sheet warning that only technicians should install this board. No manuals were included with this brand new cpu board.
Could not locate a website for Swemmer Electronics.
I have several of his sound boards running in my sys80A games and they sound great. I highly recommend them.
I bought a Swemmer sound board for my Black Hole. Right now, I can only do self tests on the board as I need to repin a many of connectors to get the game booting up so I can actually play it.
Impressed so far with the sound board.
I recently put the swemmer MPU into my system 80 Counterforce and it works great! My game already had the ni-wumph driver board in it, too...which is a plus.
Quick question- I still need to do the ground mods.
Can/should the ground mods be done with a game that has these two boards already running? And if so, do the ground mods need to go somewhere else on these boards?
Thoughts?
Quoted from KenLayton:What in the hell do all the LEDs do? This cpu board has a billion of them on it.
To be honest, they are more decoration than anything.
But they look pretty darn cool when all lit up
Quoted from KenLayton:What in the hell do all the LEDs do? This cpu board has a billion of them on it.
Just indicators that associated components are working. I have no idea what the tic-tac-toe board is supposed to indicate.
Quoted from KenLayton:Could not locate a website for Swemmer Electronics.
No website. Just a guy. I'm pretty sure he's here on PS but I forget his handle. You can definitely find him on eBay and he'll answer any questions you have. Also has a youtube account which he uses to post videos for customers as proof their new board works before he sends it out.
I really like his stuff. Super happy with my 8TB mpu (bought through K's). Wish I had bought a Swemmer driver too but at the time they were out of stock so I got a Ni-Wumpf (direct from ni). It works fine enough, I just would've liked to have the LED indicators for everything and not just the solenoids.
Quoted from swanng:I'll stick with Gottlieb OEM, thanks.
Still have that piece of junk too.
Quoted from Ranhorton:Can anyone share/show how they added the grounding mod to their Swemmer and ni-wumph boards?
Ground mods may not be necessary on his board depending on how he did the ground traces. Gottlieb did it by running separate grounds for just about every function or driver group (actually the correct way to do power/wire harness designs). Of course, as the connections failed, problems showed up. If Swemmer or Ni-wumph has all the ground traces connected across the entire driver board, about the only place that I would think would benefit from addition grounding would be power supply to MPU and the MPU to Driverboard connections. So, grounding should be the same. You just have to determine what the ground trace is on each board (which I guess is what you are asking for?).
Certainly, the biggest benefit I see for the Swemmer boards is the use of the IDE style ribbon cable to replace the interconnect between the MPU and Driver PCBs. Of course, it seems unclear if this option exists yet unless he is making new versions of driver boards.
I have a swemmer mpu and a ni-wumpf driver in my Genesis with the ribbon cable interconnect. It didn't seem necessary to add the ground cables. I plugged the boards in and it was all good. No glitchy crap. I did end up later adding the grounds anyway to be on the safe side. The swemmer mpu has a hole in the center of the board for a ground lug in the same spot as the oem board. Ni-wumpf has a ground lug.
Quoted from KenLayton:Does the 8Tb cpu board have a free play function?
No. Only Gottlieb 80B freeplay I've seen (aside from modding the coin door) is burning a ROM from here: http://www.flipprojets.fr/Proms80B_EN.php
Quoted from Ranhorton:Can anyone share/show how they added the grounding mod to their Swemmer and ni-wumph boards?
Quoted from 20eyes:I have a swemmer mpu and a ni-wumpf driver in my Genesis with the ribbon cable interconnect. It didn't seem necessary to add the ground cables. I plugged the boards in and it was all good. No glitchy crap. I did end up later adding the grounds anyway to be on the safe side. The swemmer mpu has a hole in the center of the board for a ground lug in the same spot as the oem board. Ni-wumpf has a ground lug.
If you use the ribbon interconnect from Swemmer MPU to Ni-Wumpf driver or Swemmer driver, the extra ground is included there. The Ni-Wumpf comes with a ground lug, so that's all taken care of, no need for mods there.
Running a full set of Swemmer boards and I can attest that they are rock solid. Fred is a pleasure to work with and committed to giving his customers great service. I only wish he did System 1 boards, as well!
There are Gottlieb 80 / A free play roms.
I am almost positive that Fred modified the driver circuits as well so that you get no "thunk" on start up.
The added interconnect was also done to allow mix and match to some of the other aftermarket boards.
But basically same Gottlieb Rockwell design with a light show for the mice!
Definately a good choice if you need a replacement. Rock on Fred!!
Quoted from mr2xbass:No website. Just a guy. I'm pretty sure he's here on PS but I forget his handle.
Fretto1 is his PS handle. He made posts number 8,9 and 11 in this thread.
Quoted from KevinD:Fretto1 is his PS handle. He made posts number 8,9 and 11 in this thread.
Well there you go!
I replaced every single board in my Haunted House with Fred's products and never looked back. Best money I've ever spent on a pin. Been rock solid for years now.
Let me reply to Ken Layton's "What in the hell do all the LEDs do? This cpu board has a billion of them on it. "
It was, if I remember correctly, Ken Layton's idea and addition to System80 Repair/PinWiki to add some LED's to all of the Gottlieb boards.
I think it was a great idea and integrated a billion of them on the MPU board and a dozen trillion on the driver boards. The tictactoe print is nothing more than a logo which lights up when running your game. It is a detail to break the edge of an otherwise very boring circuit board. Nothing more but a finishing touch and you watch........... this feature will be copied by others into their designs which I think is absolutely great.
For the freeplay option: NO, I will not offer that service. It is up to the user to modify with aftermarket ideas. (I think it is great by the way).
Schematics; I always refer to the schematics in the original game manuals since these boards are nearly identical to the OEM GTB boards, with exception of the U2/U3 masked roms which for 80 and 80A games have been replaced with a 2764 EPROM that holds stacked images of these masked roms. This way now all MPU's I build are operating like a 80B MPU and hey, that is a gigantic benefit since there's (almost) no new 80B boards available elsewhere.
Website from Swemmer Electronics: NO, does not exist.
I recently created a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/fred.gottlieb.543
Reason for this is that making these boards is out of love for pinball myself, and my time is limited to create these hand built boards. I have spent years though, to re-design/copy/modify and revamp the original designs to a point so I could replace all these old boards in my own machines. That task has almost been completed after almost 15 years.
I can not justify a site where all my products are shown, simply because of my (low qty.) output. These boards sell faster than I can build them, no complaints but I wished I was equipped with 6 or more hands to this body. That be wonderful.
It is fun, not as much rewarding financially if you consider my cost in creating gerber files, obtaining proto boards, debugging, sourcing parts, forming & assembling THOUSANDS of parts by hand (MADE IN USA!!!! QUALITY) cleaning and testing boards and so on and so on, takes so much of my spare time that I really don't have much of a regular life. Some get that, some don't. All ok with me.
I am by myself, this is a 1 man operation, my 'premises' are nothing more than an extended residence with excellent assembly and test areas.
For that reason I always ask to respect my first preference which is assembling new circuit boards. If I start (read: continuing) repair jobs, there will never be time to create new products. I would be on the phone all the time fixing machines remotely. Besides that I don't want to do so anymore, I also have a regular fulltime job at an engineering company where I work as a normal production worker.
Bottom line is; I love pinball. That is what I do it all for, for you pinball people and for myself.
When you find a MPU, driver, or sound speech board from Swemmer Electronics, just remember you are looking at 6 hours of my life put in each and every board that are out there.
Just recently I sold the 300th Gottlieb replacement MPU, the 100th Driver board and the 100th Sound Speech board............ for this brand alone that is over 3000 hours of intense labor next to my regular job outside the house.
(Not to mention I also build many many many Williams and Bally replacement boards).
And of course it happens that you will find a crappy part left and right, I always apologize for that but it is always out of my hands and where I can I will help out.
And Mr. Clayton; thank you too for all your tips. I love LED's, as most of my buyers do.
Quoted from Pinballer73:Is there a list of what boards you do sell and there prices?
They are all up there, or you can speak with Fred directly.
I've purchased many boards from him and had them shipped to Australia, his service and quality of packaging is exceptional. Really a great guy to deal with.
Quoted from Fretto1:Just recently I sold the 300th Gottlieb replacement MPU, the 100th Driver board and the 100th Sound Speech board............ for this brand alone that is over 3000 hours of intense labor next to my regular job outside the house.
Thank you for what you do for the community.
Running a swemmer board in my black hole paired with a niwumpf MPU and swemmer power supply. Had a couple of issues with the driver board but Fred who builds the swemmer board was very helpful. Works great no issues.
Really wish there was a manual for these boards. And not a big fan of "refer to original board manual." Fred?
Quoted from seshpilot:Really wish there was a manual for these boards. And not a big fan of "refer to original board manual." Fred?
Me too.
For instance: what is tic-tac-toe lights section for? What is it indicating?
Another thing: what is the 1F, 5.5v "option" area for? I'm guessing a memory retaining device, but not exactly sure!! Fred, you're making GREAT stuff here, just please provide some information on your boards for newcomers to your products.
Quoted from seshpilot:Another thing: what is the 1F, 5.5v "option" area for? I'm guessing a memory retaining device, but not exactly sure!!
Memory backup capacitor, unnecessary with the nvram installed in those boards.
These two videos give a little insight into Fred's operation (hobby). In another video (not these) he mentions the tic-tac-toe section on the MPU just being something for fun to fill an empty spot on the board; he didn't mention it being there to indicate anything.
Quoted from Fretto1:The tictactoe print is nothing more than a logo which lights up when running your game. It is a detail to break the edge of an otherwise very boring circuit board. Nothing more but a finishing touch and you watch........... this feature will be copied by others into their designs which I think is absolutely great.
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