I just picked up a Baby Pacman yesterday - super thrilled about it. I played it as a kid and thought it was such a unique and weird machine. It was just fascinating. This one came with a Alltek MPU board which sounds to me that I might have dodged a bullet in troubleshooting. The monitor is really pretty too, very dark blacks, good color, no burn-in! The playfield condition is marvelous.

Now for the dumb question - how does one level this machine? Is it all based on the cabinet feet? If so, what should the angle of the playfield be, and how (or where) do you measure the cabinet being level?

My playfield is a little slow and while it has a good left-right balance, I'm not sure the front-back is angled correctly as the ball has rested between the inlane and top of the flipper before.

Looks like:

Blue
White
Yellow
Black

On mine at least.

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Please do post them. I could go for sanding, decaling, and spraying mine for sure.

Yeah, I think that looks factory, honestly.

I have a couple goofy questions about my Baby. I wanted to do a little cleaning and refreshing on it.

1. My insert lights are 555 lights, and if I understand right, this apparently sucks. I don't have the game on every day but I am concerned about heat and longevity. The mylar above the PAC MAN inserts is starting to get... interesting. Not burnt but becoming textured let's say. Are LED lights usable in this game? And since it appears that removing the individual light brackets is pretty much impossible because of the soldering, is the accepted method of replacing the lights done by bending the light brackets for each individual light, pulling the bulb, then bending it back?

2. I have a polarized (?) screen in front of my monitor. It isn't attached, though, it's just kinda wedged there. It's wedged so well in fact it make the backglass really difficult to remove. In essence the screen lays in the cabinet's backglass channel and then gets wedged underneath the fluorescent light frame. I've tried to include pics to show what's up. What was the accepted method of installation for this thing? You can see the one I have is way too big. Was there always a polarized screen? Should there be some mounting method on the monitor frame or something? It's hard to find info on this.

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What mod?

Does anyone have any info or advice on that polarized screen? Did it normally mount to the monitor frame?

Just if you can, it's a curiosity.

Ok. I'm going to figure out some alternative way to put up the tinted screen then.

Thanks everyone!!

I thought the ball was supposed to kick out automatically after small amount of time, but you can speed that time up with a flipper press.

So my E of TUNNEL and my right red arrow light are now flaky. Of course it's because I was putting LEDs in it but I thought I was careful. The E light doesn't come on at all but if I waggle around the E light the red arrow stays lit constantly. Should I attack this as a wiring/diode issue or as a transistor issue? They are of course the lights on the Q23 transistor.

I didn't, and generally don't... but that also doesn't mean I was as careful as I should have been when it was turned back on.

Ok, so I am trying to replace what I assumed is a bad transistor on the driver board at Q23 for a bad tunnel E light and right spinner light as they no longer came on.

After replacing q23 with a 2N5064, the transistor smoked and blew. Great! then I tried a 2N5060 and it started to blow, too, so I powered it off. Is it possible I have bad diodes on the sockets or is it something worse? How should I keep troubleshooting this? I don't *see* any bad grounding in the lamp cabling or any voltage crossing.

As an aside over this recent development, the reason my SCRs kept blowing up was because one of the sockets had leftover solder on it from a previous owner's repair.

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Cleaning out the solder and replacing the SCR did the trick. Now the whole playfield is LED'ed. Looks nice.

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My right drop target resets continuously when it is in the up position when the game is in pinball mode. I don't think it does it when it is supposed to be down. I don't see any switches stuck during test, but I haven't dug too deep yet either. Is there a good place to start with this one?

I think it's just that drop target. I'm gonna rip some diodes I think, when I get time during my Elvira restore.

Also my Hurricane blew up.

Feel like Final Destination around my pinball games lately.

Except for the fact the sockets suck and for gods sakes don't keep the power on when you installed LEDs on this game.

Both, hah. The transistors are super sensitive to shorting when changing lights, so don't do it when powered on.