Yes, I've walked up to my working machine with the oscilloscope and taken the snapshots with the game as is in lamp test mode.

Any chance you can do the Q14 gate leg with the same time base you used in the second image in post #1299 so we can see more repetitions?

That second image looks like the lamp is only being switched on once every three or so Zero Crossings. It should pretty much be once *every* Zero Crossing.

Can you do the same on Q11 which is a working lamp so we can compare?

Sorry to leave you hanging but I've got to head out - maybe someone else will chime in with your further results.

This is the gate leg of Q14 during lamp test:

Screen Shot 2018-10-06 at 12.31.20 PM.png

I'm pretty sure that's just "on" state. Here's expanded to 50ms/div to give you the off state:

Screen Shot 2018-10-06 at 12.39.13 PM.png

This is the gate leg of Q11 during lamp test, on state:

Screen Shot 2018-10-06 at 12.33.44 PM.png

Here's expanded to 50ms/div so you can see the off state:

Screen Shot 2018-10-06 at 12.35.04 PM.png

BUT WAIT! EUREKA!!! After I did that Q11 measurement, Q14 stabilized!!! I recorded quickly:

Screen Shot 2018-10-06 at 12.37.57 PM.png

Then, while I was looking at it, it fell back!

Screen Shot 2018-10-06 at 12.38.37 PM.png

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? Me monkeying with gate legs fixed it for a few seconds!?!?!?

Oh crap, now they are all blinking. What have we done.

Sure enough. Here's Q11 now during on state:

Screen Shot 2018-10-06 at 12.45.33 PM.png

Blast it all...

Ok switched back to the Alltek (the Bally was "free floating" in my backbox) and we're back to just Q14 doing that. This has got to be cabling/ground.
[Edit: Now it reverted to all blinking again a second time, with the Alltek.]

So now we're back to Q11 working properly in attract, but in lamp test giving me the same wonky pattern as Q14.

Tried replacing Strobe 1 with a dedicated wire, re-terminated between the connectors, no change. Put it back.

New clue: The Alltek board has a test board you can plug into J2 and run some diagnostics.

You set the MPU’s dip switches to accept test mode, then you can move through various tests.

When I did this on lamp diagnostics, I could move through each controlled lamp and light it one by one. Nothing blinked. I could also put it in “SCR” mode and it rolls through each SCR one by one. Nothing blinked. Everything worked properly.

What do the plugs look like in the backbox? On some of the Bally games there are some small 12 pin connections that you can disconnect if you take off the back box. Those can be mixed up and in some cases the lights still work but not how you'd expect. Double check the wire color codes on all the loose hanging connections in case a set got mixed up.

I will check them, there are two of these (I believe a 9 and possibly a 14 or 20). I don’t believe the colors/positions are documented anywhere, so my best course is to check that colors continue through the connectors. If anyone can find it documented let me know.

They are on the "plug connectors" page of the schematics. Top left is the 24 position connector and bottom center of the left hand side is the 9 position connector. Watching this whole affair with interest. Mostly over my head but learning.

What were your hands touching when this happened?
Does wiggling the J4 connector at the LDB change anything?

You can see from the snapshots of the gate pin playing up that the decoder tries to switch the gate on (where you see those skinny spikes) but for some reason cancels/fails before the SCR gate has reached switch on voltage.

Are you getting good 5V power and ground to the LDB through the J4 connector?

BTW, is it worth taking this discussion back to your restoration thread so things can return to normal here?

Here is the page from the schematics...

Future_Spa_Plug_Connectors (resized).jpg

To everyone who has been following along, my thanks and also my apologies for hijacking the topic so long.

For those interested in continuing to follow, we will keep hunting in our restoration thread, here:

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/future-spa-father-and-sons-second-restoration

I will return here and post the solution once we find it.

Thanks! Yes, I’ll be going through mine later, just seemed to miss the plug connectors for some reason.

I have been seeing a bit of a problem since bringing Frontier home from a tournament. Whenever Special is qualified all of these lamps turn on. Not sure if this is an MPU thing or a lamp board thing. Any thoughts? This is the first time the game as been on for more than a couple hours at a time. During the tournament, the displays would go blank. Only after turning it off for a while, would the displays come back on, but then after some time, they would die again. Not sure of the two problems are related. During regular play, the lamps behave as they should.

20181020_082616 (resized).jpg

Crickets???

Bump anyone?

The first thing I would look at is loose or misplaced plugs. Doesn't take much to cause big problems. Use a flashlight. Check and then check again. Hopefully an easy mistake.

Shawn

Check schematic. Assuming from photo it’s all the controlled lights that are on when should not be? ... see where special light is connected in relation to all the lights that are coming on... whats common to them?

Before you get to Special state, do all the controlled lights turn on when they are supposed to?

I've reseated all the plugs on the lamp board and MPU and didn't fix the error.

I'll take a look at the schematic. Prior to "Special" state, all of the switches and lamps work correctly. You would not know that there was something wrong unless you qualified a Special (any of them). It worked fine before the tourney, which I think is weird that it started acting up after I brought it home.

Tech Question:
Bally Evel Knievel
Feature Lights shut off once the game warms up
I then shut the game off and turned back on, and this time once the game warmed up, the Feature Lights froze?

Is this due to a Bridge Rectifier going bad?

I'm thinking I need to just rebuild the Power Supply Board and see where that takes me?

Inspect your lamp driver board.
Look for bad solder joints at the connectors and possibly acid damage from the MPU above it.
Check the ground connections at J4 (1-2 & 11-12).

Peter

Didn't get a chance to look at the schematic lasts night. I think what I'll try next is to swap lamp boards with my Paragon or Flash Gordon. (they should be the same right?) to see if the problem follows with the board. Would this be a bad idea?

You can check voltages coming out of your rectifier board. I can't tell you the details of how off the top of my head but that's probably where I would start.

Classic "Bridge Rectifier is headed South" symptom. Had this exact same issue with a Power Play and it plagued me for weeks until I figured it out.

John

For anyone curious about the troubleshooting we were doing to solve my problem, the problem is now solved.

It was my solar panels/inverters on my house. Before the teardown, that system was shutdown for maintenance, and there was no problems with my lamps latching on the lower addresses.

While the game was being restored, the inverter/solar panel set up was repaired and completed, and inverters re-activated.

After the game was restored, my AC power in the house had inverter noise. It turns out that noise was interfering with the zero crossing detector just for the lower addressed lamps.

Turning off the house inverter resulted in the lamps not flickering.

File this one under weird...but thought I should close the loop on this one.

WOW, that is about as out there as I've ever heard!

I'll add this to my "one-more-reason-I-don't-do-solar" file.

John

Compare with a different MPU. Perhaps you have an Alltech to put in?

Change capacitors on Solenoid driver board. C26 is likely causing this.

There is an Altek in my Paragon that I could swap over. Do i need to change anything when I move it over?

So I swapped in an Alltek MPU that was in my Paragon and it didn't help. I then swapped in the lamp driver board (also from Paragon) and that seemed to have worked. I then reseated the decoder chips (previous owner had added sockets or changed sockets) and it now lights up as normal when I get Special. Thanks guys!

my AC power in the house had inverter noise.blockquote>

So - a few stupid questions from someone who is thinking seriously of moving to Solar and has a bunch of these Bally/Stern games...

1 - What does the inverter do on your A/C line in relation to the Solar? Does it help efficiency? I can't imagine they'd have put it in if it didn't have a reason
2 - There isn't a solution other than turn off the inverter?
3 - Do all solar solutions require/recommend an inverter?

Thanks!

You can have solar. Some inverters make electrical noise. Mine is unusually bad for nerdy reasons. If you experience some lamps flashing where they shouldn’t, it could be that. You can sometimes fix the inverter setup to make less noise, or, you can filter the noise, or use noise suppressing things at the game like isolating transformers or ferrite chokes.

Also remember this is my -18 board game, and it probably won’t happen on other models or even other games. It’s a very weird and unique situation.

Cross that bridge when you get to it! I have had solar since 2001. I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t.

Sure enough! Changed out the BR1 on the power supply and the Feature Lights are amazing. That BR1 solder is a bear to heat up and get off the board! Had to up the iron to 850

What a great group of help. Just added two classic 78 Ballys to go with my Harlem Globetrotters. Very nice to know you all are here in case shit goes south.

IMG_1730 (resized).JPG

Harlem Globetrotters - I have the spinners dialed in really, really well. They spin so good. The problem is when hitting one of the middle spinners and it goes in the globe saucer it will stop counting up the bonus lights entirely until it finishes doing sounds etc for the globe saucer. I assume because it's also adding bonus? Is there any way to change this? I didnt know if it was a weird memory thing or if it could be changed any way in settings. When hitting the left spinner it keeps adding that even through the globe saucer stuff.

I get the same in Paragon. It processes the saucer or other stuff before it comes around and checks on the spinner again. I Don't think you can change that, it's built into the sequence that the mpu cycles around checking all the inputs from the matrix. It becomes part of the gameplay to try to keep the ball bouncing around and not going into the saucer until you're spinner in done. My spinner goes long enough that after processing the saucer it will still register a few more spinner lights.

Stern's Big Game waits for the spinner to stop or at least slow down before it racks up your saucer bonus. To bad Bally didnt pull that off.

Even if you don't get the spinner noise effect have you checked to see if it awards any points for the flips after it does the saucer business? I know some point score gets stacked up and the CPU works it through later... I am not sure if a spinner gets that type of behavior.

It definitely stops racking up the bonus (lights don't advance for the spinner "v" or the bonus lights). It resumes after the val is kicked from the saucer but that can be a lot of points lost. Shame cuz it seems like it would be a small code modification. Maybe I need to look into how to do that stuff like the dudes on slamtilt.

It's not so trivial, the Bally operating system can only process one switch at a time so while the ball is sitting in the saucer, no other switches can be dealt with. All that can happen during that time is other switches can be flagged as needing to be serviced but there's no count facility for how many times they needs to be processed.

But it seems to work with the left spinner going when it lands in the saucer is that not the case?

That's not what I'm seeing in emulation. The bonus jingle being played while the ball in the globe saucer is taking precedence over servicing all the spinners.

After working on some code updates for a Blackjack machine to change the rules I can say that would also occur in that game too.

Help!!! I went to change a bulb on an insert and broke the base. Game won't boot but have gi's so I clipped the wire hoping for something if I took it out of matrix but still no boot just gi's. Going to order some new sockets, but was wondering if this is the true problem. Oh why did I lift the playfield. All done with game off. Any help or insight is appreciated.

Ballys Playboy is the game.

I've broken 2 power fuses trying to check. One in Playboy and one from Harlem Globetrotters. HG does same thing without fuse so maybe coincidence of timing on Playboy. Ordered parts but still curious.

I posted this in the Future Spa club thread, realized I should try here. I recently bought this machine so am working through normal things like changing switch caps. I believe this is a switch matrix issue but a weird one. Future Spa has 4 inline targets with a stand-up target at the back. The yellow stand up target at the back of the four drops has stopped working. It seemed to have trouble from the get go but it worked once in a while. Now it no longer works. Note that all the drops and the stand up happen to be on the same switch matrix strobe.

Here are the symptoms:
- all drops and stand up work (one at a time) in switch test
- any combination of two targets down, touching the stand up works.
- if three are down, the stand up stops working, except one combination 1,2,4 down, that one the stand up works.
- all four down, the stand up does not work (this is how game play normally works, the other test combinations are not possible)

I tried changing the diode on the 3rd drop since is seemed to be a common to some combinations but no luck.

Hopefully someone has an idea what this is.

Every other part of the game plays properly.

what is the best source for display connectors? I have a globetrotters with a flaky display but I think its the connector and not the display itself. It looks corroded.

8d0498e18e1c90800e960463b6b91a5d594de887 (resized).jpg

I think most folks buy from Ed at GPE.

SOLD!

Parts - For Sale

Bally/Nitro Ground Shaker plastic promo pieces Archived

New (selling multiple, business) - “For sale: three promo plastic pieces, sold individually, $8.00 each with free shipping. The round Bally tag and one NGS tag have been sold. The bottom three can be used for key ch...”

2018-12-26

Jarrettsville, MD

Alan_L

8 (Firm)

Archived after: 66 days

Viewed: 113 times

Status: Sold (amount undisclosed)

SOLD!

Mod - For Sale

Nitro Ground Shaker promo standup plastic set Archived

New (selling multiple, business) - “This item is a four-piece plastic promo standup for a Nitro Ground Shaker. It is brand new with protective film still on both sides of all pieces. $25.00 including shipping in th...”

2018-11-14

Jarrettsville, MD

Alan_L

25 (Firm)

Archived after: 12 days

Viewed: 42 times

Status: Sold (amount undisclosed)

SOLD!

Parts - For Sale

Nitro Ground Shaker slingshot plastics L&R Archived

New (selling multiple, business) - “For sale: One pair on slingshot plastics for a Bally Nitro Ground Shaker. They are brand new, left still has protective film, both in excellent condition. Price is $25.00 for the...”

2019-02-07

Jarrettsville, MD

Alan_L

25 (Firm)

Archived after: 42 days

Viewed: 62 times

Status: Sold (amount undisclosed)

Parts - For Sale

Two brand new Nitro Ground Shaker plastics Archived

New (selling multiple, business) - “For sale: two plastic playfield pieces for a Bally Nitro Ground Shaker that are commonly broken. Brand new with protective film on both sides of both pieces. One piece is the lar...”

2019-02-07

Jarrettsville, MD

Alan_L

35 (Firm)

Archived after: 42 days

Viewed: 70 times

Status: Not sold

Some Pinside Marketplace ads for various Nitro Ground Shaker plastics and plastic promo pieces.

Does anyone happen to have a part number or link to the correct flipper relay on the Bally/Stern driver board? I'm going over one for a Flight 2000 and the traces for the left flipper going to that relay were burned up and jumpers added. The cover has been off that relay and I think the contacts got a little toasty. I'd like to put a new one on the board.

Thank you.