Years and years ago I installed the Oliver EBD rom with the odds/evens bonus bug fix and the little added extra feature of shooting the DELUXE letters in sequence, it was cool. That board went south and I put in an Altek CPU board. So fixing bugs/changing versions with an aftermarket board like that with multiple games coded into it is moot, right? Wish they made them with USB ports and the ability to do that somehow.

Ah you are correct, I just tested it, bonus bug is fixed. I guess I figured they would have only used original Bally code so I never tried it. The little extra DELUXE sequence feature is not there though so maybe it's the code on IPDB that says it ONLY fixes the bonus bug.

Never heard of that one, I'll have to try it on mine. It actually kinda makes sense as a reward - if you manage to get the replay level down below, you *deserve* two replays!

I verified it with sw. 27 on or off (changes the rules of how the sequence starts), either way the extra DELUXE sequence feature in his final custom version is not in there.

I must not have payed attention when I tested it before because I was playing a two player game today and the count sounded wrong, then I tested it again to make sure. The EBD 'bonus bug' is still in the code on my Altek-equipped EBD. Previously earned racks on player 2/4 are still scoring 63K instead of the correct 56K (one extra bonus of 7000.)

Mines only about 2 years old. The first time I tested it and believed the bug was gone, I must have forgotten the specifics of the bug and only tested the first full rack scoring at the end of the same ball with which it was completed (when it does score the rack correctly for 56K), not after subsequent ball drains when that rack it is then scored from storage via the '56K' lamp... and scores wrong as 63K.

Can you take a look at your Altek board and see what the version # is on the rom chip? Mine is 9.1. Thanks

I tried my Altek with the free play turned on and off, no effect on the pesky bonus bug, nothing I tried did. Now that I know the bug is still there I may end up just swapping the Altek into my Lightning, then put the Oliver roms into the Lightning mpu, I already have the Oliver roms from the EBD's previous old kaput mpu. Plus I'd get back the Oliver DELUXE feature back. Or I'll get a new Dash board for the EBD with the Oliver roms and keep the old Lightning board, I could use an extra working one for testing purposes anyway.

Yeah that's a much older one than mine for sure, discrete resistors/caps instead of SMDs, some different chips, different layout and still uses a battery pack. Actually I'm kind of surprised 'new' boards would have the EBD bug fix or any other bug fix. I'd think they would need to stick with the licensed code for each game. For buyers too, like "hey I want the original code, not some altered version." Though they did add the free play option which works via one of their own added DIP switches but I don't know if that means they had to actually make changes to each game's code or it functions some other way(?)

... Now I see the Weebly board does have both original and some custom game codes selectable on it including the Oliver EBD version.

The free play DIP on your early Altek appears to be 'on', I guess you could try turning it off and see if the bug comes back. Had no effect on the EBD bug in my newer one either way though.

Also the BH bug where if a ball's first score is other than via one of the upper three rollovers (or the rollover switch hit does not register), it usually goes off track on the next ball and the rest of the game it thinks it's got multiple players and the wrong displays are lighting up etc.

Yeah mines a v2, I didn't even know the bug existed until I had the glass off one day for testing some stuff and noticed when I manually scored things with the ball still sitting in the shooter, it would go bat crazy on the next ball.

So what would have been the typical way to handle it when credits are maxed - 1) When Special is lit, award nothing, 2) when Special is supposed to be lit, default it to lighting the 50K instead, or 3) just don't light the Special? I don't even know what the other Specials award at max credits, never tried it on mine.

Yeah if it's isolated to that particular Special it's more of a "why did they do it here but not there?". The left lane Special can alternate with 50K too.

I used to have a System 6 Williams 'Blackout' that I had already fixed up and was working 100% (and when I had it the game was only 4 or 5 years old). One day I decided to see if anything weird would happen if I intentionally drained the last ball after manually scoring 1,000,000 to roll the score over to all zeroes '000000'. It went kooky, firing off a bunch of coils and blew a fuse before I could shut it off. Didn't do any damage except the fuse. Seems like that 1 out of 100,000 bug would be related to the basic Sys 6 code vs. the game code.

1 out of 100,000 if was totally random but of course it's much less likely than that because of the difficulty of getting the score to a million or more in the first place. Probably extremely unlikely that it would occur only once within the entire production of Blackout or the entire production of Sys6. Unless it's done on purpose, but I had to take the glass off to do that.

It was a long time ago but thinking back I probably tried that first since it would be easy, and initially I was thinking more like 'what if the score ended with zero points', and it didn't do anything weird so then I tried the forced 1,000,000 trick. And I honestly thought this trick even less likely to do anything goofy than a game ending with all tilts.

Ending with zero could happen on location if some player with a ton of credits decided to try it once with a few shoves... or say the tilt was stuck closed. I believe if tilt bob closures setting was '1' then the game would just serve up tilted balls and if all of them were shot by the player the game would also end with an actual zero score. Both seem like things more likely for the designers to worry about than the 1,000,000 thing.