Quoted from gdonovan:Fellow Centaur owners a question you can perhaps answer for me.
About one time out of ten the ball loader solenoid will fail to get a ball into the underground launcher. You will hear the mech fire but the ball doesn't make it into position. Its just random enough I can't quite witness it but the one time I did the ball seemed to be launched hard out of the trough and actually bounced back in place before the next ball in line could move forward.
Anyone else run into this? I tried tweaking the pawl position, weaker spring, stronger spring and even a piece of foam on the "stop tab" across from the trough opening which seemed to help.
Of course when the ball doesn't load proper, it will try and launch the ball (which isn't there) 3 or 4 times before giving up. You would think the switch in the center not being tripped by a ball launch would let the MPU know nothing is happening and try again to load a ball.
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Quoted from vec-tor:That problem is inherit to the game.
I did a modification to the 1st ball micro switch. I used a long flat blade type.
That stopped a lot of problems with the game.
If this problem is the mechanism failing to mechanically load a ball into the launcher, and launch it, then I don't think it's inherent to the game.
I've had my Centaur since 2012 and played a few thousand games, and to my knowledge this has never happened, not even once. When it's time to launch a ball onto the playfield, it always works: First solenoid 14 (ball release) fires, then 15 (kick to playfield) fires, and the ball shoots out. Every single time. It's never not worked, to my knowledge. So it should be possible to fix and/or adjust the game to make this reliable. This is my experience with my current Centaur and one that I owned way back in the mid eighties.
What DOES sometimes happen about one out of ten times on my Centaur is, after I make the Guardians or Spell ORBS in sequence, a single ball is kicked to the playfield, and then the kick to playfield solenoid will fire again, with no ball, usually four times, with accompanying sound and playfield blackout, then the game will give up. This is not a problem with the mechanical ball release ball or launcher, because the single ball did load and launch. What's happening is, the MPU did not see switch 33 (end of trough) closing when the launched ball rolled past it, and so it thinks the ball is still in the launcher, and it's trying repeatedly to kick the ball out and looking for a pulse from switch 33.
If the MPU doesn't see switch 33 close, it's one of two things: Switch 33 is not working at all (broken/misadjusted/wiring/diode etc.), or switch 33 closed and opened so quickly that the MPU did not see it. In my machine it's apparently the latter, because the switch is good. I've tried adjusting the trip wire, and I installed a .05 switch cap on the switch to try to extend the pulse. I think that my trip wire is too short or the wrong shape, and that's why the pulse is too short.