This Cinema is the first pinball that I ever owned... now I'm at 9 EM's. I've had this for 5 years or so and it's run fine up until recently. All it needed when I bought it was a new ball, rubbers and a play field waxing.
So, today I'm trying to figure out why it goes into "end of game" at 2 balls instead of 3 or 4 balls when it's set for 5 balls.
The ball count stepper switch seems to be functioning fine, it steps up and it resets back to the "factory position... indicated by orange paint on the circuit board and contact finger" first position okay. I have had the stepper switch disassembled for cleaning but I'm about 99% sure that it is reassembled properly.
When I get a new EM, I will always totally go through them, play field, cabinet board and score reel board. I disassemble and clean all stepper switchs, score reels, score motor, all switches, relays, wire solder joints etc etc. I've had great success in doing this and it virtually always fixes anything that's wrong. So, this isn't my first rodeo.
That said, I did totally go through this Cinema since it was starting to give me grief. The score motor was running continuously, I tracked the problem down to an internally broken wire in the score reel "0" circuit. On a 4-player game it was occasionally scoring points for a different player but that's no longer an issue.
So, now I have this 3-ball, 5-ball problem and I'm guessing that it's something that I screwed up since this wasn't a problem before

Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
John

Nope, that's not it. the gap looks good, I blocked it anyway and still the same problem.

Okay... I have about a thousand hours into this issue! I'm about to call it a 2-ball or 4-ball machine and leave it at that!

Can someone walk me through the basic operational sequence of the ball count circuit?

I've checked every switch contact, relay performance, score motor contacts in this circuit including the ball count unit, Ball Count unit post switch "0" break, Out Hole relay and switches, Game over relay and switches, player control unit post switch at "0" break, coin relay switches and about 50 other things... it's kicking my ass!
This seems like it should be a simple problem to fix... I'm missing something here.

Good afternoon... sorry about not replying this weekend, it was simply busy around here and today I need to get a snowplow mounted on a 4-wheeler so I don't have much time to spare.
Anyway, sorry about the confusion also...
So, if I have the machine set for 3-ball play, the game will end after the second ball drains. The 3rd ball light doesn't come on and it goes to "game over". The same is true if I set it up for 5-ball play, after ball 4 drains... end of game.

Pinballdaveh... thanks for the run-through of the system and I'll pull the schematics back out and do a double check of all components in this circuit. The question that I have to ask though, without looking over the schematics, is this... would this part of the circuit only be active for the last ball, be it set for 3-ball or 5-ball, or would this affect all balls to be played? What is different for the last ball to be played that ends the game?

So, here's another weird... weird one. Is Rod Sterling in the house? The other day after my last post, I was dropping the play field down to close things up for the night. I saw something that had been done to the machine years ago and something that I should have tracked down and changed when I had the "belly board" out.

What I found was that the adjustable pin from the right "coin chute switch" was in the "on" receptical, which it has always been (1 coin=1 play, 2 coins=3 plays). But, someone had de-soldered the wire (grey-white wire) from the adjustable "right chute adjustment" pin and re-soldered it over on to the top of the pin for the right coin chute.

I don't know why this was done so I moved it back to the pin (without a wire on it) that was in the #2, Y-B wire color position on the "right chute adjustment".
I then started the game up, played a single player game in the 3-ball mode and it played normally... end of game on the 3rd ball drain. I then played a 4-player game set up for 3-ball play and all went fine, the 4-player game ended on 4th player, #3 ball drain. WALLA! Life is good!!! It's fixed!!!

Then I decided that I should shut the machine down and restart it to make sure things were still good. Well, all went back to where we were... 3-ball game ends after the 2nd ball drain and when set for 5-ball, game ends after #4 ball drain.
Well, really? I mean REALLY??? So I set it for 5-ball games and it's again a 4-ball machine. The grandkids have played the hell out of it and every game ends on ball #4 drain.

I'm not familiar with the "right chute adjustment" and I'm not sure what it's for but there are 4 positions that the pin can be moved to and I haven't had time to dig into this.

Again, thanks for the input and any advice will be helpful.