Eight Ball was my third pinball and 1st restoration. Eight Ball came to me with a totally worn out ball rack section that somebody further ruined with a poor paint job that then lifted. The cabinet was missing a ton of paint and along with cigarette burns. I redrew the artwork from scratch, sent the playfield through a modern flatbed printer, then clear coated it and rebuilt it. Found a CPR backglass since the original was mostly empty spaces.

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The Alltek has all the game ROMs onboard, you select the one you want with DIP switches, makes it easy to move between games. The Weebly uses the original game ROMs, you need to swap chips if you switch games.

How new is that feature? I swear 3 months ago it was not there. That makes a big difference.

Do you have the extra lead wired in, where did you connect it? Did you check those sockets with incandescents?

This thread needs more activity. My first pinball was a Black Jack which has several layout similarities to Eight Ball. I got a really rough Eight Ball soon after and restored it and had them side by side for quite a while. I could roll Black Jack over from time to time. Eight Ball defied me forever, I have only done it twice now. For some reason I play Eight Ball as a 5 ball game because of how they were when I was young. Everything else I own is 3 ball.

I find Eight Ball pretty merciless and I own a Flash Gordon! One of the toughest games I own with the huge left outlane.

The title of this thread says it all, simple but wonderful.

Let us know how it goes without the cap. Keep in mind, you are likely to have all bad caps under the playfield. One of the first tasks I do on a newly acquired machine is to replace all of them. Related switches in the matrix can contribute to the issue if they have bad caps.

Change all the under playfield caps on all switches that have them. That and replacing all the coil sleeves and you won't believe how much faster the game plays.

Inserts bowing is not necessarily from use. The sanding of the inserts when they are installed removes the top compression layer. They will certainly bow more due to heat from bulbs but they will still bow.

When your chime gets stuck, is the coil powering it still on? If so that coil will be heating up quite a bit. It should be Q5 on the solenoid board. If this is happening I would suspect the transistor is starting to short out or the pre-driver transistor which is in a DIP package. It seems more likely it is just sticking though.

The lighting board SCRs fail all the time if they are original. I keep a supply of the SCRs and swap them when needed. I find they fail when powering fresh bulbs due to the higher current draw.

New rules for Eight Ball

You may have heard of the new Bally/Stern Operating System created by Dick Hammel. You plug a small adapter board onto the J5 connector of the MPU card and a small Arduino board takes over and operates the pinball machine. There has been a small group of people working on several different machines. There is a ton of information here:

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/replacing-the-m6800-in-a-stern-mpu100-with-an-arduino

I have been working on an update to Eight Ball I have named Eight Ball Plus. I am getting close to releasing a version of the new game. The original game rules are still there but now there are 6 goals to be achieved with special game play modes after getting 3 and 5 goals.

Goals:
- Singles digit of your score shows qty of goals achieved
- Can be achieved in any order except for some that are unlocked

SuperBonus - the original Eight Ball rule set goal. Get balls 1-7 or 9-14, then 8 and lose your ball. On the next ball SuperBonus is lit.
Next Ball - Capturing sequential balls gives 5000 pts (time set in coin door)
Pop Mode - Hitting the pop bumpers more than 40 times (qty settable in coin door) scores 1000 pts per hit
Spinner Mode - Hitting the spinner more than 50 times (qty settable in coin door) scores 1500 pts per hit when lit and 2000 pts when lit if you do it again.
Spinner Combo - Complete Spinner mode twice starts a timed mode where you have to shoot the Bank Shot and then the Spinner again. You have 12 seconds (time set in coin door) to reach it for 5000 pts. If you do you get a second ball to chase for 20000 pts.
Scramble Ball - unlocked by pop bumper mode, hit the otherwise useless target to the left of lane 1-9 to randomly rotate your captured balls (have 1 and 2 currently? Now it might be 6 and 7).

After getting 3 goals, you enter Ball Chase mode. This it is a timed mode (settable), where you pursue the single blinking ball target for 5000 pts. If you get it on time you get a second chance at another one for 20000 pts

After getting 5 goals, you enter 15 ball mode. This is the wizard mode. You can now light up all 14 balls, then get the 8 ball for 100000 pts. However there is a catch. If you capture balls 1 and 9 for instance you get 5000 pts for each one. Go through the same gate again, you lose a ball and lose 10000 pts. You need to know when to quit while you are ahead.

Here is a video of the game play:

I have a few more things to clean up and some additional display features not shown in the video, then I will release it on GitHub.

You can pretty much plug and play if you want to. I think the links in the video show you to a Pinside store where you can buy the hardware. You then upload the correct game into the Arduino. I wrote a specific set of instructions for people who are new to Arduinos. It will be pretty straightforward.

Is that the Eight Ball beach re-theme? If it is running the original boards it will work fine. Is it still using the chimes?

I really wanted to make more of the chimes compared to the original games which were at the time mostly mimicking EMs. If you have headphones on when watching the video you can hear the double chimes from the spinner, pop bumpers, and the bonus in 15 ball mode. In pop mode each bumper has a different twin tone. I also use the knocker as an event indicator much more often than the original game.

The guy selling the boards RoyGBev is who I bought my boards from. He won’t be able to load the code yet for you since it is not yet released but it is coming soon. If you wind up with a board in your hands I can just send the code to you by email, it is not a huge file.

I have to check out a few more things but all the timed modes now display a count down in the other 3 displays while the mode progresses which really helps you keep you track.

What happens during the solenoid test? If only that one is wrong it is probably the transistor. If a few do, it could be a stuck address line. A stuck address line though would likely mess up the lights too.

On the solenoid driver board, the outhole kicker should be Q4 (the bottom row of the board start counting from the left), does it look like the others?

The address lines are in connector J4 on the solenoid board, pins 3-6. They are set in unique combinations (1 of 16). The outhole is 7 (binary 111), the kicker is 6 (110). I would really make sure that connector is well seated. The other end is connector J4 on the MPU, pins 1-4. Make sure both connectors are cleaned and seated nicely.

But before anything I would run the solenoid test from the coin door. Does the machine do all the solenoids in order:
01 Outhole
02 Knocker
03 Kicker
04-07 Chimes
08-11 Bumpers
11-12 Slings
13 Coin Door
14 Flipper Relay

Yes, that one is correct. Whatever you order, make sure it is the Arduino Mega as that one is. We all started with the Arduino Nano which requires a different adapter board but we all ran out of room. The Mega is 8 times bigger.

I wrote detailed instructions for people to use when programming the Arduino aimed at people not familiar with them.

What is the latec board? Which board is that in the machine, top left? It sure sounds like a stuck address line. What does the lighting do, do you get the normal looking attract mode? Do the displays work?

The Alltek board is so much newer than the originals it is likely not the issue, especially if you had a second one to try. The specific solenoid order is what will help sort this out.

I have now released the first version of Eight Ball Plus now on GitHub. https://github.com/BallySternOS/Eight-Ball-Plus

I also created a new thread specific to the the new code here: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/eight-ball-plus-new-rules-for-bally-eight-ball#post-6841147 so if you have any specific questions about the new game post them there but I still follow this thread as well.

I have created an updated version of Eight Ball Plus V80. Some new rules and display functionality. I put all the info in the dedicated thread.

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/eight-ball-plus-new-rules-for-bally-eight-ball#post-6906568

I did a complete new playfield for my Eight Ball. I painted the side rails and the apron the same colour, you see no mismatch that way. I had the colour custom mixed and used a cheap air sprayer to apply it. One thing is when you paint the apron, any non-automotive paint will be chewed off by the ball pretty quickly. You can either coat the ball face with mylar or in my case I used spray Varathane the water based stuff. Put on thin, there is no effect on colour and the toughness is many times that of regular spray paint.

A few people have been asking about the defunct BSOS links for games with new rules. Good news is Eight Ball Plus is back. It is exciting in that the operating system has been updated to work on Bally/Stern, and now Williams Sys 3-11. So now the operating system is called Retro Pinball Update. There is a new repository.

I have updated my code and renamed that game to "Pinball Pool Game". Boring I know but does not conflict with any registered names. The new repository is here: https://github.com/RetroPinUpgrade/PinballPoolGame

Although it says V82, it is in fact the same V80 code I had previously released. If you have the code already running, there is nothing to do. If you are new to trying out the new rule set, this is the code you want.

I plan to make an updated version of the game but that will take a few months, but I have some minor bugs to fix as well as planning to revamp the mid-game mode after 3 goals to be much more that chasing the 2 balls we have at the moment. All to come. I will update the dedicated thread as well located here: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/eight-ball-plus-new-rules-for-bally-eight-ball

There is a new version 87 of PinballPoolGame (aka Eight Ball Plus). I have done quite a few code updates, lots of cleaning up, new sounds effects, etc. The 6th goal Scramble Ball now has a sound effect so you can tell you achieved it.

The new code is found here. For the time being the previous version is still available.

https://github.com/RetroPinUpgrade/PinballPoolGameV87

The news is the middle mode Chase Ball has been replaced with Roaming mode. It is also a timed mode but much more interesting to play. Details are shown here in this preview video I made recently.

If you are new the game entirely, here is the previous video showing the whole game but with the old middle mode.

I also posted this in the dedicated thread. https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/eight-ball-plus-new-rules-for-bally-eight-ball

I included instructions in the repository. https://github.com/RetroPinUpgrade/PinballPoolGame

At long last EightBallPlus V90 is now released. https://github.com/RetroPinUpgrade/PinballPoolGameV90
This is probably the last version of the game, it is pretty complete now.
Changes for this version are a lot of code clean up, more distinct sound effects in a number of places, plus a new mini-game called Alley Mode.

The dedicated thread has more info. https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/eight-ball-plus-new-rules-for-bally-eight-ball/page/2#post-8081204

Gameplay video.

Rules description