'Nother couple of questions for the Pinside Brain trust.
1) I started installing the Cointaker kit today, then I realized that they send me a bunch of the 555 style for the playfield inserts. My machine doesn't have a single 555 socket. They are all 44s. Now I realize that this game changed somewhat during its production run, and I have an early version because I had the old Millionaire style display board. Does anyone know if they changed some of the lamps over to 555s at some point or did Cointaker just screw up?
2) I tried put in a few of the LED flashlamps and about half of them stay lit all the time, although they worked normally with incandescents. Taking the backbox flashlamps for example, they are on 2 different circuits - Flasher 9 and Flasher 10. The flashlamps go through a small board that appears to be a simple voltage divider (pic below) but when I try to measure across the resistors I get an open circuit for all except R2, which reads about 6 ohms. R2 is part of the circuit for Flasher 10, which is the one that is on all the time. So what do these boards do and is there a problem with R2? R1 and R4 also get very hot, and when I measure voltage across the positive lead of the lamp to GND I get 33 VDC with the lamp off. Something definitely seems amiss.
3) Flasher 9 and Flasher 10 are also wired to the playfield. Flasher 9 includes the blue and the white flashlamps toward the back, but I don't see where Flasher 10 would go. The wire was cut and twisted back together very unprofessionally, so it just goes to the pf and returns back up. Is there a playfield flashlamp somewhere that is on this circuit? I can't find any evidence of one. The manual indicates it would be near the other two for Flasher 9, so I would think it goes to the red one up there, but that is tied to the red flasher on the opposite side, which I think is Flasher 7. If someone wouldn't mind running a coil test and see if anything on the pf flashes during the coil test for Flasher 10, that would be helpful.
4) This game frigging kicks butt. I have other System 11s, including Whirlwind and ES, but this is quickly becoming my favorite. Awesome theme, music, callouts, and of course the light show. And holy hell, is it fast! One of SR's best, and I think it puts many later games to shame. Can't believe it took me this long to get one!
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