I have had a weird problem with my #FGY for some time and it's time to get it resolved.

When I first got the game many years ago the Death target was not registering at all. I didn't see anything obviously wrong so I replaced the target opto board and life was good. Several months later, the target stopped registering intermittently again and it's been that way since.

With the Death target down, SW9 (the drop target opto) is not registering in the switch test. However - I found if I move the captured ball on the right side of the TV scoop off of its rollover switch (SW7)-- SW9 registers. As soon as I close SW7 (which is the normal state when the playfield is down) SW9 is dead.

So with the Death target down and SW7 closed, SW9 won't register. With SW7 open, SW9 registers.

The only thing these two switches seem to have in common is that they are both driven from Q1 in Row 1. I played around with some other switches in Row 1 and could intermittently get SW9 to fail simply by closing other switches in the row, but generally speaking, with the playfield lowered, unless SW7 is open, SW9 won't register.

My first thought is that Q1 is bad and needs to be replaced. But if that were the case, I would expect everything else in Row 1 to be flaky, but's that not the case. Every switch except SW9 works perfectly with the playfield down. I guess it's possible the drop target opto board has gone bad again, but that would be two failures which seems awfully unlikely unless there is some other electrical issue with the game.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Randy