Quoted from 1stpingalaxy:
Thanks. I'm going to go through the connectors tonight. I went ahead and cut the AC voltage I fixed earlier to try and 'get back to where I started' but the dimming issue is still there, and the machine is rebooting on its own sometimes (with an occasional solenoid firing randomly).
I did remove the corroded battery earlier, it was actually the first thing I did before I moved onto anything else. There wasn't any real visible damage thankfully.
I'm not really sure where to start here but I'll probably start by pulling the J1-J3 connectors and testing voltages with various areas isolated first. Then perhaps I can narrow down whats causing the dimming/rebooting.
I was only replacing feature bulbs last night, but perhaps I introduced a short somewhere in the process. I was extra careful, but anything is possible. The fact that the bulb wire has to be unscrewed from the back of the playfield to change them certainly increases the odds of something getting crossed along the way.[quoted image]
MPU looks surprisingly clean. Seems like 90% of originals you come across have battery damage. You can gently flex on the MPU board and it's chips to see if a flaky connection is causing the reset. The 12v regulator has an isolated ground return between the rectifier board and the solenoid driver board. Its common to see that connections toasted at either/both ends and can cause resets if the voltage regulator input drops below the breakdown point. Its an orange wire. Check out the ground modifications to the driver board. Its basically combine all the grounds together at the driver board. They should be pictured with more info on pinwiki and other guides.
Flippers are going to cause some dimming of the lamps. Its unavoidable to some extent but having the rectifier board connections in good shape will help.
If the lamps stay dim while a flipper is held the end of stroke switch on the flipper mech needs adjust to open up at the full stroke of the flipper.