Well I have finally had some extra time in the past couple of days to work on my Comet project(s). I bought 2 non-working machines. 1 has good boards/playfield , but broken wiring issues and is a newer production machine. The 2nd one has bad boards and has been 'well played' and is an older/earlier production run of the machine.
I noticed there are several differences in the boards and componets from one machine to the other. Williams 'upgraded' the boards through production and it seems they changed components for 'bug' fixes or something. Notice the difference between the main cpu boards. Can you tell which one is the older one? They upgraded the resistors. I had the machine on for like 15 minutes and I shut it off. I touched the resistors and man, they were hot. Is that still normal?
This probably was normal with all production runs of machines as technology was always changing, but I plugged in the old machine playfield to the newer machine boards last night and it half-assed worked, but there were no displays. I didn't check if the master display board was getting power but I ran out of time and beer last night and had to call it a night.
The playfields should be interchangable and just plug and play wouldn't they? Even with differences in components? The plugs were all the same!?
