I helped troubleshoot a problem with a Gottlieb Far Out recently that seemed to reveal a schematic error. I'm hoping Far Out owners can check their games for what we found.
The symptom was that the Add Player Unit was getting two pulses when it should only get one so the game would skip players 2 and 4 for example. These are the relevant bits from the schematic:
Far Out Motor 2C error (resized).jpg
In a multiplayer game when the ball drains the Add Player Unit should usually get just one pulse through the Score Motor 2C and 1A switches which are wired in series (in the red boxes above). Putting these two switches in series should allow just the 2nd of the five pulses from the 1A switch to reach the Add Player Unit solenoid as shown in the first abbreviated Motor Sequence Chart above.
What was happening in this game was that the 2C switch was operating too early which allowed the very end of the first 1A pulse and the very beginning of the 2nd 1A pulse to reach the Add Player Unit solenoid as shown in the second Sequence Chart.
The solution was to move the switch dog on the Score Motor 2C switch stack from the "S" position to the "L" position which delayed the 2C switch so it overlapped just the 2nd 1A pulse as it should.
I always thought that the "S" and "L" positions for the switch dogs meant Short and Long, but now I think a better mnemonic might be Sooner and Later which describes what happens to the switch activations.
So the question I have for Far Out owners is, what position is your Score Motor 2C switch dog in, "S" or "L"? In this game it needed to be in the "L" position, but as you can see above the schematic calls for it to be in the "S" position.
The previous and next 4 Player games, Magnotron and Super Soccer, use the same basic circuit but call for the 2C switch dog to be in the "L" position. Does the Far Out schematic have a typo?
BTW for those wondering how this Far Out got that way. Our best guess is that someone had disassembled the Score Motor at some point (there was some evidence of this) and reassembled it as called for in the schematic. So games probably left the factory assembled correctly even though the schematic seems to be incorrect.
/Mark