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

TimMe described the score motor in some detail and has a nice composite pulse chart at https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/1964-gottlieb-sea-shore-startup-sequence-help#post-6130215 that confirms some of your principles.

At a recent online repair clinic he confirmed that 2C is the only switch stack to use the L position. He also mentioned that the two position switch dog was introduced to address a timing issue with the 2C switch stack. The L position effectively delays the 2C pulse. The switch dog specification seems to have appeared in the schematics in about 1960. Dancing Dolls is an early example I found with the switch dogs specified.

Williams occasionally used a "long dwell" capability on their score motors to similarly manipulate the pulse timing.

I wonder about the 1E, 3E and 4E pulses though. Charts like this one from Pioneer show them all happening at the same time (0 degrees) at the start of the cycle:
Pioneer Score Motor (resized).jpg
I get that they only happen once in three cycles, but what confuses me is that the switch stacks don't appear to be 120 degrees apart. The #1 and #4 stacks appear to be 90 degrees apart while #3 stack is at some other angle relative to the other two. It's hard to imagine how a pulse generated by all three stacks from the same pin would all be at the start of the cycle.

I've been looking at this but reviewing @rolf_martin_062's earlier work clarified it some for me. I think the desired behavior may be to only fire the XB/Last Ball relay after the Player Unit has finished stepping. The Player Unit advances on Motor 1A pulses from 1 to 4 times depending on the number of players:
Far Out Player Unit (resized).jpg
Each Player Unit advance pulse uses a different path as shown by the red numbers. By using 4A and 4C switches in series you get a narrow pulse to the XB relay after the 4th motor 1A pulse, but before the 5th pulse. That would be after the worst case where the Player Unit takes four steps in a one player game.

The same thing might have been accomplished by combining motor switches 4A and 1B, but there may be another reason why the pulse needs to be at the end of the normal motor 4A pulse (which 4C gives you) rather than at the beginning of it (which 1B would produce).

There is a lot of Score Motor trickery in mid-late 70s Gottlieb multi player games having to do with the bonus count. Maybe the interaction with the bonus count made 4C a better choice than 1B.

Edit: Looking further, XB does things like turn on multiple players' score lights and fire the QB/Game Over relay so it would definitely need to wait for the Player Unit to finish stepping.