Gang:

I am stumped at the moment and appreciate any ideas/insight offered.

My game was working w/o issues until I recently went to power it on and it booted up in tilt - and what I mean by that - is the tilt relay immediately pulls in upon power up and all GI is out.

Board set is as follows: Ni-Wumpf (rev. F) CPU, Boston Pinball Driver, GPE Power Supply.

Direct connection to ground cables are installed on both the Power Supply and Driver boards.

The coin door slam tilt and roll tilt are both CLOSED. This has been confirmed not only by sight, but also by DMM on the outside of the switch blades to confirm solid point contact. Playfield tilt and plumb bob switches are OPEN. No broken wires at any of the tilt related switches or at the relay.

Testing the Q2 transistor produces the same results of all like resistors on the Driver board and does not seem suspect.

When I disconnect A3-J5 the game does not tilt.

This is a 1 player game (Asteroid Annie) thus rendering diagnostics (practically) useless as I have no player 2-4 displays to reflect diagnostic feedback.

Thanks in advance for the help!

Ah, should have mentioned this in the original post - all side edge connectors were re-pinned in 2016 and they still look clean.

Bump for the AM crowd.

Cheddar I'll check and confirm this evening.

Tilt relay DOES energize immediately upon boot up with A1J7 removed.

Does that indicate that the problem is not rooted in the physical switches?

@cheddar, yes. It's A1-J6. When disconnected, boot up sequence still ends in tilt.

Bumping and adding a shot of the switch matrix.

20190726_193023 (resized).jpg

Machine powers up and goes immediately into tilt (relay engaged). This means that pressing the start button produces no response.

The Q2 transistor when tested produces the same results as all of its matching counterparts on the driver board.

The interconnect cable is a new one (built in 2016) and I can disconnect it and see what happens at boot up.

Will report back tonight.

Cheddar thanks for all your input!

The game tilts IMMEDIATELY. There is no 5 second delay. There are no strobing zeros - most often just the number "343".

Uuuf... do you really think the board needs to go back to Ni-Wumpf?

That would certainly be why I can't figure out the issue...just stinks to have the board gone for a while.

So, this is interesting...

At Cheddar 's behest I disconnected the interconnect cable on the driver side. Game booted up and not in tilt (as expected - nothing to drive the tilt relay).

Replaced the interconnect cable and now the game boots and goes into "ready state" (as there is no "attract", per se) perfectly.

While this is refreshing, it is also maddening. I would like to understand WHY removing and reconnecting the interconnect cable caused things to work - it's almost like "something" reset. Is this a known/expected behavior?

Again the interconnect cable is new (2016) with fresh wires/headers/pins and the board is a new (2017) Boston Pinball driver. One would not expect poor contact between the two components.

If the game continues to perform as expected for a week, I'll mark this topic as "resolved", but I would still like to understand WHY it is working now (after wasting hours trouble shooting).

I agree that the Pascal boards are best in class. In fact, I have several. One of which is the "All in 1". My only concern with the "All in 1" is that it is a single source of failure. Maybe I am overthinking it, but in all my other Sys1's, I have Pascal MPUs but keep the 3 board architecture to allow for more flexibility in terms of troubleshooting/repair and lower cost when something has to be replaced.

Pascal won me over with all the additional functionality. It may be a minor thing, but I love having an attract mode on these old games and seeing the lamps cycle when not in use.

OK, so I can't close this one out yet...

I installed a Pascal MPU board last night and the game is booting, but then going into "SLAM" mode.

The coindoor slam and roll tilt switches are indeed closed.

After replacing the spade connectors on the roll tilt switch (while coincidentally the coin door was open), the game played 3-4 games flawlessly.

Closed the coin door and started up another game and again, straight to slam tilt.

It's so bizarre, because I have carefully inspected the wires on or around the coin door and see no evidence of a short.

Thoughts?

This one still has me stumped.

I know the switches are fully closed and have confirmed by testing for continuity on the switch lugs.

Ground is confirmed all the way up into the boards.

Transistor for the (T) relay on the driver board is good.

Throughout the troubleshooting process, there have been a few brief periods during which the game has played corrrectly, so the problem could be considered "intermittent" (although it is down 95% of the time).

What could possibly be telling the tilt relay to engage as soon as the game powers on if the slam/roll switches are fully closed and the playfield/plumbob tilt are open?

Bump for the weekend crowd.

OK, so it's been a couple of months and I now feel like I can close this out as "Resolved".

Turns out that when I swapped interconnect harnesses that all of my issues went away. This is perplexing because the one I took out was one of the "newer" ones sold as an upgrade.

I have now had the game up and running with zero issues for 60 days since changing out that harness.

Thanks to everyone who helped me troubleshoot!

Funny thing is, it was not pinned incorrectly - and it worked well for about 2 years.