I have a new level of respect for System 3 games. I own a "Lights...Camera...Action!" and in all honesty, it's one of the most popular games in my collection, even sitting next to Earthshaker and Whirlwind.

From a hardware standpoint, I feel like Gottlieb really hit a stride with the architecture. Extended switch and lamp matrices allow for 108 individual bulbs and switches is nice, even if they never really took advantage of all of them--I don't think that even WPC games had this many at their disposal. 25 controllable solenoids with built in "anti-machine gunning kickers" is smart, and their use of lower voltage DMDs and alphanumeric displays, and lithium batteries was forward thinking. I'm willing to overlook their grounding issues and shared strobes. I hear the System 3 boardset is pretty robust as well.

From a games standpoint, I wish Gottlieb took more of an advantage of the hardware. They always seemed behind the times, even though under the hood, they could easily outperform any William's System 11 title in terms of technical aspects. Awkward flippers, early "street level" designs, and lame licensed themes later set them back, imo. But the awkwardness in design is what makes them special to me. They're sorta the "anti-pinball" for when you want something good and unique that wasn't designed by Bally or Williams. Kind of like comparing the Sega Genesis to the Super Nintendo, this was the last era where pinball machines from different manufacturers truly had a different look and feel. Never have I wanted to own a Class of 1812 as much as I do now, and I'd love to stick a Cactus Jack's in my collection as well some day.

In my game, yes, they were the same thing. Just rebuilt them the other day and, it too, had plenty of hacks from the previous owner. When I bought my rebuild kit, it came with the EOS switches pre-soldered to the filter capacitor which was all attached to the EOS plate. It was probably the easiest replacement ever. Everything just dropped right into place.

For anyone curious, I recently changed out the ROMs in my Lights Camera Action. Here's what I came up with:

The order of revisions along with checksums are as follows:
$D880 --> Revision 1
$D169 --> Revision 2
$E1F5 --> Revision 3 (the most recent revision of software for this title).

For anyone out there wondering, the 3rd revision of the software changes a few topographical things. For starters, the "Gun Fight" and "Mystery" award animations are MUCH faster. Mystery awards seem more balanced as well; awards like extra balls and million points are now pretty rare compared to previous software revisions. It also changes the speed at which certain callouts are made, notably the ones pertaining to the "draw card" sequence. Finally, a more proper delay was added to the amount of time the "status report" would show after trapping a ball. Oddly, the game still completely lacks any kind of ball search.

How old were you guys when you realized that the game "Silver Slugger" is called Silver Slugger because the players are weird futuristic android/robot/guys-in-robot suits playing baseball?

I was today years old...

Does anyone know what game was the first Gottlieb game to conduct a ball search? My Lights Camera Action definitely doesn't have one, and I don't think Super Mario Bros. has one either.

Side note: Do ANY Gottlieb games have software compensation for having a ball get stuck and being able to play with one fewer ball in the trough?

Just more of a curiosity thing than anything.

Assuming there isn’t a hardware issue (ie broken switch or the like), I know that Gottlieb games get super weird when there’s a memory issue/battery not holding a charge.

My Super Mario Bros only popped up the center target ball save when it felt like it. There was no rhyme or reason. Drove me nuts until I simply did a factory reset. Now it works fine.

On my lights camera action, it was awarding specials like candy. Again, no reason behind it, other than I did a ROM upgrade, and the rules bugged out. After a factory reset, all was well.

So maybe start with that and see where it gets you.

Installed instruction cards from Mr_Tantrum this afternoon in LCA. Looks great!

99581E2F-AD9B-48AD-94E5-4D8155663688 (resized).jpeg

Check all the trough switches in switch test, and/or make sure you have all 3 balls in the trough. Early system 3 games won’t perform a ball search, and they won’t give you any notification that one might be missing. It’ll start a game, but do literally nothing after that if it doesn’t sense all 3 balls in it.

I know the 3rd leg of those Gottlieb switches tends to corrode, so give them a good clean while you’re at it. It could be the root of a ball not being detected.

As far as I know, you can’t stop it. You can turn attract sounds off though, so it’ll do it “silently” but you’ll still hear the mechanical clunks of the gunfight going on.

Edit: what version of ROMs are you using? (Specifically, what’s the checksum of your ROMs? There’s 3 versions I’ve found, and they all handle the gunfight slightly differently)

Completely normal. The motor will run continuously during gameplay. There's a small clutch between the motor and the rotating playfield that allows the motor to keep running, even though the playfield is being held static by the small armature.

No tournament mode switch on the Alphanumeric System 3 games. But switching the game to novelty mode disables extra balls and awards points instead.

There are several revisions of the A1 MPU board. Bell Ringer, being an early Alphanumeric game, uses the early revision System 3 MPU board with a 6116 RAM chip at U3. Verify that the MPU board you have installed has this particular chip. Count the legs. It should have 24 legs.

If you have a later revision board with the 6264 RAM at U3, it'll have 28 legs. As far as my (limited) knowledge goes, this will not work with bell ringer unless a 6116 RAM is installed and the jumpers are changed to accommodate it.

Yea, this is pretty normal. The glass crashing sound is kinda harsh and loud compared to other sounds and music.

The audio also changes volume occasionally, specifically, at the start of each ball, the volume will be low, then when you plunge, the volume gets loud and remains loud until you lock a ball or drain.

Unfortunately, none exist, and I’ve done a lot of searching. What ROM revision/checksum are you using? I did a lot of digging several years ago when I owned the game and came up with this:

The order of revisions along with checksums are as follows:
$D880 --> Revision 1
$D169 --> Revision 2
$E1F5 --> Revision 3 (the most recent revision of software for this title).
The 3rd revision of the software changes a few topographical things: the "Gun Fight" and "Mystery" award animations are MUCH faster. Mystery awards seem more balanced as well; awards like extra balls and million points are now pretty rare compared to previous software revisions. It also changes the speed at which certain callouts are made, notably the ones pertaining to the "draw card" sequence, and a more proper delay was added to the amount of time the "status report" would show after trapping a ball.

As far as normalizing the awards further, I ended up putting the game into novelty mode, which causes the extra ball award on mystery to award 1 million. Also, disable catch-up. Beyond that, there’s not much you can do.

Lamps on System 3 games are polarized. If an LED doesn’t work, it’s often because the lugs were soldered in backwards. So check the suspect sockets with an incandescent. If it works, either the LED is bad, or you need to reverse the lugs (de-solder, flip and resolder).

Flippers are operated mechanically. No CPU control like fliptronics. The switch test will only tell the CPU of a switch closure for things like lane change and putting in initials. Diagnose non-working flippers as you would any other game: check for loose wires at lugs, and check the flipper relay contacts in the bottom of the cabinet.