*Moved from Tech: General*

I recently acquired my first pin, a childhood favorite of mine - a Haunted House. It works well, but does have a few minor issues. The most notable is that the lightning effect in the backbox doesn't happen. Also, the upstairs window that is supposed to occasionally flash, doesn't.

I've checked the Sound Board DIPs 3/4 and they are set to ON/OFF, which should mean that the attract mode triggers every 10 seconds. Also, the lamp that lights the eyes of the raven, and one just to the lower right of the house, is always on. From what I've seen on other games and videos online, I don't think this is right. All of the sound effects and playfield lights cycle, so attract mode seems otherwise OK.

Note that this game has the Ni-Wumf System-80 CPU upgrade. Also, when I first picked up this machine, I noticed that many of the lamps in the backbox for the lightning area were missing. I replaced them all with #47s.

Here's a quick video I captured, for reference, of how it looks now:

Any ideas on what I might try? Is this an issue with the CPU? Did I just use the wrong lamps?

I think I figured out the issue. Looking at the lamp driver board today, I realized that 1A11-J1 wasn't plugged in. I doubt it ever has been since I've had the game. What a simple fix, right?! Not so much.

I plugged it in and powered up the game, and sure enough, there was some strobe effects. About half of the "lightning bolt" lamps were strobing properly. But the others stayed lit constantly. And the two lamps near the lower right of the house and the raven's eyes were constantly lit. Worse yet, the displays were going haywire. Every time the lamps pulsed, the displays generated odd characters. Clearly, something is wrong with this lamp driver.

So I quickly powered down and took another look. And sure enough, the problem was staring me in the face. Transistors Q9 and Q10 were gone. Completely missing. No wonder the thing doesn't work properly. And I'm pretty sure I know why it was unplugged!

Should I try and seek out these missing transistors and solder them in myself? I'm skilled enough with basic electronics that I'm pretty sure I can pull it off. The trick is figuring out which Darlington NPN transistor to get from Mouser...

The more expensive, but easier alternative seems to be getting a refurbished A11 board from K's Arcade:
https://ksarcade.net/gottlieb-system-80-auxiliary-lamp-driver-a11.html

Any tips/advice here would be greatly appreciated. As this is my first pin, I'm stumbling in the dark a bit here.

bad_lamp_driver.jpg

Thanks, Ken. I'm thinking total replacement on this sucker.

Great stuff here, guys. Thanks.

Ah! I had a feeling that might be the case for some of lamps. I've tried to decipher from the schematics which lamps go where and its not intuitive to a novice like myself. Oh, if only there was a map of the physical (not logical) location of every lamp socket in the game and which of the three types are supposed to be used in each! Are there any other lamps on the backglass that should be 455s?

Cool. I'll use my trusty ol' Fluke to test the transistors. Does anyone know offhand which transistor type is used on this board? I believe they are of the Darlington NPN TIP variety. But I need a few more specifics than that. There are 73 potential matches on Mouser, :
FS=True">http://www.mouser.com/Semiconductors/Discrete-Semiconductors/Transistors/Darlington-Transistors/_/N-ax1sb?Keyword=TIP&FS=True

I also noticed that there were a bunch of missing lamps that encircle the lower playfield. I replaced all of these with 47's, but they didn't light. Now I know why. I'm also guessing that they have been 313's?

Wow, guys. I can't thank you enough for the wisdom here. I've ordered a handful of MPS-U45's to fix the lamp driver board.

Nice tip. I'm going to try the green LED replacement lamps for the 313s. That should look cool.

Man! What an education, Flippers. All I ever hear about Gottliebs is how much of a pain they are to keep running. This sure sounds like the reason, and the remedy. The good news is that your ground mod guide here was already followed by the game's previous owner. Looks like they did a pretty nice job too. But for some reason, they didn't mod the aux lamp driver/light chaser board! I'm going to do that myself. I did notice that the thumbnail for the light chaser board on your site is pointing to a bad link: https://www.flippers.com/images/Gott-GroundMod-Sys80-light%20chaser.JPG. It'd be cool to see the bigger version of this image, whenever you have a chance to fix the link.

Thanks again, all! I'll post an update once I have these fixes done.

Ah-ha! Thanks, Ken.

Taking a while here as the soldering iron I had bit it. Figured it was time I upgraded to a real soldering station - the Weller WTCTP. Will be doing the lamp driver repairs once that lands.

Whew. Took a while for me to get this knocked out.

So I had to replace 3 bad transistors and add two missing ones to the aux. lamp driver board. I also replaced all of the 313 lamps lighting the lower playfield with the 313 replacement LEDs in green from Cointaker per Patofnaud's excellent recommendation. The cellar never looked spookier!

I figured I'd also replace the appropriate lamps on the backbox behind the upper floor window, the raven's eye and another to the lower right of the house with their appropriate 455 lamps.

Powering it up, it WORKED! The lightning was glorious, and the raven, house gargoyle and 2nd story window ghostie all blinked away happily. But I noticed that in between rounds of lightning, there were some subtle bumps from the speaker. I'm not sure, but it sounded like something wasn't grounded properly. And I remembered I forgot to install the grounding mod on the aux. lamp driver. $hit.

That's about when I heard a sickening pop, and the displays started going haywire again, every time the lightning flashed. Ack! I think I blew another transistor. Back to the soldering bench for another round, and this time, I'm going to add that missing ground cable now. Is there anything else going on here I should be thinking about??

Ok - so I'm wondering how to do the ground mod on the aux. lamp driver board. How does one solder to a trace? Isn't there some sort of laminate that has to be removed first? And won't the heat of my soldering iron cause the trace to lift off the board? Soldering components is something I can manage, but this is new to me.

Any advice on this would be grand!

Thanks, guys. In this case, there isn't any green solder mask on the trace, so it should hopefully make things a little simpler. I'll give it a go tonight. The alcohol cleaning tip is one I hadn't heard before.