HH that I've been working on for someone started doing some absolutely insane shit.

When a game starts, it will just advance through balls and say game over without shooting a ball out at all. Seems odd because I was under the impression that if you house ball without a switch it would just keep kicking the ball out... Anybody have thoughts on what to point to?

Only one thing that it could possibly be that makes sense. It's haunted.

Did you remove the ball and fiddle with the trough switch?

I would if I were there, but this is a friend’s machine that is almost 3hr away. He says the trough switch is working.... but.... ya know.

It has a Swemmer MPU that checks out, but stock everything else, but it DOES sound like an MPU issues doesn’t it?

I replaced a lamp in my upper playfield that was burned out and it seems to stay on whenever the lights on the upper playfield is on. The other three lamps next to it will cycle on and off. I think the light should cycle on and off too but I don’t remember. Can someone confirm if this light should be on most of the time? If not I may need to pull the driver board and check it.

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Finally had a chance to pull the power board and install the new potentiometer for the main 5V supply. The old original was on it’s way out. Should have this back in soon and want to resolve that odd issue above with the lamp to get it back to 100 percent.

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That's normal. First few seconds and last 40 seconds of this video

Thank You! Just wanted to get confirmation if it was right or not. Looks like I can go ahead and get it back together now.

I recently restored a HH and have trap door question. The left most outlane switch opens the trap door. Is this normal?

Thanks,

Yes

For the ppl that have used the mirco HH playfield set, what's everyones opinion on it, I'm thinking about scooping up a set, my HH is cleared already from the previous owner but it wasnt sanded and polished so it's kinda bugging me

I’m interested in this also. My playfield is pretty good but I wouldn’t mind swapping it out for a new one if I knew the quality was there.

I have a better main play field that I was thinking of swapping in but one look at the underside of this beautiful beast made me suddenly very happy with my current playfield! It looks like a beast to swap!

Their all a pain in the @$$ to do....I have used mirco in the past on a couple swaps and it was pretty straightforward. I'd just like someone to chime if they have done HH and was the quality good

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/haunted-house-playfield-swap

Dunno if Bryan will chime in but he does some pretty killer work and did a great job documenting his playfield swap. I actually referenced this thread pretty often when I was doing a full topside teardown.

I've bought a new modern pop bumper to test and fault find.
I'm going to get a Pascal mpu board soon.
Of the 4 pop bumpers I have 2 displaying 5v and 2 displaying 24v.

**update**** I checked the pop bumpers and noted when I changed out them I left the switch open. Now I have 24 and 5 to each bumper, school boy error****

Is this telling me I have bad coils?

F4 will blow after a few minutes if a game is loaded so plenty to do.

Got my HH two days ago. Got a list of things to do. It mostly plays, but no sound. Planning on doing ground mods and repinning connectors. Did that drill on my Cleopatra.
I’m looking for the list of codes to interpret the test button tones on the sound card. I saw it somewhere online, but can’t find it now. My HH sounds two tones when I press the test button. What does it mean?

Thanks for the help.

How are the DIP switches set on the MPU board. Switch 5 turns background sounds on and off. Switches 3 and 4 can also control sound. Try turning switch 3 and 4 on if they are off.

With the power off have you reseated the connections? The signals from the MPU travel through the driver board.

If you don't have the manual you can get one from pbresource.com

Hi everybody, I have officially joined the Haunted House owner's club, took the excellent example that SunKing wrote up previously on this forum (and posted lots of details on another thread, he did just a beautiful job of rebuilding the mechanics and getting the playfield from BAD shape to back to near excellent condition in my opinion). The only things the machine really needed were:
1) some exterior cabinet work; Brad did a really smart job of taking a terrible situation and making it look good with the red "blood" effect ("before" and "after" photos below), my wife thought I should just do the same on the other side which I considered but decided against (FIXED - filled in things a bit, sanded cabinet, painted by hand and put in my own "lighting", does not match the factory paint design but close and is fine until (and if) I want to do a full repaint with templates or a wrap
2) some adjusting of the attic upkicker (FIXED - wound up swapping out the 5195 coil that was not original and going back to the 5194 OEM one, works great)
3) new Secret Passage plastic (FIXED, well soon, ordered one from Europe, here any day!)
4) the sound worked ok but sound quality was pretty bad (FIXED - new $25 Pioneer TS1634R 4-ohm speakers via Amazon sound like a darned IMAX theater compared to the original speakers ... yeah I painted the underside of the cabinet as well, had extra time and paint on my hands)
5) some troubleshooting of the trap door which opens and closes fine BUT opens when a game is started instead of waiting for you to hit the right target combos, then it closes when the game is over ... and opens back up when the next game is started (NOT FIXED, DRIVING ME INSANE).

So I beg, no I plead after spending more than a few days trying to figure out this trap door thing for some help! So here is what I have tried:
1) replaced the driving transistor (but turned out the reading for the original one showed the original one working fine, I just got a strange reading until I completely took it out of the circuit ... brand new transistor behaves the same).
2) double checked the circuit back to the Pascal board (V1.3); the repinning work is excellent (by Brad) and the L16 circuit from the board all the way to the transistor on the playfield works with a completed circuit using my meter.
4) Checked the switches that normally would activate the trap door, no issues (the trap door rollunder and the left lane rollover next to the lower bumper, switches both work, although I noticed that the score increments but there is no sound for the lower left rollover, seems odd since every other switch seems to have sound associated with it)
5) Using the Pascal board you can test each coil individually; well, they all work EXCEPT nothing happens for the L16 test, which of course is the trap door.
6) Using the Pascal board to test the "G" coils ("general" coils common to everything I think?), the VERY first test which shows "Relay" in the upper left score, "9 game" in the upper right, and "G-test" in the lower right activates the trap door coil; I think that is the Game Over relay test (since it activates the trap door I figured it might have something to do with the equation).

And I have cleaned every relay, checked the gaps for every relay, plugged and unplugged everything carefully multiple times, but for the life of me I cannot figure out this one. So if anyone has any tips or info to help with the trap door issue, I would be super grateful. But the machine is beautiful, plays great, and so far I love this pin ... a true classic that I am SO happy to have in my collection. Thanks in advance for any suggestions
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Can anyone tell me about the basement window? Aka the see through bit in the middle of the playfield. Can you get a reproduction one? Is it green or clear? Havent ever seen a Haunted House In the flesh. Pretty rare in Australia.

A replacement green window for HH can be purchased from Marcos Specialties in the US for $50. Here's a comparison of my original 40-year old window and the new one. Definitely worth the $$.

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I'm so glad I did mine. Did take a little shaving down with the Dremel to make it fit flush but been good ever since.

UPDATE - BAD PASCAL BOARD TRANSISTOR! I literally woke up in the night, thought about the trap door issue, and it hit me that perhaps the issue is with the Pascal board which I assumed was totally good to go. The board also has transistors, so that seems like the last area I haven't thoroughly checked. So today I pulled the board from the machine, tested everything, and sure enough there is a bad transistor ... you guessed it, QL16, which is related to the trap door circuit. I am a newbie and had never tested a transistor in my life until owning this machine, but I'm getting pretty good at reading schematics (although for the life of me I'm confused by the Gottlieb color-coding which doesn't always seem to match my machine ... especially references to brown wire which always seems to be white, but I digress).

AND this solves a mystery of the playfield transistor that I thought tested bad, replaced, and then the old one tested fine out of circuit. Now that I have the board removed, the playfield transistor in circuit tests fine, so that bad test was due to the one on the Pascal board, not the playfield. Note to self: for future transistor tests on the playfield, disconnect from the main board and test things separately where possible.

So I am relieved to have found the likely root cause of the issue, which is basically a $1 transistor (BD681). Now I have the decision to make about how to install it and not ruin a precious Pascal (and not cheap) board. I grew up soldering various little projects as a kid (model railroads and such), but hadn't tried it in years until I swapped out a coil on this machine. And it looks like a 5-year did the work, which is "ok" for a coil, NOT ok for an expensive board. If anyone has a recommendation for an electronics shop in Austin Texas that could swap out that transistor for a reasonable rate please advise. Or maybe I'll get a soldering station, practice, and then do it myself. Will post again whenever the transistor is fixed (and hopefully the trap door will be good to go, although if there is a short or issue that ruined the transistor in the first place then I may have more detective work to do). I am seeing how part (most?) of the fun of Haunted House is working on it ... fortunately I truly enjoy that aspect at least to some degree

EDIT: Well I wanted to have a System 80 game and so I think I'll "man up" and learn to solder properly, then install the transistor on the Pascal board (new soldering iron, practice breadboards, and 10 transistors on order!). Should be fun, hopefully by this time next week I'll be back in business with a 100% working machine.
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Wow, your old one looks ok but the new one looks awesome, might have to add one to the cart next time I place a Marcos order. Thanks for posting those pics.

During the "great Pinside outage of 2021" I completed my soldering job and swapped out the bad transistor on the Pascal board. It was scary due to my lousy skills, but after getting a new cheapo iron from Amazon and practicing on a breadboard my confidence grew, and the final product looks almost as if a robot did the work ... quite proud that I didn't botch it! So the big test: I fired up the machine, started a game, and lo and behold the trap door now functions exactly as it should ... it is FIXED!!! So the machine is truly now 100% functional, and I have been playing it for about a week with ZERO issues. I really love this machine even more than I thought I would and am thrilled to be part of the HH club. Now I'm thinking a Black Hole would make a great sibling machine ... aaah this hobby is addictive

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I'm impressed!! Great job on the sides as well. I'm super glad that old Haunted House went to someone who has given it such a great home.

Thanks SunKing yep it certainly went to a loving home, you really gave it a completely new life, now I have an even greater appreciation for the amazing work you did with the mechanicals and the playfields, man what an endeavor!

Just for future viewers, my "new" HH is playing great, but every once in a while it decided that the cellar to main playfield VUK was just not going to kick the ball up enough. I tried adjusting it, would see it work fine maybe 5 or 10 times in a row, and then fail several times in a row to where it was ROUGHLY a 70% success rate. Playable, but everything else on the machine is absolutely 100%. The coil was fairly new with a crisp wrapper, but I finally realized that the coil number was a 1496, yet the part number should have been the slightly more powerful A-21741 per page 54 of the manual (although it appears to be a different part number in another location in the manual and on other forums threads). But bottom line, I put in the A-21741 and it has that ball flying up and out of the tube EVERY single time, probably have 100+ upkicks at this point with 100% success rate. So of course there are a variety of other issues that can cause the upkick problems, but at least for me swapping out the coil for the 21741 finally did the trick. LOVE HH, what a great game! And it has taught me SO much about working on machines in just a matter of weeks, been 1% frustration but 99% satisfaction

I've always said "If you can fix a System 80 you can fix any pin".

Can we rewind to this post? Were you watching Gilmore Girls while working on your HH?

Traded my project HH a few months ago, and was looking forward to getting it together. Damn it. On the hunt for another now.

Great combo. Equally as frustrating. I really enjoy having GG on the background while I'm working on pins, because it helps occupy this part of my brain that can be totally shut off when I'm thinking about technical info. Same goes for when I'm playing. Often times, at tournaments, I'll have headphones on. What am I listening to? Usually old episodes of This American Life that I can recite from memory.

I doubt I'll ever sell my HH, and when I do, it will be when I clear our my whole collection. It's the game that started the whole thing for me, and I had to rent a private barge to go to an island just to get it (and then have it be DOA when I got it back).

Check your U-Relay switches.

I just wanted to share the extra spooky Haunted House Black Hole in the Cellar Pop Bumper Mod that the game I used to own had.

The previous owner pointed out that there was a Black Hole in the cellar when I was purchasing the game.

The more I thought about how spooky and haunted that it would be to have a black hole in the cellar the more I liked seeing the blue pop bumper down there!

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Very excited to clean this up and move into “the arcade”

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Beautiful in any setting! Yours looks like a really nice machine. Funny, I only have two pins: a Wonka and a Haunted House, and now that we have had some friends and family over I can say 100% (old and young) are immediately drawn to the HH. Update us with a pic in your "arcade" please!

and PS, the Viper in the background is not too shabby either, maybe not HH level of awesomeness, but not bad

Excited to be back in the club. Now to finally bolt one down so it stays...

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Long shot, but anybody have a spare plastic for the lower playfield on the left? Mine has two chips out on the drop bank edge.

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Wow what a stunning pair!

Definitely! I posted somewhere else that I think I’ve owned each game 4 or 5 times now, but never at the same time. It is nice to see them side-by-side.

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Colsond3, PinballCenter.de here in Germany sells all of the plastics for HH. The part you need is on their site for €36.90

https://www.pinball.center/de/shop/flipperspezifisch/haunted-house/7916/plastic-fuer-haunted-house-6

They will ship to the states but it is pricey. If you can't get it worked out, send me a DM and maybe I can help. I'm an American living over here and I'm flying back to the US for vacation in July.

Colsond3 it's so fun to see both the lower level games together. I have that lower level plastic but it's also got a chip out of it (not as bad as yours).

They go out of stock super fast, but the plastic protectors that Marco sells for both the secret passage and that lower level plastic are essential in my opinion.

Just FYI everybody, the Netherlands site www.ministryofpinball.com has some HH plastics (but I did not find the lower bank playfield part unfortunately). I ordered the "Secret Passage" plastic for around $30 total including shipping to the US; took maybe three weeks to arrive, but it is a perfect replacement and looks great. I was just glad to find somewhere that sold it; no luck with any US sites or eBay / etc.

Good tip. I might purchase one just to have another on hand

I really like the score cards here, do you have the files to share, or can someone share if they have them please?

I installed these on my HH a couple of months ago and they amazing and fit perfectly, nicely laminated and very sturdy as well. I bought them via eBay from a guy in the UK, around $12 shipped, well worth it for me. I can contact the seller and ask him to list another set if you are interested in picking up a set.

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Looking at a Haunted House pin possibly. Boots and plays but no sound and the flippers in the lower playfield do not work. Cabinet seems pretty good condition, no rust. Been in the peoples home for 30 years and not maintained. I see lots of sound issues with this game in the past posts but not much about the lower playfield. What would cause lower flippers to not function? Do the sound boards usually just go bad?

Hi all!
I’m building a Haunted House from scratch so I hope when the project is done I can join your group of owners.
If any one are interested to follow the progress of the project, I have made a thread here on Pinside,
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/project-haunted-house-building-a-pinball-from-scratch
Thanks all and I already love this game.