Hi everyone.

Looks like we have a problem with the general illumination playfield lamps on my Haunted House table. None of them are lighting up.

I've isolated and tested the power supply and it's running smoothly. The bridge rectifier responsible for powering on the lamps show all four lugs with the proper value of .4 to .6 (.49 to be exact in my case). I also ran my DMM through the rectifier with the game on and it's showing the proper value, cycling from 0V to 6.3V.

But as soon as I pop in an 8A fuse... FOOM... it burns out.

I'm curious to everyone's thoughts about what's happening. Could it be a short in the wiring for the lamps?

Also, I removed the power connectors from the lower and upper playfields so it appears that if it's a short then it's on the main playfield.

Am I heading in the right direction?

Now I know why this table is called "Haunted House". You fix one thing and something else goes wrong.

-Bob

Thanks for the advice, folks.

Yes, it just started happening. I recently purchased a new 6-digit display and had to leave it on overnight for the display to charge. The next day, no GI.

The main playfield has been isolated as the problem and I'll just go through the GI sockets one by one. Luckily there aren't many of them.

I have the great System-80 repair guide pdf that Clay wrote, and have done all of the grounding modifications, so I guess it's just a short somewhere.

This message board has become indispensable since I got this bastard.

Update:

I was able to trace down the problem. Something bad must have happened to a lamp socket. Its terminals were completely fried.

After replacing it and powering up the machine. It became very happy and turned on all of the GI lamps.

My machine loves me very much now.

Thanks again everyone!

-Bob

shorted-lamp.jpg

Wow. I've been meaning to check out PinWiki but haven't got around to it.

Just browsed around it quickly. Awesome job so far!