Bought a Haunted House, thank God it at least works.

Thing is, you'll start a game, sound works 100%. As the ball goes along, first you'll loose the background tune, and eventually it'll just drop the other sounds as well. Then, if you turn the game off and back on, the sound will be find, and the process will repeat.

One of the pop bumpers is out, I'm guessing it could be one of those pop bumper boards? Geez.. This thing had 3 of those other boards replaced before i got it, the receipt, as well as three other pop bumper PCBs were in a bag along with the manuals and such. At least the guy took good care of it, and apparently NEVER played it, since he was upset about that pop bumper not working.

Maybe I could try swapping out this pop bumper board with a known good one? What sort of design flaw causes these to go out like this? Or better yet- WHY have a special pop bumper board at all!? Maybe I can borrow one out of Night Moves.. Night Moves, Circus, and Monte Carlo. My collection of non-working Gottliebs. Alas, I WILL figure this out in the end!

-Brian

If the game is cold, and you play really quickly, you can get in a game before the sound starts it's slow decline..

Caps? None of them are visibly buldged, or outright popped, but, seems like this might be an easy fix - Hope hope hope..

-Brian

Interesting. I cleaned the connectors on the sound card, A6 J1? and what I gather is the other side, A3-J5, both of which had what seemed to be some corrosion. Not bad, but the eraser got pretty black on both accounts. Okay, well, it seems to have improved the situation. NOW, the game will start with full sound, and sometimes 1/2 way through a ball, the background sound will cut out. The individual sounds will continue to play, and those never seem to stop now. At the end of one of the balls that the background music has stopped, when it kicks out the ball for the next ball in play, the background music will start again. Very Odd.. I can certainly live with this more than sound cutting out completely!

What makes that background music cut out like that? Also-

How do you clean inside the plugs? I cleaned the boards' contacts with eraser, but inside the plugs is impossible to get at with any eraser I have!

-Brian

I have all the stuff to re-pin Bally & Williams - The 156s, and the .10s connectors, housings, keys, and crimper. I guess I'll have to dive into these. They don't seem as easy though- It doesn't seem like it's going to be possible to trim down an Edge connector the way I do with the 156 plugs. Too long? Just trim it down a little!

Unfortunately, the cleaning didn't really solve the problem. It seemed like it played a little better for a while, and I had a string of games where the sound didn't cut out as badly, but I left the game on for a few hours, and all the while it was doing it's attract mode thing. It'd play the organ every once in a while, which I find is GREAT addition to my arcade, between that, and Black Knight Hollering about how he's going to play you, it makes for great 80s ambiance.

How about your (Mr. Grizlyrig) suggestion about the caps? There look to be 6 or 8 caps on this PCB- Definitely something I can handle with my Aoyue!

-Brian

Re-pinning these old gottlieb pins is I guess a necessity. With as many of them I have sitting around waiting to be fixed. I noticed one of the connectors in my Monaco GP had the problem where the corner of the connector breaks off, and there is nothing sandwiching the connector onto the board. Heck, I'm surprised it works as well as it does! On the Haunted House, besides the Sound, it has mechanical problems with a couple of out/up kickers. The Gate from where you shoot the ball doesn't seem to land correctly, and lets the ball jump back through the gate.

I fixed a pop bumper on Haunted House the thing by taking a paritcular resistor off another one of those pop bumper controllers, this one was broken in half, so I took one off another one that was bad for some other reasons. Does anyone actually repair these pop bumper boards or is it just too easy to shell out $18 and get a new one?

More Gottliebs to fix!

Hell, all Pinballs are known for connector issues! Whats the first rule of fixing pins? "It's the connector-connector-connectors. If it still has problems, check the connector." with the corollary, "It's always the connector"

Which is why I was wondering if I could test that Q59 circuit somehow on that MonteCarlo, to determine if it's actually Q59 that's gone bonkers, OR if it's the wiring.

-Brian

Whats with the Bifurcated vs. standard type of these pins? What is the point of splitting them like that? It's not like the Trifurcon pins where there are three sides to grab on...

-Brian

The Sound Board has it's own power supply? Geez. They really did things oddly in these Gottlieb games! ALL the other manufacturers always have all the power done on one board, and then divvy up that power to the various boards that need it. What is with this? More things to fail? Hahaha..

But No, I didn't check it's voltages. I guess that's the next thing to do! It's funny, because I have a whole string of Gottlieb games I'm trying to fix, or keep running- Haunted House, Monte Carlo, Night Moves, and Circus (Not to mention my Big Hurt, which I'm praying nothign goes wrong with bewcaseu I can't take ONE MORE Premier game going down the tubes on me at this point!!! What a Circus!! If I make/keep all these running I'll definitely be a master of Gottlieb by the time Im done!

-Brian

Thanks Chris, Yes, I have that printed out. That, Clay's Gottlieb Guide, and the mysterious Gottlieb system 80 manual that nobody is supposed to have. I'm digging through all of it!

Still no luck with my sound card cutting out after a game or two.

-Brian

I THINK I fixed the sound issue in Haunted House. That was the major problem that this machine still had. Now it's a couple of coils acting a little sluggish, and the gate at the top, where the all first exists from the Ball shooter trough, it bounces, then should settle down and drop onto the playfield, instead it's bouncing back off the bumper too fast, the gate doesn't catch it, and the ball goes back down the shooter Ramp. (That was a tough explanation!) but anyway, I'm just glad to have permanent sound! Amazing what a handfull of caps can do for a game!!

BadCaps (resized).jpg

Blah. No, Not fixed. It's still the same thing. The sound works for a while when you start a game, then, after a while, the background music cuts out, and then after a little more time, ALL the sound cuts out. If you end your ball before all the sound cuts out, then the background sound will start again on the next ball. If the sound cuts out all thew way, the only way to get it to come back on is to shut the game off, and turn it back on again.

I'm at a loss. There aren't any test points defined on either the sound board A6, OR the aux power board A7. Is it possible/worthwhile to test the sound board at the point that it goes out?

help me obiwan Gottlieb You're my only hope!

-Brian

I don't have an Oscilloscope.. I have a logic probe! I'm not much for knowing how to use it though.. I've used it a couple of times with the test chips, like with Marco's test chip, to look at various chips downstream, and see what is, or isn't working correctly, but knowing what "Normal" values would be to compare against I haven't a clue.

About the spray- I'm willing to give that a try- So you wait for the problem to manifest, and then what? Cooling an individual IC can bring it back to reality?

One problem I have with Gottlieb/Premier products is there aren't as many test points as there are on Williams and Bally equipment. If I test the voltage at a specific TP, and it says X, I know if the number reads or doesn't read what it's supposed to. I'd like to see somehow if the problem is power related, Maybe the power stops working for the board when it's gone into "Non-working" mode- But how do I test the voltages on the pins - or even on the cables! I have a sound issue with a Monte Carlo (Another system 80b I think) and that one the sound NEVER works! But if it's turned on, I don't want to just unplug the cable from the sound card to test for voltages.. These are so frustrating. If I knew for SURE it was the board, I'd go ahead and pay whatever and get another one- but like with the individual components, seems like you can swap and swap and maybe not actually find the exact card that that is the culprit!

-Brian

Thanks Ed, and Marco! I'll have to score a can of that Freeze stuff. Ed, do you carry that?

I need to get the whole spread of Edge connectors. It seems like more and more I'm running into games that have these nasty old edge connectors, you can look in the connector and see all sorts of corrosion that is impossible to get at. Heck, it looks to me like the corrsion on those is often times worse than the corrosion that one finds on the .156 & .10 connectors!

Thanks again Gentlemen, it seems like the problem with HH is getting worse. Now, the audio will only play for just a minute or two before it craps out. If I were going to replace the boards - Actually I'd rather fix them, I get a kick out of finding one of these problems and bringing them back to life - but if I were going to replace the boards, what? Start with the smaller power board, and see if that fixes the problem, and then graduate to the (what I gather would be) a more expensive entire sound board? I've seen these boards they have displayed on Youtube and elsewhere where they have a talking HH. I'd like that.. Or maybe even the Multi-ball version! but, alas, I think I'll make the base unit work first.

-Brian