Ain't going to be ready for the fair ?

https://www.flippers.com/ Check with John Robertson. He may be able to help and might have parts.

LTG : )™

Any chance you could remove the batteries. Let it sit awhile, then try turning on ? Maybe it will forget what was going on.

LTG : )™

The trouble is...you own a Hercules.

What do the diagnostic LED's tell you at the CPU board?

Those Atari games often need a lot of work after all those years.....bad memory chips, bad IC sockets, bad capacitors, bad connector pins, bad interconnect between CPU and driver, cold solder joints at the +5V powr supply board..... No easy job!

Toss in that Atari populated the boards to specific games. You will not be able to pull a board from a superman and get it to work in a hercules.

I think this counts for the earlier Generation 1 games like Airborne Avenger, Space Riders, ...... The boards in Generation 2 games (Superman and Hercules) are the same. I never saw differences or different populated boards.

Marco

Good luck, Tony. I'll be starting work on Middle Earth soon, and let you know what I learn. A Gen 1 system, but circuitry is probably similar.

Gen1 and gen2 systems are two very different animals when it comes to their boardsets.

To add to that, the only difference between game-specific gen1 MPUs is that they were only populated to the point where only the lamp circuit ICs and solenoid transistors that were necessary for the specific game were actually installed on the board (a cost saving measure, I would guess). Supposedly, if you fully populate a gen1 MPU, you could turn it into a universal board and then just change the ROMs for the game you want to put it in. When I get some time and a spare board that needs repairs anyway, I was thinking of giving this a try since I have two Atari games that I could test this theory with.

According to John at John's Jukes, he has (or had--not sure if he sold out of them) NOS universal gen1 MPUs, so they do exist.

However, as for Gen2, I acquired two power supply boards that had slightly different layouts. I'm not sure if other variations exist for the other boards or not.

http://pinwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Atari_Repair#Power_Module

Atari-gen2-power-supply-compare-front.jpg
Atari-gen2-power-supply-compare-back.jpg

I've seen this 2 different power supply boards in 2 different Superman games. 1 has a relay for switching the power to the flippercoils, one has a transistor. In Hercules, the relay/transistor is completely missing. I also encountered 2 types of driverboards with the same functionality. Observe this picture taken from our Hercules:

IMG_3105.jpg

What are the differences between the driver boards that you mentioned? I looked at a few different photos and compared them to yours, but I didn't catch any obvious differences.

Look at the PNP power transistors. They are mounted vertically at the driverboard, some glued together heat shrinked tubes. At most boards I've seen they are mounted with their surface flat on the circuitboard, pinned with some kind of plastic pin (like the digit drivers on the CPU board).

A bit of a show of....but I spent a lot of time at our Atari collection last year.....(and we are looking for a The Atarians).....

P6271141.jpg

Ah-ha, I see what you're talking about with the transistors.

Nice collection

John is a great guy and an amazing wealth of knowledge. I still owe him for the hour and a half long masters class he gave me on troubleshooting GI issues earlier this year. It came down to a roll pin that had fallen out of the head on a sling shot and welded itself inside a lamp socket.

Wow, I can't imagine trying to troubleshoot that issue. I would have been doing this the whole time:

It was amazing to watch. He started at the board looking for shorts or low resistance between pins and then moved to the underside of the playfield when he had it narrowed down to a couple of runs. He went through each leg of the run disconnecting them to isolate segments until he found the one with the short and then went from socket to socket until he found the one with the short. It sounds simple once the process has been described but I would never have gotten there on my own. He even helped resolder all of the connections he had undone.