So Ice Fever started doing this one day and I'm not sure what is going on. You can see the display, but it does not kick out a ball and there is a relay clicking on and off turning the controlled insert lighting on and off.

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My Ice Fever sat for a few months and when I went to turn it on there were some strange display issues. I could press start, it would play the music, but never kick the ball. This morning I was going to work on it, turn it on, and the displays are fine. Press start, plays the music, and doesn't kick the ball.

Ok, let's investigate. Fuse is good, but the left flipper also isn't working. Let's test coils. I press the test button one time and this starts happening. It seems like it would go on forever if I let it.

On my Ice Fever I can start a game, it will play the music, but does not kick out a ball. Standing there I can hear a relay kick on and off and the inserts are alternating between what I think attract mode is and what the start of a game looks like (I-C-E inserts blinking). I thought the relay and the lights were cause/effect related, and they may be but standing there tapping the flipper buttons I noticed something. When the relay clicks and the inserts go into game mode, the flippers work, and then the relay will click back a second or so later and the inserts show attract mode and the flippers don't work. It doesn't kick out a ball ever, but I think that's because it tries when the relay isn't on and never tries again after that.

Previous owner was kind enough to replace the battery with a remote holder, and I just put in fresh batteries, just in case.

The displays are funky as well for player 2/3/4. Notice the upper dashes are on. Player one looks fine, as does credit and ball count.

OK, on the fly update. As I sat here typing this all of a sudden it was playing random sound clips, firing a coil and random times, and flickering gibberish on the displays.

Here is the new random stuff:

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Thanks to the both of you for suggestions. The remote battery was done by a previous owner before the battery could do any damage, the spot looks beautiful.

As for the other things. I now have a list to check. Thanks for the suggestions.

I just turned it on to check voltages, and the displays don't come on. That's new. Heading over to the power board, everything checks out ok aside from 5V. On TP4 I'm getting 1.62V, so not the 5V I'm looking for. Investigating that now, but wanted to report my early findings.

Got a new power supply board as it was easier and less time to just swap than repair for now. So I have 5V and the game boots but it’s still being strange cycling between thinking it’s in a game and attract mode. Will see if I can clean chips tomorrow and if anything changes.

This is a friend’s Circuis. He didn’t have it very long until this showed up when you power it up. He has played it for a little while, and then this started happening. It will show 88 88 at times, so the digits seem to all be working.

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Didn’t get to check. I will have him take a look.

Ice Fever seems to be alive again. I pulled the game chip, inspected it and wiped it down a little (nothing looked out of the ordinary) and put it back. Game booted, but was still cycling a relay. I looked and it was the outhole relay. Checked the fuse and it was blown. Replaced that and now it's working just fine. I had also replaced the power supply board to get my 5V back. So a few things combined to take this game down for a little while. Thanks for the help to you and Forceflow.

There are still two pop bumpers not working even though their fuses are fine. I have a board to swap out and see what that does.

So it turns out that he thinks the battery has been removed in place of NVRAM. He removed the edge connectors for the displays, cleaned them, and replaced them and everything worked.

Then, he was adjusting the gap of a slingshot switch with a switch adjuster, heard a pop and now can't figure out what happened. Says GI will turn on and lights will do attract mode, but no displays and can't credit up and start a game. Apparently this has taught a lesson of turning the game off before playing with stuff.

Just replaced the Z14 7400 IC and now I have displays, but coins and test buttons do nothing so I don’t think it’s fully booted. Also, that’s credit display looks a bit unhappy. The main displays probably have a smaller issue as well.

It does do the 5-second click, but I was going to do the bypass anyway. Went to check and it had already been done. Thanks for the link though. Good info in there.

There are two coin switches. One set of wires had been cut to add a credit button outside of the game. That had later been disconnected, but the wires never fixed. So there are wires sitting there. Touching them and holding together makes a “boop” sound of sorts and seemed to add credits, but as that display is flickering it is hard to tell. The other side seems to do nothing right now, but I just thought that maybe the chain to that switch is broken from the cut wires.

Test button still does nothing. Is there a signal of some sort when the dip switches are in a bad configuration? I haven’t checked those against factory yet as a starting point.

Getting the credit display to stop flickering would likely be a good goal at this point as it might be trying to show info I can’t currently see.

Did yours clear up after you replaced Z14? Mine got a little better after doing that, but not fully fixed.

I got the 7400 from a surprisingly awesome electronics store in town. It's called Elliott Electronics. Not the best prices ever, but if I want to work on something that day, it's worth the trip. https://www.elliottelectronicsupply.com/

Z12 was also very warm, so I replaced that just now. The displays used to come on and stay on, but the game would not respond to buttons. Now it clicks to turn on the displays and they go off right away.

Going to do the ground mods tonight on Circus and if that doesn't get it to boot all the way to attract mode I'm all out of ideas.

Added ground mods, it boots, beeps, then goes back to bed. Any guesses?

Hmm, very interesting. I will manually ground the pins, but pressing the test button didn’t do anything. The speaker made a slight popping sound like when you have a walker talkie and press the talk button.

Here is what mine does.

I don’t have another here. I have an Ice Fever on route, but that one isn’t set to come home for rotation for a while.

I had a thought while driving in to work today. If there is an issue with my (Circus) sound board, and I unhook it, will the game boot up? I'd like to know if that isolates the issue. I'd also like to just bat the ball around knowing that there is an issue on the board that I can investigate further.

Cool! I'll give that a try today and turn it on with fingers crossed.

No dice. Displays did the same thing where they went on for just a second after the 5-second timer and instantly went off. Seems like this is pointing back to the MPU as the issue.

No worries. Seems like I’m in need of some sort of flow chart of areas to check for voltage or logic.

It worked when my friend got it home. He was doing something by the slings (with it on) touched something and then the game went crazy. I’m assuming he connected high voltage to switch inputs because it fried z12 and z14, I think. I have replaced those two with progress each time.

Also, please see posts 2367 and 2371 for videos of the current state of the game.

I have cleaned all contact areas with eraser and that was a noticeable change. The head was removed to move it, but it never was repaired at his house, so no change in what it was doing there compared to what it is doing now. Slam tilt has been bypassed, but connectors have not been done yet.

Not sure I follow what “south of the battery” means.

Looking at this sequence it’s weird because my displays come on for a short time, but the coin coin accept relay doesn’t power up.

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Sounds good, thanks.

I borrowed a friends James Bond MPU and put it in Circus. It booted fine and I got to play the strangest game of Circus anyone has ever played. But, the flippers worked just fine so that’s all I wanted to do.

So now that I know my MPU is still not working what are my options?

Do any new System 80 MPUs come with NVRAM? I actually have some on my Circus MPU, but want to get a new one to get the game up and running while I try to fix the original one.

Got my universal MPU yesterday for Circus. It now boots, which means the original MPU has something wrong, but I have no idea how to figure out what. It also has about half the switches not registering. I will see which ones do and do not and see if there is any pattern. At least I got to smack a ball around.

I have a lot of new contacts that recently arrived, so I'll likely be doing those when I can. Previous MPU had NVRAM, and doesn't look like any previous battery issues, but I will double check just to make sure.

Ok, what am I missing here? Half my switches don’t work, including the test switch. It goes to A7, which is the panel in the bottom of the cab. From there it should go somewhere and end up in the head right? I just did a continuity test on all the connectors in the head and no beeps for the test switch. Since I can’t find a schematic where things come out of A7, things seem to just vanish. It looks to be A7J1-2 as the “500” color coding makes sense.

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Yep, found it hiding on an earlier page. Now to try and fix it

Edit: I found something interesting. None of the diodes on this section in the bottom are letting continuity through. I tested, reversed the probes, and tested again. It’ll buzz from the tab the the leg of the diode, but not through to the leg on the other side of the diode. Can I replace them with regular diodes that I have plenty of?

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I’ll test in diode mode, but I got zero continuity going either way and was point blank, so didn’t have 10 feet of wire dropping the signal at all.

Well they are all reading .222-.229 in diode test, so I have no idea.

I repinned the connector with the test switch on it and it still isn’t working. Just to test the switch I get a weak buzz at idle (normally means weak connection) and I made sure the tabs weren’t touching. When I press the button I get full connection. Vert da ferk man?

I just repinned all of A1J6. The playfield switches that weren’t working are still not working. The test button isn’t working either, but that’s not on J6. Anyway, I got the switch matrix out to see if there was a pattern. There is. Rows 1 and 2 (strobe 0 and 1) are completely failing. I have a new Rottendog MPU in, so it shouldn’t be an MPU matrix issue. What else might I be missing?

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Wow, I had no idea those were even there. I measured the left side and right side, both layers. All of them measured in the .230 ballpark, except for two. On the left side set, the left diode on the top and bottom board measured .000. Colors are black/purple/purple and what looks like a faded brown/orange/orange. That relates to sw 16 on row 2, and sw 6 on row 2. Would one diode on each row being out cause the whole row to fail? If so, I’ll have to swap those out and give it a go. I’m pretty excited to have a new path to follow trying to fix this game. Thanks.

Boom! Swapped out those two diodes and all (most) of the switches work. The 10 point switches still weren’t working, but I found one more hiding where I hadn’t previously looked. It was closed. Opened it up and touched another and it worked.

And guess what? The test button works now too. Time to move it inside and level it and figure out how steep I have to make it for it to be a little more dangerous.

Anyone know how to light the spinner on Circus? I did it once during a long ball, but wasn’t really paying attention to that area and I’m not finding any text on the art describing how.

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Cool, thanks.

Do any of the coils have voltage?

I moved Ice Fever to the other side of the room at one of my locations and now the displays won’t turn on. It’ll coin up and start the game and plays just fine. Didn’t have my tools, so looking for suggestions to check.

I’ll check for voltage, and hopefully the fuse filament didn’t snap in the ten seconds it took to move. Outside of that, maybe a harness or two needs to be reseated. Any typical ones to pull and reseat?

What category of display issue might this fall under? It’s the only display doing this.

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Ice Fever is blowing the 1/4A fuse for the displays right at power up. Pinwiki has a lot of spots to check for power but no mention of potential/typical areas that could cause the fuse to blow. Any ideas would be appreciated.

I have a Gulf Pinball power supply in here. Before I unplugged J3, I unplugged each display’s connector. With the displays unplugged the breaker (I got one today) blew. Unplugging J3, the breaker didn’t blow. For reference, here are my measurements on the PSU followed by (printed value).
TP1 13.7V (12V)
TP2 is GND
TP3 5.0 (5V)
TP4 7.94V (8V)
TP5 83.2V (70V)
TP6 62.5V (60V)
TP7 44.5V (42V)

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The first time I tried that the breaker blew, even without any of the displays plugged in. Doing it again nothing blew ever. I plugged them all back in and the breaker was fine. Strange, but ok.

Here is the game in attract with the fuse pulled for back box lighting to try to not wash out the displays. Nothing is scrambled like what used to happen, but you can see a few digits are completely out in one display. The credit/ball display is on, but barely.

One other thing is when I put the backglass back on it played a sound. The game is in attract mode so shouldn’t do that. It used to play the spinner sound and the startup song at random and that might still be an issue.

Well, after attempting to swap displays and see if the missing digits stay or follow the display the problem has resolved itself. Connector might not have been fully seated, or starting to go bad, or who knows. So that's done.

Now my next issue is the ball/credit display. Super dim. I tried to apply voltage to the pins of the glass and that didn't work. The three wires inside got a red glow and turned it off after a minute. Plugged it back in and it was still very dim. Any other options to look into?

Left the game on in the garage to try to get it to juice up the 4-digit display a little. Came out a few hours later to this. No clue what’s happening to cause it...

Digging a little deeper on my display fuse blowing. I pressed on the connectors on all of the boards and couldn’t mimic this behavior, but if I press on the front of the light board (or sometimes when you nudge) I can get the displays to flicker.

They all flicker at once, so it’s not seeming to be a single display. I can hear an arcing sound up in the top right corner when the light board is closed, so top left when it is open. That’s power supply and sound board territory. When I fidget with the connectors I can’t get it to flicker the displays.

Any guesses would be appreciated.

Found the source of that little arcing sound.

This is the A2 power supply board on my Ice Fever. I’m trying to track down some low voltages on some coils, but I can find the other side of this J3 connector. I’ve tried following it in real life, but it goes into a very busy bundle. Anyone know where A2J3 pin 3 spits out?

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Maybe that’s why I can’t find it. Thanks, I’ll find that section of the schematic since I did see the game over relay path earlier, so I know ballpark where it is and what I’m looking for.

Well what do ya know, F10 was showing 34V on one side, and the same 1.8V on the other side I was seeing on the coil legs. The DMM couldn’t quite make up its mind but bounced between .5 and 1.0 megaohms, so it was blown, but still hanging on by a thread.

Replaced that and the coils fire, and the choppy audio issues (which was my next thing to work on after the coils) seems to have cleared up.

Things are looking up, so will have to play some test games to make sure everything is doing what it should.