Or more likely some crossed wires, but I'd prefer demons. This is long, I apologize.

Background - I have had this Hook since roughly 2005. It has been played very sparingly. For the most part over the years it has played fine but has had intermittent sound issues. Lately the sound had gone away completely. For these reasons it's sat mostly unused, with me thinking I'll get around to it at some point or get it shopped, because I didn't have time to mess with it. Hello pandemic and free time... so I've started to pay attention to it. I ordered a refresher kit, ordered a new lock for the backboard because I didn't have the keys for mine, things like that. While I waited for everything to get here, I began investigating my sound issues on this site... got some tips to check voltages, etc. which my son and I were going to do as soon as we got the backboard open.

Before I started to work on it I moved it from one side of my basement to the other and changed the batteries in the main board, and bam, the sound worked. I figured great, all good. Plus I ordered a Pinsound board, so I figured I'd skip checking for voltages. My son and I replaced the rubber in the front half of the playfield last night and everything worked fine afterwards.

This afternoon he played it and the sound started to cut out again. I didn't worry much about it with the Pinsound on the way. We changed the parts in the plunger mechanism and then lifted the playfield (for the first time, that's probably important) to troubleshoot a weak shooter eject coil/mechanism.

That's when everything went to hell.

In playing a few games to try out the plunger, the machine started to slam tilt. This has never happened before. At first it would do it a few seconds of game play, but eventually it started doing it every time the ball went into the skill shot. Eventually I realized if the ball was shot past the skill shot and went into play, everything would be OK, but putting it into skill shot caused the slam tilt.

I put it into diagnostics and checked the switches in the skill shot. They came back on the display with incorrect readings - one thought it was the center coin switch (something I don't have) and one thought it was either the left coin switch or some switch that wasn't in use. With these readings happening, the slam tilt would happen as soon as the ball hit that area.

However, I found that lifting the playfield seemed to clear the issue temporarily. if I lifted the playfield and set it back down, the skill shot switches would read correctly. But after about five minutes or so of gameplay, it would slam-tilt again. Same cycle - check switches, get the wrong readings, lift the playfield, set it back down, works OK again.

This whole cycle also seems to have some effect on the audio. Sometimes it will work fine, but then randomly a switch in the game will stop the music, the voiceover, or both. It seems to reset itself when the ball ends, but not always.

The only thing that appears to be moving when I lift the playfield is the large wire loom on the right in the picture below. Nothing else appears to be disturbed.

So I'm looking for some opinions on what to do next. Do I lift out the playfield completely and get a good look at that loom? Look at something else?

Thanks in advance.

hook cabinet inside (resized).jpg

I actually did order Chad's ROM and it arrived, but I broke four legs on the chip trying to install it. I have another one coming. But I reinstalled the old stuff and it worked fine after that. Hopefully I'll have the new ones again soon.

Swainer just so I'm understanding your thoughts correctly (I'm very new at this) - the switch matrix is a diagram and a road map of sorts rather than a physical thing, right? I clicked through to the link you posted and it sounds like most of the Star Wars problems were due to a loose screw that was affecting something in the row of switches suspected and causing a short. This concept makes sense to me, as the "HOOK HOOK HOOK" reset always seems to happen at random times and now the slam tilt issue is doing so as well. In fact while I was sitting there yesterday reading through the ops manual, the sound was occasionally resetting itself with nobody doing anything at all to it. So I will head under there a little later and see if I can find anything that's loose.

I've spent the last hour or two diving in, trying to find some common things and seeing if I can diagnose it any further.

When I have the playfield out and vertical, the switches all read normally. They continue to do so when I put the playfield back. Over the course of game play, the problems re-develop.

My problems appear to involve a sneak circuit from the green-yellow wire in column 4 to the green-brown wire in column 1 (my switch matrix is attached) and occasionally, but less frequently, to the green-gray in column 8. On one single occasion, the problem appeared on the green-red wire in column 2. But most of the time when the problem is there, activation of the various switches in column 4 activate the parallel switches on the white loom in their corresponding rows.

The interesting thing is that the green-brown column comes from everything that is in the coin door and at the front of the cabinet. It runs directly from there through the cabinet up to the CPU. So it is not meeting underneath the playfield... meaning that my hope of a loose screw or something under the playfield making contact with the wrong things doesn't seem to be the issue. I did not find anything like that immediately apparent underneath the playfield.

The problems seem to come and go when I move the large wire loom that forms when everything comes together under the playfield and goes into the black plastic tube to go up through the hole into the backbox. At one point the game was playing fine... then I put a hockey stick in the cabinet and just lifted and set that loom back down without opening up the playfield, and the problems returned.

I have checked the green and white loom connections at CN8 and CN10 on the board and don't see any visual evidence of problems there.

So while it doesn't make much sense to me, it seems the problem is somewhere in that main wire loom.

What I can't logically figure out -

- what it is about playing the game that makes the problem come back. The act of game play itself doesn't cause any movement in that loom. I'm wondering if the simple act of current going through all the wires back and forth to the CPU is causing enough of a disturbance to re-engage the problem.

- how, if anything, this relates to my sound issues. They seem to come and go with the problem. It seems the worse the game works, the better the sound is, and vice-versa. Lately, the music has been coming and going but the voiceover has been staying more often than not.

My thought at this point is to snip open the zip ties on the loom and go through it to see if I find anything there, but I thought I'd toss that out to this group first.

Thanks for all the help.

hook switch matrix (resized).png

That service bulletin turned out to be it. I had looked at that once before, but it was before I knew how to pull out the playfield all the way. Did it tonight and found the below. Thanks for directing my attention back that way.

wires (resized).jpg