Just joined the club finally. This is a fun game. I completely shopped the heck out of it and installed LEDs. Has the NiWumpf and I put in a playfield protector to smooth the cupped inserts.

I noticed its set up for 5-balls and it gives extra balls instead of free games. It also seems easy to get extra balls with the ABC and/or drop targets. So I have some questions for other owners:

How many balls is yours set to?

Extra balls or replays?

Extra balls disabled?

20190526_174936 (resized).jpg

It looks like there are some similar options on the Ni-wumpf board. Seems like the game is plenty tough even on five ball, so I will leave that on along with one extra ball per ball. I will swap it to replay instead of add a ball though.

I should be there!

OK so I have some strange issues. Keep in mind the game has a Ni-Wumpf board in it.

1) The game is set on 5-balls, but the order of spotting the drop targets is wrong. It goes 10, A, Q, K, A. It should go 10, J, Q, K, A according to everything I have read and the instruction cards.

2) The tilt barely registers at all. I literally have to hold it over touching and then it tilts. I tried both settings for switch scan speed on the Ni-Wumpf and cleaned the plumb bob and ring. You can slide the game back and forth while playing and it won't tilt.

Update: OK so I was looking at the documentation in the machine and found a receipt for the NI-Wumpf MPU from PBR dated March of 1996. That means this MPU is now 23 years old and the one that it replaced was only 18 years old when it was removed! Anyway, I'm figuring this board either has issues and/or really early firmware that are causing problems. I might just chuck it into my ever growing pile of old boards and put in a Pascal (Flippp) MPU. I sent an email to Ace at Ni-Wumpf to see if there is a new ROM he can send me...

Thanks! I probably won't need the board though. At this point I fixed the board and installed the newest firmware which is 3.54. My Sinbad has 3.49 in it and works fine. The Joker Poker had 2.21!!

Anyway it turns out that not only was the firmware old, the EPROM itself was bad. It was the bad EPROM that was causing the issues. When I went to reprogram it, the chip failed verify. I found some spare chips (32KB) in my junk drawer and erased and programed a different 27C256 EPROM and now the game boots up just fine and the 5x bonus and extra balls work the way they are supposed to!

So that just leaves the tilt sensitivity issue. You really have to work hard to make it tilt. The plumb bob can clang up against the ring solidly ten times before it finally tilts. I'm going to trace the wiring and I have a feeling this is a bad connector at the CPU board. The game is 40 years old so might need to have some cables re-pinned. The tilt on my Sinbad is a little more sensitive but it leaves a little to be desired also. This may be an issue with the Ni Wimpf. I notice the Flippp board has an adjustment for the tilt...

Closer look at the tilt on my Sinbad and it is basically just as bad as the Joker Poker. Both have Ni-Wumpf MPUs. In emailing with Ni-Wumpf it appears there may actually be an issue with reliably sensing the tilt on the System 1 games.

I've done some experimenting with the wiring and even tried adding a capacitor like they do on the old Bally games and the tilt still just doesn't work unless you hold it over against the ring. The connection is just too fast and doesn't get caught. I notice the Flippp boards say they have two settings for the tilt, so I assume they found a way around this.

Funny I can make the plumb bob on mine clang like mad without tilting. I replaced the connector on the cable heading to both switch connectors on the MPU, and replaced the plumb bob and cleaned all of the other connections. There is also a tilt switch on the playfield that is wired in parallel with the cabinet tilt. This in an actual tilt and not a slam tilt. By the time the wires go down to the cabinet tilt and then up to the playfield tilt and then back up to the MPU, there are a few ohms of resistance there. The tilt on the playfield works great by the way. Problem with that one is that it vibrates so much that it almost always tilts through to the next ball.

As I mentioned above this happens on my Sinbad also. Once in a tournament at a friend's house people were sliding his Genie around like they were doing a waltz with it and it would not tilt. That game I'm pretty sure has a Pascal board. I wouldn't really care about this but my game all seem to end up being used in tournaments, so need to have a tight and fair tilt working. At this point I actually might install a tilt relay that I parted out of an old EM. In the mean time the tech at Ni-Wumpf said he is aware of this issue from previous experience and is looking into fixing it.

Captive spring hook tool is the only way to go!

https://www.alliedelec.com/product/jonard/m-145/70176675/

https://www.amazon.com/Jonard-M-145-Captive-Spring-Length/dp/B006C46QUG/ref=sr_1_28