The first thing I said in this thread is that he shouldn't be asking about resets without measuring some voltages, as others said previously.

Safe to assume that for the color dmd, because it's wired that way, but not all the other mods. I've seen plenty of mods powered by a wire soldered to a test point on the driver board.

I honestly didn't want to know what was plugged in where. He seemed to be pointing a finger at the daughter board, but left out a huge amount of details about the game. He's new here. Now he knows.

I would say the problem was excessive loading of 12V caused by the add-on mods. The daughterboard designer of course can't predict how much extra load there is in addition to the board itself.

I don’t think there is enough information to make this determination yet. Back in post #26 this was mentioned:

But zhu808 hasn’t said exactly what was connected where and probably doesn’t yet have the technical know how to determine the answer.

It’s an interesting problem. I learned some things from this thread. Good to hear different opinions on what might be happening. Without being able to look at and test the machine there is some amount of guesswork involved.

To help zhu808 determine why Theatre of Magic was having problems until the Kahr board was removed can we come up with a methodical process that could be followed by someone new to electronics troubleshooting? Maybe start with a list of every mod connected, what voltage the mod used, and where it was connected? Then measure , maybe monitor them over time? That’s a big ask for a new tech.

You could stick it on another machine, see if it screws it up too. Then we'd know for sure.

If you haven't already done this, I'd put the Kahr board back in and see if the game starts resetting again. It's possible that a connector wasn't making good contact and the simple act of exercising it made it better.

Here is what I did for my BSD and CFTBL.

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/hologram-mod-for-creature-from-pinballsp-is-under-development/page/23#post-5119156

Focus on step 3 and 4 for to get the power supply hooked up to the game and supplied power from the wall outlet to the power supply you are introducing.

Like others have said, doing this will supply constant power to whatever extras (ColorDMD for example) you plug into the power supply. To get around that, look at steps 1 and 2 (introduction of power strips with remote "on and off" feature).

Let me know if you need any further help walking through the process.

I don't think you fully understood this thread, all the KHAR board does is uses the 12V going to the MPU to produce a new 5V source to power CPU; if the 12V is degraded or overloaded then the 5V its providing will assuredly be affected.

If this is true, why is it that neither my TZ nor STTNG have any power related issues despite both having all original WPC boards that are 28+ years old?

I feel the whole mod theory is misleading/wrong information and would like to put this to bed; aside from the KHAR board, can anyone tell me of a single mod for this game that is designed to connect to the regulated 12V circuit? I can think of none.

The female connector on the daughter board latches onto the CPU board like vice grips. You have to support the back of the CPU board to keep it from flexing too much when installing the board. That tight connection no doubt cleans the males pins on the CPU board when it's first installed. You could have a problem with the factory IDC connector that connects to the male pins on the board, but I don't suspect that was his problem.

Some very simple voltage readings would tell us most everything we need to know, but he seems to not want to know any more as his game is working again. I've put the daughter board in lots of customer's games and have never had a call back. Usually don't need to rebuild connector J-210. Rock solid product. If the original poster lived near me, I'd ask him to give me his 'broken' board. For research purposes, obviously.

There's no point in going any further without more input from the original poster. I'm curious if the tiger saw motor and hat motor are running off unregulated 12V. Seems like they might not last long. Guess we'll never know.

The real lesson to be learned here is don't move to Hawaii and buy pimped out old pinball machines if you don't have any technical skills.

sure we would, nearly all 12V motors in every WPC game runs off unregulated 12V and they are low failure parts.

Those all go through a motor board before any power goes to the motor. I've heard of and have probably seen the tiger saw blade mod. It's been around awhile. The first issue he mentioned was that mod. Seems like I've heard of the hat one too, but I've never installed either.

If only we could get our hands (and meters) on this game. I suspect we'll hear more about it in the future.

The big user of 12V Reg of all the MODs is the color DMD.

Were they the deluxe model or the basic model?

OMG ... again NO! The color DMD is NOT powered off regulated 12V, it uses 12V unregulated voltage.

I honestly want to apologies to the OP for so much incorrect information in this thread while you are trying to learn how to fix your machine.

From Color DMD installation manual:
pasted_image (resized).png

From TOM Manual page 3-27:
pasted_image (resized).png

From WPC89 schematics:
pasted_image (resized).png

The entire unregulated +12V circuit from the transformer to the Power board output:
pasted_image (resized).png

It honestly is that simple, you rectify the incoming AC power to create DC, you filter it remove low frequency noise, and send it on its way. Any circuit boards under the playfield that use this voltage contain another filter cap at the input to clean up any noise induced on the power line along the way.

Yes they do; I'm not going to bother discussing what the motor board does ... maybe DumbAss would.

Thank you for your kind correction. I had regulated power on my mind and know that the DMD is powered by the unregulated 12VDC circuit. That does not change the fact that the color DMD draws on the 12V unregulated circuit and +5 and is the largest draw on machine power of all of the MODs.

It wasn't so kind as I tend to only state facts and not to sugar coat anything.

I never said the ColorDMD wasn't a heavy load ... I asked folks to list Mods that use Regulated 12V power because I already know there are none and want people to attempt to prove me wrong...most don't respond back as the facts speak for themselves. I do want to correct you on one point though, the Color DMD does not put any load on the games +5 Volts as this pin is unused by the ColorDMD, the Color DMDs on board controller produces its own regulated +5V operating voltage power from the unregulated +12VU source.

Other thoughts: I actually prefer the ColorDMD LED version in these older machines and they not only look better IMO but also draw about 1/10 the power of the ColorDMD LCD version.

Not a factor in reset issues though, right? Since it’s not using the already taxed 5v.

No, its not a factor at all

Where can I get this 2nd add on 12volt board? is there an item number or correct description name so I can look it up?

All of DumbAss 's boards are listed here: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/dumbass-test-and-reproduction-pcbs

I recently started experiencing slow boots on my White Water that I had a Kahr pro board in. Eventually it stopped booting at all with the board installed. I removed it and the game booted fine without it, but that didn't sit right with me that the game wouldn't work with it in. I decided to verify the voltages and saw 11.22V on TP3 without the board, but with the board back in it only showed 4.8V on TP3! Sure enough C2 had started to leak, a quick replacement and TP3 was back up to 11.75V with the board installed again. I'm sure had I never had the board in I would have not caught that C2 was failing until it may have caused damage to the traces. Thank you Rob for making these!