Laser Cue has a bug that is very annoying to those of us who like the set up our games to award an extra ball instead of credits. Whenever an extra ball is awarded by making a replay score or hitting a lit outlane special, Laser Cue turns on the bell and NEVER turns it off - even after the game is over. The only way to turn off the bell is to hit the lit ball target during normal play. This activates a different routine that is properly programmed to turn the bell solenoid on and off.

As far as I can tell, nobody has ever posted a fix for this bug so I set out to squash it myself (otherwise I was going the end up cutting the wire to that damn bell).

The bug is in the routine that awards the extra ball. For some reason the bell solenoid is activated here using the “always on” code instead of using a timed value. This may have been done on purpose to get one big long ring when the top extra ball target is hit. The bell is eventually turned off in another section of code that processes this target hit. The code works, but only as long as the game is configured for standard revenue play and an extra ball is never awarded for any other reason than hitting the extra ball target. In any other situation the routine that contains the code to turn off the bell is never executed.

The simple fix is to replace the “always on” code in the extra ball routine with a value that specifies a short ring.

E117: 86 ED lda #$ED
change to
E117: 86 4D lda #$4D

And then restore the checksum in an unused byte.

E7A8: 00
change to
E7A8: A0

That’s it. Now you get a quick little bell ring whenever an extra ball is awarded for whatever reason. Hope this fix helps somebody else retain their sanity.

IC14 is the only ROM that needs to be hacked. I made these changes to the Laser Cue L2 game ROMs I downloaded from Planetary Pinball. As usual, use at your own risk. This hack runs fine on my Laser Cue, but I am not a professional programmer and I assume no responsibility for any changes you decide to make to the game code on your machine.

IC14 occupies the $E000 range of memory, so in your editor change byte 0118 from $ED to $4D and byte 07A8 from $00 to $A0.

Ha ha. I had read about the problem so I knew about it going in. Having the bell ring on and on like that really added to the pressure to hit that next lit ball target to shut it off, but I really don't miss that "feature" a bit.

Hi Gaston,
Thank you. I welcome your input and your suggestions make sense. I have no problem with the changes you recommend.