Hi, wondering if anyway can help answer the the following question. If you use Comet anti flicker LEDs in play field inserts (cpu controlled) on an early 80s Bally (Fathom) does it negate the need to get an Alltek LED lamp driver board?
AFAIK the anti flicker there is for a different purpose and won't solve the SCR latching issue on the Classic Bally/Stern games. It would take a custom led with parallel load resistor inside the led housing to solve the issue on Bally machines without a new board or some type of modifications. The anti flicker addresses some issue for slightly newer games. Classic Bally/Stern have a unique issue with the SCR not having enough current to latch without the additional help of a parallel load resistor.
Lots of ways to go about adding the load resistors..
1. The cheap, but time intensive way of adding resistors to each lamp socket. Not ideal with the time/effort involved, but resistors are a few cents each and not all lamps may require them.
2. There's a SIP resistor modification you can do to the back of the board's header pins that is a decent cheap way out, but would require some soldering experience and some people may not like how it looks. Nice thing is it's maybe $4-5 in parts and would probably only take someone about 5-10 minutes to do per board once you got the hang of it.
3. Brand New FULL replacement Lamp Driver Boards, like the Alltek you mentioned. Usually run around $100. If you don't want to have to solder anything, it's also the sure-fire way to take care of any board issues, whereas if you're keeping an original board in there it may have to be serviced because they OFTEN have cracked solder joints, a few bad SCRs, etc. If you've got a 100% working original board, you can easily offset costs about $30-40 by selling the old board on Pinside.
4. There's piggyback boards (Siegecraft, XPIN) that are a plug-and-play mod to the original board, but require the original board to be in good shape in order to be plug-and-play. Otherwise, with cracked solder joints at the headers or bad SCRs, you're going to spend more $$ getting the original board fixed because the plug-in boards won't fix issues happening on the original boards.
That's about the extent of options at this point.
Quoted from adamsebas:Hi, wondering if anyway can help answer the the following question. If you use Comet anti flicker LEDs in play field inserts (cpu controlled) on an early 80s Bally (Fathom) does it negate the need to get an Alltek LED lamp driver board?
You can use SeigeCraft LED boards or solder resistors onto the lamps. Anti-flicker LEDs themselves will not work.
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