This is great, I'm looking forward to playing it. I love that it allows new and old code to be chosen by a switch.

New rules look great. Thanks for doing this.

I’ll will be watching this thread with great interest.

Following the stink out of this one.

Phenomenal. Can't wait to finish putting my Meteor back together.

Probably will add some sort of relay to also lift the speaker from the existing sound board and connect it to the WAV trigger board.

Is this all compatible with the alltek board? Looks amazing.

Just some Meteor porn

E30C377A-0739-4C71-B652-FAA7F8A276D8 (resized).jpeg

Is this board kit compatible with this?
https://pinside.com/pinball/market/shops/1304-roygbev-pinball/04736-arduino-nano-adapter-for-classic-bally-stern

RoyGBev mentions a jumper that selects original or Arduino, and you mention its selected by weather or no the Arduino is switched on. Just want to make sure.

Thank again for doing this.

I just built one of Roy's boards this evening. Well done and easy kit to build. Only mod I did was add a .1uf decoupling cap on the bottom of the board directly across the power leads of the 74LS125. I also put in a socket for the 74LS125. The notes mention the 10K resistor is either 1/2W or 1/4W but looks to be an 1/8W included in the kit. Any of those would work fine so maybe the notes could use a quick update to mention that.

Going to try and get the code loaded up on the Arduino this evening and take a look at the Wav Trigger to see what cable it needs and if there are any special steps to get the sounds loaded. Hope to give it a try in the game sometime this week. Can't wait!

Robert

What size SD card do you use for the WAV trigger board? It looks like that should just be a regular FAT formatted card and copy the audio samples over. Also from the pictures with a short 6-pin straight through cable the WAV trigger is powered from the addon board which pulls power from the MPU.

I think I have everything on hand now to do this. Maybe will get to test sooner than I thought.

Any recommended WAV trigger flash versions? It looks like they are up to V1.32.

Also, a big thank you for sharing your project and answering questions. It is much appreciated!

I'll give that a shot. Will let you know how it all works out!

I think I am making great progress! Was able to reflash the WAV trigger to V1.30, format one of my spare MicroSD cards and setup all the WAV files on it. If it press the button on the WAV trigger the first sound plays as expected. Just going to do the solder bridge on that board so it can be powered from the 6-pin cable. I also found a spare 6-pin cable I had saved in my stash of spare wring.

For the Arduino it looks like with the latest update on Github that the definition file is already configured for the V1.3 Wav trigger firmware so I didn't need to update that. Anyone using that who hasn't updated the firmware may need to swap it though. Code built and downloaded to the Arduino with no issues.

I just need to find an extra set of amplified speakers that I know I have here and an try it out. One thing that isn't clear is if running on the MPU-200 is if I still need to add that additional jumper to R134 or not. Besides that everything should be good to go and plug and play.

Your docs are great. No issues. If anything I hope any feedback can make them even better. Since I flashed the newer firmware that new default worked out ok for me. It was just the opposite from the docs. Either changing the docs to comment out the 1.3 and uncoment the earlier one or change which one is in the code is fine as long as they match. As it is it wasn't a problem. Just thought I'd mention it.

The thing that got me was that solder blob to enable the 5v power on the WAV trigger. Had I seen that first it probably would have flashed it the first time. As it was I had to go through an old box of random power adapters until I found an appropriate one to power the trigger so i could flash it. Saw the note about bridging those pads afterwards and just did that on the board.

Found my extra amplified speaker set. As long as I uploaded the code properly and didn't make any mistakes compiling it then I should just be able to plug this in, power the amplified speakers from the internal power plug, and give it a try.

I wonder if it would be possible to take the signal from the WAV trigger board and just inject it into the input pin of the TDA2002 chip on the existing SB300.

Will this work with a weebly MPU?

This is F'n cool! Nicely done!

Man it's clear I don't have enough time in the day.

I tried the board this evening but don't have it running yet. When it powered up I could tell it started and saw the new light show for a moment and then had random coils firing and the lighting effects no longer looked correct. Not sure if I missed an option while I compiled the code as all the settings appeared correct and I was able to upload it to the Arduino. This adapter has a 74LS125 which I would expect to work but I have a regular 74125 I can bring along for next time. I may have just gotten a bad Arduino NANO.

I'm going to build up the second adapter with another Arduino. I also have a spare Meteor MPU that I had rebuilt. I'm just going to try and get it running on my bench with the extra parts then isolate why it wasn't running in my actual game. My game has all original Stern boards in it that have been running solid as they are so I don't think it will end up being a board issue.

Thank you for the suggestions! I'll try that out. It helps that I have a couple different MPU-200 boards for Meteor (As well as the Alltek I pulled out of it) and will be building a second daughter board which I can preload a different build.

That totally makes sense as a possible explanation if there haven't been a lot of people using the MPU-200 boards. It looked like it started out ok but then sort of lost it.

I know what you mean about the J5 and when I rebuild boards I'd typically replace it if that connector is bad. Since the Meteor uses it now for the sound I'd expect less J5 related troubles on the Stern boards vs some of the Bally boards with heavy oxidation on them from never having anything connected.

First thanks for all the hard work giving meteor some new life.

I attempted to build a board and tried to fire it up last night, but I ran into a similar issue as Robotworkshop above. I powered the game on, saw the new light show for a few second and then random coils fired for a few seconds, turned off the pin. I am using an original MPU-200 as well, so I will try the different timings, but if you happen to figure out the issue with yours Robotworkshop please let me know.

I'm sure we can get it sorted out. I still have an Alltek and will try that on the bench first. I also built up a second adapter and will try the new timing values on that but leave the other one intact so I can swap them back and forth. Hope to be able to spend some time on it this weekend.

Amazing. I'm definitely interested in doing this, but I'm a little intimidated on the software side. Will be watching for new developments!

It's an absolutely great effort to produce new software for what is already a good game. Is there anyway to purchase a ready to go, out of the box piece of hardware that will run this software?

While I haven't had a chance to plug this back into Meteor yet I was able to get my old Bally Simulator/bench tester up and running last night. I still have some bugs to work out on that unit and repin a bunch of connectors but it is running enough to power up both Bally and Stern MPU boards properly.

I saw the same odd behavior with the daughter board on my spare MPU-200 board. I took the 2nd Arduino daughter board setup and loaded up a fresh copy of the sketch with 120 and 80. It seemed to help a lot but I think may still need some tweaking. I'm going to upload the sketch to the first daughter card as well to see if that gets better too. Before I do that I'll probably try it as-is on my spare Altek board to see if it just works on that to ensure it is just a problem with MPU-200 boards.

On the two daughter boards I built there is one difference. One has the old boot loader and the other the new one. The code seemed to download ok on both as long as I selected the appropriate boot loader. Not sure if we are supposed to use the old boot loader or not and if that does make any difference. Both were ordered off Amazon so it seems that there is no way to tell the boot loader until you get it.

Once things appear stable on the bench tester I can carve out some time to try it in the machine again.

A positive note is that the WAV trigger all worked the first time. Running the later V1.3 firmware.

It looks like it is close. Hopefully with a bit more experimentation can get the parameters dialed in for the MPU-200 boards.

If you do get a chance to post it I'll be glad to give it a shot. I wanted to use your base OS to write some additional tests for my fixture. Maybe I can help with what you already have.

Robert

I've been looking for the same thing but haven't found anyone yet willing to sell them "ready to go". Please let me know if you find a source.

I'm sure you can probably find someone here to assemble one or the kits if you aren't comfortable with soldering.

While I haven't gotten a chance to get back and try this in my Meteor machine and on that particular board I have done bench testing on three separate MPU-200 boards and a Altek with interesting results. Oddly the board doesn't want to run at all on the Altek. Just played the first couple sounds through the Wav trigger then nothing.....

Using the test program:
MPU-200 #1 - (clock speed 826khz, Display 398.92)

MPU-200 #2 - (clock speed 658khz, Display 339.13)

MPU-200 #3 - (clock speed 551khz, Display 424.12)

It appears that the clock is off on all of these boards and should be closer to .895mhz The code seemed to run ok on board #1. I'm going to look at why the other boards are running slow. Those still powered up on on the bench and the board with the 658khz clock did run in my Meteor at some point.

So I think I need to get the clock issues sorted out first then look at tweaking the values you suggested for the loops. It would be interesting to see what clock values others have that were running into stability issues.

Roy's board is a breeze to assemble, especially if you buy the nano that already has pins. My soldering skillz are about a 6/10 and it was easy even for me!

I haven’t run the switch test on the Alltek yet but will do that today. Also putting all the boards back on the bench to check and verify the clock speed with the scope and frequency counter.

My test rig/simulator has an actual Bally transformer and bridge board and also has a full set of coils. It was acting like it did in meteor. I can usually tell right away since the flipper relay on the driver will act up too.

Got my Roy board on its way and the nanos ordered, I'm looking forward to building this.

Actually it must have been a bad connection since I was able to run the switch test and get the game code to run ok on that too. The switch test reported a clock speed of 564khz with the jumpers set to MPU-200 setting. Didn't rerun the test at the MPU-100/Bally setting.

I did pull out the scope and it looks like a couple of the MPU-200 boards are running a bit slow and the lowest was 820khz.

I see how you are using the interrupts but how are you using the clock signal within the Arduino code?