So I picked up a meteor in a bulk deal in February, fixed it up (touched up and clearcoated the playfield but not perfect), repinned/rebuilt everything and put new plastics on and 7 digit displays (although going back to six digits). Eventually I'll probably repaint it and powder coat the coin door but it plays fast and held up all through TPF pretty well.

FYI I used LEDs with a new Altek board set. GI was just natural whites.

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It amazes me every year I go, no matter how many times I walk around there is something I didn't see.

I will say I was disappointed in the 7 digit displays, they kept having a 1 million point bug where the score would just increase. I'm going to try them in a Nitro Groundshaker I've repainted/powder coated/rebuilt. I just have to swap the playfield. Those six digits are going to go in this meteor.

Thanks. I'm going to get these and put an original MPU back in instead of the Altek so I can use them.

I don't think that particular one will work. I don't usually burn my own, but buy from John Wart. However if you want one, check out like the Top 853 (or TOP 2008) on ebay. They work with the older ones, but I haven't used one. I've just considered buying one for a while now.

I agree the Barakandl board will be fine and I may pick one of those up for a centaur I'm having restored so I can use the home ROMs.

I put colored transparent flippers on my meteor, but experience shows they'll break long before you'd expect them too (to brittle).

However, I've used the one piece bats in every other old machine I've fixed up, etc (except on Gottliebs). They should work just fine, but I haven't put them in a meteor. I don't like the two piece systems since I think they have a tendency to loosen up and be the cause of so much playfield damage over the years and the plastic flipper part seems thinner.

I have bags of different sleeve sizes because I got tired of trying to figure out the correct one to order. They all have the same diameter, so you just need to match the length. You can measure them and find the lengths on marco. You can also cut down longer ones, as long as it's a nice clean cut.

For the linkages, I usually take them apart and tumble them for the drops since they don't move to often. If you don't have a tumbler then use some green scotch bright pad and clean with alcohol afterwards. That should take off any light rust and you'll be good for years.

The others, I just match them with modern ones as needed (again I've bought several sizes in the past so usually have a new part lying around).

Sounds odd. If the problem stays in the same spot, then the high voltage section of your driver board probably needs rebuilt, or at least new caps. It doesn't sound like a short or you'd pop a fuse, but it might be bad connectors.

You can test the high voltage with a DMM and make sure it is high enough. If it's under 190 you can bump it a little (there is a pot on the board) at a time and see if that helps. Just don't go higher. The lower you can have it and they work the longer the displays will last. And remember it is high voltage and can zap or maybe kill you so be careful. If you have a strong 180-190 on the test, check the display wiring.

Playfield angle I use about 6 for the older games. Might adjust up or down depending on how it plays and how well the flippers are doing.

That was the part I couldn't remember off the top of my head. I thought it might have been split on the board.

Then I'd suspect connectors first.

So, I really don't know what's going on with that. My guess if the power is good, then it's signal lines to the displays. Possibly an MPU problem, but I couldn't tell you what on the MPU would affect it.

If it was my game, I'd still check the actual voltage coming out of the driver board and see if that changes over time, just to rule it out.
I'd then check MPU connections (pull and reseat with game off, maybe wiggle some at startup). If the pins look non shiny I'd probably repin them. I quite often repin all the MPU, lamp driver and solenoid pins in the backbox to make things more stable. If I was still having the problem, I'd swap the MPU.

Luckily I keep an extra working MPU around. I usually use an Altek to get games up and running and then fix up the original board if possible so I could try that easily and cheaply.

I hope someone else has a more specific solution for you. Maybe create a thread specifically about the player 1 and 2 needing to warm up before working and you may find someone else that has experienced this and can help out specifically.

OK, I wanted 7 digit displays in my meteor and originally tried the XPIN displays, but that didn't work out well. So I built up a set of seven digit LED displays and got the 7 digit ROMS. However, I had to change the jumpers on my CPU to use the 2732 ROMs. Once installed the MPU will only flash 3 times, but I think that is indicating the ROMs are fine. So I thought it might have been my jumper settings, but if I throw my Bally Nitro Groundshaker ROMS in, the MPU will boot just fine.

Question: is there something different that has to be done on the MPU between the Stern ROMs and the Bally ROMs? Maybe a different RAM chip? I'm afraid the MPU may have been setup for Bally machines and just replacing the ROMs isn't enough? Anyone have an idea?

I'll check into that jumper and see what I find.

I had an altek in it and bought a Stern MPU-200 (A602) which was working. It had smaller rom chips so I had to change the jumpers for the new ones but it booted fine originally (roms were not labeled). Since this board boots with nitro roms I'm guessing your speed jumper may be what I'm missing.

Well it doesn't look like it was the jumpers. I pulled the board and checked them all including the speed jumpers.

I'm suspicious of the second RAM chip. I read the Stern games use both RAM chips and the Bally only the first one. The flashing indicates it may not be passing the RAM test so that could explain why a Bally rom would work. I'm going to source a few new chips and see if that fixes it up. If not I may have to send it off to get checked if I can't scope it out.