After 10 years I've rejoined the Nascar club.

This game is doing something I don't remember my old game doing.

Whenever the game is powered up, or reset after going into the menu, the game will eject all 4 balls into the shooter lane and then auto plunge them. Once all 4 are back in the trough it will play just fine and never do it again. Until the next power up.

Game is running 4.5 code. I've checked all of the trough and upkicker switches/optos and all seem to be working in the switch test.

Is this normal behavior? I think not, but of course I could be wrong.

That's what I thought.

I guess I have some digging to do. I noticed last night is also does another weird thing. Coils will randomly stop working with no apparent cause. If the game is rebooted they will start working again. I think a previous owner was trying to chase this problem down because the game has a rottendog power driver board in it. Or they replaced it with the RD board and then the problem started. Or something. I don't know. I'll have to try to figure this out. Wish I had a spare Whitestar MPU board I could use for testing.

Well so far I have found either a cracked solder joint or poor through hole plating at U201 on the RD PDB. I noticed when all of the coils quit the watchdog LED on the PDB was out. If I pressed on U201 the light would flicker and come back on and then all the coils would work again. I resoldered both sides of U201, and also the cap and resistors around it, plus resoldered the big caps on the PDB just because. So far that problem appears to be solved.

Moving along I found that the game was not registering the balls in the trough VUK, and opto switch #48 is not working. Ordered some new trough boards and optos for #48. We'll see what happens once that stuff gets here.