I have a couple of Williams pinball machines that I have had for years. Recently the Pinbot died which I believe was do to battery damage years ago before I bought that machine. The damage was excessive but I was fortunate enough to find a replacement board (no battery damage) from a Pinbot that had been parted out. It had a couple problems that I am trying to work through. I hope that some of the other users on this forum may be able to help answer a few questions.

I work on a lot of the early personal robots from the 80's so I already have a lot of the parts I may need as well as test equipment for working on the boards.

Robert

The main issue I had left to fix was some missing speech on the Pinbot. I had swapped the sound board and made a new ribbon cable with no change. I ended up putting back one of my original sound ROM's and got all the speech back. I found out that the ZIP file with latest L-5 ROM set that everyone hosts had a corrupt U22 image. I later found a separate image for U22 that matched my original ROM so now I have a known good set in my machine. That explains several other threads I later found where some Pinbots had some missing speech. I started a thread specifically on the ROM checksums that covers the issue that I hope will help others.

The remaining thing I have to do is rebuild the power supply that was in the machine (to keep as a spare) and rebuild the MPU that was in the machine since the battery damage finally killed that board. I took off all the components in that area and am cleaning that board then want to revive that as a spare. That will be quite a bit of work since I am concerned that some of the via's are questionable as well. At least the Pinbot board I have in the system now had no battery damage. So, my machine is good for now and just building up some spares to ensure I can keep it running.

I like the way the Pinbot plays and the sound effects are perfect. That machine is a keeper. It is even a favorite game of robots too.

Robert

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