Tell me more! I'm currently dealing with display issues on my Last Lap. Trying to reverse engineer the displays, have new boards made, and start fresh with modern components, but it's slow going.

I combed the globe for replacement connectors and was unsuccessful. My originals were crumbling. I ended up soldering individual molex connectors directly to the pins on the MPU, insulating them with double layers of shrink tube, and running pigtails to a modern molex connector. It's ugly, but it got the game to be functional and reliable--aside from the issue with the displays mentioned above.

Yup. simply awful materials used. I ended up rebuilding the head with new wood, as the particle board was crumbling away to nothing. The cabinet itself is fine on mine.

Ken-

See attached. It's an unusual connector. Header pins are round, and 1.5mm (.059 inch) in diameter. Center to center, the pins are 4.96mm (.195 inch) apart.

The connectors from the cabinet to the head are standard Jones plugs, albeit the absolute worst quality ones I've ever seen. I replaced them with old EM ones from my stash.

playmatic connector (resized).jpg

Mine is a Last Lap. The displays look just like the photo you posted. I'm not sure where the problem lies with mine, but there are some burned out segments in the actual displays (I've tested them). When I swap displays around, the displays show the same problems each time, so I suspect the chips may be bad.

I have the same schematic you posted, and an electrical engineer friend re-drew it in some testing program-- he couldn't get it to work based on this schematic, so we're still tinkering and trying to figure out where the schematic is failing us. If we can get it to work, I'm going to have new PCBs made in China, and I'll populate them myself. Maybe even offer it as a DIY kit for others if there's any interest.

It varies from display to display, and segment to segment within the displays. I tested the individual segments with a 1.5v power supply, and there were only a couple that didn't work in the game that I was able to get to work with the power supply.

I've reflowed everything. I suspect it's that IC that has failed on these. Like I said, I swapped them around, and they did the same thing in each position, so that leads me to believe that the problem is in the display, and not in the decoder board or wiring.

No stuck segments, but I reflowed one of the display boards anyway-- no appreciable change. There were a couple of segments that started working after that, but only a few.

I already had that on my list to do. I don't really know how, but I do have a logic probe.

Congrats! Love my Last Lap. It's a little finicky (the connectors they used were garbage) and I had to make a backglass for it (which took me dozens of hours of work in photoshop).

It’s more of a plastic than a clear coat- think early version of a hard top.

If you come across an actual schematic, keep me in mind. I’ve not found a proper one.