I just picked up an RFM. The seller showed it booting. When I actually picked it up, the game wasn't booting.

When I put the game back together, I got the multicolored test screen, then a "please wait" screen. Each line appeared after a couple seconds, then got stuck on "starting update game code".

Pin2k is a new beast for me, so I'm not entirely familiar with it. Some quick googling didn't reveal a symptom like this.

Any ideas? I'm wondering if this might be a botched update of some sort.

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After reseating everything in the computer case, it sprung back to life.

Battery was at 2.97v.

Powering it down and later back up a few times, it didn't seem to be a fluke, and has come on each time so far.

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Well, looks like I spoke too soon. It will boot 2-3 times, then that will be it for several tries before it finally starts booting again.

I don't think it's a heat-related issue since I have the back door, translite, and PC cover off, and for a few tries between successful boots, I wasn't waiting very long between attempts.

12v and 5v are good.

3v for the prism battery and motherboard battery are good.

Motherboard caps are not bulging.

It looks like the original power supply was replaced, but the green caps on the motherboard have not been replaced.

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I have a cap tester, so I'll probably try that next.

That particular sparkle power supply started coming out in 2003. I'm fairly certain it's a later replacement for the original power supply. All the fans are working.

Sometimes it boots from a cold start, sometimes not. Sometimes it boots after a warm start, sometimes not. If it was heat related, I would think there would likely be a pattern of some sort, or that the game would lock up or crash after it warmed up. So far, that's not the case.

All the voltages seemed to check out, so the next thing on my list to check are those motherboard caps.

One step forward two steps back. I replaced the caps and ended up with the computer not booting

The caps had low ESR. So, I replaced all 5.
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I put everything back together, and was greeted with a blank screen on power up.

So, I removed the prism card and booted without it. I got the BIOS screen going through it's RAM check, then it halted looking for something to boot from.

While I was at it, I swapped the 64MB stick of RAM with a 128MB stick to let it go through that RAM check at boot, but after I powered it back up, the screen went strange like the V-sync was out of whack. I can tell it is trying to show the BIOS boot screen, since those are the same colors and positions where the text and logo appeared. I tried adjusting the H-sync and V-sync, but that that only changed how the distorted/garbled/tearing image cycled across the screen.

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I tried swapping the 64MB stick of RAM back into the motherboard, then powered up again, but the screen still showed the same garbled image.

Well, it booted normally a few times, and garbled a few times.

I read that there were a few different motherboard models that were used in pinball 2000, so between these issues and that fact, that got me thinking about the power supply, like was suggested earlier. So, I ordered a new power supply. Guess we'll see if that ends up being the problem, or if there's something else going on.

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Since I was getting a normal BIOS screen, I went ahead and installed the prism card, and managed to get the game to boot once.

However, on the test screen, the image twitchy and was half flickering like there was a bad connection somewhere. When in the actual game, there were glitchy boxes around the graphics/sprites.

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The display issue is new problem that only started after I worked on the motherboard, so I suspect it's localized to the motherboard.

The prism card's LED is locked on instead of blinking, so it's not booting blind.

The previous owner said the monitor had been recapped, though I haven't yet had a close look at it to verify. The picture quality was perfect, though.

As far as I'm aware, that is not the case. It was routed as an RFM for at least 10 years or so.

I'd like to try to get it up and running with the original hardware--it does come up and play games, albeit very intermittently. I didn't see version 1.9 mentioned for nucore, and I'd like to try that version out at some point.

Well, I replaced the power supply (with the green wire mod to turn it on), and nothing. The power supply fans turned on, but the computer didnt boot, even with the prism card removed.

For a good measure, I pulled an older atx power supply out of my parts stash, it turned on, but that too failed to boot the computer.

During the second swap, I plugged the fan into the 3-pin power connector in the motherboard, but the fan didn't run.

So maybe power isn't flowing through the board?

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The other 3-pin connector runs the fan.

I did manage to get the garbled BIOS boot screen once, but that was it.

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I ended up tearing down the entire computer and rebuilt it a part at a time. I managed to get a series of successful BIOS boot screens. Then I finally installed the prisim card, and got the game to successfully boot several times without fail.

I'll try it again tomorrow to make sure it's just not a fluke.

I'm not quite sure what the issue was. I don't think it was a ribbon cable, since I tested all of them and there weren't any breaks or flaky behavior. I didn't notice anything that could possibly be shorting something, nor any cracked solder joints on the motherboard.

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Fired up the game this morning with no problem, so things are looking promising so far.