Hey folks. I'm having solenoid issues with my Simpsons DE.
Purchased it a couple weeks ago and it worked fine at the fellow's house. Got it home and unfortunately my stairs were too narrow to take the machine up whole, so after putting it off a couple weeks I had to remove the back box. All the plugs are keyed so it was a breeze taking it apart and back together. But now the solenoids are all wacky.
Attempting to start a game the shooterlane won't fire. When you drain, the lazer kick goes instead of the outhole. The L/R goes crazy clicking sometimes. And the center drop solenoid is locked on and fires every time the L/R shifts... which is also every time the lazer kick goes. Which is repeatedly since the ball never leaves the outhole.
After browsing the forums, I pulled the PPB and reflowed all the edge connectors and the L/R. They needed it.
Pulled the CPU board to check if anything fell behind and was shorting... nada.
The solenoids all work when I ground the transistor tabs, and the correct ones fire according to the manual. (Though if I shift the L/R the center drop sol is still locked on.)
Tracing back the misfiring solenoids to the 7408 chips, they all go to different ones. I'm finding it hard to believe that multiple chips have gone bad from a trip up a single flight of stairs.
There's got to be something simple here I'm missing. Or at least a single probable cause. I'm leaning toward perhaps a switch matrix issue... such as an incorrectly installed plug... but I have checked those several times. But who knows, I still could have missed one. Sometimes it's the simplest things that get overlooked by me overthinking it and some fresh opinion helps shake it out.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Josh