Theatre of Magic
Bally, 1995You're currently viewing posts by Pinsider Brijam.
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Feels like I have tried everything to stop my Theatre of Magic from ejecting two balls. Trough optos test consistently good. Ball shooter switch was a little mangled but works good. New balls. New trough sensors. Tried one, then another of those little plastic shims. No loose wires. Tried adjusting the screws on the trough kicker. Prayers. Sacrificing chickens. Nothing works. W T F send halp
Quoted from Crash:Are you sure the game has the correct number of balls installed and there isn’t one too many?
Yes 4 balls.
Quoted from pintechev:What about the MPU and the cables?
Seated and re-seated the connectors. The CPU board has seen quite a few repairs, but the MPU is clean as far as I know. Is there some specific test you are recommending?
Quoted from scottslash:Balls magnetized?
I thought so too but new balls didn't fix it.
Quoted from arcademojo:Does it do it all the time or just sometimes. I’ve encountered this problem on several games and like yourself I also would start with everything in the trough area to only find out it was a bad switch for a ball lock. The last one I remember was my Funhouse. It would randomly do this and turned out to be a failing second ball lock switch. Fixed the switch and never had it happen again. Another game was T2. Same thing bad ball lock switch.
90% of the time. ToM has opto boards that seem to work fine.
Quoted from arcademojo:Does it do it all the time or just sometimes. I’ve encountered this problem on several games and like yourself I also would start with everything in the trough area to only find out it was a bad switch for a ball lock. The last one I remember was my Funhouse. It would randomly do this and turned out to be a failing second ball lock switch. Fixed the switch and never had it happen again. Another game was T2. Same thing bad ball lock switch.
All the optos check out good in the trough. I'll check the ball lock switches/optos, Wouldn't hurt to try that.
Quoted from GreenMachine19:if the game doesn't see a ball in the shooter lane it will continue ejecting balls from the trough until it sees it. It sounds like you've spent a lot of the time looking locally in the trough/shooter lane area. Have you looked at the CPU board where all those wires go? Maybe reseat the associated connector or re-pin if this ever had battery alkaline corrosion or is otherwise corroded. I would go into switch test and drop a ball in the shooter lane to make sure it sees a ball.
There's no corrosion on the CPU board. Switch test triggers every time. The second ball is triggered very fast, not after a one or two second delay, it ejects the second ball immediately.
Quoted from Bryan_Kelly:Make sure when the ball is kicked into the shooter lane, the switch actuator stays activated. If the actuator is bent or incorrect, it won't and the game thinks there's no ball there (even though there is) so it'll kick anther me out. The second me will activate the switch.
It doesn't seem to be the shooter lane switch. I can leave the ball in there all day long in switch test and it stays triggered.
Here's an animated gif of what it is doing. I cleaned the trough, adjusted the kicker bracket to max top, max bottom and middle, tried one thick, one thin, both thick and thin plastic shim and no shims. Four brand new balls are loaded. No luck.
This is driving me G. D. Crazy.
Any ideas @ltg ?
tom-ball-trough.gifOne screw had come just loose enough for the opto board to vibrate and register empty. Tightening the screw fixed it.
Quoted from arolden:Nice. How did you figure it out?
I had a new opto board to swap out and was unscrewing the board, and I noticed that one of the screws was already loose. I remembered someone had mentioned that a loose board or opto could cause an interrupt, so I just tightened it back down and that was that.
Previously I had tested if wiggling the board would trigger the same result (it didn't).
I feel a little silly for not checking it much earlier.
FWIW it was the opto board facing the backbox so the screw wasn't the easiest to get to.
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Manteca, CA