Recently bought a Torch from, I think, 1980. Good looking machine, but has plenty of problems. Glitchy display, no coils whatsoever, no sound, and it blows the same fuse all the time. It'll boot up, lights come on, and you can put a ball in play. You can then watch it drain because nothing works. Several of the common System 1 mods, such as the ground mod have already been done. My question is... Should I even bother trying to sort this out, or would I be better off just buying a new Pascal board and seeing what happens?

So, it does score. The only reason I know is because I can see the display change when I hit switches. The numbers are garbled though. It does also put the ball in play into the shooter lane.

My apologies.... No flippers, no bumpers, etc. Putting the ball into play seems to be the only one.

Repin? As in put them into new edge connectors?

Here's a video of what it's doing. The ball counter works. After 5 balls drain, it's game over, and pressing the start button gives you a new game, just as it should.

I was already reading it

I already knew a repin was coming. I suppose the old edge connectors wore out and at some point, a PO got the idea to just solder directly to the circuit board.

I wouldn't ever do that, but it had already been done by someone prior to me. That means I'm going to have to clean the solder off those wires before I can repin. Not all of them, but maybe half of the connectors on the main board are now soldered on. Ugh.

Actually, I don't know why I said "half." I meant almost all.

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I have some other weird stuff going on. Some of the power supply voltages check out ok, and some are wayyyy out of whack. On the power supply board, A2-P1 Pins 6 and 7 should be 69 VAC. I get 50 and 20 respectively. On A2-P3, the voltages on pins 1 and 3 are unreadable. They fluctuate wildly. This sounds like something I should look into before ordering a new board.

I was not checking between pins A2 6 and 7. I was checking each separately relative to ground, and that's wrong. It clearly says "return" in the troubleshooting guide and I missed it. When checking across those 2, I get 75 VAC. A tad high, no? With regard to A2P3, I was not using pin 5 as the ground. Again, user error. I was basically skipping the regulator. Those pins now check fine. A2P2 6 should be -12 but is -12.3. Slightly out of spec, but I doubt it's causing my problems.

I was almost hoping it was trashed, just so I could skip all this and buy a board. But no.... Now I have to go further down the rabbit hole.

That would be the one. The eBay ad said that the flippers and bumpers were working. When I got it home and plugged it up, no such luck. I knew to had issues though, like the sound and the display.

were you bidding on it or something?

It ended up going right at my max. I had pretty much forgotten about even bidding on it.

I actually already own that same crimper. I make tons of audio cables and I've used that to crimp the pins on db25 connectors.

So, long story short, since I'm going to be spending hours repinning, I'm just going to get the combo board. I think it'll be worth the time savings of troubleshooting.

I was under the impression that it wasn't required to get the other sound board. Am I wrong on that one?

I'm working on repinning my connectors to hook up to the new Pascal board. I've found pinout diagrams for J7 and J6. I can't find any for J2 or J3 however. The old connectors are soldered on, and while they've all matched the correct pinout so far, I'd like to verify against a real one. Does anyone have it?

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Just a quick thanks to those who helped me out here. I went with the Pascal board and it's amazing. A couple of odd things are still going on. the 2,000 and 4,000 bonus lights don't come on, even though the bulbs are good. All in all, just minor annoyances. The hours I saved by just replacing those boards are certainly worth it.

I found a site online that had a schematic with the wires labelled according to Gottlieb's three digit code system. Just a minor bit of translation gave me the correct combination. BTW, does anyone on this thread need a PSU board? I have the sound board too. The PSU board tested good, but I don't need it anymore. In the interest of karma, I can probably let them go for shipping costs. The sound board, I honestly have no idea if it's good or not.

the boards are spoken for. Thanks!