Picked up an Apollo 13 the other day; it has a few problems and was once on a route (maybe 10+ years ago) but has been sitting in a dude's house for a good long time with no attention of note. Amazingly it had ZERO leakage from the (still mounted!) battery holder despite my suspicion that the guy who owned it never used the key in the coin door! It's getting a NVRAM since it's a socketed chip on these and it's a 30-second job.

Playfield is in good shape and a half-day with it got it mildly cleaned, 3/4 relamped with LEDs and the mechanical issues fixed so it's fully playable. The moon and rocket both work after a bit of attention although someone at Stern needs to be attached to a tree; 4 flashers (2 in the rocket and 2 in the backbox on that channel) is 2 too many on the stock power board transistor and one channel is blown. Waiting on some TIP102s (I was out) to take care of that and bayonet-base LEDs to fix the dissipation issue "for good." This is a game that punishes you *very badly* for missed shots (usually with a SDTM) but it's growing on me rapidly (the kid loves it, including the frustration level it generates.)

It'll get the full strip-down, clean and rebuild flipper treatment soon once I have all the rubber parts I need -- I'm missing too many of them to want to tear it apart twice for a full cleaning, go-through and re-rubber treatment.

I'm a Bally/Williams sort of guy but this isn't a bad table at all...it has exceeded my expectations thus far.

I'm now officially out of room for additional pins unless I invade a second room.... which is kinda likely to happen

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Thanks... I didn't quite steal it, but it was offered at a (very) nice price. I suspect the PO knew it had problems that he didn't quite tell me about (like the DMD randomly going out -- cracked solder joints on the HV board, a fried power transistor in the flasher circuit, etc) although he did say the rocket kicker didn't always work (big shock given that the coil was installed 90 degrees off and interfering with the playfield resulting in a broken connection -- at least it had plastic insulating sleeves on the coil connections or it would have catastrophically shorted that channel against the raceway metal.) The coinop route guy who had it first's sticker was still on the backglass, and the guy who I bought it from said he had never had it open other than to push the service-credit button on the coin door -- I believe him, given that the pricing wasn't even set! No manual either but I found one on FleaBay. That the CPU avoided a battery leakage mess is just a flat-out stroke of luck.

Even with a few hundred in parts and enhancements (speaker upgrade, etc) plus a couple days to strip the playfield completely and clean it really well along with relamping it in LEDs I won't have crazy money in it, and it plays nice. I recently went to Ann Arbor's open house thingy a couple weeks ago after I knew this was available but before buying it and got to play it, so I knew I'd like the title. I may put a ColorDMD in it; the existing one is real good shape though and running well within spec on both volts and current drawn.

My only real gripe in working on it as a Bally/Williams WPC era guy (Safe Cracker and No Fear plus owning both Pin2ks) is that Sega appears to pay exactly zero attention to mechanical access once initially assembled -- even simple things like GI sockets. Wire looms over the subway under the board making its removal essentially impossible without un-looming all the wiretie bundling and similar plus there are click-board wedge sockets inside the subway molding when it's all bolted up (just try getting those off to re-lamp without having to move the subway out of the way) as just a couple of many examples.

BTW to the guy who recently scored the White Water... I used to own that one and sold it a number of years ago. My copy had a rough previous life before I got it in the playfield cosmetics department although mechanically it was fine. I still regret selling it instead of restoring it.

Nice! Old Chicago was one of my favorites as a young kid.....

Nice... I have a No Fear and it's one I keep coming back to to play more.