This has been a long time coming. I just set up my Alien Poker from my storage project games last night and got this thing playing pretty good. I had already purchased a new backglass from Planetary Pinball and a new plastic set from CPR. Great stuff there! I missed this one. I had it set up about 8 years ago in my first house. I've since moved and it was buried behind a bunch of other projects.
Glad to be back playing this one. I was playing it last night and thought "man..... I wish this was a multi-ball game. There are already 3 kick outs you can lock balls into like Firepower.....
And then I read this thread. Probably not going to do a multi ball mod. I didn't think of all the points I'd be loosing!
It seems I have one small issue remaining on this one though.
It seems to be about every 10-15 games or so, when you hit the start button to begin, it will automatically add a player 2, even though the button was only hit once. Ugh...... almost there!
I have scoured over this thing 2-3 times now making sure that no switches are touching anywhere and there is nothing else like a loose diode to be found either. I've had a few games with random issues and found someone just wrapped a diode around the contact end instead of soldering it so it would cause strange behaviors like this.
I've gone into the diagnostic test mode and no switches are stuck on. All switches register the proper number when hit, but it seems almost randomly sometimes that when you hit a switch the number will show up correctly and then go right back to the switch number that you hit previously. It doesn't do it often, it's almost like when hitting the start button, you hit about 10 switches or so and then boom, back to the previous switch number.
Strange.
Probably something simple like a failing diode on a switch somewhere, but you have to remove a lead for each diode all around the machine to test them and get a good reading to find the right one..... I hope I don't have to do all of that!