Hi All!

First off - my name is Mike, from Providence, RI and I'm both brand new to pinball machine ownership and to Pinside, despite being a pinballer for years. I'm excited to own my first two machines. One is a Gottlieb Hi Dolly EM machine, and the other is a Williams Flash.

The Williams Flash was a home use only machine - the coin door is pristine, the cabinet is in perfect shape. It played great when I bought it a week ago. The 5 CPUs were replaced with 3 by a pro in the area.

The first issue began with the upper right flipper sticking, but that eventually stopped. It still sticks for a brief second if I hold the right flipper button in, and then releases - sounds like an electrical thing.

Once that issue worked out, however, other strange things started to occur. Sometimes during a game the knocker would go nuts and a ton of credits would be added out of nowhere, then the machine would tilt randomly and I would have to reboot. Sometimes the LED displays would go nuts until I shut down and rebooted one more time.

Today, in the middle of a game, it did both of those things. When I pressed the start button, a new game started, but the ball would not eject into the launch chute (coil just wasn't activating) so I tried shutting down and rebooting. After a few tries, the start button went dead and would no longer start a game. I opened up the head to find that the fuse for the coils was blown. I replaced it, turned the machine back on, but it is still having the same issues. I've tested every fuse with the multimeter, and they're all good.

The machine turns on, there is general illumination. When I go into diagnostics mode, the flippers all work, but nothing else does (slingshots, etc) but I also have not learned how to do the diagnostics properly yet, so I may just be in the wrong mode.

Can anyone help here? Do you think this is a driver board issue? It seems like too many things were affected for it to be just electrical. Did something short?

Hey barakandi, I think you're right. Here's an update - after learning and understanding diagnostics better, I set the game to free play mode after doing a factory reset - start button works again and starts games. All the switches work in test mode - here's the thing - it's all the special solenoids that don't work now (I believe the ball launch is one of them, isn't it?) So, I've replaced the fuse, and the flippers work, but the special solenoids do not. Are they powered by a different fuse? Am I missing something?

That actually was the fuse that blew, and is the one I replaced. After replacing it though, the special solenoids still don't work. Did something else short out?