I too have been working on restoring a Gott Hot Shot. The machine was a basket case that I rescued from the basement of a house that was being rehabbed for flipping. It was completely dead, with several missing parts assemblies, and someone had painted the cabinet over with a brush using blue & red house paint.

I had never owned a Gottlieb 4-player EM before and put in a lot of sweat equity and had some good help from another Pinsider. Now have the game booting and mostly working properly.

I note that when booting the machine for a 1-player game, one of the latter steps in the sequence is for the 4 large drop-target bank reset solenoids to fire and raise all the targets. No problem there. If I then press the credit button again to enter additional players, the machine fires all the drop target reset solenoids one time for each additional player added.

Is that the way this era of machine was supposed to work, or do I still have a bug to search for?

My understanding of the schematic is that these solenoids will fire every time the S relay energizes (by pressing the credit button?). Seems like a lot of unecessary pounding on the target bank reset parts occurs with this step? Is my machine operating correctly?

Thanks King and Bonzo. Good to know it is normal behavior; it didn't seem right that the machine kept firing the big target reset solenoids just to add players. That explains some of the wear I can see in the metal parts of the drop target reset mechanisms.

This machine has been a piece of work with dozens of issues, including the bonus count. I learned a lot from a previous thread about HS bonus accuracy.

Lee

It sure is a clunky old EM. Makes me really appreciate the simplicity (and relative quiet ) of a wedgehead.

I owned a Sure Shot a number of years ago, but really don't clearly recall how it did the bonus.
My guess would be that it was different than Hot Shot/Big Shot, as I do not specifically remember the "2-speed" bonus scheme and the cacophony of sounds.

Yes, I had read Mark's great explanation and found it very helpful in understanding the circuitry and function.

My Hot Shot was also intermittently short-changing the bonus scoring by 1, 2, or very occasionally 3, but ONLY when a double-digit number of balls were lit. It absolutely NEVER shortchanged for counts of 9 bonus or less. In testing by manually collecting bonus for 1, 2, or 3 drop targets, it never would malfunction, over many dozens of tests and/or games played. Even for bonus counts of 10-15, it was quite erratic, sometimes short changing 1 or 2, and sometimes not short changing at all. If you observed it closely with say 15 bonus lit, you could hear the stepper go into the fast-count mode once or twice when it should not have, and thus, skip over lit balls and fail to score them. The issue was not dependent on which balls were lit or not lit. I can often figure out potential causes of problems by studying the schematic, but this time I was stumped as to why the issue was only occurring with double-digit # of bonus scored.

Not sure exactly what I did to fix it, but the issue is gone. I ended up going through every single switch in the bonus collection circuits (mainly the I and J relays) at least 3 times and I finally stumbled on whatever it was. My "guess" is that the issue was in the make/break switch within the I relay. It was a typical Gottlieb short-throw relay with very small tolerance to adjust the gaps when one switch was supposed to be open. Perhaps the center blade got to bouncing due to the vibration of firing the stepper multiple times in a row and it forced the stepper into the fast scan mode? I don't know, but that was the last thing I worked on and the issue seems to be corrected.

Lee