True, it says so in the manual.

SoccerKings (resized).jpg

Hello and happy new year to everyone!

We are producing them, still some time to get them ready to ship out.

Hello and happy new year to everyone!

We are producing them, still some time to get them ready to ship out.

I need to start working on my Soccer Kings.

It's too long that it is waiting for restoration works. :/

Can anybody explain what the appropriate bumper lamp behavior on Farfalla should be? I get two bumper lamps coming on at a time, which seems purposeful. But a third glows dimly (new bulbs, good socket), so unsure if it is supposed to be on or not. Appreciate any insight. Cheers!

Finally finished my Farfalla and made a video to show the game play and LED bulbs in action:

Regarding the bumpers, they switch on in pairs and the pair changes when the upper contact under the upper playfield is hit.

PS
I have one bumper which has a contact problem and unfortunately it's the one under the upper playfield which means, I should remove the all playfield to fix it and for the moment I have totally no time to do it

Oh sweet, thanks for the video. That helps. I will give that a look and see if I can get it working proper.

I just got my new back glass today! I'm sad now, though. I managed to crack my original pulling off the lift bar. I was supposed to take it to Stephen Azzam at an expo later and have him run the original so I could have mirroring. I have to mount the bottom cleat before I install it. I had to modify the fit. These Zaccs have a saggy back box. Eventually you can't get the glass in and out safely because the bottom plate bows under the weight. I milled a curve into the notch on the backside of the cleat so it sits all the way down against the warped plywood. When it's installed you can't tell it's modified, or that it's bowed.

I have a Soccer Kings that I have just got up and running, however, it has issues.

Does anyone have any of the winged flipper bats? the upper playfield flipper bat is missing.
David G has been out of stock for years.

Sorry, mate. I don't have much of anything spare. Except a bit of knowledge. Only been fiddling with Zaccs since September.

Got everything squared away except my one coil plunger. Stephen's back glass is fantastic. The brilliance of the colors is exquisite! 100% worth the annoying wait times. The translucency of the glass isn't that bad when running incandescents, either! 271174166_459011818935426_8849266514367448614_n (resized).jpg271367443_270952585022434_1227392200858195236_n (resized).jpg269770839_301286131951445_4326272898237901516_n (resized).jpg

Definitely go to BG Resto if you guys need a back glass!

Also set my highest score today. 2,480810

I am selling my Farfalla pinball machine.

pinsidead=127851

Machine - For Sale

Farfalla

Used - shows wear but 100% working and clean - “We are moving and need to sell our pinball machine. I have owned the pinball machine since 1996. It has been rarely used. Everything works 100%. I paid a pinball professional ...”

2 years ago

Omaha, NE

andymassey

Expired!

7AABBB41-B433-4818-B60C-B669DFA02939 (resized).jpeg

98DFA62B-DF7F-4155-9D23-18B796814E2A (resized).jpeg

2F82F2EB-53E5-4834-AEC5-DDCA7973042C (resized).jpeg

Hi All,

i have recently restored a Soccer Kings, but it came with a dead soundcard. I decided to give it a crack over the last week to make my own soundcard (i have a history in electronics/programming).
The aim was a cheap and simple replacement of the existing sound using off the shelf components. with the main investment being on the coding time.

Luckily i have a fully working Pinball champ that i was able to attach to a logic analyser to understand what is going on in the databus between the MPU board. this made a lot of troubleshooting much easier. Also lucky that the schematics for these Gen2 systems are really good.

I have given this project the name of "ZaccSound" for lack of a more creative name.

What I'm showing here today is the second hardware prototype, which i am happy enough now to leave in my machine and consider it a decent replacement.

The system has 2 main components;
1. The micro controller - An Arduino Leonardo R3 (chosen at the time because it was cheap and available)
2. Arduino MP3 Player Shield - Accept commands from the Arduino microcontroller and plays MP3s from a Micro SD Card
The rest of the components are just to make interfacing with the existing Zaccaria system a plug and play experience.

How it works;
1. The Micro Controller reads the commands coming from the MPU,
2. Its plays the MP3 associated with the command and sends a signal back to the MPU to tell it that a sound is being played.

The SD card needs individual sound files as MP3 loaded on to it with there filenames being the number of the command of the sound/speech to be played from the MPU.

for example
043.MP3 is the speech of "Game Time Bonus"

One of the fun benefits of a system like this is that you can make the sounds be anything, i replaced the background 'music' with the bally dungeons and dragons pinball music.

The limitation of this system is that it is not polyphonic, being that it can only play one sound at a time, however from my understanding of the Zaccaria sound cards this is the same. (can anyone confirm this?)

One thing i am chasing down now is a collection of sound files from the original Soccer Kings Game. I am trying to get a visual pinball version of the table working and am hoping that i will be able to get in to the service menu and record the sounds then split them up in to files.
For the moment my 6 year old son and i have recorded most of the speech files just as a fun exercise. for the sounds i just have files that is a computer generated voice saying the file name.

I know there are sound card replacement solutions for other systems but does anyone know of any for GEN2 Zacc Machines?
if there is any interest i could create a separate post with further details on the system, going forward i plan on keeping my rev2 hardware unchanged and just refining the code as i find opportunities/issues.

IMG_1783 (resized).jpg

IMG_1784 (resized).jpg

Here is a short video of the system in operation

note that the beeping sounds were to help me with debugging and knowing when a new file is being called up, they are not there normally

Great work!
If I'm not mistaken, the gen 2 sound boards are essentially a ripoff of Ballys Squawk & Talk sound board. Does the Zaccaria MPU issue two nibbles to form a sound command byte or is the interface already byte wide?

Does this MP3 player need to restart the background music every time a voice/effect interrupts it?

You could hook up two MP3 boards (they're cheap), one to play background sounds/tracks, the other for speech and sound effects.

Interesting, I did come across the squawk and talk board similarities but didn’t have one in any of my machines to play with.
The data is is a byte wide. But as there is so few sounds 7bits is the most you need to look at

The MP3 player restarts every time. I have a second one here that I do plan on doing just that with for background music

The similarities run deep.
If you get to play an Eight Ball Deluxe, you'll recognise where some of the sounds on your Pinball Champ came from

I will confirm that the Gen2 systems, at least for my Time Machine and Soccer Kings are not polyphonic. I have been playing them nearly every day for four months. The way it has to decide is only by first come first served, so it really does sound low quality sometimes. From what I have seen, Spooky has multiple sound boards. I'm only assuming this is to have the capacity to run background and voice simultaneously. I haven't seen the guts from Pool Champion, or Robot. I don't know if they have a multi board sound setup. Meldenhut This project is amazing! What an awesome way to improve the quality of the games! This also opens doors for easier re-themes if people decide to get into that.(may be a sore subject for purists )

Andy, did you get my PM about your Farfalla?

robot uses the same sound board as Time machine, farfalla, devil riders, magic castle.

Pool champions sound board is similar to that of clown, and there isn't any speech in either game.

So does anyone have any schematics for a 4 player Zac Woods Queen? Been looking for a copy for quite sometime. Any help would be appreciated!

Looking for some help here.

Long story a short I have a friend that has a small collection of Zac. Games. Farfalla, Magic Castle, Devil Riders. The games are all there and while not perfect in decent shape. They all work intermittently and the boards appear clean, so I am assuming connectors need attention.

I still need to get pics, but what would be a fair price for a game needing a light amount of work in today's market? Would 1700 each be fair?

Congratulations, it's a very nice project.

To answer your question, no, there is actually no new sound board available on the market, we are working on a similar project since quite long time but it is intended to be a wider project for multiple models and multiple languages. No idea of when it will be ready.
And guess what? The name is supposed to be ZacSound

would be awesome to have a universal sound board for zaccaria. For all the changes.

We will get there, just matter of time...

Help needed from anyone that has a Soccer Kings,
I need someone to take a video of the machine running service test 5 (sound test)
As i dont have a working SK sound card i am trying to confirm the sound mapping, doesn't need to be a good quality video, i just need to be able to see the LED display so i can cross reference the sounds to the numbers on the display.
I know there is a sound map on zaccaria-pinball.com but im not sure if its entirely correct. im also aware that the sound test doesnt play every sound used, but at the moment im just trying to get a starting position.

any help appreciated.

Thanks

Out of respect for your awesome work in all the products you offer to bring these machines back to life i am changing the name of my little project to be "Sound Time Bonus" as to avoid any future confusion

An update on my sound card project.

“Sound Time Bonus”
New revision of Prototype hardware, software is almost complete, basically just debugging now

“Background Sound Bonus”
A side project to the side project, an add on card that adds background music. Can be used with existing sound card or the sound time bonus card. Fades the music out when machine is not in use and brings is back once a game starts (or attract sounds).

Both cards are working in unison in this video. D&D music for background and a test set of sounds loaded on the Sound time Bonus Card.

Next stop I’ll be refining code and producing some revision one PCBs

Id be happy with any multi channel sound.

I hate it when a simple pinball sound kills a vocal call out...lol.

Hi all,

Just a brief intro post...

I've finally taken the plunge (after lurking for a while) and become a member on the site. The main reason being that I'm starting work on a Zaccaria Moon Flight I picked up about 15 months ago and I figured I would tap into the interwebs brains trust as needed. It's my first EM and having finally cleaned the brick sized wasps nests from it, it's not as bad as it might have been...

I've ordered a new score reel coil (one appears to have been poached by a previous owner) and aside from the nylon/plastic arm that should have been attached the rest of the machine appears to all be there (and not obviously burnt out etc). I haven't been able to locate a new arm (I believe that it may have been part 3B-7296 if that helps) on the web. If I don't have any luck I'll have to fabricate one using the 3D printer (fortunately the other arms on other score reels are still present so I can always use them for measurements).

Depending on how things go once I've received the parts, I might be screaming out for help with other things (or maybe it will all work perfectly...)

If anyone has any insights I'd love to know - I've seen a couple of 'help'posts for the Moon Flight which I've bookmarked...

I'll let peeps know how it progresses if anyone is interested.

Nick

for em's , if you need things like the arm and stuff. I usually rob them from the credit unit.

Thanks! - I’ll check it and see if that works

Another Update on the Sound Time Bonus Project,

The code is now fully working with both Sound and Voice, and also a background track that the volume automatically fades out on when the game is not being played. All sounds including the background track are just MP3s on flash memory so they can be changed easily.
I'm still running a lot of "test sounds" in the video below, the volume on the tracks is not normalised etc. I plan on now tidying up a set of audio tracks for the game and mounting the card and speakers properly.

the speakers in this video are both taking an onboard amplified mixed mono signal from the mp3 player card (~1.2watts each)

Plans going forward are integrating an audio mixer and amp for the 2 voices (game sounds and backing music) from the stereo 3.5mm outputs and providing output channels that can drive a set of typical pinball speakers. im unsure if ill include this in the production pcbs at this stage as im really happy with the result at the moment.

You are having a lot of fun!!!
Nice results

Go on and enjoy!

Made up a set of volume Normalised Sounds and Voices Today.
Here is some gameplay footage

I don't have working Soccer Kings so I cannot compare with the original but looks quite interesting.

Hello Gianfri. What is the status on the revised power board? Want to put one into my Devil Riders.

his power board works great in devil riders. It's currently in mine and working strong.

Hello everybody,

the power board got some delay but we are starting the production of the Rev B
I'm getting few boards in stock by next week and they are reserved for customers who requested them last year.

Actually, I'm just worried I may have forgotten who asked me on the forum so if anyone did already contact me please send me a message or email in order to organize the shipping.

For the others, I expect to have more boards coming in soon so it's just matter of few more weeks before being able to order them.

Thanks for the update. Would like to get one as soon as possible.

Hey Zaccaria fans,
Hopefully this helps someone in the future. I picked up a Devil Riders that was missing the back fuse cap for the transformer. The 20A fuse, I was not able to find an obvious replacement initially, but as luck would have it I found a match. Ended up costing $6 for the cap and fuse holder.

0E9D9D80-C611-45FB-A6EC-922C461E6B0A (resized).jpeg

let us know how reliable they are.

Has anybody tried eliminating LED flicker in controlled lamps by adding a resistor to the socket? I'm going to experiment with this today a bit, but thought I'd ask.

I only use incandescents in inserts.

Yeah, just curious if anyone has tried and had success.

I tried Comet non-ghosting wuthout success. I have Ghosting on many inserts in my Robot. I am about to change to incandescent bulbs

Did you try the LED bulbs I indicated some time before?

If you watch the video I published some time ago I have no flickering on my Farfalla.

I haven't tried them yet, no. But I will give them a run at some point

Im using Comet 2smd frosted sunlight LED's on every single bulb in my Farfalla (except the move ramp bulb in the blue drops, its a special bulb) and have no ghosting or flickering.

I ordered some and recently received them. Have not had a chance to open a game and start swapping them out however. I’ll try to find time this week.