Hello,

I'm hoping you can all help me with a few oddities I have found on a Zaccaria Pinball Champ Restoration i am doing.
The machine came to me in an un-working/wrecked state.

My Machine has a Farfella Paint design in pinball champ colours on the coin door area of the cabinet, where as other images I have found show it should have the normal stars pattern. the machine is a 7 digit display version with the serial number F/ 127.226
I am assuming that it might be an early model (hence the seven digit VFDs) and the paint job was revised in the later models?
Any info would be appreciated.

Normal Design
IMG_0784 (resized).JPG

My Cabinet
IMG_0790 (resized).jpg

Ill post another post with the as found and current state, i even rewound new coils to match the Zacc specs and sizes.

Try this

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/rcs27dtc2coj0mz/AAC9vgP3oXhkjSlsHCIkAs8xa?dl=0

Let me know if you need any more, I would also be interested in a backglass, i contacted BGresto a while ago but didnt get any response, i suspect its because i need shipping to australia.

Cheers

Thanks
I’m definitely very interested in getting a back glass

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

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

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

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.

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