Hello,

I'm having a problem with a Zaccaria Time Machine. This machine has been talked about before here in a [previous post](https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/zaccaria-time-machine-rising-playfield-problem#post-2492313). When I got it everything was working well.

Now the problem seems to be that the machine seems to mostly think it is in the past. Every time the ball lands in the time hole. The pop bumper platform raises or lowers as expected, but the machine almost always announces "now you will go into the past." In this state, the drop targets only award a bonus in the past. The worst side effect of this is when playing with multiple players. Then, the pop bumper platform changes position on the next ball (e.g., Player 1 gets the platform up, then drains; the platform goes down for Player 2). Needless to say, the machine "as is" can't be used in a tournament.

I have gone through all switches and they all check out. Switch 51 (the switch that marks if the platform is down or not) seems good too. The connectors for the switch matrix were weak and old, so I have changed all of them with trifurcon pins. That didn't seemed to make a difference, but on the other hand all the switches still work.

From reading online, I thought that IC38 might have been bad (since "maybe" the future/past state was part of the matrix?). I socketed and switched this as well and it didn't seem to make a difference. I also thought that maybe some transistors were bad, but they all seemed OK as well.

I'm starting to get at wits end here. I'm hoping someone may have seen this issue before or maybe has a suggestion. To me it seems like there is a problem in the software somewhere and not in the electronics. I'd be happy for any suggestions.

Thank you in advance!

YeOldPinPlayer No, unfortunately not. But thank you for asking.

I'm kind of at a loss. The only thing that I can think is to get some test ROMS to see if the my RAM is bad or the ROMS are bad. I tried to change the RAM chip at IC4. Even though, the chips are the same, but it just made the machine go crazy (as in even when it was in service mode with Dip-4 switched on, I couldn't do anything). Maybe both IC4 and IC5 need to be changed at the same time, but that seems very strange.

I'm really grasping at anything at the moment. So, I'm slowly going back through the information about Zaccaria machines on-line. Seems there is stuff on zaccaria-pinball.com, pinwiki, and pinrepair.

Still, any sort of hint would be useful. I'll be sure to post a follow up if I have any sort of breakthrough.

CavemanJoe Thank you for posting this!

Sorry for the long silence here. It's been very slow work for me as I've had issue getting parts, finding time to get to the machine (working on a PhD). I went the other way and thought memory or the ROMs were bad. At the end, I now have new memory and free play ROMS that work great, but the problem is still there.

I will look at the microswitch and see what happens as that seems very much what I'm seeing. What did you do in your experimentation to see this?

I will of course post my final solution.

I didn't get a chance to talk to @funwiz. I only just returned to this. I'll PM funwiz too.

Thank you, @funwiz! I bought some "electronic connection cleaner without oil" at the local electronics store and sprayed it into switch. It took a couple of attempts, but afterwards the game started recognizing the "future" and "past" again. Yes! I never would have thought to clean the switch when it tested OK in switch test.

I'm marking this resolved. Thanks again for the help, even though I was slow to get back to this, I have a much better Time Machine than I started.