Not much to report, but I'll probably end up writing a lot about it

Not much happened this week. I bought some screws that I used to mount the boards in the backbox, then lightly plugged in as many cables as I could find plugs for. I didn't want to plug them in fully since I want to be able to disconnect them when I get power in, so I don't end up sending 100 volts to the CPU or something because the power driver isn't working properly.

A guy at work who builds his own amps and stuff loaned me a catalog of electronic parts, thinking I could find the transformers I needed in there, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it.

The Fliptronics II board arrived -- this guy actually used Priority Mail -- but I haven't done much else besides mount it.

Hey, for fun I wrote a Firefox search engine for Internet Pinball Database. I still need to read how to make it general enough to release, though.

A few weeks ago a guy advertised playfield glass on Mr. Pinball, so I reserved a pane for delivery at Allentown... Doctor Who won't run without glass on it, to avoid people's hands being crushed by the mini-playfield (mine doesn't have the motor to crush anybody's hands, but the game probably doesn't take that into account), and I'm hoping the game will be running before the York show in October. Last night I saw another guy on Mr. Pinball guy selling pinball legs, so I reserved four rusty ones for $5 each... we'll see how well they clean up. I checked the guy's website, and in addition to pinball he also makes pretty good full-body character costumes... I especially liked his Banana Splits Drooper and Bender from Futurama. He advertises that he's Furry friendly, which made even my quiche-eating California-liberal brain go "ewww!! gross!!"

I'd like to try to plug the various voltages into the game to see what works tomorrow, but we'll see if I have time. Most of this weekend has been taken up already with driving to my daughter's new school, Gettysburg College, for Get Acquainted Day. Of course, for me it was You Better Find a Shitload of Money Fast Day, but then when is it not that day? Also, the house looks like crap so I have to get some cleaning done. And I really need to sell some stuff on eBay. I need to watch a Netflix so I can get it back in time to (hopefully) get Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children (for that matter, I need to finish Final Fantasy VII ^_^; ). The yard needs mowing, the cats need ironing, etc., etc. Really, my weekends need to be about a month long.

Epiphany in the Shower

This morning in the shower I had a thought that probably should have been obvious last night... my game has the wrong transformer in it. Now I have one more thing to troll eBay for.

I should have know that going to Home Depot (notice I'm leaving off the "The" to show my contempt) for bolts was a waste of time. I can never find specific nuts & bolts there or at Lowes or anyplace.

Whoda thunk?

Did you know that pinball machines have about a million plugs? I didn't. ^_^;

I started identifying plugs, carefully determining wire color and writing the socket it goes in, and after about 10 realized that it was kind of pointless. I could do a lot better by mounting the boards and plugging the plugs into them... that way, I don't have to identify the same plug twice or search desperately for an unidentified plug only to lose it when you turn to read the manual.

So then I decided to find only the ones that matter for the task at hand, namely the guys that go to the transformer. What I found was that there aren't enough wires coming out of the transformer to power the game... in fact, there's a 12 pin socket coming from the transformer and a 15 pin socket going to the backbox. As the kids these days say, wtf?!? This prompted a change in stragedy... I got a good idea of which pins should have which voltages, so I'm going to measure them and see if they're correct. I'll also measure some of the random wires that are hanging around and see what's up wit them.

A few more positive notes... since I was messing with plugs, I installed the board s under the playfield and plugged them in, and placed the under playfield ramp (with only one screw, which is all I had handy). A couple of eBay auctions flew by... they weren't my style (actually, they went beyond what I was willing to pay). I did buy a working Fliptronics II board for $51... they generally go for $80, so the savings offsets the fact that I won't need that board for a while.

Tomorrow I plan to go to The Home Depot and pick up a bunch of bolts so I can mount the boards in the backbox. I plan to get enough that I can replace missing bolts in my other games as well...

The rest of the world must be travelling at a significant fraction of the Speed of Light...

... because I'm moving so damn slow.

Today I plugged the game in for the first time. I tested the voltage at the internal outlet, and got a satisfying 120V... not totally unexpected, since it comes directly from the power cord, but I am being extremely careful. Then I plugged the transformer in and turned the game on. Despite its rust, it emitted the typical pinball hum, so it appears to be working.

Next up, I have to do the job I've been dreading: The identification of the cables. That will be followed by a few more voltage tests, and finally (providing none of the cables is missing) plugging in my boards and seeing what happens.

On the bad news front, yesterday while trying to determine which parts in the parts list correspond to the parts I'm missing from the playfield, I found a divot in the playfield's Diamond Coat that goes down to the wood. Ouch! Today I found another one! Gak! Luckily they're both small and in areas of relatively uniform color, but still...

Yay!

Here's some rare good news... a guy at work had a bunch of power supplies that he was hoarding for a project that never happened, so he gave me one. Unlike the one in the old computer case, this one was brand new... and it was only 250W, so no decent computer would have anything to do with it, but perfect as a pinboard tester.

So, I cleared a spot on the dining room table, plugged it in, and started playing. It worked great, so I started trying to troubleshoot my one bad CPU. There were only three chips I could reseat without soldering: the ROM, the CPU, and the ASIC which has 80 pins and is nasty to take out. First I swapped the bad board CPU onto my good board and it worked fine. Then I thought I would try to re-reseat the CPU before making an attempt at the ASIC. When I was verifying that the notch was facing the right direction, I noticed that the notch was facing the wrong direction on the card. I put it in correctly and the card booted right up! Poor English guys... they had two working CPUs and didn't realize it!

Here's my first picture! It's a shot of the board from the auction... I've editorialized slightly.

A favorable verdict from the bench

The power supply that I lovingly extracted from the PC didn't work. :P So my fallback solution was using another old PC I have sitting around... I unplug the power cable from the CD drive, plug some aligator clips into the socket, and let it rip. This turned out better than expected. I plugged in a ROM chip (the Who ROM and cables arrived a few days after the boards), applied power & ground to the J210 plugs, and see what happens. What I found was the working board that I got last week appeared to boot (that is, the LEDs on the board showed the program was running), and in a surprising development one of the two boards from England booted as well.

On the board that doesn't work, the power and the blanking LEDs stay on, and the LED that indicates that the game is running doesn't. At a later date, I'm going to probe the board with my multimeter and see if the voltages are good, and possibly try re-seating the some of the chips.

Tomorrow, if I don't get sick again or some other calamity fails to befall me, I'm going to test the transformer in the game. If that delivers satisfactory voltages, I will try plugging boards into it and see what happens.

Anti-lameness rant

I finally got the boards, and they seem to be in OK shape. I just gotta spew my vitriol, though... the guy charged me $16 for shipping, so I figured it would go out Priority Mail. When it finally did ship, the email said it was going Parcel Post... I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, as I figured he wrapped the boards in the more expensive anti-static bubble wrap or something. Turns out, no. He wrapped them in plain bubble wrap and sent it Parcel Post which was about 1/2 the cost of his shipping (Priority was only $2.50 more). I spend almost $450 with this guy and he nickel and dimes me on the shipping. And he's a power-listing SOB. Lame.

Now I have to test the boards as best as I can without the cables. About all I can do is connect power to the CPU and see if it boots... I'm going to pull the power supply out of an old PC I got from work and use it as a bench test thing. I did that with one of my Bally MPUs that was not booting and it worked pretty well. Then I have to test out the transformer in the game and make sure it's providing the proper voltages, wait for my ribbon cables to show up, then start seeing if stuff actually works in the game.

I really have to start posting some pictures...

Joe's Pinblog -- now with Conjunctivitis!

Over the weekend I came down with Pink Eye... I'm not sure where I got it, though I did shake hands with someone on Friday. I've been ordered to stay home from work for three days, so I can catch up on my current purchases. Things are a little blurry, so I'll do my best.

My next purchase for Doctor Who ended up being a bit of a mistake. There was a pair of non-working CPU boards from England that I thought I would bid on, with the idea that I could pay $60 to have them fixed by either The Dallas Arcade (who I've had good luck with in the past) or The Coin-op Cauldron (recommended by the guy who sold me the game). I was actually thinking of sending a board to each to compare and contrast, keeping the one I liked best and selling the spare to offset the cost. Anyway, the key to that scheme panning out was winning the auction at a decent price. I decided that my max bid would be $115 for both boards. So when the time came (I was at work, which added to the tension), I lurked until the last minute, entered my max bid of 115, and won! Then when I went to check the cost, I saw that it was actually $160! After a few panicky wtf moments, I realized what had happened... since it was an English auction, the bid I entered was in pounds, not dollars... so I'd actually bid £115, which is almost $200. Thank goodness no one was dumb enough to bid it up that high... another American nimrod like myself and I would have been in bad shape. The final price was £97 with shipping, which ended up being about $170, but that day I'd gotten a 10% off coupon from eBay so I used that to cushion the blow. The seller, btw, was named Edwin Mole, who I supposed used to run an arcade in Toad Hall with Ratty.

A few days later a guy listed about a zillion things I needed, but he obviously used a program to list them because they were all within a few seconds of each other (I've ranted about this earlier). The trouble here is that I foolishly bid on the first item in the group, when I should have been on the second. The second one almost always went for less... I got a power driver board for $235, which I thought was great until I saw that a newer version of the same board sold 15 seconds later for $60 less. O_o But I've already gone over that, so oh well. The third (working) CPU looks like it has a Black Rose ROM chip, so I bought a Who CPU ROM from a guy on eBay. Finally, I found that the highly regarded Great Plains Electronics had a complete set of the cables I'd need to string the backbox boards together, so I bought those for $25 including shipping.

That's where my purchases stand right now... I've received the boards from the English guy, but I'm still waiting on the three other boards, and it's been over a week. *sigh*

Power and CPU were at the top of my list of things I need to get the game going, and next up is the display and driver board. Since I'm more or less out of money for now, I'm going to probably wait and see what prices are like at the Allentown show.

OK, my left eye is really bugging me, so I'm going to leave off for now.