Struggles and Triumphs

Well, that was an adventure.

I spent a great deal of time last weekend testing and agonizing. First I installed as many new parts on the playfield as I could, and put back the parts I had taken off for the purpose of comparing with new parts. I was able to replace the slingshot posts with stuff from the Judge Dredd parts, and two of the spanners from the Hurricane lot fit under the ramp on the left slingshot, so that was reasonably successful (I also contacted the other bidders on those auctions so I can share the wealth). I fastened down the long ramp and dove in.

The new power supply freaked me out. I installed it while my daughter was watching the commentary on Clerks. Everything seemed to work fine, but when I tested the voltages I got crazy numbers. I didn't want to plug it in to the power driver board and have it melt before my eyes, so I got some advice from the communal overmind at rec.games.pinball. A prompt answer from a guy with a transformer page indicated that I shouldn't test the voltages against ground, but rather against each other... so pin 1's 20.6VAC and pin 2's 8.5VAC suddenly became about 10VAC when measured against each other. I'd actually seen his page before when I was searching for a way for the transformer I had to work, but since that wasn't what I was looking for I didn't grasp its full significance. When the transformer tested out against all the values in the Measured Voltages table, I plugged it in to the power board. Nothing bad happened, all the LEDs that were supposed to light lit, and the one that isn't didn't. So we're in good shape so far.

Next I installed the CPU. Power on, the CPU booted, no problems. So I chugged though. It helped that my wife was catching up on new Doctor Who episodes (just released on DVD today! buy it now!), so I had appropriate background noise. I put in the rest of the boards and plugged each one in in turn... really the only noticeable effect of this was when I hooked up the sound board and got a beep at power on. Finally I came to the Dot Matrix Controller board, which caused the CPU to not boot. Bad. I checked some plugs and I think the ribbon cable wasn't plugged in properly or something. So finally I plugged in the DMD, started it up, and got this:
And just so you know, that's NOT the Bride of Pinbot saying she can speak ("Oh, no!"). A little poking around showed that one of the fuses was the wrong value (probably not the issue I found out later) and, after testing the voltages coming out of the controller at J604, pin 8 (+62V) was 0. Even I know that that's probably not a good sign. So much for "it is tested and Working", right. I like to believe that the fact that the guys shipped it in plain bubble wrap ruined the board. Or his test was that it didn't cause the game to explode when he plugged it in. Who knows. Anyway, after another post to rgp, the consensus is that the high voltage section is messed up, and they gave me some things to test. I probably won't make this my first foray into board repair, though the board does cost $50 to repair, ouch.

So that's where things stand right now. I've got a few things to test which I figure are my patriotic duty to perform (it being July 4th and all), then we'll see where that leads. I have to admit, I'm reasonably happy with progress so far, since things appear to be mostly functioning. I was kind of counting on the DMD to give me actionable error messages, but I guess the jagged line was a pretty clear message itself.

And while I was linking to The Machine: Bride of Pinbot page in ipdb (using my Mozilla search engine, of course!), I found a link to the homepage of the woman who did her voice! Kewl!