Terminator 2: On Location!

So, last time I was talking about Doctor Who, which I finally finished putting back together. Unfortunately, it's very resetty, so I kind of ignored it for a while to mask my disappointment.

But in the meantime, my league held their annual Fairfax Pinball Open last weekend, and I volunteered the Terminator as one of the games. Previously I had taken in Quicksilver and (in December) Eight Ball Deluxe, and they had earned a healthy $50-60.

Of course, having a deadline meant I had to actually finish fixing up the game. There was a bunch of routine upgrades I would have to make to any game going out into the world (backbox lock, a coin door that accepted quarters instead of drachmas or pesetas or whatever, etc.), easy stuff that I just hadn't gotten around to (replacing a temporary alligator clip to the start button lamp with a real connector), and stuff that broke while I was doing all of this (the VUK platform broke off, so I replaced the entire mechanism with the spare from the other game). However, I also had to do some stuff which I had been putting off.

One of the criticisms I got when I took the game to a league party a few months ago was that the flippers were not properly aligned to the little holes on the playfield. I took this opportunity to add a fun upgrade which I'd bought from Pinball Life after hearing about them on Spooky Pinball -- chrome flipper bats and buttons. Much to my wife's chagrin, I'm not a fan of a lot of pointless bling on games, but I felt that they are a good fit for the game what with the T-1000 and all. I don't have a good pic of the flipper bats, but here is one of the buttons.

Another thing I've been thinking about fixing was the Skynet plastic over the right ramp. It rubs against the wireform behind it, so the paint at the point of contact has worn down. I dealt with this but cutting two small pieces of black electrical tape and putting them on the back of the plastic, which worked out well because it not only masks the wear but now it's the point of contact (and can be replaced when it wears down). My picture of the front isn't so good because the tape has different reflective properties than the plastic, but it works very well in low light basement and bar conditions. On the back picture, if you look carefully you can see the square of tape on the upper part of the logo.

But one of the most important fixes I had to make was one I've been dreading for some time... I had to fix the lamp column problem, where any CPU controlled lamp would also cause the corresponding lamp in column 5 to light. Based on the limited trouble-shooting I've done, it was probably a board-level problem, not a wiring problem. My old printed copy of Clay's repair guide indicated that the problem was most likely with the column transistors on the driver board, so that's where I went. I pulled the driver board out and started testing with my DMM. Sure enough, the transistor for column 5 was bad, so I desoldered it and replaced it with a TIP107 that I'd bought about a year ago because I knew I would have to do this at some point. As always, board work freaks me out, so it probably took me twice as long because I was constantly checking and redoing my work. But finally I got something that didn't look too terrible, so I put it back in the game and threw the switch. Success! The lamps on the game worked perfectly.

With everything working, I was able to even fix something I didn't even realize was a problem. At some point while checking the lamps I noticed that the CPU GI in the center of the playfield never lit up. Recall, I had rebuild the GI connector based on my Doctor Who wiring, and I had rebuilt it a second time because I made it backwards the first time, so wiring was a prime suspect. After spending a while debugging and an extremely fruitless attempt to get rgp to believe that it was probably just a wiring problem (they wanted me to go straight to replacing transistors), I found a connector pin out diagram in my printed Clay guide, and sure enough I had mis-wired two of the pins. I rewired it and the GI worked as advertised.

So I moved the game into John's Place on the Washington's Birthday Holiday, came back and actually set it up the next day because I had neglected to bring the legs with me, and my Terminator was out in the world again (the picture below shows John Locke, league member/Lost character/Enlightenment philosopher, playing the game). It was not a tournament machine (not sure why) but was a practice game, and aside from some problems getting it to stay level it performed admirably all weekend. And did it earn! By the following Monday it raked in $112.25 at 50 cents per game (obviously somebody lost a quarter ^_^; ), of which I kept half... that basically paid my costs for tournament, which was a minor consolation because I did terribly. I also got some compliments on it, which was nice. One of the league muckity-mucks said that T2 is a great teaching game for all levels of flipper skills (especially aim, passing, and multiball cradling) and that made a lot of sense to me.