Big Bang Bar

[awarner]

I bought a Pinball Magic a few weeks ago at an auction. It was sorta working at the auction, but I figured it needed more. It took me a couple of weeks to even get it set up. Then I found out that the power board was worked on by 400lb. gorillas with blow torches for soldering irons. Most of the 6 big caps would wobble and various items would work, but not all at the same time. So I took the board out and there were jumper wires all over and not a single plated through hole was intact. After extensive reworking, the machine came up with all power LEDs working.

Now to figure what else was wrong. I go into the menu and the right flipper button wasn't working, I traced that back to a bad connector near the flipper. To get it working I got the wires out of the one side of the connector and jammed them in the other side. A good TEMPORARY fix. Now, let's play a game. Hmmm the right flipper still won't fire, but the button is surely working. Look up the coil section on Clay's site. Not much info there other than it's a lot like the Sega/Stern White Star board in this respect. OK, but how will I find the proper transistor? The menus say its Solonoid-10 or SOL-10. So I look at the driverboard and they had actually screened what pin went to SOL-10 right on the board - Yay! Then I figured I would simply trace it over to the transistor, but SHAZAM they didn't number the driver transistor Q999 or something meaningless like that, they numbered it SOL-10! YEAH BABY! And guess what? There was NO TRANSISTOR THERE! Someone must have needed one and took that one. 15 minutes later it was flippin NICE!

The last, most annoying thing to get working was the magic wand. For some reason the ball would get 1/2 way down the wand and drop off. Weird. It wasn't like it wasn't working, just not strong enough. I pumped up the setting to max for the "On" time but it didn't help. Then I noticed that there was a little black paint on the white nylon tip of the wand. Hmmm. Then I felt the underside of the wand and it was rough. Somebody painted this, probably with a brush. And the paint is limiting the magnetic power and too bumpy. A little 200 grit sandpaper later and it's working like a champ.

I played a couple of games and other than a few switches out of adjustment, it was playing decently.

Then it stopped. Weird stuff on the display.

One of the voltages was out on the driver board and I found it was a bad bridge rectifier. 1/2 hour later (same gorillas worked on this at some point) it's back. It's been about a week and it's been running well. In a week or two I'll take it apart and give it a much needed cleaning/shopping.

-Al-
_________________
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[BigBangJoe]

Does that mean that you're satisfied with how Capcom designed the electronics? It seems like you fixed quite some nasty problems on this one so you're in a good position to judge the general design.
Mushroom Bart (the Capcom freak) always told me that Capcom's designs are so much better than any other machine, but I'd like to hear the same from someone else too

[awarner]

Capcom electronics were good in some respects, but the use of surface mount electronics, particularly in the switch matrix was a bad idea. Another flaw was those big honkin' caps that rip themselves from the board when the machine is moved. These problems shouldn't be a big deal for us since we won't prolly be moving the machines a lot and we'll all be real careful not to short the coils to switches - Right?

But I really liked the basic servicability of the coil network and the machine does have a very solid feel. It's also cool to be able to adjust the flipper power. I think they had it mostly right. I'm not quite sure why they redesigned the boards for the "Classic Series" (Breakshot). You would think that fabrication costs would outweigh the savings, but maybe after 3 or 4 "Classic" games, it would pay off.

So, I like most of it. I just hope I never have a switch chip go out.

-Al-

PS - Most of thes opinions are Clay's, I just agree with them.
_________________
Pins and Vids #4 - A New Hoax DVD, Available NOW at www.pinsandvids.com for only $12.00 plus shipping.

[Bertl]

I have all four games (AB, BS, FF, PM) in my collection and i had only small problems (loose cables, broken metal rings on bumpers, some optos) with them. Those were easy to fix. From my view, the technic is solid and good.

I never had electronic problems upto now.

Brgds
Norbert