Armed and ready

Yesterday I've finished with the playfield. The machine is now in it's full playable form. Needless to say, all the other work stopped for now since everybody want's to play it. Here are some pics of the final steps. There's not that many of them, since I was rushing to get the thing playable ASAP.

Bigfoot ramp installed


Rail attached


Insanity falls is so huge, I had to use a tub to clean it


Installed Insanity falls.


Finished playfield. Boulder garden still missing.


And here's a thing waiting to be done:

Star trek on it's knees

I had an interesting episode with my Star trek the other week.

I was playing a game, when suddenly it started to behave a bit strange. It was popping the balls out during a regular gameplay, it lost the track of number of balls in play an was being all weird in general. A couple of minutes later a coworker came into room and started complaining about something burning. By that time I was already done with my (weird) game and i noticed that the machine was unable to put the balls into proper places. I also smelled something funny so i turned the machine off quickly. I took the backglass down and to my surprise, it was full of smoke!

After panicking a bit I pulled myself together and dug into the problem. It turned out that one of the diverter coils underneath the playfield simply melted.





What followed in the next couple of days was a classic procedure of:

• traveling home
  
• picking up the needed tools
• finding the replacement coil
• forgetting to pick up some fuses (F103 got burned when the coil failed)
  
• looking for a place to buy the proper fuses in Ljubljana
• etc....
  

Anyway, today I was ready to test the thing and it was also over in a second. The moment I turned on the machine the new coil fired and the next second the F103 fuse failed again.
I am now in the process of investigating, what could be wrong. Pinrepair has a whole paragraph dedicated to this exact problem with the Star trek exclusively, thus I have more than enough info on my hand. At a first glance it seems that some problems with the wiring took down some transistor on the auxiliary driver board, but I haven't found the time to check one or the other yet. I will report on the progress.

Home for the hollidays

Indeed, I had an opportunity to spent an entire week near to my Whitewater. I wasn't dealing with it for the whole time, but I definitely made same progress. What I did was the following:

• Finished the cleaning of the upper part of bottom playfield
• Replace the rubbers with the new ones
• Replaced all the broken flashers
  
• Cleaned all the bottom pathways and places where the ball is moving underneath the playfield
• Cleaned all the lamps and replaced the broken ones.
  
• Cleaned the lamp PCB s.
• Cleaned the entire bottom of the lower playfield
• Fixed the broken bounce back target
  
• Started fixing the disaster drop ramp
• Even took some before and after pics. Here they are:

#1



#2



#3



#4



This concludes at least a couple of chapters of the cleaning story. I wasn't naming the blogs properly, but I'll try to sum it up here:

Chapter one - stripping down the playfield
Chapter two - cleaning the upper part of the lower playfield
Chapter three - cleaning the bottom part of the lower playfield (here you are)
Chapter four - cleaning the upper playfield (not yet started)
Chapter five - cleaning and re fitting the ramps (not yet started)
Chapter six - cleaning the cabinet (not yet started)
Chapter seven - I bet something will show up (not yet started)

This is how I plan the things will take place, but we'll see what the time brings.

Oh, and happy new year to all.

With a little help from my friends

It's been a busy November. So busy, that I don't think I played a single game of pinball in the previous month.

But finally, this weekend I found some time to get back to my White water. A couple a friends jumped in and together we finished the first part of cleaning. We cleaned bottom playfield and all the basic parts that I left on the machine. Here's how the action looked like:


And a couple of hours later, the result was playfield, all clean and shiny. Here are some pictures:













This concludes the first chapter of the celaning story. I will continue with the ramps, and all the bits that I will be putting back to the machine. I hope that I will be able to find some time to continue before the end of the year, but it looks pretty grim for now.

Cleaning, chapter one - stripping down the playfield

Finally, I got to the job I managed to postpone for months. Although the display still isn't working, I decided that it's time to get my hands dirty and begin with hideous task of cleaning the Whitewaters playfield. And boy did I get my hands dirty. It seems that this one is even dirtier then the Star Trek was.
Here are some pics that I took, so that I'll be able to put the thing back together.

Filthy upper playfield


Filthy stripped bottom playfield


Filthy right side


Filth


Filthy ramps


More filthy ramps


Removed filthy upper playfield


Filthy whirlpool lamps


Filth


More filth


Even more filth


Filthy secret passage


Filthy removed parts


Entire playfield, filthy

R.I.P. Pinball ?

On this very day, exactly 10 years ago, Williams abruptly terminated it's pinball division. As it was the only remaining mayor player in the pinball business at the time, this move actually meant that over 90 percent of pinball market suddenly ceased to exist.


Many people declared this day as "The day that pinball died?"

Do I agree with them?
Unfortunately I must say that I do.

Although that new machines still get made by STERN, with every new pinball announced I keep asking myself: "Where's the progress?". Every new machine could as well be built in 1995 and no one could tell a difference. We all know what happened with the technology in the last 10 years an nothing of that reflects in any of the new pinball machines. Here's some stuff that could be well used in new pinball machines, but it's not:

• LCD displays; the only step forward here in the last 20 years was pinball 2000 platform. Instead of hi res graphics that could work as both, backglass and display , there is a 128x32 4 color dmd.
  Tiny, gsm like displays could even be integrated into playfield itself, instead of archaic lamps.
  
• Connectivity; new machines could easily be connected to the internet where global scoreboards could be published.
  Machines could notify operators about earnings or problems with machine via gsm or email.
  Operators could mark machines with location data, that would be published online, so the players could easily found the desired machines.
  Entire online community could be built around machines, where players could communicate with operators or each others.
  
• Lasers; just remember with happened to the pc mice in a last couple of years. I'm sure laser motion sensors would be quite useful in pinballs
• Moore's law; Imagine the cpu/memory capacity could be put in machines these days. What sort of games or self diagnostic tools could be built with that.
• New materials; I'm not sure about this one, but i bet, that there's tons of new stuff that could be used
  

So. I guess Now I just have to wait until some STERN guy stumbles upon this blog and convince his boss to invest into Pinball 3000.

Until then I'll just play with with we got, although it's build on 15 years old technology.

The DMD, Part V

I tested the DMD board today. It was over in i second. I turned the machine on and the R5 resistor exploded.

I'm running seriously low on ideas now.

The DMD, Part IV

I was finally able to get back to my White Water this weekend. Of course, my primary goal is still to get the DMD controller back into working state. I just picked up the controller and some tools and took it back here with me

Here's the approach I'm taking now.


On the left, there is a broken White Water's controller and on the right the Star treks, that is all fine and dandy.

I measured the resistance of all the components and all the traces on both boards and try to identify any suspicious components, that might be causing too high negative voltages.

Anyway, the following measured quite different than on the working board: D4, D5 and D7 diodes. Q4, Q5 and Q6 transistors and R3, R4 and R6 resistors. These are the things I'll replace.

I guess I'm going shopping tomorrow. Naturally I will report about the results.

The DMD, Part III

The DMD controller failed again yesterday. This time it went with a bang and scared the hell out of a friend playing the machine.

At first it seemed that only the fuse failed, but after replacing it, the display looked really really weird. No letters, no graphics, just some sort of huge blob in the middle. I measured the voltages (Again) and the two negative voltages were waaaaaay of the normal readings. They read -152/-130.


What am I going to do about this one? I don't know yet. I'll see in a couple of weeks, when I'm back with my Whitewater.

It seems that if things continue to evolve in this manner I'll have to start a new blog and dedicate it to DMD controller exclusively. :)

Broken switches

Now that the DMD works again I checked out the whole bunch of broken switches that the self diagnostics reported.

Result: All of them actually work.

I guess my dad was playing and hit very little switches in a whole lot of games :).
Must I add that he is not a very good pinball player.

The DMD, Part II

I came back home today and naturally the first thing to do was to fire my whitewater.

To my surprise, here's what I found:

Now that's something that puts my soldering skills to trial. I started dealing with this issue immediately, so the first thing i did was to measure the voltages again. The two negative voltages were perfect this time (-118 and -106). The wrong one was +62 which read only 24 volts. Here's what pinrepair has to say about too low +62 voltage:

"The +62 volts is not +62 volts.
On WPC-S and earlier games, the positive DC voltage trace that comes from a very small bridge rectifier BR1 is physically routed underneath resistor R9 (1.8k 5 watt resistor). Because of the heat generated by this 5 watt resistor, and the current drawn from the bridge rectifier, this circuit board trace can become burnt and break underneath resistor R9. Because the trace physically runs under this resistor, the broken trace can be hard to see. "

And here's what my controller looked like:

Apparently this is exactly what happened to my board. I consulted the enclosed board schematics and here's the solution I came up with:

The DMD lightened up and I was really thrilled until I noticed that some sparks are flying around the board. It' seemed as that the cable I soldered on to the resistor was to close to the heat sink. I quickly turned the machine off. The board worked, so no other components were burned. I just had to replace the missing trace in some other way.

My second attempt looks like this:


And here's the result:

No sparks this time. I guess it's playing time again and let's see what the testing will bring.

Fun, fun, fun

After quick-fixing the both faulty switches I decided that it is not the time to begin with the other repairs or even cleaning yet.
I just didn't feel like it, so I ended up playing, playing, playing and then playing some more.
Man, this pinball is fun. Even though it is horribly dirty, the switches are all wrong and some ramps are not quite as they are supposed to be, it is so much fun it's almost criminal. This gotta be some of the best layed out playfields ever.
I can't remember ever having this much fun with the Hurricane. Thank goodness I got it back.

Analysis

Let me start with a picture.

Here it is. My white water.
Finally I'm back with it and I have some time on my hands to examine it closely. Naturally, the first thing to do is to install the DMD controller and check what the self diagnostics have to say.
Here's what came up:
* Check switch 57 - Canyon main
* Check switch 73 - Hot foot upper
Looks pretty good. It might be in better shape than I anticipated. A closer look showed that a couple of solder joints are broken. Piece of cake.

What about the other stuff? Here's what i found up:

1. Faded right side of the cabinet

I don't know what I'm going to do about this one. Perhaps one day, I'll invest in new decals.

2. Only four working waterfall ramps
I guess replacing the bulbs should do it. The current bulbs are not #194 , but some sort of weird 12V car light bulbs. No wonder they're all broken.

3. Broken (and horribly fixed) disaster drop ramp

Luckily the missing bit was still inside the cabinet. I guess some gluing and installing a ramp protectors will do the job.

4. Broken bigfoot ramp

I' guess I'll have to improvise here a bit.

5. Wrong lock switches, wrong hot foot switches

I'll order the correct ones if I'm able to find them

6. Broken plastics on the boulder garden

I'll order the new ones, if I find a store that sells them separately

7. Bigfoot's head is not spinning
It seems that motor is spinning and that the optos are working. Looks like just the head isn't attached properly.

8. Broken light kickback switch

I also find this one inside the cabinet. I'll try to glue it back

9. Some weak solenoids
Some cleaning should fix this ones.

10. Some rubber rings are missing, the others are in quite a bad shape.
I'll just replace them all

11. Very, very dirty
I'll put it to pieces an clean it thoroughly.