Upcoming projects

Posted: 7 January 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Devil Riders, General, Pinball Champ '82 | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

A new year, some new resolutions… Let’s get these machines finished.

The Pinball Champ’s displays are failing again, so I’m going to replace them with LEDs. The 7 segment displays are on order (estimated delivery 28 January), I have the PCB etching kit ready and I’m almost done with the PCB design (largely stolen from Leon).

Display PCB design

Display PCB design

One of my pinball friends Eric exchanged my Pinball Champ backglass with a less damaged one. He only used his to hang on a wall in his gameroom and didn’t mind exchanging it for mine. One of the projects will be to fix the paint on the glass with some clear varnish. He also exchanged his Zaccaria etched playfield glass for my blank one, so now my Devil Riders also has an original playfield glass. Thanks again Eric!

Then finally I have scored myself a new 2nd generation CPU board. I’ve given up on the one I had for now, I might revisit it in the future, but it’s not very likely. The new CPU board has a bit of battery leakage damage around and under the memory chips that I need to fix. Hopefully I can get it to work 100% so I can put it in the Pinball Champ and get the Devil Riders’ CPU board back. Then I need to recheck all the electronics in the Devil Riders as my last CPU board test caused sparks on both the Power Supply and Driver board.

If all goes well both machines should be up and running by April 5th.

I’ll keep you posted.

 

Driver boards tested and fixed

Posted: 1 November 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Devil Riders, Electronics, Pinball Champ '82 | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

So I put together the little address selector tool that Leon designed on his website (see my links) and used it to test both the Pinball Champ ’82 and Devil Riders driver boards.

Driver board test tool

I used a LED to test each input individually for the eight possible addresses.

Driver board test setup

I had to do it on the PC82 since I don’t have an independant 5V power supply anymore… really need to fix that!

The Devil Riders driver board was in perfect condition. This machine is turning out to be just a case of bad switches and dirt, lots of dirt… excellent!

The Pinball Champ driver board was another story. I had intermittend faults on connector CN21 while signal that came for the same SCR’s on CN18 where perfect. After a more thorough visual inspection of the board I noticed this:

Bad connector seating

As the solder didn’t appear broken and I had a very hard time desoldering this connector, I suspect it had been put together this way 29 years ago… So now it’s reseated properly and I replaced four SCR’s that were faulty, this board is now in tip-top shape as well.

I’ve also tested the Devil Riders CPU board with Leon’s test EPROM and it’s also in perfect condition. I’ve also found some discrepancies in the way the Pinball Champ CPU board functions compared to the Devil Riders board. I’ll get into that next as it’s the only thing that needs to be done before I can really get into the Devil Riders.

Wish me luck!

Memory check: passed!

Posted: 19 September 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Electronics, Pinball Champ '82 | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

The mailman (actually a woman) had my new memory with her today! It took me all of 5 minutes to get the old 2114L out of the CPU board and the new 40L45 in. Popped Leon’s test EPROM back in and bingo, memory test passed!

The new 40L45 memory.

After that I did the input checks and I’m happy to say that that passed as well. So now all I need are the 3081 driver chips and probably a BC548 transistor (TR3) and the CPU board should be fixed fixed!

These two 3081’s are dead or heavily injured.

This little transistor is looking very suspicious indeed.

So I assembled everything except for the sound board and switched the machine on. There was life… sort of.

It’s alive!

I found the test button to be unresponsive, but when I put the CPU board in program mode using the dipswitch it did kind of start of normally. It was even able to kick the ball out of the out hole and the flippers, some bumpers and the poppers worked. But not much else. So the driver board needs work.

The flippers work.

Also, only two of the five 4×2-digit displays were fully functional, so 3 of them to check and fix.

Only two fully functional displays.

Still a lot of work ahead. To be continued…