I owned a Jack-bot for awhile, the Pin-Bot "remake". What a brutally challenging game! Outlanes were drain monsters. But I kept hitting the start button for more punishment!
Ron, great job with the troubleshooting. And its ok to call them PCB boards, I do sometimes. Pinbot a newer classic, but great machine to play. Thanks for the video.
I believe TC4001 is a general purpose NOR gate, an inverted OR gate. the little circle on the output indicates it is inverted, and it will OR the two inputs :). Not that it is critical to know that when you are comparing one chip to another :) Once again, brilliant work in fault finding and repair techniques.
Awww here I go! Picked up a High Speed and it appears to have all kinds of display and sound issue so far. Time to replay your System 11 vids! Thanks sir!
oh man that sucks that no one has made a modern replacement or a upgrade kit to save these machines from display rot and failure the coolest display mod i have seen is the color screen mod for the Addams family pinball machines it replaces the orange screen and the color rom is flashed to the screen not the board itself so you dont have to mod the board or hack a game for color
LEDs require different drivers from the original displays. On the bally/stern games the drivers are on the individual display boards, so you can mix and match. On the williams and gottlieb machines however the drivers for all the displays are centralised so LED replacement is all or nothing.
The system 11 era had a lot of good games. I remember Swords Of Fury having a great soundtrack, F-14 Tomcat having a ton of flashers, and plenty of others that were fun to play for various reasons.
O man i miss pinball machines and arcades so much. there used to be huge collection of old and new arcades at this attraction park i used to go to every year since i was like 2. but the old owner passed away and the new owner threw all the old machines out and replaced them with those boring gambling machines. I used to play tommy the pinball wizard, outrun, daytona USA twin, sega rally, simpsons arcade, turtles in time, street fighter 2, time crisis 1 and 2, project X, Aliens, this one really big arcade racing game with small cars (forgot the name). These are only the ones i can remember from the top of my head they had allot more there. Guess i was one of the few people that loved old arcades over there. The owner had good ass taste in arcades tho. It would not be so weird if i was talking 80's 90's here. but i am 18. They had great condition arcades in 2010 and it was the only place i knew of that had that many great arcade machines in the Netherlands. playing on emulator is just not the same. Love your vids dude.
Thanks for watching with us man, yeah it sucks when they 'update' the arcades, I think they have trouble keeping the old ones running every day and the new ones are nothing anybody wants to play except for small children. I'm hoping eventually they will remake some of the classics!
Thanks for another great video Ron. I have a question: If the glas is broke (in your case, the left bottom display) and the gas is gone, is it normal to feel that it warms up when you power it on, and put your fingers on it? Or should it be cold when the gas is gone? Just asking cos i got one that heats up when power on, and would be glad to hear your exprience about this.
0,5V-0.7V with the meter Diode setting you use indicates a working diode. (called the Forward voltage of the diode) Swap the leads around and you will get OL on the meter.
When I was a kid... I thought Pinbot said "Pinbot cervix activated" *not knowing what a cervix was... Now that I own one, that's still all I hear and chuckle every time I start a game.
What are the chances that i just finished this pinbot series of videos which are great by the way, and today acquired one to repair for a guy? Thanks for the help and making it easy for us!
@@LyonsArcade Pinballs.. never straight forward in my very limited experience. Thanks again for all your videos. Pinbot series has inspired me. Need a Pinbot..
I have the exact same.machine and same issue, but I'm too novice to know what I'm doing. All the resistors and transitors and connections look good, and no burn outs. Fuses look good too. Any suggestions?
If you use a diode testing mode and you get a 0.5 to 0.7 volt drop between a data pin and a power pin then it's probably a protection diode that is put there to save the chip from ESD damage. Most chips have reverse diodes from every data pin to ground and VCC
I just ran into that same thing on a bally solenoid driver board, just after the IC's and before the transistors there is a diode on each line, probably exactly what you're saying here.
We used to ship, but then we got robbed once and it ruined it for everybody :) What we do is have people set up the shipping themselves, there's a guy named Bob Cunningham who can bring games to you.
I have seen you assemble a wolfpack set of led displays, ever thought of making your own displays? I have a williams system 9 comet, which had bad displays. Being in europe buying an led set is even more expensive because of shipping, taxes and import fees. So I made my own! It’s a little more work offcourse, but it cost me about $60 for a full set of masterboard and the 5 displays. I have some pictures of it on pinside in the comet thread. If you’re interested I can you the gerbers so you can have the pcb boards ;-) made.
@@LyonsArcade Yeah you have a point there. First one took me a bit of time to build, mainly because all 7 segment digits I can find are a bit too wide, I ended up 3d-printing a saw table for my dremel, and with this I could easily saw off a small part of the sides of all digits. Building one from scratch now takes about 2 to 3 hours which is quick, but maybe not quick enough from a business point of view.
JOES Classic, What is the strobing signal doing to the displays? because each display has a different strobing signal for each display. I'm guessing the strobing signal is changing the letters or numbers on the displays?
The strobe signal goes to each display and that way they can send information down the same lines that will be different on each display because of the timing of the strobe. So the information is sent to one display then the strobe moves so the other display is active and the information changes, then the strobe moves to activate another display and that one interprets the info, etc. If you didn't have the strobe all the displays would display the exact same number all the time.
@@LyonsArcade I'm not understanding how only one buss wire or harness wire is connected to all the displays using only one strobe signal but it can activate and choose which display it wants to activate. The strobe wire is daisy chained connecting "in series" to all the displays and send only one strobe signal to choose to activate which display it wants?
Holy cow, this looks intense. I'm actually working on displays myself, although it's a dot matrix on my prototype #2 Alvin G Mystery Castle. For some reason the display reboots randomly and sometimes when the game gets powered on the display stays blank. It always comes back eventually and it works perfectly otherwise, but it just randomly blanks on bootup occasionally. Any advice? Is it true that most companies used the same DMD boards? If so, I would just need to find a display repair guide instead of a specific one for Alvin G games. Great work as always!
Jetrulez to be honest I don't know anything about Alvin G's or DMD's but most games have two parts, a DMD screen, and then a controller that runs the screen. It may be all on one board though on Alvin G's, i'm not sure. If it's rebooting, it's probably the controller part, not the actual screen part which is the expensive part. I'd look in the schematics for whatever part has the DMD rom on it, that board or part of the board is where your issue is, basically the code isn't always starting up.
Hi. I love your videos. I'm dealing with a Williams Fire where the main board isn't getting power. Tested the power supply like you show and it's fine. All fuses OK. Any idea what points to check on my mpu to see where it's not getting power. I've seen diagrams online but as a newb it's a bit confusing.
Robinson, you have no clue what you're talking about. they are not vfd's, they're plasmas, why would you tell me I'm wrong when you're wrong? Go bother somebody else.
It is really nice to see these old pinball machines restored i have been lucky to play all these games brand new
I watch just about all the videos, I learn so much all because you make it understandable to me. Thanks so much
PIN*BOT was and still is one of my favorite games .
It was a real classic! We're going to be working on a Bride of Pinbot soon!
Once again Ron, You "Displayed" excellent trouble shooting skills and really illuminated this subject. Keep up the awesome vids!
Haha thanks we appreciate it 😎
Hey guys, we have a punny one!
Seriously being it on.
The pin bot was the first pinball machine to impress me very much when I was a kid.The table has great music and a robot voice.Now i see you.
Yes it was something else, at the time! Still holds up pretty good!
Thank you for the 'complete' diagnosis runthrough. Very educational and entertaining.
Pin*Bot is one of my favourites. Nice to see someone to fix one up,
We’re just getting started 😎
Great! I'm gonna watch every part of it. I spent couple of coins to it, when I was a teenager. Now I'm 51 and my young days are far gone.
I owned a Jack-bot for awhile, the Pin-Bot "remake". What a brutally challenging game! Outlanes were drain monsters. But I kept hitting the start button for more punishment!
I want to get one one day....
Ron, great job with the troubleshooting. And its ok to call them PCB boards, I do sometimes. Pinbot a newer classic, but great machine to play. Thanks for the video.
I just put that in there to upset the people who can't handle imperfection :)
I believe TC4001 is a general purpose NOR gate, an inverted OR gate. the little circle on the output indicates it is inverted, and it will OR the two inputs :). Not that it is critical to know that when you are comparing one chip to another :)
Once again, brilliant work in fault finding and repair techniques.
Thank you Brendan I appreciate your comments as always 😎
That is a busy game. Lots of action.
Wait till you see us try to take everything off the playfield :)
Awww here I go! Picked up a High Speed and it appears to have all kinds of display and sound issue so far. Time to replay your System 11 vids! Thanks sir!
man i loved that game
these videos are GREAT ...but they make miss playin these games THANKS GUYS!
Thank you for watching Dude Huh!
@@LyonsArcade thanks for makin me jones
@@LyonsArcade thanks for doin
I love old pinball machines they don’t make old ones anymore I miss playing them
I definitely like the older ones better!
"He's is the craziest of the three brothers" (cue music from game). Nice pickup and great video of the repair.
A very handy video that will go in my saved library - thanks
Thanks for watching David we appreciate it!
oh man that sucks that no one has made a modern replacement or a upgrade kit to save these machines from display rot and failure the coolest display mod i have seen is the color screen mod for the Addams family pinball machines it replaces the orange screen and the color rom is flashed to the screen not the board itself so you dont have to mod the board or hack a game for color
They make a replacement, you just have to replace all of them so it costs about 200 bucks.
@@LyonsArcade ouch well thats good they make replacements
LEDs require different drivers from the original displays. On the bally/stern games the drivers are on the individual display boards, so you can mix and match. On the williams and gottlieb machines however the drivers for all the displays are centralised so LED replacement is all or nothing.
Nice, all 5 displays are fine after repair. Great Pinball i like Pin Bot😎
I do as well, it's fantastic!
Great video as always. When I run into a problem I just say to myself what would Ron do.
I would start at the power plug and work through it :)
Oh man, Pinbot, I want one for the sound and speech alone! Good work, as usual!
The system 11 era had a lot of good games. I remember Swords Of Fury having a great soundtrack, F-14 Tomcat having a ton of flashers, and plenty of others that were fun to play for various reasons.
If you look at the list almost all of them were awesome...
One of my favorite pins. great game in the series
it sure is!
Great video. Thanks for posting this. Have a nice day.
Thanks for watching Kurt, we appreciate it!
O man i miss pinball machines and arcades so much.
there used to be huge collection of old and new arcades at this attraction park i used to go to every year since i was like 2.
but the old owner passed away and the new owner threw all the old machines out and replaced them with those boring gambling machines.
I used to play tommy the pinball wizard, outrun, daytona USA twin, sega rally, simpsons arcade, turtles in time, street fighter 2, time crisis 1 and 2, project X, Aliens, this one really big arcade racing game with small cars (forgot the name). These are only the ones i can remember from the top of my head they had allot more there.
Guess i was one of the few people that loved old arcades over there. The owner had good ass taste in arcades tho.
It would not be so weird if i was talking 80's 90's here. but i am 18. They had great condition arcades in 2010 and it was the only place i knew of that had that many great arcade machines in the Netherlands.
playing on emulator is just not the same. Love your vids dude.
Thanks for watching with us man, yeah it sucks when they 'update' the arcades, I think they have trouble keeping the old ones running every day and the new ones are nothing anybody wants to play except for small children. I'm hoping eventually they will remake some of the classics!
Tricky fix Ron...nice job
Great pinball! Wish I had one!
It's pretty awesome!
Loving the video as always, the board work and electronic parts are always my favourite.
Thanks for another great video Ron. I have a question: If the glas is broke (in your case, the left bottom display) and the gas is gone, is it normal to feel that it warms up when you power it on, and put your fingers on it? Or should it be cold when the gas is gone? Just asking cos i got one that heats up when power on, and would be glad to hear your exprience about this.
0,5V-0.7V with the meter Diode setting you use indicates a working diode. (called the Forward voltage of the diode)
Swap the leads around and you will get OL on the meter.
When I was a kid... I thought Pinbot said "Pinbot cervix activated" *not knowing what a cervix was...
Now that I own one, that's still all I hear and chuckle every time I start a game.
Wait, you were able to purchase a Cervix? !!! ???? !!!!
@@LyonsArcade A PINBOT! Ha! That made me seriously LOL
What are the chances that i just finished this pinbot series of videos which are great by the way, and today acquired one to repair for a guy? Thanks for the help and making it easy for us!
Very cool, hope it works out well for you :) It's a great game, and the System 11 stuff is a breeze to work on...
Love the repair vids keep em coming :)
Glad you enjoy them, more soon!
Nice fix...cheers.
Great video. Can't test in circuit.. now I know more stuff. 👍
Sometimes you can, just depends on the circuit I guess!
@@LyonsArcade Pinballs.. never straight forward in my very limited experience. Thanks again for all your videos. Pinbot series has inspired me. Need a Pinbot..
I have the exact same.machine and same issue, but I'm too novice to know what I'm doing. All the resistors and transitors and connections look good, and no burn outs. Fuses look good too. Any suggestions?
If you use a diode testing mode and you get a 0.5 to 0.7 volt drop between a data pin and a power pin then it's probably a protection diode that is put there to save the chip from ESD damage. Most chips have reverse diodes from every data pin to ground and VCC
I just ran into that same thing on a bally solenoid driver board, just after the IC's and before the transistors there is a diode on each line, probably exactly what you're saying here.
Hell, yeah! Pinbot!!
He can see again!
@@LyonsArcade "I see you!" That thing was super creepy as a kid. I loved it.
We need a 90s pinball repair please
ruclips.net/p/PLXBCNT6PGQNoyWaz-Y5BP1eDjr3iVdhfe
@@LyonsArcade iv watched all of them lol
Pinbot!
Has Arrived!
Argh, my grail game...I wish you guys shipped
We used to ship, but then we got robbed once and it ruined it for everybody :) What we do is have people set up the shipping themselves, there's a guy named Bob Cunningham who can bring games to you.
@@LyonsArcade ah yeah been there I get it.
that game is sweet. i have his "wife", "the machine bride of pinbot". i would love to park a pinbot next to the bride
I have seen you assemble a wolfpack set of led displays, ever thought of making your own displays? I have a williams system 9 comet, which had bad displays. Being in europe buying an led set is even more expensive because of shipping, taxes and import fees. So I made my own! It’s a little more work offcourse, but it cost me about $60 for a full set of masterboard and the 5 displays. I have some pictures of it on pinside in the comet thread. If you’re interested I can you the gerbers so you can have the pcb boards ;-) made.
That's pretty cool Patrick, I thought about making some but the time involved adds up after awhile if i'm doing it as a business!
@@LyonsArcade Yeah you have a point there. First one took me a bit of time to build, mainly because all 7 segment digits I can find are a bit too wide, I ended up 3d-printing a saw table for my dremel, and with this I could easily saw off a small part of the sides of all digits. Building one from scratch now takes about 2 to 3 hours which is quick, but maybe not quick enough from a business point of view.
JOES Classic, What is the strobing signal doing to the displays? because each display has a different strobing signal for each display. I'm guessing the strobing signal is changing the letters or numbers on the displays?
The strobe signal goes to each display and that way they can send information down the same lines that will be different on each display because of the timing of the strobe. So the information is sent to one display then the strobe moves so the other display is active and the information changes, then the strobe moves to activate another display and that one interprets the info, etc. If you didn't have the strobe all the displays would display the exact same number all the time.
@@LyonsArcade I'm not understanding how only one buss wire or harness wire is connected to all the displays using only one strobe signal but it can activate and choose which display it wants to activate. The strobe wire is daisy chained connecting "in series" to all the displays and send only one strobe signal to choose to activate which display it wants?
@@waynegram8907 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplexed_display
Wouldn't be possible to use an alphanumeric display in place of numeric display? An alphanumeric just has some extra segments, which would be unused.
Possibly!
A great pinball that is
I like it!
One of my favorites
I want one sooooo!!!! Bad. Probably going to have to buy a fixer upper
You can fix them, just take it slow and find a video of someone fixing a similar title :)
Holy cow, this looks intense. I'm actually working on displays myself, although it's a dot matrix on my prototype #2 Alvin G Mystery Castle. For some reason the display reboots randomly and sometimes when the game gets powered on the display stays blank. It always comes back eventually and it works perfectly otherwise, but it just randomly blanks on bootup occasionally. Any advice? Is it true that most companies used the same DMD boards? If so, I would just need to find a display repair guide instead of a specific one for Alvin G games.
Great work as always!
Jetrulez to be honest I don't know anything about Alvin G's or DMD's but most games have two parts, a DMD screen, and then a controller that runs the screen. It may be all on one board though on Alvin G's, i'm not sure. If it's rebooting, it's probably the controller part, not the actual screen part which is the expensive part. I'd look in the schematics for whatever part has the DMD rom on it, that board or part of the board is where your issue is, basically the code isn't always starting up.
Hi. I love your videos. I'm dealing with a Williams Fire where the main board isn't getting power. Tested the power supply like you show and it's fine. All fuses OK. Any idea what points to check on my mpu to see where it's not getting power. I've seen diagrams online but as a newb it's a bit confusing.
Was there a reason that one blue electrolytic cap was bridged?
We talked about it in the video when we went over that part...
TTL is not so sensitive to ESD.
CMOS is...
i remember i was scared of pinbot when i was 11 years old but i was aeble to play it but is gone now only backglass survived
NOR Gate.
That's the one!
These are VFDs. Not plasma Display.
Robinson, you have no clue what you're talking about. they are not vfd's, they're plasmas, why would you tell me I'm wrong when you're wrong? Go bother somebody else.
@@LyonsArcade i will not bother you . That is for sure. Do not forget comments just kept respectful.