I haven’t written a repair oriented post in quite a while. I figured I’d better document this one while it was still fresh in my mind.

The problem was a Stern CPU board out of a Spiderman that was draining the battery quickly. This era of board is Stern’s SAM system that was used from Pirates of the Caribbean until Wrestlemania, which was the debut of the Spike system.

A quickly draining battery usually involves the board’s clock or RAM. These are what the battery supplies power to when the game is powered off. The area we’re interested in is this section of the CPU board schematics:

I typed the following on a forum post and figured I may as well throw it up here.  It is just some of my thoughts on using original circuit boards vs. buying new:

Some people want things original.  There’s nothing wrong with running the old boards. One person may not like it, one may prefer it. I’ve certainly seen a fair amount of problems with brand new stuff. And often a new board doesn’t solve the problem because the actual issue is something else. I’ve seen new boards damaged because the original problem was not correctly repaired. In the end a new board didn’t save the owner any time or money.

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I decided to save parts from the repairs I performed this year.  Above is an overview of the pile from 2013. Continue reading →

I haven’t posted a repair in a while, I just haven’t had the time to document and write up what I’ve been doing.  This one was quick and easy so I figured I’d post it.  My Star Wars in Pizza West seemed to be randomly closing switches, one of which was the slam tilt.  When that happens, it is game over and the machine reboots.  Obviously it wasn’t playable.

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Here’s a good example of two things, don’t overfuse your game and change your batteries.  In the photo below, a red X designates a component most likely destroyed due to overfusing.  A white X designates a component destroyed by battery corrosion.

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I figured I’d post about what happens when you half-ass a job.  A customer was having problems with their Tales of the Arabian Nights.  The game wouldn’t kick the ball into the shooter lane.  I had completed another repair, had some extra time and was close by, so I called and stopped in for a quick look.  Here’s the CPU board that was in the game:

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I picked up a Star Trek the Next Generation (STTNG) in February. It was in very good shape for a routed machine, but it definitely lived up to its reputation of needing a lot of attention to get it running 100%.

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I was asked to look at a gearbox for the Deadworld assembly on a Bally Judge Dredd.  Something was wrong and the assembly would not rotate.

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