They Burnt Up The Lamp Board, Let's Build One From Parts! - Bally Supersonic Pinball Machine

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Joe's Classic Video Games back with another cool pinball repair video for you this evening. We have been working on this valley supersonic. It might be a 10-footer, maybe more like a 20-footer. This poor thing, we got it in really rough shape. Um, the playfield is about half destroyed. We're going to be working on that in the near future. Uh, the cabinet has heavy wear. We put some nice legs on it. Um, and then we tried to boot the thing up. There were a couple boards missing. So, the solenoid driver board and the lamp driver board was missing. We thought, "Okay, well, those aren't that big of a deal. We've got those." And, uh, I worked on the power supply a little bit and turned the thing on and it like, you know, zapped big timez on camera. So, if you didn't see that, go back and watch. It's a few videos back here on this uh series of videos. I've been trying to color code the thumbnails. So, if you go back and look, it's the ones that are light blue with yellow writing, just like this supersonic blue and yellow. Um, so we've been slowly working through it. The the MPU board had a short on it that sent 43 volts through every board in the game and fried every chip on the game pretty much with a few exceptions. So, we did one where we worked on the power supply. We did one where we worked on the solenoid driver board, which was missing. Got it going. Then we did one where we rebuilt the MPU that was fried. Every chip on the MPU was fried. Got it going. Um, and then we did one where we worked on the displays and got them all going. They were fried, too. They even fried my displays. What are they doing to me? So, we've about got the thing where it's almost playable. Um, but the next thing that it needs is the lamp driver board. None of the lights work because the lamp driver board's actually missing. So, we know now why they're missing. But those are just where I repinned one of the connectors. That's not a little rat. Look, I don't know why y'all even thought that. It's not rat drop. Look, don't worry about it. So, the lamp driver board was missing and the solenoid driver board was missing. So, we need to scrge through my parts uh pile. my super duper secret valley parts pile and see if I've got a lamp driver board that we can put in this sucker. Now, this thing um they made three or four different varieties, but they all do the exact same thing and they're all interchangeable. So, if I can find one Bali lamp driver board that's in decent shape, we'll be good to go. So, let's go look in the uh let's go look in the warehouse. So, just for giggles, I figured I'd look in the manual and just see what the part number was of the original board because I've got a whole bunch of different ones and just it'd be interesting to see if I have the exact one, the exact number that was in it originally. It doesn't really matter, but yeah, it's interesting, right? Um, and I found this in the manual. I've never seen this. It says module component starter kits. Each kit contains an assortment of the most needed electronic parts for use in module repair. Kit 490 for the rectifier board. Kit 503 for the MPU board, but it doesn't contain the memory uh U1 through U6. Kit 492 for the solenoid driver voltage regulator board. Kit 493 for the display driver. Kit 494 for the lamp driver. Kit 518 for the soundboard. That's interesting. So, there were little kits. I'd love to find some paperwork where they just described what was in the kit. That'd be cool. All right. uh MPU module. So, it was the -35 by the time Supersonic came around. There was an earlier one that was the -17, I think, of the MPU. It's just just slightly different. Um, it can be modified to make it a 35. Okay. So, that's that. Now, let's see here. Here we go. So, the one that was in it was the AS2518-23. And that's what it looks like. 2518-23. So, we'll see um if we've got one like that, but I'll show you. We've got a whole bunch of different versions. We've got a few of them. Um this is the type of stuff I like to hoard because they have very little value, but if you need one, saves you 100 bucks. Or the price used to be a hundred bucks. Are they still 100 bucks? They might be 150 now. You can buy brand new ones. So, it's not the end of the world. But if I've got all of these parts ones and this game's kind of ratty and we're doing this whole series on fixing each board, well, why not fix one of these? You know, that's kind of how I do it. Anyways, I just to me there's like an efficiency to it. It's just so cool that I've got a bunch of them sitting around that I haven't pulled any of these out of games, by the way. I put them back into games. Y'all are all parting them out. I'm parting them in. See, I'm about to part this one in. But, um, I don't know. Um, I don't know where these all came from. I've picked them up all over the place. U, sometimes you buy things and there's a bunch of extra boards or there was a point where I probably bought some of these and had them shipped off of eBay or something. Um, but I've been scavenging parts off of them and stuff for years. So, we'll see if we can find one that's fairly complete that we can just pop in there to test um and then repair. So, -23 was the one that was in it. But any of these would work. If they uh if they're complete, we're going to go with them. So, this is actually a Stern. If you don't know about these early BS, Stern completely ripped off their design and did and made their system exactly the same. From what I understand, the way that they did it was they bought the company that Bal used to make their own boards. So Bali had contracted out to this company to make the boards and Stern just bought the company and used the same exact board design for their machines. How that works, I don't know, but that's the story. Okay, this one's pretty complete, but it's also it looks pretty corroded. You know, it may just be a couple little spots in the game. This sits right underneath the MPU. There's about that much space between the MPU board and it. And on the very bottom of the MPU, right in the center, is the battery. And so, the battery leaks and it screws up the board um all over the MPU. Now, from what I understand, it's actually leaking like a gas or something, too. So, that explains why this gets all screwed up because it's just in the proximity of it. But you also sometimes will see like a drip mark where alkaline has dripped out of the battery down and screwed up the board where it hit the board underneath it. Just wild. But, so this is a stern one. Let's look at the back. Yeah, it's completely fixable, but it's pretty rough. You know, this is better off as a parts board just because, you know, you got so many of them. If we do eventually have to use this one, we will, but it'll be down the road. It might be good to scavenge parts off of though. You know, if you need one of these little suckers. Look at these little suckers. Doesn't this stuff all just have kind of like a beauty to it? Look at that. What a cool little board. All right, let's check out some of the other ones. So, next up, D-23. So, that's the one that was originally in it, but it's missing a bunch of parts. I've already scavenged a bunch of stuff off of it, or somebody did. So, this is basically just a parts board now. Looks like it had a transistor burn up on it. That's probably why we started parting it. This looks like another one. Dash23. Doesn't look too bad. Does have some missing parts, but you know, you could steal them off that one. Now, this is another interesting thing to point out. It's a -23, but it's a revision one. Well, they're both revision ones. Look how it says replacement for -14, but the SCRs in the middle here are completely different than the SCRs on this one. It's also a completely different color. They you you know, you got to remember they were making a ton of these games. This this would have been probably the same board in eightball and eightball was the biggest selling game of all time. Kind of kind of. All right. This is yet another Ballet 23. This one looks pretty good, but it's got some corrosion. Yeah, this one isn't very good, actually. Look at that. Look at that. We didn't look at this one. Yeah, it's had a big boo boo. Had a little fire issue. You know, sometimes that happens like on this game. Next. Dash 23. But there ain't much left, folks. She's about done. And now there ain't no way I did this cuz I wouldn't have I mean they've taken almost every SCR off of there. They did a pretty good job. I see a couple lifted traces, but most of it's pretty decent. And there's no corrosion to say or to mention. All right, so this one says dead. Some guy named RL said dead parts March 4th, 2017. He probably didn't even know what he was talking about, but should we take his word for it? We'll keep it out just in case. Uh, where can I set all this stuff? I got too many of them. Um, okay. So, this is the -14. So, this is the earlier one. I would have assumed that was the later one. It's missing, you know, about half of the SCRs, but looks decent. It's completely fixable. Here is another stern one. I guess it goes this way. H I just noticed something I never noticed before. Uh I'll show you on this next one because it's a valley. Uh this one looks it's pretty much complete now. All of these little things being bent over. It's not that big of a deal. You just don't want two of the legs to touch. And you really don't want the the tab to touch the other one either. I mean, that wouldn't be good. But that thing's probably fine. So, this one may just slide right in there and work. There's a little something going on in a couple spots. But that may be a good board. Like I said, those things being bent over doesn't mean anything. That's just they all look like that. Brand new. Yeah, that may be that very well may be a good board if we get down to where we just have to have one. But here's what I just noticed. Um, this is the original one, the -14. And look, there's extra chips that they were able to get rid of on the -23. That's interesting. What in the world? H, I never noticed that. So, they're MC14514s, 4514s. I bet those are the same thing. They just um they're using the Motorola part number, so they they kind of hide the part number. Let's see if I can find one that doesn't that actually shows the part number. Yeah. 4514. So, it's the same chip, but somehow they were able to get rid of four little support chips, which were 4050s. Huh. Yeah, I never noticed that. And it looks like the resistors are pretty much the same. I mean, there's resistors on this one. The chip's just gone. I'm sure they're I'm sure it was overdesigned a little bit and they figured out that hey, we don't actually need that. Okay, so this one would this one looks really good and it's a it's a valley. Oo, I see a little corrosion, but still not that bad. Let's see what the back look looks like. Yeah, backspine. That's a strong candidate. These three we like so far. Uh, so this one half the stuff's missing. This kind of was that is this one I was already looking at? Are we going backwards? It looks pretty good, but it's missing half the stuff. It's another -14. Looks pretty good. Missing one SCR. No big deal. We'll have more than that of them messed up. Yeah, it looks looks nice. It's not that bad. Very usable. I still got all kinds of good stuff. Boy, this one looks good. But some guy named RL again has written parts half the chips bad. October 28th, 2019. He probably did that on some video where he showed that uh half the chips or half the lights were out and he just swapped in another board and got it going. But this one looks pretty decent. So, you know, if they could be just if it could be fixed with a couple chips. Um, some of these are missing already. Another thing about these, not all of them are used. So, if you look at the schematics, there's several of these that don't that aren't connected to anything. It's designed into the board and it connects out to the uh wiring harness. But on some of the games, like if it can do 60 light bulbs, on some of the games they may have only done 50 light bulbs, so 10 of the transistors don't do anything. So depending on which game you put it in. All right, this is a good one to look at here. So this one at first glance looks fine, but then you see the grip. So, the battery would have been right up here. And if you look, there is like a column right under the battery that's all screwed up. And you can actually kind of see it like see it over here. Everything looks good. Over here, everything looks good. It's just right under where the battery was. Pretty wild. But that would have been our one. That one would have been perfect. And it may still work. What I would do, yeah, you can see it real good like that. What I would do on this one if I was going to try to use it is take a wire brush and just go crazy on the middle of it. Just try to rub all of that freaking corrosion off there that you can and then hit it with a little vinegar to neutralize it and see what see if it'll work. But it feels like the back's messed up. Yeah, I remember this one. It looked like it was decent, but if you look at the back, you just can't use it. These traces on the bottom. This is really strange, too. This is actually the bottom of the board, but for whatever reason, it usually gets in worse shape than the top of the board, even though that battery is right there. I don't know why it does that, but it does. Um, but you can just see that this is pretty rough. Well, if you have this a little bit, you can sand that down and then put a jumper wire. Um, and then some of those traces aren't even needed. So sometimes they have um where it's connected to like two pins. So like if we look at this this one um so this is a pin that is used in the back box. So this connector goes to lamps in the back box. But if you look that one trace comes out and it goes all around and it goes all the way around the bottom of the board. You can see how easily that would get damaged if it's damaged like that. And then it comes up here and it connects there, which this is one of the ones that goes to the playfield and then connects over to this resistor. Um, blah blah blah. Well, anyway, um, so they are using one SCR to connect to the playfield, but also to connect to the backbox. So sometimes you get lucky and maybe it doesn't use the lamp in the back box. It just uses the one on the playfield. It's different for every game, but you know, whatever. These these are easy enough to fix that you don't really need to be using crippled boards. Um sometimes that I guess that lamp might be the um same player shoots again lamp if it's connected to both. All right, so that one looked promising, but no dice. Now, this one is interesting. This is the Stern LDA100. Again, uh I guess it's similar to the one that we already looked at, but look how they've done theirs. There's actually transistors over on the left side before the chips. And then instead of having them all sorted like these are, they're all kind of just mixed in. The reason that they have those bigger SCRs is because that's typically the one that they're using to drive two lamps like we were just talking about. So on the playfield, a lot of times you'll have something that'll say um uh lights 100 or it'll say like scores 1,00 when lit and it'll light up over here and then it'll also light up over here. or there'll be a couple places on the playfield that use that same exact feature or it'll say like um um you know A B C D and whenever you roll through this it turns on A and it turns it on up here and then there's some kind of bonus thing in the middle and A's lit now in the middle too. So they need to drive two lamps at the same time with the same signal would be the easiest way to do it. So they use one of these transistors that's a little bit bigger to drive two of them. This is some kind of like a sticker was on it. Oh, just piece of tape. It probably said works good. Put in supersonic. Good. Put in the supersonic. Um, it's a stern, so I'd rather just put a bley in there. But if we don't have find a ballet, we could put this one in there. This is our decent pile. I hope this isn't as boring to you as uh as uh well, it's not boring to me, so I hope it's not boring to you at all. This still has filth on it. It is a 23. It actually looks pretty good. This might be the one. How bad are those connectors? Oh, those will clean up. Okay, let's look at the back. What do you think? is going to have battery damage. Look at that nice, beautiful board. This is probably the one. Doesn't even have any SCRS missing. This thing might work fine. Definitely at the top of the pile, literally. Okay. Uh, another stern. It's just a shame. Oh, by the way, a lot of people uh remove these from their game because they don't handle LEDs all that great. So, it if you put a um you can put a modern board in that has a extra resistor designed into the circuit. Uh so, it makes a a LED bulb work better. And people are all in on them leads now. So, they take this old board out and put the new one in. And then they let me have this one because they're suckers. All right. So, this is a Stern one where they chose to use the blue. And look, it's it's different again. This was what Stern ripping off their earlier version of it. It's got the extra chips, but doesn't have the transistors on the side. I like that one. That's pretty cool. Stern. And if you don't know, it's the same Stern that's around now. It's the same guy really. Gary Stern is still involved with Stern at the moment. I believe he is. I don't think he's retired yet. And he and his father uh started um the company way back in the day and did video games, too. Yeah, this one's pretty roached. Uh, that's not too bad. All right, so this is the one. I like this one a lot. We're going to roll with this. It's even the right part number. Doesn't get any better than that. I hope it doesn't have a bunch of chips messed up. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to uh clean it a little bit just by hand just to make it look a little better. I'm going to straighten out these transistors so they're not touching and stuff. Um, and then I'm going to resolder the connectors on the back. Let's see how bad the the um solder joints are. So, on the end, yeah, see there, when you pull off the connector, you end up breaking the solder joints eventually. So, after maybe 30 times that someone pulled off the connector, it cracked it. So that whatever that one is right there on the end, that's not going to be touching anymore. So that pin's not going to work. And it's usually the ones on the end. Now, I've talked about this a thousand times. I'm sure you all get the point by now, but I'm, you know, this is what I'm going to do next. So, same thing there. That second one looks particularly bad. See the little line around the edge of it? It's it's it's a physical thing. Look at that one. That thing looks like it's in a damn cave. Look at that. That's horrible. Okay, so I'm going to clean that up a little bit. Resolder all of those. I'm going to clean up the front of the board. And then I'm not going to test any of them. We're just going to pop it in this game and see if everything works. I haven't even replaced the light bulbs yet, but that'll be a good start. Look how beautiful it looks. Cleaned it up a little bit. Resoldered the connectors. Let's see. Come on, baby. All right. All right. Yeah, it's doing some stuff. So, in the test menu, if you press this button, you go into a test on Valley. The very first menu is all the lamps blinking. Now, I haven't replaced any of these bulbs yet. So, you can see that most of them are working. This one's off. This one's off. Same player shoots again is off. Um, number one and number three. It could just be burnout bulbs, but I want to show you a few here. This 3000 when lit, I think is always on. I think that's just the um I think that's an AC one, you know, just a general illumination one. But look at this one. See how it's dim and then bright? That one screwed up. And then this one, dim and bright. And see how it's backwards from what the other ones are doing. the transistor that runs that one and the transistor that runs that one are definitely screwed up. All right, so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to swap the bulbs and then uh we'll do it again and u after we do that we'll make a list. So I'm just going to take out every bulb. I always do this anyway and put uh brand new bulbs in it. Okay, so I've got all of the blinking bulbs replaced the uh computer controlled. We have an interesting problem where there's several of them that are coming on at the wrong time. So, if you like if you look up here, they're like going back and forth. They're not supposed to do that. They're supposed to come on and off, on and off, on and off. And so, it's there's so many of them, it's kind of hard to tell when they're which ones are supposed to be on and which ones are supposed to be off. But, you can kind of tell by the back box because the backbox isn't doing it. So if you look, the backbox lights are blinking and so you can see which ones of the playfield are blinking at the same time. So for instance, this one and this one are supposed to be on. So we can go by that. And I'm just going to make a list of all the ones that that aren't right and aren't lighting up or lighting up and it's all screwed up. and I'm just going to make a big list of it and uh then we're going to look at the schematics and see if we can tell by looking at the schematics if there's one chip that's causing all of those problems hopefully. So, all right. So, here are the schematics for that board for um supersonic and it's, you know, each one's different only basically on what's where each light hooks up and the software is telling it the code telling the chips to turn this off, turn this off, turn this on, turn this on and these are the lights, right? So, the software is controlling all of it, of course. Um, so what I do is I've got this huge list. Look at all these all these lamps don't work. They're either out or they're screwed up and lighting up at the wrong time and all that. So, I've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 23. I got about 25 of them that don't work. Got my work cut out for me a little bit here, folks. So, what I do is I go through and I look and I try to just mark the ones that don't work and then see if there looks like there's a common reason because it saves you all kinds of time if you're trying to repair one of these. And I did find a common reason. Uh, bonus 1k, bonus 5k, bonus 9k, the number one top lane, the number two top lane, jetream, I think that says star five, I think. Uh, the number one star, the number one left lane, the bonus 5x, uh, left and right bumpers. I didn't even check those. Those are the pop bumpers. Uh, the side target 3K. Um, and the shoot again, the ball in play, the number one player, and the match. Every one of those doesn't work. And every one of those comes from this chip. So, obviously, this chip screwed up. So, we need to replace U1 for show. Now there are others down here but they come from different places. So some of them are driven by this chip, some of them are driven by this chip. So it seems like that those are probably the SCR itself is bad. So it'll be either be shorted or it it um uh will be bad, right? So I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and replace U1 and then I'm going to check try to test the SCRs on the bench. I've tried this before. It's hard to find a bad SCR. it just they don't I can't ever test them right. There's a there's a technique to test them. Um but I always get a bunch that say they're good and then you put them in the game and they won't work. You put a new SCR and it fixes it. So I h I'm not too good at finding all of the bad ones. Um ultimately it just comes down to if you're down to you've got like two lights that don't work, you replace those two SCRs and it fixes them usually. Um, but I'm going I'm going to definitely change this chip and then I'll look with my multimeter and see if I can find other ones that are messed up, these SCRs, and swap those out. Um, and then see if I can get a lot of this list knocked off. There was one socket that was obviously bad, too. So, one of them, um, one of the top rollovers, um, the socket was screwed up. So, I got to put a new socket in it. All right, folks. So, I put a socket in and replaced U1. U1 has been replaced. Hopefully that will fix almost everything in the game. And then I found one transistor down here that was shorted. So I have swapped it and I just took one off a parts board. It might be bad, too. Probably not. And then I found three of these SCRs in the middle that tested differently. And so I replaced those three with three off the parts board. Now they're different parts. They're in a different case. Uh, but they're all the same thing. It's just they use different stuff over the years. It's a 106. It's a 106 MCR 106-1. and the smaller ones are 2N 5060. The MCR 1061s they use uh pretty much to um to run two lamps. So it says that it's a 58529. I wonder if that's what they're calling these ones. Yeah, see it on the center. 58529. So, it's the same thing. It's just in a different package. And the the leg orientation is the same as well. All right. So, let's pop it back in and see if that helped any of our issues. All right. So almost all of them was fixed by the U1 and the couple transistors that I changed, but I came down to I had six left. And so I wrote down the wire color and I checked the wiring in the back box. And it's actually in very nice shape, all of it. So it's not that it needs repinned or anything. But we have a problem with Q35, Q46, Q28, Q24, Q23, and Q21. Now, like I said, some of those do two lights. Q21 is um an arrow in the middle that I miss missed before. And then this one here, Q46, the left special, it was working and then it stopped working. So that's kind of weird, but All of those with the exception of Q46 are on this one chip. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to hook up the uh logic probe and just check the output of these lines. I mean, you know, I've got five different ones that don't seem to be working right, and two of them are ones that I actually already changed the transistor uh whenever I changed U1. So, I'm going to check that out. And then this this one down here is just a random one. Maybe it's maybe I swapped a bad one in or something. But, you know, it's kind of it's just interesting that this one has five different lights that don't work on the same chip. And then this one right next to it. Every single one of them works. No problems. So, um, let me see what I can figure out. All right. So, if you look at this board, you know, we decided that this was a pretty good one, but really the chips actually have a lot of rust on the pins. That's the one I was just saying worked great. So, I've went ahead and swapped that second one as well with a good one off of another board. You can see the the the legs are pretty rusty. So, you've got to imagine that some of that's getting inside the chip, too. So, with the logic probe, uh, on the gate of each SCR, you get a nice strong coming from the pins, right? But on the ones that weren't working, it just went completely different. Completely different, folks. And they were all coming from that one. And then this one down here. Hopefully we don't have one pin dead on this one for that left uh special outline. Uh but it's this transistor. So I've swapped this transistor again. And we'll see if that gets any more of them working. All right. So, we appear to have every single bulb on this worn out playfield working except for that one I was just talking about, Q46, the special one. Everything else is working. Wait a minute. That top left one up there, Jetream. All button score 1000 when lit. That one's not working either. I'll have to look. H, that might just need a little tweak. Um, and I don't know about the pop bumper yet. So, we've got four bulbs here I got to keep finagling with. We've got the sound board that we still have to mess with. We've got to mess with all the solenoids. We got to mess with all of the switches, but it's getting late and I think we're done for the evening. So, leave your comments below. Let me know what you think. Oh, I guess I should just show you the game up and running. Turn it off. Turn it back on. Look. Come on now. What's the problem? There's something going on. I don't know. There's something and then it went off. I don't know. There's something about the George. That must be it. George is back. All right, folks. So, leave your comments below. Let me know what you think so far. I think I'm just going to have to swap that fourth um that fourth I see as well. So, we were joking about how nice that one looked. I think uh I think at least three of the the uh decoder chips are bad, but that's all right. Whatever. So, they'll be nice and new whenever we're done. All right. So, uh we'll leave that for next time, though. I think, you know, I'm kind of in the mood to get started on the playfield. I kind of gota, you know, I keep limping through these boards. You guys are going to get bored. So, bored. You'll get bored. So, I think it's time to, you know, really Oh, it's turning off. It's just they're turning on. Yeah, it's turning off. Okay. Um, I think it's time to do the playfield because I got to get the thing where you can at least believe that we should be working on it like because it looks like we're working on a something that washed up on the beach, right? So, I got to get this playfield looking nicer. If I can get the playfield looking nice and I can get this back glass looking nice, somebody's probably going to want to buy it before I even get finished with it. So, we'll see. And we'll save the few light bulbs that aren't working right and the uh sound board and the testing the solenoids and the switches. We'll save that for finishing touchup. So, uh this playfield is going to take me a little bit of a while. Um, but you know, we got to get started on it. It won't be that big of a deal. I think it's going to look great whenever we're done. So, if you haven't seen me do a playfield before, stay tuned to the next video. Now, if you would like to see me do a playfield, I'll put one up here that we repainted a while back. I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know what you thought, what you think about what where we've gotten so far, and we'll see you on the next one.