Horrible Battery Damage On This Williams System 11 Road Kings Pinball Machine!!!!

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Joe's Classic Video Games back with another cool pinball repair video for you this evening. If you saw our last video, we've been working on this Williams Road Kings and I picked it up. I went and got it out of a guy's house who gave it to me for free and I brought it back. I was able to get it to turn on and I redid the play field, cleaned it all up, put all new rubbers on it. Ron had touched up some paint, but it's still not quite right. You know, it's not working. It's still broke. Our displays are acting up. Sometimes they'll come on and for whatever reason, it keeps trying to kick that ball out there. But anyway, in this video, we're going to try to get the rest of it working. So I want to, I guess we're going to have to get that glass out of here. You can see the displays are starting to come back. I don't know if the displays are just shot or we've got board problems. We did have some, a little bit of battery damage on it. So that may be some of our issue, but we'll see. I guess I got to get some of this out of here and start working on it. I think I'm going to, I think I'm going to take the power supply out first and then we'll reflow the connectors, check the fuses. We may change some of those caps. Sound like a plan? All right. Well, I changed all the caps. A couple of them look kind of questionable, but I mean, you really can't tell by looking at them. I reflowed all of the pins and everything else seems to look okay. So we're going to put it back in. I doubt that's going to change anything, but this is just one step in the process. So after we get this back in, we'll probably have to check some voltages and see how that goes. All right. So I got the power supply back in. I checked the voltage is actually getting good voltage over there. And as you can see the game's actually up and in a track mode, but it's got a little bit more acid damage than I originally thought. I don't know if you watched the first video, but basically somebody left the batteries in and you can tell it's got some corrosion around this area. And guess what plugs in right here? See this ribbon cable? Goes over to guess what? The display board. So I think we've got to take this main board out and we'll probably take this battery holder off and clean all this up with some vinegar and see if we see anything out of whack. How's that sound? So I'm going to turn it off, unplug all these connectors, undo some screws, and we'll go from there. All right. I got the board out. So I actually went ahead and cut the battery holder off. And basically these two chips run the displays. All this is display stuff really. And it looks like these two chips, that corrosion had creeped down here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this chip out, this chip out, this chip out, this chip out, this chip out. And I'm going to sand it down a little bit. I may take all these out too. I'm going to sand it down, hit it with some vinegar, get it all cleaned up. And then I'm going to have to check the traces. If I can find all the traces, they're pretty small. See them? So I have to assume either these chips are bad or a couple of these traces are broke and that's why the displays are not working right. So that's next. I'm going to work on this for quite a while. I think I'll take all this stuff off. Well, this is starting to get kind of out of control here. I took this chip out, that chip out, that one, that one, that one, that one, that one, and that one. And a bunch of capacitors, all these little resistor packs up here. If you know you're not going to reuse the chip, I like to cut, just cut the legs off as high as you can. And then you could just grab the legs with these again and unsolder it from the backside and pull it through. Because, you know, it's easier on the traces that way. If you try to unsolder all of them, then pop it loose. You're probably going to rip some of these traces. So I just cut them and then put a new chip in there. But anyway, I'm going to, I'm trying to leave these two chips for now. They don't, for whatever reason, they don't look as bad as these did down here. I don't know. We may end up having to replace those later. But I'm going to try not to because there's so many pins and there's so many traces that run through there. And the board was working. We just had display problems. But these are the two display chips. But this up here was so bad. I'm hoping that that's going to take care of it once I get all this back in there. And I haven't even cleaned it up yet. I still got to hit it with vinegar. And then we're going to put water on it after that and get it all dry. I'm hoping I can get it real clean. But yeah, this is a kind of a big job here. Most people probably would have just bought another board. Which, you know, that's the easy thing to do. But we do everything the hard way here. Yeah, there's quite a few chips we're going to change. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Then all these up here. These little resistor packs. At least eight chips and lots of little caps and resistors. But we're going to keep chipping away at it. I'm going to go try to clean it up some more. And I still got to get these legs out of these holes here. But we're getting there. This is the easy part. It's getting cutting the chips out. Now, am I actually going to be able to get this clean? Get all the sockets back in there and all the chips back in there? And it actually work? And that's the question. Make sure you keep watching the video to find out. Don't just skip to the end now. You got to watch the whole video. All right, so I've put some vinegar on it with a toothbrush. Kind of scrubbed it pretty good all the way around. I got my sockets cleaned out pretty good. I don't have any fancy tools. All I got is a soldering iron and a solder sucker. Okay, that's all I got. I think that's pretty good though. So now I'm going to sand it down a little bit more to make sure my traces are good and get it where solder will stick to it good. And I like to use these, something like this, I like to use these sockets because you kind of make them your own length and then you can still see the traces in between. So then you got to go through and check every trace with your multimeter. You got to put it on continuity to make sure you didn't mess up any traces. I did mess up a couple. That one and that one. But you got to go through, check it. So this is going to take quite a while because I've got to do that on every one of these traces. So I'll be back when I get a little further along. All right, so this is basically what I do. I sand it down so they're nice and shiny. I replace the socket. I like these kind of sockets. I know a lot of people like the other kind, but I like this kind because I can check the traces, you know. But anyway, that's basically what I'm doing. So I'm going to go through and start doing some of these other ones one at a time. All right, I'm getting them in there. One little thing you can do is you can take one of these flashlights, shine it behind the board and you can see all the traces there. Make sure you don't miss none. You still got to check it with a meter, but still helps you out a little bit. All right, folks, I have been working on this with Joey trying to figure out what's going on. We've got some serious display issues. It really does look about as bad as it does on the video here. If I back up, you might be able to see it a little more accurately. Okay, so the first player segment. So we're going to say first player, second player, third player, fourth player. What in the world is that noise? It's finding new ways to be scary. First player, second player, third player, fourth player. The first player, digits one, two, and three are gone whenever you turn it on. And then four, five, six, seven work pretty good. Player three, same thing. One, two, and three are gone. Four, five, six, seven work pretty good. You can see though that player digit one and digit one here in first and three have showed up. Okay. Player two, it looks like all the digits are trying to do something, but it's all garbled and just screwed up. Player four is completely dead. The ball in play wasn't working at first and it's actually working pretty good now. So there is some ghosting going on on one, on one and ball in play. So, you know, I'm just trying to see if it's the board or if it's the displays or what. If you look at the connector here, look at the damage on the connector on player two. One and three don't look that bad and ball in play doesn't look that bad. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to see if I've got any other ones that I can swap in and just see if I can get a better set or something just to test. If I can get one alphanumeric that works, I can try it in each position and, and see what we get. So let me look around and see what kind of stuff I've got in the stash. I think I've got a few, but we're probably going to end up ordering an LED set, but we're trying to fix the the main PCB and we want to see if, if it's that or the, the displays themselves. Okay. So on a good note, all of the lamps, the lamp matrix seems to be working now. There might be one or two out, but in general, everything's working. There's a couple there that aren't, but in general, it looks like all the lamps matrix is working the rows and the columns. I don't know if there's enough out that one of the rows or columns could be out, I think pretty much they're all there. It says lamps and this is a single lamps. We don't need to do that. This is coils. We've got some coil issues, but we can't completely read what's going on. Some of them are working. Okay. Switches we can't mess with right now. I kind of want to see if the background music is working. Joey said there was a problem with that. Okay. We're back into a track mode. Let's go back in. That's music. Okay. So yeah, it is playing the background music. Okay. Uh, I don't know. You can whip it, whip it good. Okay. So yeah, the music is working. All right. So, uh, we got that working and, but we're trying to figure out this display mess and it is an actual absolute mess. We had to put a bunch of jumpers on the back of the board because of the traces being screwed up. Uh, uh, but it could be as simple to as ribbon cable or this master display board. Cause if that thing was corroded, that one player, I mean, how screwed up is this board? How is the corrosion even getting up that far? There's no battery here. You know, the battery was over here, but with, if you look at it with the door closed, the batteries would be right about here. This is player three, which would explain all of the damage. No, that's player two. Uh, this is player three. So this could have serious problems. So I'm just going to look and see what kind of stuff I've got and we'll start swapping stuff. We'll be part swappers to test. I looked and looked and looked and believe it or not, this is all I have. I've got one alpha numeric display. I think I must've thrown away the ones that weren't any good. So maybe this one's all right. I don't know. I've got one alpha numeric display and I've got one, um, board master display board, but it's missing some of the chips. So I've taken six chips off of it or somebody has. So I wonder, I was thinking, well, maybe they were like that, you know, from the factory, since it doesn't have player five and player six. If you don't know at the time, Williams was making a bunch of shuffle alley games. Um, they were actually pretty popular with them and those have six displays. So they, you know, when they design their stuff, they would design it so that it would work in the shuffle alleys too. So they made this board where it would have player five and player six for the shuffle alley. Um, so it could be that I didn't do this and somebody else did and they just ripped off the chips that were needed for the two extra shuffle alley displays. That's pretty, uh, hopeful thinking though, but we'll look into that on the schematics. So here is the board that's been in it. Um, it's pretty rough actually. It's got a lot of freaking damage. So I think I am going to swap it. I mean like that, look at that. That's not helpful. Um, and it could be if the chips, you know, that are missing from this, if I don't have new ones, I could steal them off of this and swap it over. But that's what we're looking at. I think player two being dead. I mean, I think the ribbon cable is probably an issue too though. I might have some of those, you know, you can use any ribbon cable. So if you've got some from old hard drives and things from back in the day, IDE hard drives, those will work too. I think I've got a whole bunch of that stuff laying around somewhere, but anyway, let's, uh, it'll be interesting. Let me look in the schematics and see if we can get away with any of these six chips being missing. Um, if they were only used for player five and player six, you might think, oh, that's ridiculous. But look, see you 12 there. They, they do look like they run, but just player five. I wonder if they jump over though. Yeah, I think they jump over. That might screw me up. Um, and then, uh, like if you look at this, some of them, I don't know, we'll look in the schematics and see if there's any of them we can delete for five and six. All right. So we're looking at the schematics. Now this is one of those weird issues where it looks like the displays are all screwed up, but I think it's actually the board that's all screwed up. So this is one of those instances where if you bought a whole new set of displays now, spoiler alert, we're probably going to put a whole new set of led displays in it. But if you bought a whole new set of displays, it probably wouldn't fix the issue. So I'm trying to get ours working as good as possible until the replacement set gets here. Um, because I think no matter what we do, uh, display number four isn't going to work, but you know, we've got all kinds of problems where some of them fade in after a while. And then, um, some of them are just missing the whole time, et cetera, et cetera. So the way this thing works is it sends all kinds of data to turn on actual little segments on the displays. Now it could be the numeric displays, which have seven display, the seven, um, segments to create a figure eight. And with that, you can do one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero. And then they have, um, extra segments in the alpha numeric. So you've got another diagonal one. And then I think there's two more vertical ones. So that would be one, two, three, four, five, six, at least six more to make it work. There may even be a few more than that. So if you look at the, the schematics where it shows, um, the signals that are sent to the, this is the master display board. They ultimately get turned into what it's A, B, C, D, E, F, G. So that's one, two, three, four, five. So that's seven segments that create a numeric display. And so the, the machine tells it whenever it's on digit one, the very first number, it tells it, okay, light up this segment and this segment. And that makes it say one, and then have all of these other ones off, right? There's also a comma on each one that it can turn on. So that's controlled by, uh, signals coming in on this, um, ribbon cable. And then it has other ones too. So it's got a dot and it's got H, J, K, M, N, P, R. And you'll notice that it's missing I, uh, because that looks a lot like a one and it's missing L for whatever reason, I guess, because if it was under case, um, lowercase, that would look like a one and it's missing O because that would look like a zero. And so they're trying not to confuse you. So it's got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight more display the eight more segments. So that's, they can make an X. So one, two, three, four diagonal ones, that's four more. And then I think there's two more straight ones so that they can make things like an H or a, they can move the one over how, for whatever reason they do that or make a J or whatever. So they need six more and then they've got a dot for something and blah, blah, blah. So you get the whole point. These are, this controls all of the segments. Well, it looks like the segments all work if you think about it, because the same signals are used to do all of the segments. Um, to an exception. I mean, if you, if you look down here below, there are also some that have a little hash mark above it, just like a second set. So for whatever reason they do that. And if you, if you think about it, uh, only player one and player two actually use the alphanumerics three and four and the ball and play display are just numeric. Okay. All right. So that's how the segments are handled. So do we have a segment problem? Well, we had that one that kind of looked a little weird, the top left one that faded in after a while. So maybe it's a segment problem. And then we have up here. So these are the strobes. So the way the thing works, and this is just a layman's explanation. I don't completely understand it. I'm not an engineer, but basically very fast. They refresh the displays. I don't know how fast, but it's fast. And if you've watched my camera earlier, whenever we were filming it, you could see that they kind of faded in and out and had this weird thing going on. That's just because the shutter speed of my camera is different than the, the actual refresh rate of the displays. It's very similar to how like a television works. So if you look at an old CRT, you get a similar line scrolling through it on a camera because there's a difference in the refresh rate. To your naked eye, you don't see them flickering because they refresh faster than your eyeballs do or whatever. It blurs enough that you can't tell. So on the master display board, you've got these two connectors here. Okay. Now we just messed with all this. And so these signals come in and it has here, it says strobe 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. And then it says strobe 1 hash mark 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. And if you look at these first 16, they go to, let's see here, player 1 and player 2. So that makes player 1 and player 2 work. And then we can cheat and player 3 gets the ones with the hash mark and a player 4 gets the other ones with the hash mark. If there was a player 5, it would double up some of the ones that are used for the first and second displays or maybe player 2, something like that. And then player 6 would use some of the ones that are used for 3 and 4. And then the credit match one uses strobe 1 and 9 and 1 and 9 hash mark, which if you look back, weren't used on player 1 and player 2. So anyway, what are those for? Well, each one of those turns on the digits. That's why you've got 4 on the ball and play credit match unit. I keep calling it ball and play because whenever it says ball number 2, traditionally on the older ones, it would show that there on that. So it appears that the strobes are screwed up because we get three of them all the time, but then there's some of them that just never turn on. Even if you move the thing over there, it never turns on. The segments are working, but the digits aren't actually working. Well, the strobes are what turn on the digits. So it just really fast goes through. And if this strobe is high at the same time that it's sending the information through to tell it to make a 1, then it gets displayed on that position and it does it really fast, right? So all you really need to know is the other ones control the segments, which is why it's saying A, B, C, D, all that. It shows you the segments, which segment is which on the little drawing in there. And the strobe actually turns on the actual digits. So we have a strobe problem for sure. And we may have a segment problem as well. Now that could just be the cable because if the cables coming to here were screwed up, you would be missing that signal. And so that strobe would never turn on, et cetera, et cetera. And if you notice the same signals that create strobe one through eight also create strobe one hash mark through eight hash mark. So they're doubled up. There's just two different chips, 6118 chips that make it work. So it appears that we've got these signals are screwed up. This is not the ribbon cable though. The ribbon cable is this connector. So it is all of the segments. So do we have all of the segments? I think we do. There might be one missing or something, but that could be the display too. After a while, you've got all the segments on at least one digit. So the segments it appears is getting through, but the strobes it appears isn't getting through. So let's look at the other part of the manual. So in the manual, this is a picture of the CPU board and it shows you what some of the connections do. So this connection over here, for instance, the speaker, this connection is volume control. One of those actually goes off the board up to the background soundboard. Look, I found a bunch discrepancies in the manual. So you kind of got to look at what you've got in the game. Some of the stuff that it was showing me on the displays on the actual schematics, a couple of the numbers were backwards and stuff like that, but whatever. This connector is power. And then this one says widget in out. If you look, that one connects to the background soundboard. So there's a background soundboard that sits up here that connects to it. And the volume control one connects to it. Then they've got this one, display data. That's the ribbon cable that goes over to the master display board. But these three connectors also go to the master display board. And you can see that it says IJ1 is digit strobe, IJ2 is digit strobe, and IJ3 is display BCD. So what does that mean? You see it says blanking signal and it says comma and comma. And then it says A2, B2, C2, D2, A1, B1, C1, D1. And then on the strobes, you've got strobe 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. So that kind of goes along with what we were thinking as far as the strobes that we're looking for. So this is the schematics of the actual CPU board. This was all screwed up. And we have meticulously checked each one of these lines to make sure they're connected properly. And we've replaced these. Joey replaced those, obviously. This chip was also replaced. But this is what handles all of the segments. You can see all of the segments that we think are correct. Notice this blanking signal comes from somewhere else. It's running down to here, which is also a signal that's used on the soundboard, et cetera, et cetera. So that's the ribbon cable part. And then we're down to the soundboard part. So then you've also got this little part. Now, all of this looks real confusing if you don't work on these. But if you think about it, we're just trying to break it down to what is the actual problem. The actual problem appears to be the strobe signals because those are what turns on the digits, which we know that because of the number of them and everything. And by looking at the schematic. So here is where they come from on the CPU, strobe 16 through 1. So that is on connector 1 and connector 2 on the CPU, IJ1 and IJ2. But then we also have this other one, IJ3, that's on the end. And it says that it's blanking comma 3 and 4, comma 1 and 2, PB01, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, which is A2, B2, C2, D2, A1, B1, C1, D1. All right. So where does all that come from? Well, this chip was all screwed up. We replaced it as well. And we've double-checked the socket and everything, and it's all connected to here. So that chip is not the problem unless the chip we put in there is bad too. But this chip, all of these outputs, it's just a decoder chip. It's a 4 to 16 decoder chip. So it turns four signals into 16. Well, where do these four signals come from? They come from the same place that these all come from off my screen here, which is U51, which is another 6821 PIA chip, peripheral interface PIA, peripheral interface adapter. Is that right? PIA. Yeah. So how do we know if this chip's bad? How do we know? Well, the other chip we've already replaced, this chip we have not, it's got, it looks like it might have some damage too from the batteries. And then it is fed by the data bus and the address bus. Okay. Well, the address bus feeds everything else too. Like it's making all this work. Well, actually that's where it's coming from. But the data bus and the address bus are also used on the other PIA that makes the segments work. And it seems to be working at least halfway. So we know our data lines are probably all right. And our address bus is probably all right. You might run into some weird thing where the connection's messed up or something. But in general, that's used for all kinds of other stuff too. So it ought to be working just fine. Right? So this is kind of like the one thing that does all the things that we have problems with and screws it up. Now, interestingly enough, we might be able to tell what's going on by the four to 16 decoder chip. So we kind of know that strobe five is working. It's right in the middle of the chip. And every time you turn it on, that middle first player digit is on and works. So four, five, and six, something like that usually work. It seems like. I don't know which way the strobes are going. I don't know if strobe one is the right digit or the left digit. You can figure it out by keeping looking at the schematics. But we know four, five, and six pretty much work, something like that. Okay. And that's player one. And then if you come down here to player three, the same ones are strobe four, five, and six with the hash mark, right? And then we already looked at that back here, four, five, and six, and four, five, and six with the hash mark come from the same signals. So it would be J2 pins five, six, and five, four, and three. Pins three, four, and five on J2, which would be brown and blue, brown and green, and this one's brown and yellow. Okay. Well, if you look over here where the board was, it's that left-most connector. Brown and blue would be, I think they started this on one, two, three, four, so it'd be five, six, and seven. Pins five, six, and seven on the left-most connector. Which is J1, and I counted from the wrong side, so it's three, four, and five. Is that right? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Yeah, it's pins three, four, and five on J1, which, yeah, is listed as strobe four, five, and six. And then if we go back, it looks like it's pins three, four, and five on the 74154 chip. You know what? I shouldn't say pins. It's strobes. See this strobe zero? Strobe three, four, and five. So this is the data table of the 74154, and these are the four signals coming in, and then these are the outputs that you get. So when they go low, it turns it on. So I was looking to see if any of them line up. It doesn't really line up. I was thinking, so you could have it where, let's say this one was stuck low, and this one was stuck high. Well, it would make it where the only things that could possibly work would be four, five, six, and seven, because if these two were still working, when they went both low, it would make one work, and when they went low-high, it would make another one work, and when they went high-low, it would make another one work, and when they went high-high, it would make another one work. I don't know. I can't see any obvious fault there. Sometimes, though, you can tell by what it's doing that, oh, this line must be missing or something. Anyway, with all that said, you can check all this with a logic probe while it's turned on, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and replace that PIA that runs all of that and see if that gets us all of our strobes back, because we've already replaced this decoder chip, and it didn't change anything. Joey was making the point, too, that all that stuff he replaced didn't really change anything because it's still doing the same thing. It's got the same digits pretty much missing, the same segments working kind of the same, and the sound working kind of the same, so all that stuff he replaced, maybe it prolonged the life of the board, but it didn't really fix the problem. The problem could have been more on this side. Okay, so that brought them back, but we had a couple of them that it was the actual display. So everything except the third digit came back on all of them, but the ball, this one was, you could actually see arcing in it. That one, that was the ball and play one, the first digit and the third digit didn't work, so I removed it and it made all the other ones work properly. Since they're all connected together by a strobe, if you've got one that's got a short in it or something, it can screw up all the other ones while it's plugged in. It can even permanently screw them up, so you've got to be careful with it, but luckily it didn't permanently screw these up. However, like I said, we're going to order a new set of LED ones, but that's kind of where we stand on the board right now. We still got a little bit more work to do on it, and we don't even know, I don't have this chip in yet. It's a 7447, which is what makes the LED work, the diagnostic LED. So we're waiting on that, but we got everything in there. This is the PIA that we just replaced. We don't know about switches and things yet. I can't completely really see what's going on because of the displays yet, so I think we'll wait for the display set and then we'll work through the rest of it. I found a couple more displays that apparently Joey had that kind of do their thing, but they're not quite right. I also need to order a set of ribbon cables because this cable has all of that corrosion on it. Look at that. Luckily though, they still make these. You can order them from the pinball places, or you can actually just order generic ribbon cables too if you get them with the right number of pins on it. So I think that's where we're going to leave it for today. Join us back next time. We'll work through it a little more. So we need to get the LED displays in, get them built and installed on the machine. Make sure that the board is able to drive those. It looks like it will. By the way, the LED display set comes with a new master board too, so you don't need that. It doesn't come with ribbon cables though. And once we do that, we also need to get the 7447 in to make sure that the diagnostic LED works. Once that happens, we need to put in a NVRAM so that it doesn't need the batteries anymore. And then we need to check all the switches, all the lamps and all the solenoids and play it a little bit. So it's getting there. I'm happy with the progress so far. I wonder if Joey rebuilt the power spike. Kind of looks like he did. Did he do that on the first video? I don't know. He keeps getting stuff knocked out without me even noticing it. So we will work on it some more next time. I hope you enjoyed it so far as we track down a display issue on displays that we're not going to keep. But hey, now we know. And I can mark the ones that are working as tested working and put them back in my stash. But I got a little secret for you. I save all the ones that aren't working too. So I have to mark all those to make sure that I know. You never know when you're going to need something off of it. You might need a connector or maybe you need the board or whatever. Whatever. I just throw away crap that I can easily stash away. But that's why we've got so much crap in our showroom. And yes, that's a pop. Don't ask about the pop. We haven't got to that yet. All right, folks. So we'll see you on the next video. I hope you enjoyed.