Testing Several Williams System 3-6 MPU's in Our 1977 LUCKY SEVEN 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 williams lucky seven pinball machine i've never had this one before we got a little while back and have been working through it trying to get the thing up and running and uh we're up to the mpu board today we've worked on the play field and got it all looking pretty good nice and beautiful the previous owner had put mylar on a bunch of it but they cleaned it up really well before they put the modeler down so it looks really good so we're happy with the play field and then on the last video that you may have watched if you missed it go back and watch it a happy time was had by all on the last video we worked on the power supply got it all doing its thing um it was already working but we uh it had a solenoid fuse had blown and we went through and replaced some capacitors and all of that now we have a buddy mr james who has sent us some boards of his out of his williams flash and so we've been fixing his williams flashboards as we go along and so we had all kinds of problems on his power supply but we got it all doing its thing so we've fixed his power supply now we're going to move on to the mpu now our mpu is up and running as you can see but i kind of want to test his so this isn't a flash though so i don't know i haven't decided completely how i'm going to do that you can test them on the bench too but we'll look at the board and just decide what we're going to do but the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to remove that board our board so we can get a closer look at it and then we're going to uh work on the the battery setup i don't know how that is i don't know if those batteries have started leaking or not but someone has mounted a remote battery holder so that the batteries aren't on the board so that's good but uh so i'm going to pull that out and we'll look at his board and our board and just see what they need what needs done to them and how we can maybe test his in the wrong machine but on these on a williams they have two boards over here that kind of work together so there's the mpu and then this is the driver board the driver board is attached to the mpu with a 40 pin connector there and if your driver board isn't working um the mpu won't work so it's the driver board has to be hooked up and running because the mpu talks to these pia chips here pia chips peripheral interface adapter chips um so yeah that's that maybe i'll think a little bit about the best way to test his but let me pull ours out and we'll look at it and we'll see what all he sent us as well all right so here's our driver board i put a tag on the back so we wouldn't get it confused and james sent us a couple of his as well i'm trying not to bang these around too much they're very prickly so here's his uh it at one point was fixed by docent electronics in ohio right uh that's pretty good ones two of them are already socketed the pia so if you have a problem with those it's easy to swap them out that's usually the main problem is you'll have a problem with one of those or something but this driver board looks pretty serviceable i like that one so he also sent us this one which is in a bag marked bad so this one may be bad um these uh pia chips i guess could be a problem so we'll work on that not today though that's gonna be in our next video stay tuned for our next video okay so this is mine don't need it right now all right here is our mpu and like i said somebody put a remote battery holder on it but it looks like it has started to eat i don't know what i can't feel any corrosion i have to take that all apart and see what's going on there but it has started to eat but it didn't eat on the board so that's good so this this board is completely working so what are we going to do with a completely working board well we're going to do a little preventative maintenance stuff basically we're trying to get it where the thing is very reliable um so we can sell it and not have to worry about it breaking on somebody so one of the things i want to do is resolder all of the pins on the connectors around the edge of the board fairly common stuff you do right a lot of people replace the power connector i haven't usually seen that's something that you absolutely have to do but a lot of people choose to do that um i've never really seen the electrolytic capacitor there be a problem but you can swap out if you want um and then the only other thing that we're probably going to do is we're going to clean some of these chips um just clean the legs on them so you can see like for instance see how black the legs are on that chip and that one they're just you know they get all tarnished we'll take those out and clean them off a little bit you can do it different ways we use a little foul sand them off other people have told us that's a horrible idea i mean i've done it for years and years and years like that without any trouble but if you think that's a horrible idea do it the way you want to do it but that's what we do these things are fairly reliable if the battery doesn't eat them up um i don't know if i have the stuff to make this one run without a battery let's see what are those it's a 5101 so i would need the the 5101 is the ram that handles the settings and the high score but they make little nv ram chip little boards adapters you can put on that um so that you don't need a battery but i don't have any of those the guy that i get him from he's all out of them because there's a global uh supply chain problem going on right now so he can't get the parts he needs to make it but he'll have him back soon enough i'm sure but until then we're just gonna have to fix this little setup and have it continue to use batteries for a little while longer the next time they have it serviced i'm sure somebody will swap in a nvram and since this is in a socket it's even a situation where we could probably mail them one whoever buys it if they have a problem down the road so that's that uh let's see what his look like here is board numero uno so the way that they handled the battery problem on this one was they put a battery on the sock on the battery socket there now i don't know it's a lithium okay cool all right and i believe hmm i was thinking should that is that supposed to be recharged i don't believe it is i think they're good all right uh this is a slightly different board this is the our lucky seven is a system three one of the very first solid states this is probably a system four it may even be a system six there's a way to tell just by looking at the the sockets but i don't remember and i know you can replace these three chips with one chip here and so they appear to have done that these williams games ran off of what they called flipper roms so these two roms here are the so-called flipper roms and they had different colors so there was yellow green blue flipper roms blah blah and they were two chips and that's most of the information that the software needs to run and then the game specific stuff was in either three proms or two proms or whatever or you could put it in a larger eprom in this socket and to do that you change some address lines um there are jumpers somewhere i can't remember where they were though all of this is well documented so you can go to pinrepair.com it's on there pinwicky.com it's on there but there's there's little jumpers that they put somewhere i think they would have went here depending on which roms you're using right so if we have an issue where this board won't work we'll check that his his power supply was completely screwed up so there's no way the game would have ever worked with power supply like that there was no five coming out of it so this board may well work fine and his problem was all in the power supply but we'll do the same with it we'll resolder the connectors and we'll clean the legs of the chips right so on on his his 5101 chip is right here right and we'll see if this battery still has a good bit of juice left in it or if it needs some help oh no people look what happened the sticker fell off the eeprom window and here we are near a light oh no can't have that people have been giving me all kinds of hell lately because i'll do videos and there'll be a random eeprom with no sticker over the the window so if you're not if you haven't worked on a lot of these and you don't know what that is basically this is an eprom this is a prom which means programmable read-only memory this is an eeprom which means erasable programmable read-only memory so since it has this little window in it you can shine a uv light really bright in there for a while and it will erase this chip so the theory is if the chip is in a cabinet without a label over it that it will the light that just the ambient light that shines in it will erase the chip or make it forget one little bit or something and so it's good practice to have a sticker over it that way light can't shine in it and that's all good and that's all true right but in practical use it never happens like that we never get one of those that's been erased ever never ever ever i've got a friend who took some he wanted to try to erase him and he didn't have any racers so you slide them in a drawer in an eraser and you shine a light right on top of them really bright for 10 or 15 minutes to erase them right so he had something he wanted to erase he put them on the dash of his car now this is here in sunny south carolina we get plenty of sunlight and in your car that's like a big magnifying glass on it so he drives around for three weeks with these on his dash the damn thing's still verified so it takes a lot of light to erase these so i'm not too worried about the stickers now if i'm putting a sticker on one to label it i put it right over the window because that's the best way to do it and if one falls off yeah i'll put it back we're going we're going to tape it back on but it's not as big of a deal as everybody makes it out to be so we were working on a donkey kong board and nintendo from the factory didn't put any stickers over any of the labels over any of the windows and people were having conniption fits about this well this is a 40 year old board and it still worked fine so you know it's a 40 year old board it's got about 10 eproms with no uh sticker over the window i mean we can go by the theory and say oh well that's bad the light will make it a race but we're looking at the the the practical result of that here's a board 40 years old didn't have any stickers from the factory over the windows and the damn thing still works fine no problems so i mean obviously it's not that big of a deal at least in that in that situation now depending on where you're using it i'm sure it's different and like i said it's a good practice to do but we don't have to freak out about it people we'll be all right we're going to get there all right so uh we'll do the same to this we'll solder the things around the edges and we'll we'll clean the legs of the chips make sure they're good and then we'll end up testing it in the in the cabinet we're going to look up i think how the lights work and the solenoids work and all of that stuff in the manuals before we actually do it but but wait there's more he sent us another board too so we're gonna we're gonna check his other one so here's his other board it's done very similarly uh with the battery mod which will work just fine i think and uh these three sockets um have the problems from these have been replaced with with one prom here which is very cool i'm gonna look up the jumpers to make sure because i don't see where any jumpers were changed and i think you may have to do that maybe so i'm gonna check it out in pinrepair.com here's the two flipper roms and here's the 5101 it's been swapped as well but it's in the socket uh we may have an issue where we need to check the socket because i think that socket was added we need where we need to check it to make sure everything's connected good but it's a good looking board so same thing going to resolder these and clean the legs on the chips and then we'll see what we got from there all right so we did what we said we cleaned the chips we cleaned the pins and we soldered them there's really nothing that we know of that's wrong with them we might find something wrong we have to test them first and so what i'm looking at to test them i've got the one driver board that was in the game that works fine so i can use it to test it by mating to those okay so i'm looking to see if i just leave those as flashes and put it in a a lucky seven cabinet what's it going to do different so the main the main thing that you would be concerned about since there's a switch matrix and a lamp matrix that's not that big of a deal it might just light up the wrong lights and things like that it would be the solenoids you don't want it necessarily locking on a solenoid that it that it shouldn't be right so i'm looking in the the manuals and comparing the two so they have on the on the driver boards are the same on every game but the software controls different things on the driver board depending on what it's trying to do so i i'm just comparing the solenoids with each other so on the um lucky seven solenoid one is the left reel in the play field the center reel and the right wheel so that's one two and three so those three at the beginning of the game they may reset back to you know a certain position or something but on the flash that's the ball release the five bank top drop targets and the five bank bottom drop target resets okay so that's it may try to reset the drop targets but if it did that what it would really do would be move the center reel and the right reel so we'll watch to see what happens there okay and then number four is the left drop target reset number five is the right drop target reset so when the game comes up if those are down if a switch is connected on the play field it would try to reset those so on the flash one is the drop target reset and one is the eject hole so it may eject the ball out um well no it wouldn't do that it would it would try to reset instead of if we've got the flash software in there it would try to reset the drop target maybe and it actually would because this one uh it's wired the same it wouldn't at the beginning of the of turning on try to eject the ball or anything so it wouldn't try to reset the right drop target so then on this one ball the solenoid 6 is the ball release but if i put the flash board in that's the flash lamps the flash was the first game that had the lamps flash so it may try to flash those lamps if it does it would just eject the ball out of the game seven and eight on the on this one are not wired up seven and eight on this one are also not wired up so then 9 10 11 12 13 and 14 are the sounds that go to the the sound board on the flash but the way they did it was it's just solenoids and solenoid lines right so 9 through 13 are sounds and then 14 is the credit knocker on our older one it uses chimes but 9 10 11 and 12 are the chime bars so that if this tries to play a tune it will just play it on the chimes and then 13 it says noise drum i don't know what that is but we'll figure it out so it's probably going to try to hit it if it's the flash and it's trying to boot up and then 14 is the credit knocker and it's the same on both so 15 on flash is not used on this one it's the buzzer so the flash will never try to use the 15 so it won't try to play the buzzer 16 is the coin lockout and it's the same on here so the flash if it tries to turn on the coin lock out it actually will be wired the same and then flash has three bumper three pop bumpers 17 18 and 19. on ours though 17 and 18 are pop bumpers but 19 is the right kicker but those shouldn't it shouldn't pop unless the switch gets hit so the switch on the right kicker won't be pressing it just depends on how the switches are wired we're basically going to turn it on and see if any of the solenoids start doing crap that they shouldn't um and in when you're in uh game over mode we're not going to try to play the thing we're just going to see if it comes up um when you're in game over mode it wouldn't um you know those shouldn't work anyway uh and then we get down to 20 is the left kicker over here 20 is the right kicker and then 21 is the left kicker on flash and 22 is not used and on the original one both of those aren't used they're not wired to anything so i think we can put the board in and just see if the game comes up the displays and uh all of that will be the same um [Music] we may get some kind of weirdness going on with the score reels but we'll what in the play field but we'll watch that and see but i think that's a good way we can test it we can just pop it right in the game on the on the board that's ours i didn't show any of this because there's i didn't do anything all i did was i replaced the battery holder with a new one so i soldered a new one on the connector because the old one is rotting away look at all that we're gonna throw that holder away i put a new holder on it and i used a little diode to make the jumper the reason that i have these that are four position instead of three it originally just took three batteries i have them that are a four position one so that i can put a diode in it because a lot of times you're replacing them on a valley board and you need the diode so that power when the game's on doesn't try to come back and charge the batteries because since these aren't chargeable batteries so i've added that diode but there's one already on the board so you don't really need it on a williams but i kind of need it because i need something to jumper across the fourth battery in the holder so it'll just lower the voltage slightly it won't be that big of a deal but um i think we're about ready so we're going to test one of these flash boards by mating it to our driver board and turning it on and we'll see if the game comes up now if it if this board's messed up it could lock on solenoids and lamps and everything else so we're going to be very careful whenever we do it but uh um [Music] we'll see what what we run into if either one of them will even boot okay so we've mounted it up in there and we put the driver board on i left all of the connectors off so basically these are the switches they're disconnected these are the lights they're disconnected and these are the solenoid i think these are the solenoids they're disconnected so um i did connect these which are the displays so we're going to try to boot it up and just see if we get the displays first and then we'll add some of the other stuff in once we get a good idea of if it's doing anything or not so what is the risk of this uh it probably might be able to burn up the mess up the driver board uh the displays are actually the worst thing to mess up you don't want to mess those up but you kind of need them for the diagnostic to tell if the thing is actually up since it all of the high voltage is actually here on the the master display board though so there's no there's no chance that it's going to short the 100 or the negative 100 that it uses to power the displays here on the board so you don't really have to worry about that so i don't think it's a a huge risk but you have to have this driver board attached because the the cpu talks to these pias all four of them so without these attached it won't uh it won't boot so this is the one the pia that runs the switches this is the pia that runs the lamps and this is the one that runs the solenoids so we've got it plugged in we're going to try turning it on and see if we get anything like we had with the other board okay so you saw it lit lit then they both lit and it went out all right so at first at first look you might think oh it's all messed up not really oh four zero zero is the test mode it's telling you that it's in position for the test mode i think i think the fourth that's what the four stands for and this this 04862 is the version number of the game like it's telling you that it's a flash so it's in diagnostics but we don't have any of the switches plugged in right so i'm going to see though if we can get it to do the thing that it does where it shows zeros and then goes to 3 500 or whatever 350 000 or yeah 350 000. and so the way you can do that is there's a trick on a williams where if it's basically the battery's dead that's why it's coming up in diagnostics if you turn off the uh power and turn it back on real quick sometimes it'll since the power didn't drain out of the capacitors all the way it'll jump it into a game mode instead of test mode but i don't know if that'll work without the switches hooked up we'll try it yeah there we go okay so the game is up you may not be able to tell but it is see how it says 550 000 so that's the factory high score and then it's blinking back and forth to zero because the zero is the latest game played so this is what it does in attract mode now it should be making a lot of lights blink but we didn't plug any of the lights in so that cpu board is at least partially working it's running code as you can see the score is changing like it should and the displays are working which they would have to run code to do that too so what are we going to do next well we're going to plug in the lights i think um and i guess we could go ahead and plug in the switches too i just don't want to plug in the solenoid jet because since the wiring is different it might cause some problems if the lamp wiring is different it won't really mess anything up it'll just light up the wrong lights and if the switch wiring is different it might tell it to uh turn on some coils so for instance why would it do that well on flash if there's a saucer and there is if there's a i think there's one up at the top on flash if there's a saucer and there's a ball in it it presses on the switch when the game starts if that or when the game is turned on if there's a ball sitting on that switch it may tell that coil to eject the ball well we don't have that coil so instead of it being that it may be like this so it might just tell that to turn over and over again and it may not be the same switch so instead of that switch being stuck where it thinks the ball's in it it may be one of these is doing it so there may be one on one of the um these quote these score reels in the middle of the play field or something there none of these really should be on at any time so there shouldn't really be any switches that are telling it to do anything but we're just out of an abundance of caution trying to do it the safe way kind of interesting that you can we're basically turning this into a flash for the the purpose of testing it so yeah so let me let me turn it off plug in the lights and then we'll do it again okay so these are the switches and these are the lamps we've plugged them in we're gonna have to do the same trick though to jump it out of test mode okay we're in test mode there we go all right so it's running the flash attract mode uh in a lucky seven cabinet but it's kind of the same thing this is the game over like this one i think blink was blinking a lot whenever it was the lucky seven so these two may be wired backwards um on those two games and then on the play field you've got all kinds of lights doing all kinds of twinkly stuff i might be able to go into test that's the settings i believe i think i hit test with the wrong with the button the wrong way i can't even remember i can't go into gameplay like that okay now how does that happen maybe i gotta have it down yep that's it so there's the display test but we already knew the displays were good because they were doing that before and then there is the lamp test so again some of them are probably wired different this one here wasn't working before [Music] and again all of this stuff is actually controlled by the driver board the mpu sends the signals but you're not really going to have a problem with the lamps that's on the mpu you could but it's it's mainly the cpu is talking to these pias your problem would be down here but it appears that the lamps are doing their thing with the exception of the one that we already knew wasn't working before so that board seems to be running code just fine okay so uh next up i'm gonna turn it off we're gonna actually plug the solenoids in and then turn it back on i'm gonna try to i guess i could do like a solenoid test we could just swap the roms out but i want to i'd rather have it up and running as a flash so that i can tell them that uh it's working fine this is better than bench testing it i think we're actually testing it in an actual pinball machine if we don't burn something up all right so i've plugged in all of the solenoids now when i turn it on it might we might hear things lock on or something so we gotta keep our eye on that nothing but we're in test okay that's good so so what that is is it's flashing the flash lamps remember we were talking about that you heard the coil come on here which is the coin door thing right let's go back in the test okay yeah so uh why did it kick that out it's because then when flash runs its attract mode there are two lamps here that flash that are ran by the solenoids and it uh it tried to do that so but on this it's wired to the ball eject it's just a different wiring so we're going to go into the solenoid test and it might do all kinds of crazy crap but that all work everything's perfect no problems so it's just going through and testing off the solenoids by just pulsing them right [Music] the noise drum must not exist it's that buzzer thing we're hearing and when you hear a couple things not do anything it's because the the game's just wired where some of the solenoids don't do anything so we can't really test it long term but that mpu is working just fine with the exception of the battery um so other than that it seems like it's cool so if you ever wondered can you test the flash board in a lucky seven apparently yes you can okay folks so we have put the second mpu in the second flash mpu but we're gonna do the same thing i'm gonna leave everything on the driver board unplug now the driver board is what actually locks stuff on and that's the same driver board we know it's good so it shouldn't do that but the driver board is controlled by the mpu so if the mpu is bad it could still cause even a good driver board to do stuff you don't want it to so same thing we've got the displays hooked up and the power hooked up and we're just going to see if it'll boot i like that looked decent cool now this one booted right into a track and the reason for that is because i replaced the battery on it there was uh this uh this little lithium battery mod he's got i actually had the same exact type of batteries so i just swapped them i need to look that up though to see if that's a good idea i don't know if those will last as long um i can't do the nva nv ram because i don't have any here but i don't know if that'll last as long as the three double a's but they're his boards and he already had them like that so i just updated the batteries with fresh ones the ones that were in there said 2004 on them as a build date and these are new ones so it it uh that should at least be better than those okay so it booted and same thing we're in a track it's going back and forth between the high score so i'm gonna do the same thing we did it with the other one i'm gonna turn it off plug in the switches and plug in the lamps and see where that gets us so same thing these are the switches these are the lamps and again it's still a flash because it's another flash mpu it's the same thing we had before the reason some of these aren't lighting and attract is because on flash those might not be used but when you're going to test the test remember how i said that the flipper roms are kind of like the generic operating instruction the test is in the flipper room so whenever you go into test if i can remember which way to do it again whenever it tests the lamps it doesn't just test the ones that work in flash it just tests everything so if anything's hooked up it'll work the scariest test mode in all of uh in all of pinball so we're in the display test we've got the thing down so if i put it up now by the way the displays are ran by the mpu so if you have display issues on a working known working set of displays it could be the mpu okay so we'll see if we can go up to yeah there's the lamps and again the driver board actually runs the lamps but the mpu is what tells the driver board to run the lamp so you shouldn't really the only problem we would probably get here is none of the lamps working or i mean i guess maybe you could still lose a row if the mpu is acting up okay so the lamps are working and the switches are working so i'm going to turn it back off and plug in the solenoids and do the same test we did before same thing plugged everything in now so when it comes on so what would be the problem maybe the mpu is for whatever reason locking on the pia that tells us to turn on the solenoid so we may get an issue where everything locks on okay we're good so again it's doing that because we're running flash rom so it's trying to flash the lights the flashlights in the play field on a flash but they're not on this game that solenoid is actually the ball release on this game okay so we'll go through solenoid test that's display test lamp test [Music] all right so it seems like we have two good working flash mpus and a good working lucky 7 mpu so i think our mpu work is done now you still might end up with the problem where yeah it fails after a while so maybe it's a one for an hour and stops working that could be you know a socket problem or whatever and on these the scan b sockets are particularly not good so if you end up with it being flaky where it doesn't last works for a little while and turns off you might have a bad socket on the processor or one of the roms but can't fix what ain't broke people so those are those are working and everything is cool since we didn't test them before we started working on them we don't know if re-soldering the connectors helped or if uh cleaning the chips helped so it could have been that we fixed a minor issue that was there or something like that but i think we've got them up and running now so next time we will do driver boards and boy we got plenty of them three driver boards to work through one works already though but i'll show you about the the little upgrades and stuff that we usually do to them well then we do one upgrade usually so leave your comments below make sure to give us a thumbs up for taking the trouble to film it for you make sure to subscribe to the channel i can't leave it like that because it'll keep doing that i'm in up i think i'm in setting mode now [Music] i'd like to get it in the lamp test turn it back off and back on depending on where this little lever is set you either come up in test mode or setting mode so that's test mode there we go that's a little better all right so leave your comments below make sure to subscribe to us if you haven't already so you can catch the next video whenever it comes out and by the way we'd like to thank everybody who's been using our amazon links if you don't know about that there's a link down below to amazon we've even got them in different countries if you're going to buy anything on amazon go through one of our links first and it gives us a tip because we sent you there because this is a commercial ain't that awesome and uh make sure to also check out my brother donnie if you don't know who that is that's literally my brother so we have another channel on youtube my brother donnie and uh we do nothing really with arcade games or pinball machines over there but if you like watching us work on these old pinball machines you may enjoy watching us work on old buildings we've got a couple old buildings in a small town near here that we have bought and that we're fixing up trying to help revitalize their downtown so make sure to check that out we will see you over there but we'll see you next time where we'll work on the driver boards and see if we can find anything wrong with any of the three that we have but uh hope you enjoyed it she's getting a little bit closer to working