Let's Save this 1986 Williams PIN-BOT Pinball Machine....

ladies and gentlemen this is Joe's classic video games back with another cool pinball repair video for you today had a few people asking about this one but we've uh had this pinball machine sitting in our showroom for several months now and we are fining to the point where we're going to fix it up so you ought to be able to tell just by the side art the stencil on the side this is Williams pinbot the classic and we got this in a while back it is actually in pretty good shape we've got the trans light in the back we took it off a while back um because we stole two displays off of it so there's two alpha numeric displays up here and then there were two dig U numeric displays down here that we needed on another game so we lifted them and the reason we did that is I think one of these is bad and so we're going to put the new modern displays on it so you'll see that in this video but uh this thing is actually in pretty good shape you can see we put a little card on it I'm being repaired and we even put one inside accidentally ugly now but being restored soon well guess what people soon is here so let's see what kind of shape it's in the cabinet is pretty good you know these were stenciled this side here looks pretty good this one up this side up here looks pretty good it's got a little they've touched it up with some spray paint and stuff we're going to fix that up a little bit make it look better the front is kind of rough you can see where the uh paint has started coming off all around the door but it's such a simple design we'll be able to touch that up pretty good and then this side that we were just looking at is pretty good that you can see that they've already touched up some of the black paint there um but we'll get that looking a lot better and then the same thing here it's in pretty good shape they've done some touchup before that's spray paint so it looks kind of rough but we'll get all that fixed um and of course the most important thing is the Playfield and the Playfield is in pretty good shape for its age and the reason is because it has myar on it so if you've uh if you know about myar you've seen other videos where we talked about myar I've got the glass one so it's a little harder to see but if you look around the flippers see if that'll Focus there you go see this see the piece of see the sticker that's on the Playfield so that has protected the Playfield from wear the sticker has gotten worn that's how you know it's not optical zoom people you can hear the gears making my zoom work on the camera do you hear that the uh we're old school around here even the camera is old school the um the the piece of myar has a little wear but that saved the Playfield so the Playfield doesn't have any wear well it's got minor Weare but not much you can see up here where the uh the lightboard or the keyboard or whatever they want to call that where the myar was stuck over it you can see where it's lifted a little bit so it looks you know it's not perfect but it looks pretty good we're very happy with it it's much better than this being all beat up the last one we had had heavy wear on this to the point where we had to put a sticker over it but this one we don't have to it's got the original paint and it's still in good shape underneath that myar so I'm trying to tell this visor up here pops open and there's a face under there so I'm trying I can't tell if the face is under there there's a little piece that can be missing it might be missing but I don't really see anywhere anywhere the um the the Bride of pinbot mini Playfield here is what I call it all looks pretty good there's a little chip at the top of that cork screw ramp I don't even know if we're going to bother to replace that it's just a it almost looks like it's supposed to be like that maybe it is I don't know I haven't looked it up but I think the top of that the very corner is chipped and I don't know how easy it is to get that ramp or how much that costs and also I don't think it would affect gameplay much with that little piece missing so we may just leave that the the ramp the blue ramp ramp looks to be in good shape but I think they usually are so really it's just filthy there's nothing uh nothing really all that messed up with it other than that one little spot I don't even see any damage really so let's look in the back box so here's the display board we're going to get rid of all that because we're putting in the LED displays got your little resistor board here to make the flashers work little relay board and then you've got your main CPU board which looks pretty clean sometimes you'll have a transistor that's locked on and burnt everything up but they all look nice and clean one thing there's a local guy that does this there's a local guy that's been doing games forever and one of the things he does is he takes the batteries out which is good and he solders them together look at that but since he did that as you can see whenever they started leaking their alkaline out it leaked out over here and did not screw up the board or at least I don't think it did whenever we get it out we'll look a little closer so that's the main CPU here's the power supply so like on most of these it's been hacked a little bit this is the general illumination it gets all hot so you can see that the the um connector broke apart and they just soldered the wires right onto the power supply that's not that big of a deal we can fix that you can see right here where a connector got really hot same thing that's where the AC comes in I think You' got a couple bridge rectifiers over here here the deal with those is uh you need to add a fuse to those so power comes in if that bridge shorts it can burn up a bunch of wiring so you don't want that so you put a fuse uh in line with the AC lines coming in Mount it over here on the side and it makes it where that won't mess up this is the little flipper board looks good knows usually don't have any problems then you got another flasher or I think it's for the flashers another uh resistor board up here I wonder what that plugs into I had to figure that out and then you've got your soundboard and it looks good too so this is a good looking clean looking game um it actually looks so good I think we'll actually turn this one on usually we you know we just uh usually we just uh work on them because they're in unknown condition but this one looks pretty good so I'm going to actually plug it in and turn it on we'll see if she actually does anything before we start working on it we plugged it in turned it [Music] on and it has came up in factory setting mode which is just because the batteries are dead probably so I'm going to uh walk through the setting mode there we go adjustment 10 we're getting there oh yeah I can see his face is underneath the visor so it's actually still up and running cool game yeah you could probably just play this thing now it's been sitting so so long that uh you just said he sees me it's been sitting so long that the um rubber rings and stuff have broken so you couldn't really play it you'd Break Stuff but you see where a few light bulbs are out and stuff like that but they were probably having a lot of fun playing it if I can get the visor to open up I'll show you that thing I was talking about let's see if he looks at us here in a second there's a um it's like a a shield like a face underneath that I'm just curious if that piece of plastic is in there or if I need to order that I think he opens he opened up a second ago I think he does every once in a while bu oh it's making noise very quiet though well he's not going to come out and play there you go so you get the idea so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to pull out that power supply and uh clean it up a little bit and fix that connector on it so this is what we got you hear the cool music in the background man that's pretty neat anyway we got some of the games turned on so here is the power board we pulled it out and took a look at it um someone has already serviced it so this connector here we replaced the one where they had soldered it on there and then someone has actually replaced this filter cap and they've done a bunch of work in the high voltage section so this section up here runs the displays but since we're going to be using LED displays none of this is important anymore but it's already been updated anyway so um now the only thing we've got left is what's going on here so couple things originally the general illumination on the earlier version of this power had a little uh connector here that um into the board just like this or smaller than this but same same idea as this and eventually um they got rid of it and on the newer version they did they did this they added a little pigtail where they kept the uh they doubled up the wiring and some things like that because they had too much I'm not an expert on this but I guess amperage running through that little connector and it was frying it just like this connector has been fried right so so on this board this connector is fried and so someone has serviced this before and the way they fixed it was instead of replacing this connector which we were going to do and replacing the plug that plugs into it which we were going to do um they decided look it's just going to burn up again if we do that they said that's a flaw in the design of the power supply so just like Williams later put this pigtail on and got rid of the connector here they did the same thing here the the operator so it's a hack but it's kind of good hack so they they took that one wire that plugs in here and get run so hot and they drilled a little hole in the power supply and what they did was on the back here's where the pin came in originally you see how it's toasted that Trace just cuz there's so much power running through it you see that Trace just goes up to this F so what they did was they drilled a little hole in this trace and ran wire two wires they doubled it up from here out to that little pigtail and they made it where in the game it's unplugg so I'll show you what the other side looks like inside the game if you didn't see it earlier so here's the original connector you can see how that pin got really hot just because there's so much power running through it and it burnt itself off the board well Williams used to have the same problem with that over here but they fixed it by adding pigtails to the newer one right right so the operator did the same thing so he took this one wire and he heat shrinked and soldered two wires to it ran it to a jumper so that you can remove it from the game and then drilled a hole and bypass that pin so that the power goes straight from The Wire here into the uh to where the fuse is so my whole point with all that is that's an upgrade folks I think I'm going to leave it you know I'm just going to leave it like that now I wouldn't go out of my way to to mod one like that but they did a pretty good hack there they fixed that pretty well I've actually got this part um I could replace it and everything um and here's the other one that they hacked I'm going to act like it was a different operator because he he did a pretty good job on this one and whoever again we replac this connector but whoever uh just soldered the wires of this connector that wasn't a very good job so uh I'm going to put a new connector on this for our new connector here and I'm going to leave that one I'm just going to leave it alone cuz you saw all of the U General illumination was on right it's I keep saying General illumination I don't know if that's what this is over here that might be something else but uh everything appeared to be working so we're going to leave that hack alone and we're going to fix this hack um and whenever I do that I'm going to pop it in and then we'll test the voltages now and like I said they replaced this capacitor already all of this stuff here we're not really going to need even though it's working or our displays wouldn't have been up and running but we're not really even going to need to mess with this because we're going to use those LED displays but uh I'll fix that connector there we'll pop it back in make sure we're where we were and that our 5 volts is somewhere near 5 volts basically this this creates 5 volts and runs uh all of the chips on the CPU board and everything so you want that 5 volts to be as close to 5 volts as possible you want it to be between I don't know 4.8 and 5.1 and five or higher if possible so uh I think we're in pretty good shape with that though so once we do that we will uh pull out this main board too and start checking over all of the transistors and everything and see if there's any ISS isues going on on it we got to remove that ugly battery pack and see what we're going to do there but like I said earlier this is a pretty clean machine so we'll uh we'll do that connector and be back in a second so we got the connector on like I said we left the other connector because they did a nice clean job of it and we're back up and booted again so um everything's cool the um I figured out two things one the sound isn't Amplified so it's uh really low I turned it all the way up and you can just barely hear it it's basically not amplifying and then second this plug goes to the freaking topper that's missing I didn't even think about that but pinbot has a bar that goes across the top those are really hard to find um so that's what that's for it goes up through this hole and plugs into the the light bar that goes on the top so like we were talking about next we're going to take out the main CPU board and check it out and see if there's anything hear the sound he how low it is so that's all the way up it's basically just not amplifying so we got to figure that out um but we'll take the CPU board out next and see what's going on with it this is the main board pulled out of the game now what you're always looking for on these is battery damage because the batteries leak look at that let's see what the expiration look at the expiration date 2009 it's 2018 right now and you know batteries don't they typically have like a 10-year date so this was probably done around 2000 so these batteries are 18 years old and uh soldering the batteries is not a good idea they might explode so we're going to get rid of that as matter of fact hell let's get rid rid of it right now bam no more problems um but because they did that there is no damage on the battery holder so with the exception of that I don't see really anything on this board that's a problem we're going to test everything just to make sure so we're going to use the the multimeter to check all of the transistors here and then we're going to check all these which are on the lights and then we've got six more up here that we're going to check but you saw the game was up and running the only thing that that was a obvious problem was that if you turn the volume all the way up you didn't get you could barely hear it so it wasn't amplifying the sound so up here on this connector the j15 connector they have an empty connector but I think they just did that so that you wouldn't plug it in the wrong spot there's a connector from here that plugs onto the soundboard up above it um so I'm going to have to look into all that to see how exactly how the sound is Amplified look on the schematics um and it's different dependent on the game so since pinbot had a separate soundboard it didn't use some of this I believe I may be wrong about that but I think that's what's going on so this this sound amplifier here may be the problem or it may not even be used so we're going to have to track that down but um I'm going to U I'm going to test all these transistors make sure everything's cool going to clean up the connector and get rid of those wires and all of that of course here's the back of the board you can see there's a little bit of heat damage from the resistors that are laying on the front nothing really to worry about you can see that someone at some point has resolder all of the connectors so somebody's worked through this game but probably in 2000 um they've resered all of the connectors so you don't really need to do that so I would imagine this board doesn't need much but we'll check the transistors just to make sure everything's right we'll take these wires off get everything cleaned up and then we'll pop it back in the uh in the game and we'll I'm going to look on the schematics and see what is going on with our sound okay so we're looking at the sound output uh this is the sound board and on pinbot it works really weird the main board makes some sound and then it sends it up to the and speech and then it sends it up to the soundboard which makes background music uh sound effects and speech and then it sends it all out so this is a schematic of the um uh um actual soundboard I'm thinking that it's in the final amplification because basically nothing's loud but you can hear it all you can hear the sounds playing you can hear the speech playing all that but it's just not very loud so the way that works is here is where the volume knob plugs in I checked it with a multimeter it's fine so it plugs in here oh and we're getting all of our voltages that we're supposed to get and then the volume control is handled by this u12 chip was which is a 1458 that kind of handles the volume so I'm thinking maybe that's a problem if it was one of the amplifiers you'd have like half the sounds missing and half of them working because there's two different amplifiers one for each speaker so since all the sound isn't loud I'm thinking it's got to be this u12 so we're going to we're going to roll with that I'm going to try replacing that and see where that gets us all right folks so that has fixed our sound we've got balls stuck in the game though let's see if we can tilt them out we've we've got one here stuck on this rubber ring there you you can hear the sound [Music] so the sound's working but the uh the ball's stuck so it can't find the ball but that's that so uh we need to order the displays that we were talking about and we need to start tearing down the play field and seeing what we run into there that's all for this video folks join us next week and we will tear the Playfield apart fix it all up and then we'll look into the displays those are really cool so if you enjoyed the video so far give us a thumbs up make sure to subscribe to us you can see all of our videos here on our Channel but you can also see all of the games that we have for sale on our website go to Lions arcade.com so leave your comments below about what you think so far what you think about pinbot do you remember playing it and uh we will see you on the next video