Watch As We Try To Save A 1982 Bally Rapid Fire Arcade Game!

ladies and gentlemen is Joe's classic video games back with another cool pinball kind of repair video for you today this is Bally's rapid-fire now if you're not familiar with that it's a pinball kind of game it basically is a shooter you've got a little cannon at the front you shoot little tiny balls all over the plate at lights that light up so it's not it's not really a pinball machine there's no flippers or anything like that but it was made by Bally and it has a pinball type cabinet that was made in and it uses pinball boards but it's really more of an arcade game it was a it was a response to bat to Williams and Steve Ritchie coming up with hyperbole which was the same type of concept so Bally just completely ripped them off and made their own version we got this in the other day and the thing was filthy huh filthy so we've been cleaning it and cleaning it and cleaning it and cleaning it and we finally got it pretty clean so we figured we could start you shooting a video we don't really like filming them whatever they're just completely disgusting because people will think you know that we sold it like that which we want to get it cleaned up first so we've got it pretty clean we got the playfield cleaned up decent at least and we were just about to do some repair stuff on it and so we figured we'd film just a little bit of kind of how these work and what it's all about and all of that as we went through it and so this is the big shooter assembly we've cleaned it up a little bit you see it looks pretty good know what that hits is that supposed to well it probably doesn't whenever the things in it we've never had one of these working so we're kind of learning as we go through it but basically the way the game works is you have big handles on the control panel that goes on the front and when you squeeze the trigger bodies get hauled off did I mess that up but it has this big coil here and these little pin balls drop down here and then this coil fires I can't really get it to fire ever there's a there's a pin that shoots the ball out the can towards whatever you're aiming at and there's all these lights that light up on the playfield and you shoot them so the things aren't really that valuable because everybody doesn't really like them because they're not a pinball but you know if we get something cool like this and we're definitely going to save it so we have been trying to save it so we're gonna work through it a little bit all uh let's see here what do I need to do I'll pop up the hood I'll pop up this again and show you like what's down inside of it okay so we've actually got a bunch of parts out of it that we're painting and cleaning and stuff some of them are even hanging out the front of it but basically the way it works is all the balls after they go in whatever hole they went in they fall down on this I think they call this a baffle board it's kind of like in the old bingo machines and they fall back down into the thing go back down into the track this motor spins them around back up to the top and back it button to the top of the the cannon so there's some other stuff that goes here that we're still working on but if you take this is it a baffle board if you take that board out you can get down into the very bottom of the cabinet but they fortunately let this this little cutout here right so this cutout you can get to the power supply this is same old power supply that they had in all of the valleys in the early 80s and it's actually a very reliable power supply so I pulled that out whenever I was down in there cleaning stuff and everything on it was just fine all the fuses were still fine ah and there's a bunch of diodes on it they were still fine and there's two big big bridge rectifiers they were so fun and there's two resistors they were still fine so actually the thing was in as new condition and then on the bottom of the playfield you have this about two huge PCBs with wires soldered to them and then also all of these little light inserts and I'll show you how they're making all those work here in a minute but basically all there is on the playfield is lights that's it there's well there's a few switches but lights lights lights lights lights lights lights so the board doesn't really need to run very many solenoids but it has three motors that it runs it has a motor here that turns the wheel to get the balls back up to the top there's another motor that hangs right here that moves a little gate I think they call that the agitator and then there is a fan right there big ol fan and its purpose is to just blow on the big coil that's the shooter to keep it cool because you can shoot it non-stop and if you do that with a coil it's gonna burn it up but not if there's a fan blowing on it so so anyway power comes in goes to that power supply we check the power supply everything is cool so now the powers going back up into the back box and I'll show you where it goes after that so once the power gets up into the back box it goes to the solenoid board that is exactly as best I can tell exactly like the they've got a heatsink added to one of them oh no that's original exactly like the ones in a regular pinball machine a Bally pinball machine and so what that usually does is it takes the twelve votes from the power spot it turns it into five volts and makes the runs over here to the mpu board so the NPU board has the software and everything on it and runs everything as you can see it still has the battery on it which has leaked and ate up a bunch of the bottom of the board but it's not too bad so I think it's fixable and then on this particular game it has actually two lamp boards because you saw all those lights so since it has more lights than a traditional pinball machine they put two lamp boards in it so lights lights lights lights lights lights and more lights I'm kind of interested in seeing what they're doing with all these solenoids so all of these want a pinball machine do the you know control all of the the solenoids that are in the game but there there's I think there's only one and this one but there's three motors so I'm gonna look in the manual and see what all those drive down here on the playfield I'll take one of these off you've got with a few little plastic covers here and what they're covering up our four switches on each side and the ball camera down there the ball can hit this little door the ball hits that it goes through a little loop it goes through a little optics it's our here and it knows that the ball must have hit it and then on the back you've got a whole bunch of them and so if the ball hits one of those it knows the same thing and then the computer can figure out I guess it's just the logic but it can figure out where this must have been pointed right so if that's pointed like that if it hits that switch then it knows that it would have shot anything in that lane any of the lights that are lit up in that link so basically it lights up lights if you shoot it trick and tell because of what switch you hit in the back and then it knows if you hit the light or not or if you missed it very simple little setup it's kind of the same thing over and over again but the whole thing is you can't think of it as a pinball machine it's not a pinball machines arcade game so what we're gonna do next oh there's also one other thing there's a couple displays in here I think three and then behind it there is a sound board there's squawk and talk sound board Bally always had two coolest names for all of their boards so this one is the squawk and talked I believe which means it may have speech I'm not sure about that but the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna pull out this solenoid board work through it a little bit see what's going on with it and see if we can get this sucker get the power right okay so we pulled out the solenoid board and we're looking I'm looking in the manual just cuz I wanted to see how the thing works different than a pinball and I found this which is really neat check it out this was the one in the local mall old Aladdin's castle game that's pretty cool it has some Providence that we click on it so here's the solenoid board which is this board so I wanted to see how it's different than a pinball so in a pinball all of these little transistors on the bottom run run different things so this one might run the left pop bumper and this one might run the right pop bumper and this one might run the eject hole and this one runs the the out hole and this one runs the whatever right but this thing just has a whole bunch of switches and a whole bunch of lights so it's got three motors and it's got that big cannon and not much else all right so I figured man I'll look to see how they did it different so these are all numbered Q 1 Q 2 Q 3 Q 4 Q 5 Q 6 Q 7 right so if you look on here here's Q 1 Q 2 Q 3 Q 4 Q 5 Q 6 Q 7 Q 8 - 9 - 10 Q 11 Q 12 - 13 q 14 Q 16 so I don't see Q 15 but 1 through 14 and 16 I'll go over to here and are not used so none of them do anything isn't that crazy so these don't actually say not used but you saw in the in the cabinet there was nothing plugged into them so don't need any of that so all of this stuff is just populated because they were using a standard board that already had all this stuff on there so I wasted a little bit of money with that okay so this is like the part that makes the 5 votes for the NPU board which is all this part so of course it's the same and this part down here is the part that makes the displays this display voltage which is this part so it's all the same so a couple interesting things that they did if you look up here they run the what they call the ball filler motor which is the one up on the top and the agitator motor I mean the ball filter motors have one on the bottom and the agitator motor they run it through this board so that they can turn it on and off with the relay using q 15 and 1 we were just talking about so this one right here whenever the computer the npu board tells it it turns this relay at 1 and the wires are running from here to here and through this relay to turn the motors on and off so basically if it's sweet if it if it senses that it needs more balls up the top the the MPU tells this board to use this relay to connect the power and turn the the motors on they usually use that for the flippers so enough 10 ball machine they do the it does the exact same thing but with the flippers that relay turns the flippers on so that the flippers don't work whenever the game's over so you got that so that's one thing that it controls and then the gun of course which is what they're calling the big solenoid and so q18 runs the gun so that's this one here that has a heatsink on it and interestingly enough that might have came from the factory like that because it doesn't look like it's ever been replaced this fourth one does though looks like they've replaced it is one two three four Q 16 which doesn't do anything so maybe not maybe the solder just looks weird and then you've got what they call the fringe frenzy flashlights of flashlights to make them really bright they use a little bit more voltage so they they've got right above the play field there's three lights underneath the displays that I guess can shine really bright so they're using one to run flash lamps and then they're using one transistor to run the coin lockout so that's 2:19 so they're using all these ones at the end here and all of those that don't use and the coin lockout is if the games off there's a little point there's a little coil that loses power and it pushes a little rod through the coin mechs so that when you put a quarter in it won't take it it comes back out the the coin mech in the front when you turn the game on that coin lockout pulls in and you know it makes it where it's possible to put a quarter and they just did that so that people wouldn't lose their money so it's a lot like a pinball board but it the only difference I can tell is that there's a heatsink on it which somebody could have added later because that coil that gun coil is gonna be shooting over and over and over again so it's going on it's gonna get hot that's why I also had a fan in there oh and the fan is just straight wired so it looks like the fan is on the entire time at the game zone so it's probably noisy but I just got to do the same things that I'd normally do on a pinball machine I got to clean up all of the pins because a couple of them are used the flash lamps come out one wire so I gotta clean up all the pins I'm going to check to see if this voltage regulator is still good I'm gonna replace this big five volt capacitor this capacitor regulates the five I mean uh smooths out the five volts for the MPU so I'm gonna replace this and then I'm going to check these protective fuse and check this pot to see if it's still working good and check these two transistors and make sure they're all right check this transistor make sure it's on right and just minor stuff you know so once we do that we will pop it back in and then we'll pull out the mpu board and see how bad it's been puked on so this is what's left of the MPU board this is the brains of the whole thing and back in the day they put this little battery on there so that it would save the settings and keep basically on most of the valleys all this did was keep track of how many cool when in it and stuff like that how many times people have played it but if the operator never changed the battery it would just eat up the board so that's alkaline leaked out of the battery and ate up the board people now it looks a lot worse than it is I can probably save this one I'm gonna try to I think so like a lot of the damage is on this big ground race which you just have to clean up there are a bunch of components here messed up obviously but you can actually replace all of those really pretty inexpensively and then you got damage on the socket it needs to be replaced this socket probably needs to be replaced and this socket may need to be replaced yeah I will try to save it might not be able to I've got other boards if I need to to work on a better one on the back again that's just the ground trace that's pretty easy to take care of button down here is the same places that we were just talking about so the way you fix it is the best way to do it is you grind down all of this corrosion if you can't and you can just cut it off sand it off get it off right down to shiny metal again and you can take all the components out get rid of all of them throw them in the trash and then once you get it nice and shiny you can sand all the traces and everything once you get it nice and shiny you put vinegar on it and so vinegar counter vinegar is an acid and so it it you know you're putting it on a Bal Kalan as a base so you put vinegar on it it neutralizes it after you put the vinegar on it you rinse the vinegar off and then you can use like rubbing alcohol or you know something like that on it to make it the water evaporates quickly then you rinse it off and then you replace all of the things that were screwed up which is like the bottom two inches of the board basically so that's what we're gonna try to do I won't bore you with video of me doing all of that I'll just go through it as quick as I can it might take 30 minutes to clean it up and then after that it's just putting the stuff back on so I'll try to get as much of this crap off of here as possible and then I'll be back in a second you can tell me if you think it's good enough so this is about 15 minutes worse we're getting it a little cleaner basically on the things that you need to replace you need to get them like shiny again like that before you take them off because what will happen is if they're still covered in alkaline whenever you heat them up they'll just turn black and it won't unsolder and I'll just make a big mess but if you get them shiny again you've got enough material there that you can desolder it so so I'm gonna start taking a bunch of the stuff off of that hey folks so we got it cleaned up pretty good on the back whenever you whenever you get a chip off you can then get to all of the pads you know and get them nice and clean so we took two of the chips on this socket over here seemed to be pretty good and another thing you need to look for whenever you do these if you notice there's a trace that goes all the way around the bottom and if you see right there it's been completely ate through now that one's not too important because it goes all the way around the other way too so it's still connected but the main problem with these the batteries right there you look it's done the same thing on the front so there's a trace that goes all the way around the bottom it would have connected to the battery right there and then it goes up to that chip and up to this and bubble over so you need to check to see if it's it goes up to this transistor we took out you need to check to make sure all that's still connected so we're gonna put vinegar on this and see how much of this other stuff we can get off of here and we're gonna brush it with a little toothbrush and then rinse it off and then start putting the stuff back on it so we've reinstalled the board you can see we got it pretty clean down there on the bottom not perfect but pretty clean I have to take it back out anyway to put a battery holder on it but uh so basically we need this green LED to flash seven times if it's working each one of those is a test one two three four six seven all right so it is back from the dead it still needs a ton of work but so there's a ton of light bulbs burn out so the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pull off both of these light boards and work through them same same type of thing we need to resolder the connectors we need to check all the transistors to see if any of them are testing bad on the bench and all that so I'll work through those next and then we'll see if we can get most of the most of the lights lighting up like they're supposed to but that will have to wait till next time we'll see you soon [Music] leave your comments below and give us a thumbs up because damn it we deserve you