Shorted Board Fried EVERY DISPLAY In This Bally Supersonic Pinball Machine!!!

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Joe's Classic Video Games back with another cool pinball repair video for you this evening. We have been working on this Bally Supersonic that is in rough shape. And if you didn't see the previous videos, basically there was a short on the MPU that burnt up everything in the game because it shorted the 5 volts to the 43 volts. And if you know anything about these early valleys, basically the displays are kind of one of the more valuable things in the game because uh they don't make them anymore. So, you can get new LED ones, but it's, you know, it's a fairly significant cost. Couple hundred bucks. Um, and so we don't know what's going on with these, but in this video, we're going to see if the displays died a horrible death and if there's anything we can do about it. So, I haven't put the MPU back in it yet. We did one video where we worked on the power supply. I figured out the problem. The thing had caught on fire. You can see some of the remnants of it from the soundboard. that's still in the game. See how the chips have exploded? And then we added the solenoid driver board back in uh which is also part of the power supply. And then on the previous video on the bench, we were able to get the MPU working. So, we need to install the MPU in the game, get it to boot up, and then we need to test these displays. I have unplugged all of them. Um again, the the whole issue is the 43 volts went everywhere 5 volts went. So, all of these IC chips on any board um run off 5 volts, at least on this machine. So, uh we think it fried every one of them. But we're going to find that out today. But I need to put this board back in. So, just so it doesn't burn up the board that we just fixed, we need to check out this connector. See the smoke on it? So, pin one and two. It's actually 19 and 18. We'll do it the right way. Pin 19 and 18 are both ground. 17 and 16 are both five. And then 15 is 43 volts. And you can see where it's all charred because the board had a short on it. Somebody working on it uh unfortunately made those two pins touch together with a little glob of solder and burnt up everything in the game. Now, this particular game is pretty rough in other ways, too. Look at the playfield. We're going to work on all that as well. But before I plug another board into here, I need to replace this because the problem you run into is even though this looks fine, the black part um from the burn is carbon, and carbon can conduct electricity. So, if I plug that in, there's a chance that that 43 volts is still going to connect through to the 5volt line and do the whole thing over again. Um, yeah, that would not be good. It would actually burn up the chips on this board. Yeah, we would have major pro. Hopefully hopefully it doesn't do. Um, so let me uh let me get my equipment. We're going to replace that connector and repin it. And I'm going to look on the schematics just to make sure all of the lines are in the right place and we'll go from there. All right. So, I got it in there. Here's the old one. And again, the only reason I did it was because that's burnt. It might be conductive. You can test it, but you can't really test it at amperage. So, it might be that you test it and it's not connected, but once there's an amp running through it or half an amp or whatever it is, it's suddenly connected. Um, so anyway, let me give you a piece of advice, too. Okay, are you listening? Are you all listening with the echo? Echo echo inside the back box box. Um, when you do this, this is the keying plug. So, that keying plug, it's kind of a little pain in the butt. It's like it's just a little piece of plastic that sticks in the thing so that whenever you plug it into the board, it will only go in one spot because there's only one spot that has the pin missing, right? Now, when you go to do this, here's what you're going to think. You're going to think, "Ah, it's not that important. I'm just going to plug it in one time. I'll be very careful, and then I'll just leave it like that." You know, I'll just be careful when I plug it in. Whatever. Here's my piece of advice. Put the freaking king plug in there because if you don't, you'll plug it in backwards. You'll miss one pin. If that plugs in there, you can't miss one pin. It'll only go on one way. You can't go up one pin, down one pin, turn it upside down. It's not going to plug in except the one way. Look at this. This thing's rough. Um, so that king pin's very important. You know, I'm I'm like everybody else. I love to save a little money, a little time or whatever, and kind of, you know, cut a corner here and there or whatever. Don't cut a corner on that thing. If you can't find that little pin or you can't I was able to just take it out of this other one. If you can't get one of those, you can take just like a small zip tie and put it through that hole and just wrap it around. You're just trying to block that so that it can't plug into the wrong spot. So, make sure you do something with that. All right, so we are ready to power up the board that we fixed in the previous video and hope that it works. Oh, I hope that it works. Please let it work. All right, folks. We got our board in there. We're going to watch the LED now. The last time I did this, it caught on fire. So, hopefully it'll boot this time. We did. We couldn't make it boot last time cuz I had to repin that connector and we didn't get our seventh flash. So that's what we're looking for. So we're going to get a flicker and then seven flashes if all is good. Flicker. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. All right. So the two little things there. We don't have any of the coils plugged in. Although we do have this plugged into over there, so they're talking to each other. Um, the little click you heard was it turning on the um turning off the flipper relay, turning on the flipper relay so that the flippers don't work. Um, and then after the seventh flash, it actually dimly glows. So, I don't know if how well you can see that, but see it is. It's lit just a little bit. So, that's typical. All right. So, we didn't put one chip in and we didn't put the battery on it. The last chip that we didn't put in was the one that does the outputs for the displays. And so we need basically we have we have no way of knowing that the thing is really up and running that it's booted into the so-called attract mode or anything other than we heard it turn on that relay. So it's doing something and if it's if that LED is dimly glowing it's kind of working to make that happen. So we know that that basically that's doing its thing. Um, but there's there's no way for um it to really communicate to us right now because the lamp board's not installed and the displays aren't working. So, the most uh useful thing that you can get working next is the displays because you you kind of need to be able to read the displays a little bit uh to tell what the setup menu is doing, to tell uh uh uh if the game starting, all of that. So, we could do the lamps, but the lamps can't really tell us much information other than twinkle and look like they're working. So, um, the problem is when we turn when we shorted it, and I think it got shorted twice when they did it and then when I did it, this was all hooked up. I've unplugged them, but this was all hooked up. So, it probably fried these little chips. Now, that one's already in a socket, so that might be the best one to check. We'll do that one first. Um, so if those are still shorted and I plug them back together, you know, it's it's going to probably blow fuses. So, we're going to have to check each one of them individually. So, the first thing I'm going to do is go ahead and install that U20 IC in the board that uh we didn't put in last time. And then I'm going to pull this display out and we'll go check it out on the bench. So the U20 chip that was missing still is a 452. So I've installed that now. And then I turned it back on and the game's still booting with that in it. So I think the board is pretty much done with the exception of the battery. Okay. So this is that display. Now the reason I haven't been too upset about what happened with the voltage on the displays is because of the way they're designed. And obviously I'm not a engineer but if you check this is the schematic. This is actually a xenon manual but this was one of the last games really that still used the sixdigit displays. After that they moved to the sevendigit displays which was a very similar design but slightly different. Um and I just happen to have this laying around so I've been using it. So if you look on this schematic, you have that one IC chip, it's a BCD to seven segment U chip, you know, or encoder or whatever they would call that, right? So it gets the these signals here which they call display segment BCD data, which is actually the BCD thing is not a pinball thing. It's just a It's just a It's a standard thing that was used in all kinds of software or hardware, I guess. Um, so this is the connector on the edge right here. And you can see that it gets a ground and it gets a five. So our whole problem was this wasn't five. It ended up being 43 because of a foolish a careless little mistake on the on the MPU. So, what would happen to these displays if every one of them got 43 volts instead of 5 volts, right? The whole problem with the displays, like I mentioned, is you can't get new glass. They don't make this anymore. So, you have to buy LED ones, which is fine, but it's, you know, it's a significant expense. So, if you if you fry one of those, you just fried something that can't be uh replaced. It has to be it can't be repaired. It has to be replaced. Okay. So, um it gets five in, but that would have been 43. And you can see it's directly connected to that IC. So, did it fry the IC? probably fried the IC because the where it comes from is just there's just a common 5V rail all through the machine and it touches everything and if it got screwed up everything it went to probably got screwed up. So, we're going to see if we can tell before we put it in. One of the things about the the displays is if you have a problem with them, this chip isn't super cheap. I think they're like five bucks or something. And then the chip on the board isn't super cheap either. And you can fry them by doing something like just unplugging the the connector while it's turned on. So they're kind of sensitive anyway, you know. So I kind of want to make sure that they're all right before I plug them in or at least try to. Okay. So that chip gets 5 volts. And then if you look, it gets, you know, the four signals. I guess there's Okay, that's a blinking signal. Okay. And then a latch strobe signal. They're drawing it as like an output. They're really all inputs, but I guess it just depends on I mean, they're definitely inputs, but um and then the outputs go to the actual display. So, you have A, B, C, D, E, F, and G, which are the um the it's telling the what particular segment to turn on, right? Um, so the segments are all hooked together basically kind of. Um, and so here's a and so that chip is turning on this transistor, an MPS42 segment driver, right? Which is connected to a with a resistor. All right. And then it might turn on this one or this one or this one. And that's how the numbers or the yeah the numbers are actually created. So if if uh there is a one, it's only going to turn on like two of the segments. They don't have the little diagram here. I don't suppose a lot of times they put a little diagram. So Oh yeah, here it is. So to display a one, they may just turn on B and C. So if those two segments are on, it's a one. So that would be this transistor is turned on and this transistor is turned on and this chip is what's turning it on. Now this all happens super fast because they have to do all four of them. Well um all six of them they have to do is that a one and that's a one and that's a one and that's a one and that's a one and that's a one or is this one turned off? Well the way they do that is by timing it. So right when this gets lit up the whole seg the whole digit they turn those two on and that's how that one does it. So that's what the blanking signal and the latch display latch strobe signal are doing. Right? So it's doing it really fast. Literally faster than your eye can catch. That's how it works. If you if you uh used a camera, you might see it slowing down and extra stuff lit up when it shouldn't be and all this stuff, right? And then on the other side up here, you have the digit drivers. So the digit drivers um are also ran from the connector. So this is the same edge connector. It's just other pins on it. And they're just simply turned on. They don't need the decoder chip. They're simply just turned on by the MPU, right? So, if this one's turned on, Q6, um, it and Q12 are turning on A6. Q5 and Q11 are turning on A5, which is the 10,000s, the 100,000, etc., etc. So it's all it's so it turns on let's say that it is timed it where it turns this on and at the same time the information is coming through here that tells it to turn on segments B and C and then that is a one and then it does the next one the next one the next one the next one the next one and when it gets back to this one it either changes it or it basically does it again. So if it if the information has changed by then, it might tell it to do a two this time. And then this one and this one and this one. And it it blanks it too. So it turns it off, you know. So anyway, that's just the layman's understanding of it. It's I'm sure technically that's not exactly how it's working, but that's basically what's going on. So my whole point is the only place that the 5V touches is that one chip. So the glass, which is expensive, didn't get the 5 volt, so it didn't matter. So that wasn't a big deal. That chip might be fried though. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the chip off this one that has the socket because it's the easiest. And we're going to compare it to um one that is hasn't been in a a u a display. I think I've got some new ones laying around. All right, folks. So, the only way I can really think to test them, I guess there's a couple things I can do, but is to just check um check the the the ground pin and the 5volt pin and see if they're connected. like did it short internally, which according to the schematics is pin 16 and pin 8. And I'm getting like plenty of resistance between the two. And I've got a couple other ones here that I had that were pulls from something else back in the day and they seem like they give a similar reading. So, so I'm also going to try sometimes you can take like the the positive probe and put this sucker on diode test and put the positive probe on the ground which is pin 8 and then uh probe uh like the outputs 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 and see if there is a gate between them. So like I just put positive on pin eight and if I check it to pin nine I got nothing. Okay, there we go. So I am getting some kind of relationship there. So positive on pin 8. And this is one of the the ones that we don't suspect that was fried. Pin 8 to pin 10. See how that says 6 pin 8 to pin nine. So 9 10 11 12 13 14 and 15 are our outputs are our outputs. Okay. Um, I'll show you that here in a second on the paperwork, but let me go ahead and check um, one of the ones that this this is the one that's supposed that we think fried. Come on, baby. Oo, doesn't look good. Yeah, I think it's fried. I'll show you how I did it here in a second. This is another Yep. It's freaking fried. All right, the chips fried. Um, let me show you how I did that. All right, so these IC chips, this set like I call this 7400 series logic. It's not really because it's a MC14543, but it's the old I guess uh CMOS logic or whatever. I get I don't know. Whatever you guys get what it is. It's the older IC chips. uh these things the way they operate is they have they have a gate in them basically. So it's like a transistor. It's either on or it's off. It's a gate, you know. So that that relationship that you measure with a with a uh multimeter on a transistor is pretty much present inside of an IC. So, if I take one of these new ones and if I try to check it as if it's like an array of transistors. Sometimes this doesn't work. Sometimes it does. But, so pin eight, I'm going to turn it upside down. This is pin eight. Pin eight is the ground. So, I'm going to take the positive lead and put it on the ground. I know this isn't optimal. And then I'm going to take my negative lead and just see what the gate relationship is to the output pins. So nothing there's no connection like there's nothing right. But if I take this one, you can actually see the voltage drop just like you can if you're checking a transistor or a diode. So between ground and the outputs, I get a measurement and it's between 04 and 7 just like a transistor would be. But on this one, this is the one that was in there. I don't get that it's not there. So why is that? It's because the chips fried. Something inside of it screwed up where that's that gate relationship is no longer there. Now on this one, this is another and these are pools. So it's not like these are brand new ones even. It's on this one too. There's a good one. So that you can check the older logic chips like that sometimes. just use a multimeter on them and just compare them to another one that you've got. Like these are known good ones or we think they're known good ones and I just compared that to it and I'm getting completely different readings. Um the resistance between ground and five seemed the same but the resistance between the outputs and ground seems like it's broken. So it could be that um the five volt got fried or the the ground got fried or whatever. Something inside of it ain't happy. So, we're going to swap that chip. Um, and then we'll try it in the game and see if we can get that display to work. And if we can get it to work, then we'll we'll try the other ones. And now we know that we can kind of check the that relationship. We may be able to do it in the display without removing it from the socket, but they're probably all going to be fried. Okay, so I popped it back in. I have plugged in the connectors on the MPU. Those This is the connector that the display gets its information from. I plugged in these two switch connectors here for the switch matrix. And I've plugged in just this one on the solenoid driver board because you I want to make sure we can check all the solenoids. We're just trying to do one thing at a time. The reason I plugged the solenoid driver one in is so that the test button will work. I'll show you that here in a second. So, let's see if we get anything. Yeah, I see the high voltage on it. All right, cool. So, that is the uh the credit one. So, they're not usually all lit up. So, on the coin door, there is a test button. That button connects I think it's this wire, but it's one of these. And then the the ground for it or uh for whatever reason is on this connector. So, you have to have both unplugged in. So, let's see if we can get into test. All right. So, we're probably in test. And then the next position in text, this is the one where it flashes all the lights, but we don't have the lights in the light board in. The next one is the one where it checks the displays. Perfect. It's hard for you to see it because it looks like it's strobing really crazy. And here in person, it doesn't look like that. That's a little more like what it looks like right there. Yeah. So, all the digits work and uh obviously our MPU is sending out the proper information. So, now it's just a matter of checking all of those chips on the other four displays. Yeah. So, this is more of what I was expecting to see. So, if you look at the first player display, the chip is literally just cracked in half. So, obviously that's a problem. Um, wow. Wonder if we can get a thumbnail out of that here. This is our thumbnail that people should see, right? It needs to be something interesting, though. Maybe like that. Maybe if I clean it a little bit, it'll look better for the thumbnail. All right. So, there you go. Yeah. So, I'm going to remove that one, put a socket on it, and then uh pop it in the machine. All right. So, the second one came out all right. Now, it was up there in the first player position, but I noticed that it had some burning on it whenever I was looking at the glass. So, if you look at the bottom of the sixth digit, there's part of it missing because it's just overheated at some point and burn up a little bit. So, you know, do every time you play the game, it's going to be a oneplayer game. Do you want a bad display like that in your first uh player position? Probably not. But the other ones don't look great. You remember this one had the Well, we don't know what was going on with the solenoid driver board because we uh it burnt up and was had been removed from the game. Um but you know, maybe the voltage was too high and it has burnt the glass a little bit. You can see it really good on this one. See the little black dots? So, you know, now they'll still work like that. It's just they don't look great. Okay. So, let's look at the next one. So, this is has was installed in the game and it's a sevendigit display. So, it's it's it's the wrong display for this game. It's a sixdigit game. So, if you install this, you're always going to have a zero at the end. These six will probably work. I think they just added an extra line, but you know, it's just not it doesn't look right. That's not correct. So, I'm going to look around and see if I've got another six. I hope I do. All right. So, in my stash of stashed parts, I found this one that I had labeled as good. And it's actually pretty nice as far as obviously the black part looks like crap, but you won't even see that with the back glass in. And I can clean that up a little bit. But the uh the glass itself is very clean and lights up very well and doesn't have any burn on it and looks nice. So that'll be a good one for the first player since you're going to be staring at it a lot because you're going to play this game a lot. This is a great game. Supersonic. It's very fast. Okay. Um Oh, by the way, here's the back glass. Back glass is in pretty nice shape. Okay. So that's uh the third one. So, basically, I traded a six-digit on my part shelf for a seven digit now on my part shelf. Those seven-digit ones are harder to find. They're a little more valuable. So, um I'll do that trade all day long. Okay. So, let's pull out another one. All right. So, at first glance, it looks fine, but another way you can tell if the chip is fried is there will be a little bubble on it. Yep. See that? Well, I went too far. always go too far. So, that little bubble is where the chip has exploded. And this is a crack where the chip is cracked in half. So, there's no need to test it. It's bad. My problem is I don't have any more of these that are removed from displays. So, I'm going to have to get it off of a parts display. Luckily, I've got plenty of parts displays. So, what is a parts display? Well, it's one where the glasses broke. or it's one that the glasses burnt so badly that, you know, there's no way in the world you can use it, right? So, I've saved all of the ones that I ever had that were all screwed up. Um, so I could salvage parts off of them. Really, the only thing saving off of them is either the entire board, if you've got one where the board's just really bad, or uh this chip. Okay, so we socketed another one in. I was able to I was able to remove it from this one that has a broken glass. Now, I have no clue how that glass got broke. You know, some people are just really clumsy, but you know, not me. I didn't do it. Um, so I was able to salvage it there. It's one of those things where should I buy more chips or should I just go through and harvest them off of all of these broken ones that I've got? I've probably got I might have 50 or 60 broken displays. Um, it's a shame, too. That one looked clean, but what can you do? I bought a bunch off of a guy one time in West Virginia, and he mailed me like uh the boxes were like 2 feet by two feet cubes, like 24 by 24 inch cubes full of them. And I think there were three boxes and they were all just stacked in there like this with a little bit of bubble wrap and almost every one of them made it just fine like that. Um, so years ago I got tons of displays off of one guy. And then whenever you do a machine, you've always got a couple that are just either they're broke or it's missing or whatever. And you know on our channel we like to part stuff back in. So we part stuff together all the time. But I'm to the point now where I'm about out of these. I've got I mean I've got plenty of broken ones, but I don't have that many uh that are still in good shape. That one we just put in the machine. Um I might have one or two more. So I'm down to like having like two extra displays of the six digit. I do have some seven digits there. All right. So this one we're going to test. Uh it was one of the ones that was in there, but it it does have those that burn that I showed you a second ago. Um so maybe we'll put this down on player three. You ain't going to play a three-player. Who plays Come Come on, people. Nobody plays a three player. Who the hell plays a three? Nobody's going to do that. You're not going to play a three-player game. It's usually one, two, or It's always an even number. It Why would you do three? Doesn't make any sense. Okay, so let's test it. All right, that's four. We're looking good. Wonder if it'll let me zoom. And look how it does the strobe thing on the camera. you. People always tell me if you change the camera setting, it don't really work like that because I can't change it to the exact strobe of the displays. You got to sync it to the displays and I don't have a camera that nice. Okay, so we're down to We just need one more and then all of our displays are back from the dead. But we have confirmed that. Yep, it fried all the freaking displays. So, here's number five. Let's see. What do you think? What's your opinion? Will we get one that was just fine since I just blanket said that we fried all of them? Ooh, blurry. [Music] Trying to see what it looks like. You know, you can physically inspect it. And so, again, I didn't just plug them in because I don't know. I don't want to screw up other things. Well, you know, that's an older looking chip and it doesn't look damaged. So, I'm going to do what I did earlier and I'm going to check pin 8, which is the ground. And I'm going to compare it using a diode test to pins 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, which are the output pins, and just see if I get a voltage drop like there's a gate connection there, as I call it. Well, I got to tell you, it tests fine. It tests like the other ones we're testing um out of the out of circuit that were the good ones that are working in the machine right now. So, maybe this one didn't Maybe this one survived it. So, let me show you two other things that I always check that I've been checking on the other ones. I don't like that. Two other things that I always check. There are six resistors, one for each digit. R1, R3, R5, R seven, R9, and R11. Another tongue twister. Sally sells sea shells. Um, those are 100K resistors. If those burn up, and they will burn up, but if they burn up, you lose one of those digits. All six of these are in spec. The only other thing that I really ever test before I put it in there. Now, you could have a transistor bad. This one appears to have been replaced, right? So, you could have a transistor bad, but I don't ever test them. I just turn the game on and if one of the digits is missing, I start looking at the transistors or one of the segments is missing. But this connector here gets really bad solder joints on it. So, I wonder if the 5V joint wasn't right and so the 43 volts couldn't get to the chip. I wonder if something like that could have possibly happened. Uh so test point one is the 5VT which is in fact pin 20. Is that Oh my god. Is that what happened? Yeah, that's the 5 volt. So, I think what happened was the solder joint was so damn bad on that pin that the voltage couldn't get to the chip and so the chip survived. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Okay, so I'm going to re clean those up and resolder it and then we'll pop it in the machine and see if that one works. Well, so of the five, that one survived. That sevendigit one might be all right as well. I I just, you know, it's the wrong one. So, um, but I'm real happy with that. Basically, we were we had to swap the one, the seven-digit one, but we were able to repair all four of the other ones. Um, they seem to be working just fine. Are they blinking faster than they usually are, though? H can't remember. I haven't done a ballet in a while. They may be the timing might be slightly different, which would be a board thing, but it's so perfect. You wouldn't think that would be a problem. I'm probably just tripping. I probably just can't believe that we fixed it. All right, so we got it in unknown condition. Worked on the power supply a little bit or I don't even remember if we did that. I guess. Yeah. Worked on the power supply a little bit. Turned it on. The board had a short in it. The MPU was still plugged in. Fried every chip in the game, but it had already been fried. That's why two of the boards were missing. The lamp board and the solenoid driver board. Uh, and the um sound board had chips blown off of it. And the MPU already had a big burn mark right in the middle of it. But it's the same MPU that's in there. We fixed it. So, um, found that, reworked the or worked on the power supply. They had the wires in the wrong spot, but they were correct. They had just swapped grounds with grounds, so it wasn't like a wasn't really a problem, but I swapped them all back, put a new connector on it. Got a parts solenoid board and built one out of two or three of them. Um, put it in the game, used the original MPU that had every chip on it fried. some of them burnt. Cleaned all the soot off of it. Um, fixed all that up. Fixed the battery damage on it. Fixed that MPU board. And now have fixed all of the displays. They actually look pretty good. A couple of them have a little burns here and there, but this thing's going to be kind of a beater game anyway because the cabinets kind of beat up and the playfield. We're going to fix the playfield though. It's coming, folks. It's coming. Stay tuned. So, uh, yeah, this thing's coming together really nice, I think. Um, it's talking to us a little bit. We can finally see that it's working. It's got to be working to be doing this. So, I hope you enjoyed it. Leave your comments below letting us know what you think. What would you do in this situation? Would you take the trouble to fix all this? I had a bunch of people tell me that no, they would not. It wasn't worth the trouble. It wasn't worth the money. Bunch of negative nies here on the channel sometimes. But, uh, we got it going. So, there you go. Uh, now, if you like watching us work on these Old Valley games, they're my absolute favorite. You know, I change my mind on that all the time, though. I really like the Gotlib games from the 80s, like the the weird ones like um uh Genesis and Rock. We did a Rock. That was a cool one. Stuff like that. But I love these old BS, too. I've got a Playboy here that we're going to be doing pretty soon. I've been wanting to get one of those for a while to do on the channel. See if I get banned or not. I don't think I will. Um, but if you love watching us work on these old valleys, if you're a ballet person, check out this little playlist. We did a whole playlist of ballet stuff that we've worked on. We'll see you on the next video. Next time we have to work on the lamp board.