This Bally PLAYBOY Pinball Machine Wants To Work...

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Joe's Classic Video Games back with another cool pinball repair video for you today. Today we are working on Bal's famous Playboy pinball machine from 1978. If you didn't see our previous video on this, make sure to check it out. Uh we're going to work on the playfield a little bit today and work on some of the boards. And uh so we'll jump right in it. Joey's going to disassemble and clean the playfield and we'll see what kind of condition it ends up in. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Hey. Hey. Hey. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Hey, heat. Hey, heat. All right, I got the playfield cleaned. As clean as it's going to get. It stinks. Somebody put myar over top of wear. They do that a lot. If they would have cleaned that before putting the myar on, it' probably look a lot better. But they didn't. So now the wear is underneath the myar. Well, I got to let all this dry so Ronnie can come in and touch all that up. So I think I'm going to move on to the displays on these valleys. They get bad solder joints on them. We always reflow them anyway. Even though one, two, and three look fine. We're still going to take them out, refflow all the solder. I'm hoping that that's going to make the credit display better. It's hard to tell on camera, but that's a good one. That one's kind of flickering. Usually, we can reflow that and it'll probably fix it. Display number four is totally out. It's broke. But I'm going to take them all out, reflow them, put them back in, save Ronnie a little bit of time. And that's going to be that. Maybe we'll look underneath the microscope and see if we see any bad solder on it just for just for fun. Our new microscope they gave us. There it is. Can you see it? Bam. See that ring all the way around it? See that one? It's always usually the end ones. Uh, so the first and second one are just they're totally messed up. The third one really doesn't look that good either. Well, none of them really look good. Let's just be honest here. See how the other side look. Yep, we made it to the other side. We're to the other side. Broke, broke, broke, broke. Probably broke. And at the other side, broke and broke. So, I'm going to go through resolder all of the little pins on all of the displays. I'm even going to do the other ones that are appear to be working because they're working now, but how long are they going to work? So, we're just going to go ahead and reflow them. Get it all out of the way. Okay. And this is that Tom Lav microscope they gave us. It's pretty nice. That's the first time I ever used it. Ronnie messed with it on the other one. Well, it's pretty nice. Pretty nice. I think you might need to get one of those. It's not even in our way. It's pretty I like it. I'm not just saying that. So, you buy one. To be honest with you, I really don't care if you buy one. But I don't know how this thing works. But it goes over here out of the way. So it's not even in our way. That's why I like it. It's over there. I've got all this area to work with. If I wanted, I can just pull it back. Bam. Anyway, back to work. Going to reflow all this stuff. Yeah, buddy. They're all working like new money. I realize that if it's flickering a little bit in the video, but that's just on the video. Just imagine that you're here in person and they all look brand new and crystal clear. Okay, you're looking at that Elvis pinball machine over there, aren't you? Well, don't even worry about that. We're not to that point yet. I I got that yesterday. I had to add it to the lineup so everybody can say, "When are you going to fix the Elvis? It's been in the background. It's been in the background." I know it's been in the background. I'm the one that put it in the background. Come on now, people. Come on now. I got a story for you. Do you guys like my stories or should I just not even do it? Let me know if you like the stories. I guess it depends on the story, doesn't it? So, guy calls the other day. Stuff like this happens every day, by the way. Guy calls. I see you on YouTube. I love the channel. I said, "Oh, that's cool. Thanks for watching. We appreciate it." He said, "Yeah, I'm trying to figure out what games you got." And I told him the website and everything. So he said, "Okay, I'll check it out and call you back." So he calls me back, said, 'Well, you mostly got arcade games. And I said, 'Yeah, we don't get too many pinballs for sale. And he's like, "Oh, I thought it was a place where I could come play pinball." And I said, "No, there's a uh" I rambled off a couple places here locally because I I figured if he was coming here, he might go somewhere else locally. And he's like, "Well, how far is that from me?" And I said, "Well, it's about 20 minutes from our store here." And he was like, "Yeah, but how far is it from me?" And I said, "Well, I don't know, sir. I don't know where you are." Then he paused and he laughed and he's like, "Oh, yeah. I'm I'm down in Greer, South Carolina." So, I called I told him a couple places to check out. And one of the places I told him to check out was the Asheville Pinball Museum. I told him, "Asheville Pinball Museum." Does anybody know what his next question was? I'm gonna give you a minute. Maybe Nolan knows. Nolan is a viewer. His next question, do they have pinballs there? I just paused. Yes, they have pinballs at the Asheville Pinball Museum. This is what I got got to go through, guys, every day. But anyway, that really did happen. I don't know where Ronnie's going what he's going to do when he comes in. He may work on the playfield. He may work on the power supply. He may do the solenoid board in the back. He may put a new battery on the MPU and work on it. I'm just filming random stuff here and he he will edit it into the video wherever he sees fit. But got the displays working. We'll see what he's going to mess with next. I still can't tell what this thing is. So, that's the first thing we're going to hand. It's disgusting. What the It looks like a little monster, but it hasn't moved. So, it must be dead, whatever it is. Okay. So, I'm going to take that out and then put it to the trash can. So, when I took the thing loose, it fell. All right. So, now we get to see closeup. What in the hell am I looking at? It's hard as a rock. Somebody said it might be like rat bait. I didn't know about that, but let me see if I can look it up online. It looks like that's what it must be. It's mice bait. Uh-huh. We got you, sucker. All right, folks. So, here is the power supply. Um, now, if you notice on the pre on the first video, well, on this video, um, none of the playfield lights work. the GI lights work, the general illumination, but none of the controlled lamps work. Um, which we probably have a blown fuse accounting for that. And, uh, this would probably be where the problem is. So, the power supply basically AC voltage comes in 120 volts here in the States. Um, I think it's just a part number. I don't think that actually has anything to do with it. You can change the input voltage with some jumpers somewhere. Um, it's all in the schematics. And then it creates several voltages out of it that come out of this transformer that transforms the voltage into the voltages that the that the P the U pinball machine needs. Now, it doesn't need 120 volts. So, there's nothing there before it gets up to here. Let me think about the wiring of that. Yeah, it goes through the switches and stuff first. There is a outlet, a service outlet inside the cabinet that is 120 volts, so you can plug in a soldering iron or something to it or a little light or something if you're if you're servicing it. Um, but then it comes up here 120 volts gets turned into several volts. So, I think this is the fuse for the actual input. Now, we know that one must be fine because uh the game is turning on. Let me see if I can pry it out of there. Pink. So, it is a 3 amp slowblow. Now, let me point out that the one next to it is a 20 amp. So, why would the one that's coming in off the wall only be 3 amp, but one of the things inside of it is 20 amp. You'd think that since this thing it takes 20 amps to blow it, it would blow this one first cuz it's only 3 amps, right? But it it all depends on the voltage, the actual voltage that it's sync. So, for instance, this 3 amp one is fused across the 120 volts. So, 120 volts uh would have to pull more than 3 amps of 120 volts uh through the transformer or shorted somewhere to blow this fuse. Well, this 20 amp one. I don't know what. Let's see. It's the third bridge rectifier. Let's look in the schematics and just see what that goes to. All right. So, here are the schematics that Keith brought with the machine. This is the original Playboy manual from Valley. It's pretty cool. But they're all the same on the early pinball machine. So, I think a lot of times a lot of uh uh new pinball people find our videos and they use them to help fix their game. We get all kinds of comments like that and all kinds of emails about that. But I think what a lot of people don't realize is that yeah, we're working on a Ballet Playboy, but this is the same as all the early BS and it's pretty similar uh even to um some of the later BS after they changed the power supply. For instance, the one that they changed it to is almost identical to this one. So, my point is, yeah, I'm showing you how to work on a Ballet Playboy pinball machine, but it's also the same as Matahari, Strikes, and Spares, Eightball. All of those early games have this same exact setup, same exact parts, same exact problems. So, it all translates. There are, I think, 60, something like 60 Ballet pinball machines that use this same board set. maybe 100 between 60 and 100. So that's how um that's how prevalent this design was. Okay, so bridge rectifier three. Just making the point here. Uh or maybe we should say it does say bridge rectifier three. Which one's three? One, two, three. Okay, that's the test. We should look at the fuse, I guess. F5. F5. That's the one we're looking at. It's a 20 amp fuse, but it's 20 amps at 7 volts, right? So, that's why it is so much higher. It's because uh the voltage is so much lower. It's not 120 volts. So, yeah, you would have to run 7 volts. you'd have to run 20 amps before it would blow this fuse and it would not blow this three amp fuse, especially since you have the transformer dividing it, right? So, the amperage on a fuse is very important. If if one says 20 amps, you need to replace it with one that says 20 amps. If one says 3 amps, you need to replace one one that says 3 amps. You can't do a five where there it wants a three. Um, they specifically designed it for that. And so what'll happen if you do put the wrong one in is the fuse won't blow when it needs to blow. So you can run into problems like catching wires on fire and things like that. So it's always go by the amperage on the fuses. Okay. F4 here. 5 amp. Let's see what it's supposed to be for. It is for the solenoid voltage. Well, we know the solenoid voltage works because the game is booting up, right? Now, this 7.3 volts AC is the voltage for the general illumination. And we are getting all of the GI lights working. You know, we're just not getting the controlled voltage working. Um, okay. So, moving along to F3. Now, you can't really tell if a fuse is good by looking at it, but you can tell if a fuse is bad by looking at it. So, what do I mean by that? Um, if the fuse looks good, it might still be bad. If the fuse looks bad, it's bad. It's definitely bad. So, yeah, you should look at them and do a visual check, but you can't really tell without using a a multimeter to see if this side is connected to this side. Okay. So, F3, which one is that? Well, it's down here. It's part of the 12 volts AC. Okay. Then it runs through a bridge rectifier and a rect a bridge rectifier uh or even just a couple diodes will rectify the AC voltage to DC voltage. So, after it runs through that, it's now DC voltage of 12 volts, right? Or 11.9. Well, I just happen to know that what this is used for is it goes up to the solenoid driver board, which we're going to look at next, and gets turned into uh 5 volts. And then the 5 volts runs all of the chips everywhere on the machine. Okay. You can see there's no chips on this board because it doesn't need them. It's just literally doing diodes and stuff to change power around, to transform power, to rectify power. They call this the transformer because it transforms 120 volts AC into 12 volts AC, 8 volts AC, 8 volts AC, 173 volts AC and 49 volts AC. It transforms it, right? And then it goes to this board which is they call the rectifier board because it rectifies it. So it turns it from AC to DC, AC to DC. One AC just goes straight through AC to DC, AC to DC. So alternating current to direct current. So this is the rectifier board, right? And they also use it as a convenient place to put all the fuses, etc. The test connections, the connectors, so you can plug in the playfield and the cabinet and the the uh back box. Right. So F3 also not going to be our problem. F2. Now we're getting somewhere now. Let's see what F2 looks like. Ah, looks all right. F2. F2 is a 75 amp. So it's not even one amp. And it's running the displays. Now again, because you're at 230 volts, the fuse is actually smaller, right? because the voltage is higher. The the amps, the voltage, and the watts have a, you know, a a a relationship, right? But we know this one's good because the displays, they're all working. And that leaves us with F1. Now, F1, if we look at it, let's go ahead and pull it out and see what we think. The top of the fuse has like grease on it. That looks fine. Let's see if it looks blown. It doesn't look blown to me. It's bent and everything, but it doesn't look to me like it's blown. Okay, so F1 10 amps. Here we go. So it turns 7.8 volts AC into 5.4 volts DC through and it runs through this bridge rectifier. Okay. So that is our voltage that's being used for the lamps that are not working. So go to here switched illumination bus. So the bus is the power bus. So they're basically saying um that this is the line the bus line it's to move things right uh this is the line to get the power from the rectifier board to the switched illumination right so basically that that power is that wire is going to go to every one of the the the lights that get turned on and off. Right? And uh if you go the other way on this connector, it says the same thing up here. Now this one says playfield. The switched illumination on the playfield is not working. And this one says backbox. The switched illumination in the back box is not working. So what's our problem? How come this isn't working? Well, it still could be something here, here, and here. Um, or it could be a bad connection, but that's a little harder because there's actually two connectors, one for the playfield and one for the back box. Neither one of them's working. And everything else seems to be working. So, that's kind of strange. Um, but we're on to the right area, right? We're at least looking in the right place. So, whenever I'm troubleshooting, this is how I do it. I go pretty slowly and I just start at the beginning. So, we know this board is getting power because the game's coming on and everything, but this is the first place that that power comes from for the switch illumination. Now, if we still had it in the game, we could just check right there and see if it has 5.4 volts DC on test point one, but I already took it out. So, what we're going to do is we're going to check this bridge rectifier and see if it's all right. Um, we know this one must be because the board is booting up and it needs 5 volts to boot up, which it gets from this 11.9 volts. So, this must be fine. Maybe not perfect, but it's at least working. And we know these four dodes must work because the displays are lighting up, which is what this voltage is for. That's these four dodes here. But the one we're having a problem with is this, right? Huh? Oh, no. Not that one right there. That one we know is working too because the game will not boot up without the solenoid voltage. 43 volts. That's how you get the seventh flash. We talked about that on the previous video. So, we know this must be working. It might be off. You know, it might not be right, but it's at least working, right? So, our problem has to be in this area or it could be on the other end of of the spectrum. Let me show you what I mean by that. So each one of those switched illumination lamps gets a bus signal that power coming from this board so that it has the voltage to light up. The other side of the bulb is connected to a wire and it's on a valley. They're individual wires that runs all the way back to this board which is the lamp driver board. And so what what this board's job is to do is what this board's job to do is um the computer controls it of course and tells it when to turn on a lamp. And the way it turns on a lamp is it connects that lamp's wire to ground. So without that wire connected to ground, yeah, it's got voltage but it doesn't have the ground. And without ground and voltage, the lamp won't work. Both basically the one side of the wire is not hooked up. Right? So whenever this whenever this board grounds that um it does its thing. So how does it ground it? Well, if you look here, there is a connection to ground that is a ground symbol on the lamp driver board. And let's say that U4, let's say this last one right here, pin 19. The computer sends addresses and the lamp data to this to these decoder chips on the lamp board, right? And so this chip gets address lines and a data line, right? And it decodes it and says, "Okay, it wants me to turn down number 19." So when a certain number of these is turned on and this one's turned on and it's doing it's a certain certain uh uh things are met, one of these lines will turn on. Okay. So when that line turns on and it may ground I don't know if it grounds or if it uh if it goes to five. It depends on what these u how these uh transistors work. But let's say that it let's say that it has to go to five. So it makes 195 and so it sends 5 volts out to this transistor number Q53. And the transistor is uh turned on by that voltage which allows the voltage that is here to run through this diode. Now on a in a diode you know the line blocks voltage. So the voltage can't run that way but it can run that way. Right? So it allows the voltage that's present at the lamp through the lamp and then all the way back the wire to here and it's about 5.4 volts or whatever we were looking at is present on all of these, right? And then when this transistor is turned on, it allows the voltage to flow. And the voltage will flow to ground. It kind of works backwards and that, but you get my whole point. Will allow it to flow to ground, which connects this wire to ground and makes the lamp work. And that's just how they work. So these chips ground all of the wires. So if you had a problem with this board, like for instance, this board wasn't in there, none of the lamps would ever turn on because they would never get connected to the ground on the board on this board because the board's not there. Or if you had a problem with the ground on this board, uh the voltage was would never ground because there's a problem with the ground on the board. Maybe maybe this connection here isn't actually connected to ground. There is a connector over here that has pins four, 5, 6, 7, 14, 15, 16, 17 are data. Pin 13 is the strobe. Pin three is the 5 volts. So the 5 volts is needed to make all these chips run. So if the 5 volts was missing, it also wouldn't work, right? But then you see pins 1 2 11 and 12 are all connected to ground. So if one of those connections is still making contact, then the board should have ground. Um, you know, I could see maybe pin one isn't connected or maybe pin one and two aren't connected, but 11 and 12 right in the middle of the connector, they're probably getting ground. Um, so our problem is either here or it's on this lamp driver board. Or it very well could be every bulb in the game is burnt out. You wouldn't think that would be a thing because the GI um the GI bulbs are most of them are working. So, you know, so that's just whenever you have a problem like this, you just you just reduce it down to the simplest possible things. We need to see if everything on this board's working right. It's mainly connections and we need to see if the connections are working here. Blah blah blah. So, the first thing I'm going to do though, like I said, is test this bridge rectifier. So, uh that will tell us if it's worth a crap. So, the way we're going to do that is with a multimeter. And the way these work is it sends a little juice through here that gets caught here and then it meters it. Simple. So, how do you check a m a a a bridge rectifier? If you look real close, see how it's marked AC right here? The one across from it is also AC. You can see it here. AC there and AC there. So, on a bridge rectifier, two of them are connected to the alternating current. The AC, that's the input. And then the output is here's a negative and then here's a positive. So, this is one bridge rectifier. This is two. This is three. They all have a positive and a negative, right? So two are AC and two are one is positive and one is negative. So the way you check it is they are it's essentially four diodes arranged in a square. And so we'll do this middle one first because we know it works. You put your hot lead, the positive on the negative, right? And then you check from there to the AC connection on diode test. And we've got 0.5. That's good. So you want between 0 4 and 7 or so. And then we're going to check from the negative to the other AC. Same thing. 0.5. We just tested the diode to here and the diode to here. Now we're going to do the same thing the other way. We're going to put the the negative the ground lead basically on the one AC connection. I mean the on the positive connection. So ground on positive backwards you know and then check to the AC lines again 0.5 and point five. Now we'll test this one. I got to say though I usually don't see where it goes open and just turns the power completely off. Usually if you get a problem with one of them I'm going open you still get like half the voltage or something which maybe we've got. But I didn't see any of those lamps glowing or anything. So, positive on the negative. That one's fine. And that one's fine. Okay. And then negative on the positive. That That one's fine. And that one's fine. Okay. So on the bench, the bridge rectifier tests as if it's fine. Um I have seen though where once you put them in the game, they tested fine, but they're not actually fine. But we'll see. So that's step one. It looks like our bridge rectifier is just fine. So let's look at the back of the of the um I guess I should just let me let's check the fuse first in situ. It could be that the fuse is bad and just looks good. All right. So, what I'm trying to do is check the fuse but in its holder. So, you can do this and it tells you, yeah, the fuse is um you know, it has 0.5 ohms resistance across it. So, it's connected from here to here. But what's more important than that is is the fuse in the connector connected across. It's not great. See like the four five I'm I'm probably not getting a good bite on the actual metal there. Um you want that as close to zero as possible, but it's low enough that that's probably not our problem. So the there we don't seem to have a problem with the fuse. I'm going to clean it obviously. And we don't seem to have a problem with the bridge rectifier. So now let's check the back and see if there's a problem with the solder on these connectors. Again, it would be rare for both of them to be screwed up, though. I just noticed that the screw is missing out of that bridge rectifier. So, is that a clue? Huh? Is it a clue? You think it's a clue? It might be a clue. Just saying. All right. So, here's the back of the board. And the pin for this voltage that we're looking for is actually right here and right here. Those two. And then they do this weird thing on the front. So see how that's at pin seven there. If you look, see that trace there? I think it goes to it as well. I might be wrong though. It might go to pin six. See that trace on the front? It goes through a couple. That's probably a different one actually. But anyway, if you look at it, the solder actually looks fine on those. So, that's not going to be our problem unless the pins themselves are all screwed up. So, it's probably something on the lamp board, but we'll see. We'll check the voltage after we fix it all up. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to clean all of these pins and then I'm going to resolder them a little bit. Put a little more solder on. Looks like somebody's already been doing that down here. Um, I don't really see much that's even an issue on them, though. It's The thing's in pretty good shape really for its age. Of course, I'll still get lots of complaints from the video, but that's all right. Um, so, uh, yeah, I'm going to resolder those, clean it all up, and then we'll put it back in the machine, and then we'll test the voltage. I don't see anything wrong with this that that definitely needs uh repaired or anything, but we had to check and we had to give it a one over and make sure that it's nice and strong so that all the boards have a nice reliable power supply. All right, folks. So, we've got it back in the machine and we've got the machine turned on. So, we're going to check the voltage. All I plugged in was the plug from the cabinet. So, the power is coming into the bottom of the cabinet. It's going to that service switch we talked about. It's going to the onoff switch. Uh, and then it's going uh it's going through a line filter. And then it's coming back up here on a couple of these wires. It's powering up the transformer and it's powering up the rectifier board. And uh then there's a couple little wires here that do like the um the the uh the light bulbs on the front of the cabinet on the coin door, things like that. But most of the cabinet is not plugged in right now. The back box isn't. none of these boards are. Um, and the playfield isn't. And the only reason I'm doing that is because we're just going to check the voltages. So, on this I've showed it a hundred times, but on this rectifier board, there is a good ground right here at the bottom of this resistor. I've got it set on DC, and we'll check our uh our uh test points. So, this is test point five. 46 volts. That's the solenoid voltage. You don't need any of them to be exact because they're they're rectified but they're not regulated. Okay. So 45 that's good or 49 whatever it was. Pin four you will not get a DC reading on because that's actually an AC voltage. That's the one for the general illumination lamps. So there's our 7.2 or whatever that we saw in the schematics. Back to DC test point three. 11.92 it's supposed to be. It's something like 13 volts. Again, it's not regulated. So, but it's there. You see it. And we already knew that though, like I said, because the uh the boards are booting up. Test point two, 100 volts. So, it's supposed to be 230 or something like that. Um, that's just what it usually measures if you don't have the the back box plugged in because it goes up to the solenoid driver board up here that has a capacitor on it that lifts the voltage up. Again, not looking for exact numbers, just something close. Now, here's test point one. This is the important one. 5.7. So, our voltage is actually there. There's nothing wrong with the power supply. And there was nothing wrong with the power supply, but I didn't check it first. So, why didn't I just check it? Blah blah. It's because I wanted to work through the power supply and make sure that it's going to be reliable. So, I went through and resolder, checked everything, looked at the fuses, made sure they were all right, resoldered all the connectors on the on the the pins on the connectors, etc., etc. So, now I know that that power supply is fine. I've looked at it was in pretty good shape anyway. We know all about it. That's not going to be a problem. So, we actually do have some of them working. H I wonder if this thing just doesn't have a a track mode. Harley, some of them are working. Could just be that there's not much of an attract mode. Something you can do on these too is you can wiggle the connectors on the lamp board. You don't ever want to do that with this connector because this is the one that does the displays. That will actually that can cause you serious problems on your displays that Joe resoldered earlier. Um it doesn't like that. But for the lamps, you can do that. So you can unplug the lamps, plug them back in while it's turned on without a problem. H. Yeah, I think they're just most of them are burnt out. It still could be a problem on the board though, I guess. But did we have that going earlier? I don't think we had anything before, did we? Did we have anything on the back box before? Let's look back at the video. Well, as you just saw in the video, yeah, none of them were working, but now the voltage is there and some of them are working. I think a lot of them are probably just burn out. So, how come they weren't working and now they are? Well, what I would guess is it was a bad connection on that first fuse. You saw how the fuse looked kind of dirty on the ends. Maybe it wasn't making good contact. I don't know. Remember, the plugs weren't plugged in when we first got it and then I plugged it in. I don't know. Probably bad connection on the fuse, but we'll watch it. We certainly got a bunch of them to replace, though. But we'll do that whenever we work through it a little farther. At least now we know that the power supply itself is working good. Everything's cool. Now, the actual connectors, someone has repinned the connectors at some point in its life. You see how they they're not burnt or anything? Someone has replaced those and put new connectors on it at some point. So, that probably isn't a great idea having that in there. So, uh I'll put that back together and uh we'll keep working through it. But there you go. So, I hope you enjoyed it so far. We'll come back next time and work on it a little more. So, y'all have a good evening and we'll see you on the next video. Now, if you like watching these old valley videos, uh we've done plenty in the past. Here's another one that we did that was of a of a great game called Matahari. See you on the next video.