Repairing Bally's Infamous BABY PAC-MAN Pinball / Arcade Game !

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Joe's Classic Video Games back with another cool arcade game repair video for you this evening. Which one you think we're going to work on today? Maybe the fun house. Maybe the Super Mario Brothers. Maybe the bingo machine. Maybe the trophy gun. Maybe the sharpshooter. We got a Solar Quest over there. Battle zone. Jerk Ball. No, don't think so. Maybe. No. No. No. No. Maybe. No. No. No. No. We're almost not working on these just to mess with the people in the comments because they're like, "When are you going to work on the fun house? Oh, I can't wait to see the Super Mario Brothers." We're going to get to it one of these days. The whole thing is it's just me and Ronnie. We kind of just work on whatever the heck we feel like working on. That's just how it is. Honestly, this Super Mario Brothers we could probably fix in a day or two. We just haven't felt like doing it yet. There's only two of us and there's lots of stuff to do around here. It's not just like we're sitting around. We got to run the game store. We got to do a bunch of repairs for people. We even got to clean the bathrooms. I mean, it's a whole thing. It's just We got to sell the t-shirts. I got to ship those out. I got to do all kinds of stuff. I got deliveries I got to make. I got to go buy machines. I got to do this. I got to do that. There's tons of stuff. And we just haven't got around to working on the Super Mario Brother yet. Okay, it's coming. It won't be much longer. I think we're going to try to get this ready by Christmas. It is what's October? Is it October? It's October 12th, I think, or so right now. It's coming. I think we'll get it in before Christmas. Now, the fun house. Maybe next Christmas. Okay. Haven't had this Elvis very long. But today, I think we're going to start on this baby Pac-Man. We kind of got caught up on a lot of our customer repairs. I don't think we Yeah, I think we're pretty much caught up on the customer repairs. So, now it's time to tackle one of our projects in the row over here. These have been sitting around for a while. I got this baby Pac-Man maybe I'm going to say 6 months ago or so. So, a guy from Columbia, South Carolina wanted to sell me this and I really didn't feel like going to Columbia, South Carolina. And it was upstairs or something. I can't remember. It was in his office something or another. And I just didn't at the time I didn't feel like going to Columbia. It's I don't know what was going on. But our friend Trevor lives in Colombia. So I did one of these little beep beep texty texty said hey Trevor buddy old pal what you doing and he was like not much what's up and I was like you think you can come get go get that baby Pac-Man for me and Trevor really likes Pac-Man so he was all about it oh yeah I go get that baby Pac-Man for you and uh so he went over there and got it and uh he needed to come down here to pick up his juke box I had for from anyway. So, it all worked out. But basically, I got this baby Pac-Man here. I'm going to have to dig it out. The uh apparently the guy has had it for a long time and it's actually in pretty good shape. A lot of the baby Pac-Man's you see, all this is down to wood. It does have some uh damage on the bezel here. The marquee looks really nice. Play thread's pretty good. Herlay will clean up pretty good probably. The bend has some wear on it. Typical This cabinet's made out of that pressed wood stuff and it just if it gets any moisture on it at all, it'll expand a little bit. You'll see here in a little while. Side art looks pretty good. That'll probably clean up. But the story goes is this guy used to work for an operator and the operator let him pick out one game in the back room to take home. And this was the game that he picked because he liked how it had the pinball and the regular Pac-Man on it. if you haven't played this game before. It's basically a pinball machine, but then you can go into a certain mode and it'll throw it up to the screen here and then you're playing Pac-Man. So, you play Pac-Man a while, then you play pinball a while, then you play Pac-Man a while. But these are pretty problematic. But luckily, I took a lot of time and checked a lot of this stuff out earlier today, believe it or not. I didn't have much going on. So, I went through and I made a very detailed list of what was wrong with just about every game in this room. I may have missed a couple. I think I missed the Solar Quest and the Battle Zone. But, let me go get I can't quite remember what was wrong with this one. Let me go get my list. I got it over here. Let's see if I can find Baby Pac-Man on there. Let's see. Oh, there it is. Baby Pac-Man. Oh, that's right. It's broke. That's right. Okay. Well, that makes it easy, I guess, now that we know what's wrong with it. I guess I'm going to pull it out and we'll open it up and see what's going on. Well, the back door was locked, but luckily the control panel was unlocked and the bezel was able to come out pretty easy. So, I just took the glass out, the bezel out, and I was able to get to that lock, and that lock. They had it locked up tight. I could have drilled the locks out, but we don't want to do that. All right. So now you can see why these things have lots of problems. So this is just like a uh a ballet pinball machine board. This is the exact same board from a like a late 70s early 80s valley. But do you see the problem? Probably. Look at all that corrosion. It Well, it starts over here. Well, actually, it's all the way up there. Look, it's all the way around the board. Goes all the way around up into this socket. Probably all around through here. It's probably messing up that connector pretty good. That connector too. Bunch there. So this is the MPU and this is what they call the Vidiot board. Vidiot board. It pretty much communicates and tells it when to play the Pac-Man part or when to play the pinball part. I know these boards have a lot of problems, but it looks like most of our problem is probably going to be up here on the MPU. Of course, this is the light board here. I guess it's kind of a combination solenoid and light board. Yep. You know, if you read it'll tell you things. Lamp, solenoid, driver board. I pretty much knew that. But I've only had a handful of these Baby Pac-Mans. And the reason for that is because I know they're problematic. So, it's hard for me to buy one and sell it because it's going to have problems after I sell it. So, I usually don't buy them because it's just going to be a headache for me. If I even if I get it fixed and I sell it to somebody, it may very well have a problem down the line that I'm going to have to work on again. And that's typically why I stay away from these things. But, I got a really good deal on this. The price was right, so I figured I'd buy it, make a good video out of it anyway. But, it's still got all the paperwork on the back door. That's pretty cool. So, you could use just about any MPU from a valley of this error, but you know, you got to update some stuff. I know that power board down there gets a lot of bad solder on it from time to time. I've had a bunch of those go bad. And here's a 49. Well, I guess this is a 4800 13 in monitor. One of the best monitors they ever made. The 4900 and the 4,800. Of course, now that I say this one, this one's probably going to be a nightmare. But typically, these monitors will just run. They'll work forever. I'll take it out. I'll cap it, of course, and reflow some stuff. But this monitor probably works still. If you if we plug it in right now, it's probably going to work. The monitor anyway. Then we got Baby Pac-Man upright one49. Wonder if we got anything else somewhere else that says that. Not that it really matters, but I thought for the sake of the video, it might be kind of cool. You got your tilt mechanism up there, just like you would have in a regular pinball machine. Power cord here. Looks like we got to this one just in time. The mice had already got in there and started eating up some of the paperwork and stuff that was in there probably. Here's a better look at the side. This side's in pretty good shape. It's a shame that got scratched up like that. And then this side over here, some idiot was taking off probably one of these licensing stickers and totally screwed up this side. But other than that, this side's pretty good. Yellow is probably the hardest color to touch up. It's going to be pretty hard to touch that spot up and not be able to notice it. I could just throw a Joe's video game sticker over it. What do you think? But looks like it's all there. You want to plug it in and see what happens? I don't test none of that crap down there. I just plug it in, see what's broke. Okay, you start at the wall. See, there's here it is. You check make sure you don't have any cuts. I kind of checked that out earlier as I was pulling it out. Yeah, it looks fine. Let's go with it. What do you think? All right. [Music] Okay. Nothing's going to come on because we've got that interlock. And that may be off, too. I don't know. But nothing's smoking yet. Okay. Nothing's smoking yet. And I didn't hear my monitor come on. So, they must have it off here. Here we go. You ready? Well, there it went. Didn't I say this board had a lot of problems? This video board, it literally caught on fire. Well, that ain't looking good. I was kind of hoping I could just clean the chips, swap this board, and we'd be playing Baby Pac-Man once I capped the monitor. Now look what you done did. Well, now that it's caught on fire, I may just pass this back off to Ronnie. What do you think? That may be my best plan of action. All righty. I guess I'm going to go home now. See you guys later. I was just kidding. I was just kidding. May still pass it off to Ronnie, but I did want to see what was smoking. So, C 44 burn up. And I'm pretty sure C42 was burning up. Don't know why. It does say this is the power supply section. Does anybody know what that hippie said long time ago? It's almost 30 years ago now. was about 25 about 25 years ago. I sold a guy a Lost Tomb arcade game and we took it over to his house and we were just chitchatting in the driveway and he was a older hippie looking guy and he told me what was wrong with most of the games. He said power supply power supply power supply. So, if you ever heard me say that, that's where that story comes from. Little hippie told me one time, power supply, power supply, power supply. It's always the power supply. So, I'm going to do a little research on this and u see what's going on. on them. We'll see what kind of value those are, what kind of caps those are, and we'll go from there. I may try to just swap those two caps and put it back in and see if it burns them again. But I probably need to start checking some power down there on that other power board, too. We'll see what I can get into. Well, looking in the manual, it looks like C42 and C44 are both a 4.7 microfarad cap. So, I'm going to take that board out and swap them, put it back in, see what happens. Also, when I was reading up a little bit about this, remember we were talking about how bad the acid damage were, they say it'll actually keep going and mess up the video board, some of these sockets right in the middle. So, I'm hoping that's not the case. Somebody has swapped this battery at some point. That's not the original battery. So, I'm hoping it didn't go down to the video board cuz I I think I'm just going to end up swapping this MPU board. I've got another one in the back. So, we're probably going to have to repin most of these connectors, though. We'll see. We may try it. But to get it reliable, you really need to repin them. But we need to get it working first. We're getting ahead of ourselves here. We need to get this board out and change those caps. All right. So, I took the board out. I changed those caps. I changed a few other caps over here. I reflowed all of the connectors on the back side. I took out all the socketed chips, cleaned them, and put them back. And we're getting ready to test it again. I unhooked those going to the MPU because somebody said you didn't need to have that hooked up to test that. So, and I realize I said smoke test before and you guys probably thought that was staged, but I really didn't expect I never plugged the machine in. The thing was locked up. I literally just got in the back of it with the unhooked the locks. You guys saw me. I plugged it in. I swear I never plugged it in before. You can ask Trevor. He was here when he dropped it off. That's another game over there. All right. So, that just happened to catch on fire like that when I said smoke test. I really didn't expect that. But anyway, here we go again. Smoke test number two. Hopefully, it doesn't blow up those caps. All right. You ready? It's flashing some little LEDs flashing now. And the caps didn't blow up, so that's good. I don't know enough about this to know. Each one of those flashes means something, but I don't, you know, I don't know. The other baby Pac-Man's I think were only fixed. I have no idea what I'm doing really. I know the basics. I changed the caps. It's not on fire anymore. So, I guess we're making progress. And after all that, I talked about the monitor. I didn't hear it. Come on. Is it on? We got lights. Marquee lights up. Nice. Got lights on the playfield. Wonder if it'll make any noise. Probably not. This is kind of a big project here. And I don't think my monitor's working after all that. I talked I talked good about this monitor. Monitor ain't on them 4800's and piece of junk. All right, monitor ain't working. So that stinks. Okie dokie. That's got some test points on it. I guess we'll test that and see what that's looking like. All right. So, I got my ground here. This one says 8.2 at test five. 8.4. That's probably okay. Test point 6 says 12 volt unregulated. So, 15 16 is unregulated. It's fine, I guess. Where's all of our other test points? Test point. This one's supposed to be 5 volt here at test point 2. 5.1. That's good. Here's another 5 vol test.1. 4.95. That's probably good. Test point three is ground. Wonder what test point four is. Must be another five. We've already done test five. Test point 6. I don't see test point 7. I don't know what the heck that is. I don't know what that is. We're going to act like that's fine. Okay. So, I think all that's working probably. What do you think? All right. So, that probably tells us that all this is good since all of our voltage is good. We think Mhm. Okay. So, we think that's good. We think this is good. We've got lights on. So, this is halfway good. So, our MPU board is broke. I've got another MPU board back there and I think it works. I don't know. I haven't tried it, but I if we still got it, Ronnie may have put it in another machine by now. But I saw one back there that said baby Pac-Man. I'm going to go see if I can find it. I found it. Baby works 100%. 425. I think that's a 16. So, that thing's been back there for almost 10 years, and it was initialed by a guy, RL. Had this thing back there for over 9 years, and we haven't used it yet. Looks like RL has done a bunch of work to it. Those are all new sockets. That's a new socket. That's a new socket. It looks like whoever RL is replaced all of the sockets but this one ROM socket. I think he put I think that little connector is new too. I don't know, but it has been in the drawer for almost 10 years. Who knows now, huh? So, I'm going to assume that since it says baby Pac-Man, it's already set up for a baby Pac-Man. Do we all agree that this must be set up for a baby Pac-Man? I don't have to worry about the jumpers or none of that. Wonder if I trust that RL guy, though. We'll see how that turns out. All the socket, all the chips are still in there. All right. Well, we'll put it in there and see what happens. All right. Got the board in there. Let's try it again. Now, I know this one's got an LED on it, too. And I think it's supposed to flash seven times. You're supposed to get a quick one and then I think seven more, six more. I don't know. Ronnie mainly does the pinball. Okay. So, let's see what it'll do. One, two, three, four, five. I think it's supposed to do six or seven. Did it do a quick one though? Maybe I didn't catch it. One, two, three, four, five. I think it did do a quick one. It's supposed to do a little flicker, then either six or seven flashes after that. All right, we're going to try it one more time. See if we can see the flicker. I saw it. One, two, three, four, five. We're not getting any after five. So, let me see what the six flash is. Well, I did a little research. It's supposed to have six flashes just like the rest of them. And I'm not getting any voltage at test.3. I figured that out on the MPU. And this guy says that on a baby Pac-Man, it goes through a fuse under the playfield. So if a fuse under the playfield is blown, I'd only get five fuses. I mean, five flashes. And that would that would uh explain why RL had it marked as 100%. Maybe it is 100% and something in my cabinet is making it only do the five flashes. What do you think about that? All right, I got the playfield lifted up. There is three fuses here. And that one in the middle does look blown. We'll measure it, but I could pretty much see that it's blown. That's a 10 amp fuse. 10 amp. 1 amp. Another 10 amp. One amp's good. The second 10 amp is good, but this one in the middle is blown. Now, I don't know if that's the fuse the guy was talking about, but it is underneath the playfield. And it is blown. So, I guess I'm gonna pop another one in there and see if it blows. Something on the playfield's probably shorted or something, but we'll try it. We'll try it. All right, I put another fuse in there. Help if I turn my multimeter on. That fuse is good. All right. Now, we'll see if it's going to immediately blow the fuse again. Here we go. All right. It didn't blow yet. I wonder if it's going to come on. Holy crap. Holy crap, guys. I think we're in a track mode. See the little twinkies? I don't even have to go in the back and see if it flashed six times because I know it flashed six times because all the little lights are doing the little thing. Uhhuh. And you guys didn't think I was going to be able to get it. I think we still got a problem on that board, though. We'll talk about that in a minute. Let's watch these flashes, I guess. All right. So, supposed to have six flashes. One. Okay, I lost count. I lost count. All right, let's try it again. I I got distracted. One, two, three, four, five, six. Bam. Six flashes and a track mode. But I think we still got a problem down here on our idiot board because when I was reading that's supposed to flash 10 times, but let's count that now. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Pretty sure that was eight. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. That's supposed to flash 10 times. Okay, so we still got an issue there, but we're making pretty dang good progress, really. It was broke. It's still broke, but it's less broke. What do you think? All right. So, now we're back at pinrepair.com. This guy really knows his stuff. So, I'm getting eight flashes. I'm not getting the ninth flash. So he's saying the 689 CPU chip at U8 attempts to test the video display processor which is the TMS9928 at U16. If there is no ninth LED flash, the TMS9928 at U16 is bad. There it is. U16. This chip right here, he's saying is broke. I need to get another one of those. You're not even going to believe this. So, these are all of our chips. A lot of these are resistors. We've got some lot of RAM chips and stuff. And I texted Ronnie, tell him I needed one of those chips. and he said, "You know, this website's got them for $15. We may have one in that drawer underneath the EPROMs." So, this is kind of a random drawer. So, I pull it out. I'm looking through. I don't see nothing. And it's a bigger chip. I'm thinking, "Yeah, we ain't going to we ain't going to have nothing like that." because apparently it's only used on Baby Pac-Man, Granny and the Gators, and apparently some Kico Vision stuff. So, we have I'm going to go order it. So, then I go to shut the drawer like this. And then I see this chip is a bigger chip, which is what I'm looking for. I'm looking for a bigger I know it's going to be about this size. One chip all by itself. TMS 9928. Can you believe that? Exactly what I need happened to be laying in that drawer. So, we're going to put this baby in there. All right, I swapped the chip. Let's see. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Still eight flashes. Well, I trust clay at pen repair, so I either got two bad chips, which is possible. The way he had it worded like that, it kind of seemed like they go bad all the time, all the time. And they're readily available. You can get them on several different websites for $15. So, they may go bad a lot and that's why everybody's got them for sale, but I don't know if I'd have two bad ones. So, I'm kind of thinking the socket may be bad. So, I'm going to take the board back out and change the socket. Maybe it's got some corrosion in there or something that we're not seeing. So, that's next. Well, I got the old socket out. I think that's pretty good for just a soldering iron and a solder sucker with a worn out tip. We had a desoldering station one time. Of course, we bought the cheap one and um I don't know, it just seemed like it got clogged every time you used it. We'd rather just do it with a solder sucker and then you just change the tip or even just buy a whole another one. You know, we use this a lot. It still works pretty good for us. It's that vampire solder sucker. You have to change the tip every so often and it doesn't hold much solder. So, you got it. It gets clogged up from time to time, but it's still it's still one of the best ones we've used. We've had that one for probably two years and use it almost every day. But anyway, I'm going to put another socket in there. The old one didn't really look bad and there's no corrosion around this area, which is good, but I'm not so sure that's going to fix our issue. But looks can be deceiving. So, we'll try it. All right, I got the new socket in there. Let's try it again. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Well, that's not good. So, got a new socket in it, and it's basically doing the same thing. So, I think I may have two bad chips. And the chip that I had in the drawer back there, it was a used chip and the legs were pretty dirty. I cleaned them before I put it in there. But how that chip is so readily available. I mean, Arcade Shop even had them. Arcade Shop had them. Arcade Parts and Repair had them. Twisty Wrist had them. Seems like they probably go bad a lot. And I trust Clay at pinrepair.com. He knows his stuff. So if he says that chip's bad, it's probably bad. But there may be another chip that it gets to before that one. But again, Clay said if it didn't flash nine times, if you don't get the nine flash, it's that chip. He didn't say nothing else. He said that chip was broke. So, I guess I might have to order another chip just to I think I need another chip. So, in the meantime, that's probably going to take a week to get here. That stinks. All right. So, I went ahead and ordered that chip. It's going to take about a week to get here. So, I guess we're going to work on something else in the meantime. If that chip doesn't fix it, at least I've got an extra one, I guess, cuz uh I've got another baby Pac-Man in storage. And this video is getting kind of long, I guess. Anyway, so tune in next time. Hopefully, we'll figure that out when we get to chip in and we'll start working through the playfield, all that good stuff. And thanks for watching. We'll see you on the next one.