Bally's Beautiful Baby Pac-Man Pinball Machine.... With No Sound?

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 Baby Pac-Man for what seems like 10 years, but it's probably been like 10 days. And if you didn't watch all the previous videos, and really, why would you? We have consistently had a problem with the freaking sound on this vidiot board. Now, if you think I'm insulting you, I'm not. That's what Bally called the video board inside of a Baby Pac-Man. Vidiot. So the sound didn't work. So we have slowly been figuring it out when really it seems like it's the easiest thing that you've ever heard. I think the CPU chip is bad in the sound section of the vidiot board. So this little section down here is the sound section. There's not much to it. When it comes up, it does a little flash code, and it just skips the flashes that it's supposed to do for the sound section, the first flash and the second flash. The first flash checks that ROM. We checked it on a previous video. The ROM's fine. The second flash tests that CPU. We had no way to test it because putting it in this board is kind of the best way to test it. We tested the reset section. That seemed fine. And the amplification section seems fine. If you rub your finger in some of the amp section, you start hearing amplification out of the speaker. So really, and our crystal is there, the clock signal is there. So really it comes down to, it seems like this 6803 CPU chip is bad. So I ordered two other ones. I only needed one, but you know, what if the one gets here and it doesn't work? It'll take me another week and a half to get another one. So I ordered two. And it took about a week. They came in. They are about $11 on eBay. If you can find someone you trust to sell you a legitimate one. These two look legitimate. So we're gonna turn it on and see if we finally get our sound back. Now, I guess we'll hear it at some point and we should get 10 flashes. Finally, finally get our 10 flashes on this Vidiot board if the sound section is working. Before it would skip the first two flashes, wait about three seconds and then give us the remaining eight flashes that tell you that the video part is working. So let's see what we got. Pray for 10. Oh, please, ballet pinball people, give me 10 flashes. One, two, three, there we go. Five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. Bam, we got it. So it was just the CPU chip the entire time, apparently. She's back among the living. So now all we have to, we don't know the gender, do we? Do we know? They're very clever with it. Look what they've done. Oh, look, the baby has a little pink bonnet. That's cool. So it's a little girl, right? So we could look. Oh, wait a minute, up here, the baby has a little blue bonnet. Interesting. Huh, they're keeping you guessing. Nothing wrong with that, especially in this day and age. All right, so I think we've got everything working on it, but we're just gonna try to make things work better. The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna clean these drop targets. One of them's down because we dropped it on the last game that we played. I'm gonna clean the drop targets, and while I'm at it, I'm gonna clean those spinners. They look pretty rough, too. I don't know if I've got stickers for those or not. Maybe I'll look into that. So the way I do that is I just use a magic eraser and clean the dirt off of them with a magic eraser. These are now the little ghosts that are on there. You can either draw back in by hand or you can buy brand new drop targets. They're not that expensive, probably looking at $4 or $5 a piece, but the problem is they are a real pain to swap. You basically have to take the whole assembly apart, take everything out just to swap those drop targets, and then when you're done, they're just a little prettier than they were whenever you started, so I'm gonna clean them and see what it looks like after that. This play field was destroyed whenever we started, if you didn't see that. So I think we'll do that first, just see if we can clean those up, make them look a little better, and then we'll see what's next. All right, so that's what them cleaned off. They look a lot better. I cleaned off the spinners, too. I don't have any of the stickers for those, but the gentleman that owns this has a buddy that does art, so I think he's planning on doing some of that if he decides to replace it. I put new flippers on it as well. The old ones were all pretty nasty. They're all cracked up and yellowed and all of that. I put the correct yellow flipper rubbers on it finally so we don't have to go through all that again. This thing, I mean, I think it looks pretty good. It does have wear, but don't they all? I think it looks pretty good. The worst is up here, that one ball trail. The ball doesn't actually hit that part of the trail, though. If you see that little line in the middle of it, that's where the edge of the ball hits when it goes around. It's impossible for the ball to hit the bottom of the thing like that. It's just more damage that the rat did to it, unfortunately. I say rat as if there was one. The rat species did. There was like a million of them in there, I think. I think all of them, all of the rats in that species, I think, were in there. I cleaned off the control panel a little bit with a magic eraser. It's iffy, you know, it could probably use a new overlay. The problem with putting a new overlay on it is, one, they're pretty expensive, and it's a lot of work, but this edge always cracks. See how there's cracks down the edge? It's almost impossible to put a new one on there and not have it crack within a few months. It's just a thing, but that would look better than the wear here, there, and there. If it was mine, I'd leave it like that. I don't think it's bad enough to replace, but we'll see what the customer wants to do. All right, so that's that. I think the next thing we're gonna do, we're getting down to the end here. I think the next thing we're gonna do is remove this bezel here, and I'm going to try to save some of the flaking parts. So this piece here is about to fall off. Got some stuff here that's breaking apart. That's just dirt. See all these little areas like that? That is actually where it is also separated from the glass. That's air between the glass and the paint that you're seeing. It's just something that happens whenever you get a lot of temperature change going on with it. So the thing's in cold storage, and it gets cold and hot, cold and hot, cold and hot, and the glass and the paint start contracting at different rates, and eventually it slips right off the paint. Now, people that are smarter than me would say that's because of the lamps behind it. So I'm always told that since it has incandescent lamps, that it makes the back glass peel on a pinball machine. So the lamp behind there has made that peel, from what I understand. That's what the people that are smarter than me say. Now, I'm not super intelligent. To me, it looks like there's no lamp behind that, but yet it's still peeled. So I don't think it has anything to do with the incandescent lamps that are behind the back glass, but like I said, those people are much smarter than me. They will tell you themselves. That's what caused it to happen. It's not the cold and the heat, like I always say. Nope, nope, nope, nope. It's the lamps, and if you put leads in it, it won't do that. So if you put a lead behind there, it will not peel anymore. Just so you know, that's the way to go. Definite leads. Definitely use those. So I'm gonna pop that out, and we'll get a good look at the back of it and see if we can do anything to repair it. Okay, so I have removed it from the machine, and you can see the flaking, where it's peeled away from the glass. Luckily, almost all of it's still there. So we're just gonna try to make it where it won't fall off. And yes, we're throwing away that 360 controller. Look, folks, it doesn't work right. It's a third party anyway. Don't worry about it. Okay, so the way I'm gonna do this is the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna tape off that center window. You can just paint over the edge of it and then clean it up later with a razor blade, but you don't get as clean of a edge as if you tape it. So I'm gonna tape it, but I'm gonna come in just a little bit off of the art so that there will be a visible line, unfortunately, where the tape is. I don't want the tape on the art because it's literally just gonna peel it right off the glass, especially since it's already brittle, and we've got this horrible place up top. So I'm gonna run a piece of tape all the way down the edge, just real close to where the art's supposed to be. And when we're finished, you'll see that line, but it'll look, you know, it may even make the edge of the glass look a little more trimmed up. So I'm not too worried about it. And it'll keep us from having to clean the centerpiece, all the paint off of the centerpiece if we put tape over it. So I'm gonna do that next, and then we're ready to paint it. All right, so basically, I'm going quick here. You're creating a pool of glue of this triple-thick glaze. So it's Potter's glaze. It's just thick, thick, thick, thick, thick. You're trying to make it where it all becomes one big piece of glaze to hold it all in place. Now, the pieces that are sticking up, you want a whole bunch of the glue, the glaze, down underneath them. Okay, so I've taken Saran Wrap and placed in the thick glaze that's basically like glue, and then carefully, because you can touch the Saran Wrap without getting glue all over you, carefully press down on the big chips of paint. And what they'll do is they will crack and then lay down into place. The reason they crack is because when they curled up, they shrunk and deformed and things. So when you lay them back down, they don't go back down perfect. So you'll have splits in them. You'll have pieces that break off and move out of place. And you can move them around to an extent and try to line them up the best you can. In the mess, but pretty soon that's gonna start drying. And when it's all done, that should all be glued in place and it will at least be present and not falling off the glass anymore. So like, that's a good example, I gotta do that. All right, so I've pushed the rest of it down. There was only a few spots that still had the peeling piece. And then put something heavy on it to hold it down, just to keep it from lifting out of the glue as it's drying. And we'll let that sit and see how it all turns out. With the bezel out, you can see Bally's little tinted plexi thing that they put on the front of the monitor to hide some of the screen burn. Since, especially since it was a maze game, you know, it gets the same image burned into it eventually. This one doesn't seem to have much burn in at all though, or at least you can't see it through the plexi. So I'm gonna take that off. That gets a lot of dust and dirt behind it. That's just attracted by the, like the electric nature, the static nature of the monitor. It just attracts dirt. So that thing gets dirt caked on it, which makes the image look darker. So I'm gonna pull that off so we can clean it up a little bit. I replaced, I cleaned up the marquee, put it back in and replaced the starter on it. So hopefully that will fix the fluorescent lamp that was flashing too. The marquee is actually in pretty good shape. Cleaned up pretty nice. All right, so I'm gonna take this off and then we'll see if there's any burn in on that monitor. It's pretty good. It's got a little bit. I guess that's the score. And then there's a little bit there in the middle. That might be, I don't know what that says. That baby Pac-Man's hand or something, I can't remember. And then down there at the bottom is the worst because it says the copyright and everything. You can't quite make it out. Probably because the image has moved a couple of times. So it burned it in and then a cap started failing or they adjusted the monitor a little bit and it moved the image just slightly. And then for another couple of years, it burned it the other way. This thing, I would imagine only got a couple of years of work in the arcade. But that's a lot of screen time. If the thing's turned on 10, 12 hours a day, every day for a year, it'll burn something in. I used to have them on location at bowling alleys. Bowling alleys, they were on the whole time. Some of those bowling alleys, they'd just leave the games running all night. So we had many games that just ran for years, would be on for three or four years without being turned off. Pretty crazy. All right, so we've got that cleaned back up, put back together. The lamp top seems to be working good. Next thing we need to do is we've got this MPU board in here but the battery was removed from it at some point. Oh, it created quite the discussion on one of the previous videos. So we need to put a new battery on it. So I'm gonna pull that out and we'll mess with it a little bit. So here is the board. This is actually a replacement two bit score board. It's very nice actually. And we were able to get this working in a previous video and there is a battery that mounts right here on the Valley MPUs, including this reproduction board. So in the previous video, there was this weird thing going on with some of the bookkeeping stuff where the switches weren't working properly. It wasn't registering a credit but if you went into the test menu, it was. And so I was floating around the idea on the video that perhaps the problem was that it was the RAM was loading just strange characters into the bookkeeping. And so maybe it said it had something loaded where it said that there were A7 credits and it took B3 credits to start or some weird thing, right? So as we were trying to figure that out and working through that and working through the thing, having a good time, the replies to the video are, I was yelling at the screen, replace the battery. Replace the battery. Well, the battery is just used for the bookkeeping. In theory, it could have been doing what I was saying. We figured it all out. There's no need to yell at the screen. Another guy said he was cussing at the screen. Okay, go watch somebody else, folks. I mean, I don't need people getting angry about minor little things like that. You pinball people are crazy. I mean, a lot of you, not all of you, but a lot of you are absolutely nuts. You take something that's supposed to be fun and you just make it a pain in the ass. I mean, I hate to say it, but it's the truth. So we're finally gonna replace the battery that is only used for the bookkeeping and to keep the high scores. So we'll do that now. How about that? So it usually goes right there. Now, the way I do it isn't right either. I don't do anything the right way. Everybody has a better opinion. But the way I do it is I put in a small button battery holder. If you put this one back in, of course it leaks. So it causes all kinds of trouble. That's a well-known thing. Been well-documented many, many, many times by me, but people seem to forget that. They keep trying to teach me if I'd only learn. So the battery originally went from here to here, but the little button cell thing will only go from like here to here. So we got to mod it just a little bit. So, all right, look at that. Look how wonderful that's gonna be to all you normies and me. To all you weirdos, you'll hate that. All right. So, ground needs to go to the ground, and then the positive needs to go to here. But it's only this long, so that's why we drilled the hole. So on the back, it's a stretch from there to there. I used a diode because that battery's not rechargeable. So we're just gonna put a regular battery in it, and the board can't recharge it because there's a blocking diode in the way. Easy peasy. So our battery problem is solved. Everybody can stop cussing at the screen, can stop yelling and throwing things and getting all upset. Yes, folks, the battery has been replaced. Thank God. Thank God you can all sleep at night now. It'll all be good. We have replaced the battery. Joy to the world. Okay, so we got it mounted back in the game with the fresh battery. I put screws in it that are supposed to be in it. If you leave those screws out, they're missing on a lot of Valley games. Actually, a lot of Williams games, too. It could cause problems with sound, buzzing. You can get bad grounds on things. You'll get issues where the CPU will reboot, things like that. Part of it's because the ground comes in on a couple of these pins, but it also has a good ground connection on this thing here to this back, whatever you wanna call it, plate. It's not really a plate. I guess it's metalized cardboard, something like that. But anyway, if you get those screws in there, it just makes everything work better, right? I'm sure we'll be able to tell. And then we're gonna set up the dip switches. I've basically got everything turned off. We did that on a previous one just to see if maybe the dip switches were causing issues with us. One of the things we're gonna do is turn on the free play. Switch 30 turns on the free play. And then you've got all of these adjustments that make the game easier, basically. And this is a tough game, really tough game. So there's lots of, it has recommended game settings, which ones it thinks you should turn on, right? And easy peasy. So that should be that. We've still got to play it, of course. We've got to clean it. And we just need to generally play it and see, after we put the glass back in, play it and see if everything's working properly. I believe I tested all the switches already. All the lamps are repaired. All of the coils are working because there's just a few of them. So it's just, we're down to basically cosmetic stuff. Well, strangely enough, the free play will not work. And the usual reason that something like that happens, and again, this is completely different than the thing we had before where it couldn't even see credits. The usual reason that it won't read a dip switch is because the dip switch itself is messed up, and this one is. So if you just measure across each one of the switches, they should be open if they're not connected, and they should be closed if they are connected. And these three sets of dip switches work fine, but none of the switches on this dip switch are connected. So it's got some kind of physical problem inside it. So those three switches that I've attempted to turn on are not connected. And you can move them back and forth, back and forth. They never get connected. So I'm gonna see if I've got another dip switch laying around, I can swap onto it, and that should fix that problem. There we go. Look, it's almost the exact same part number. But remember, this is the replacement board. This is the two bits board. Let's look on the old board, the original board, and see what the part number is on there. Oh, yeah. It's actually the same as what I replaced it with. That's interesting. So the original part number is 206-8. And then the ones on the two bit board were 208-8, same company, though, CTS. I wonder if the, it seemed to me like the difference was that the 208.8s were harder to flip. So maybe it has something to do with the resistance or something of the, like the physical pound or whatever it takes to move it. What do they, they've got that on buttons, on microswitches, too. Like it counts how much pressure it takes to change them. So maybe that's the only difference. But that seems to have got us on free play. Finally, we can just hit start. All right. All right, folks, we've let it dry. Now, whenever it dries, this saran wrap will just peel right off and it won't take your paint with it. So that's what you're looking to do. And if you get less wrinkles than I did, that would be ideal. But usually you can't tell from the front if there's wrinkles. So now I'm gonna take a razor blade and trace around the edge of the tape so that when I peel it off, it doesn't try to peel the paint off, too. And then that should make it where everything is nicely adhered and won't flake off anymore. What a beautiful game. Look, the people are coming from miles around just to see it. They can't wait to get in here and check out our baby Pac-Man. I don't blame them. Don't blame them at all. So we got her all up and running. I cleaned it up the best I could. There's still the front down at the bottom is the worst looking part. I honestly think that's from wax. You know, back in the day, they had the old wax floors and you would mop that wax. Either that or just the mop that they used to mop the floors and it gets that wet and then it gets all greasy looking. So I cleaned and cleaned. I can't get it any better. We don't have a lock on it because the customer has their own custom locks with their own key. The sides cleaned up pretty good. All the brown areas you see are actually cuts in the yellow. It's not really melamine. It's like a paper. It's very similar to how they did, well, it's exactly how they did their Galaga cabinets. If you're familiar with the difference between them, some of the Midway cabinets were wood and some of them were this particle board crap. So it's made out, it's literally made out of cardboard. Here, there you go. If you get that wet enough, it will just crumble away like cardboard. But if it's not in horrible shape, you can usually clean it up. So that's as clean as we could get it. Like I said, Galaga's the same way. Tron is the same way. A lot of their stuff was. But something like Burger Time was plywood. Ms. Pac-Man was plywood. Pac-Man was plywood. And those cabinets just last a lot longer because it's just a stronger surface. With all that said, the thing looks really good. Needs another piece of side art. I think it would be worth trying to save that piece because it's original. And it's at, what, 95%? I mean, it looks pretty good. I'd wanna keep that if I could. The monitor came out pretty good. It's not perfect, but nice and bright. Got all the colors. The geometry is off on it just slightly. You know, you have things like that with the old chassis. The bezel came out pretty nice, I think. You can see where we glued it back in and it didn't line up perfectly. Sometimes you can get that perfect, sometimes you can't. I think it looks pretty good, though. If it was my personal machine, there's no way in hell I would buy a new one. But you can buy a new one. So you can get one from Phoenix Arcade who makes excellent reproduction stuff. That will probably look as good as the original and be on glass. But it's gonna cost you probably 100 bucks, 150 bucks, something like that. Same with the Marquis. The Marquis, they make new ones. Phoenix Arcade has them. But that one is damn near flawless. There's just a few little issues if you want it to be super, super picky. But for this quality machine, it's worth it. I mean, I just leave it how it is. Playfield, you saw the condition that the thing was in. Horrible condition, filthy. God awful worst you've ever seen. We had several people say that's the worst I've ever seen. So it came out pretty good. I would say right now it's about a seven. You know, it's about a seven, I think. Counting everything, counting the plastics and everything. And the damage to the ball rail up here, ball guide. And of course the spinners with new stickers, those would look better. You can do new drop targets, but like I said, it's kind of a pain. Control panel overlay is original. I will let the customer decide if they want to swap that or not. Same kind of thing. I think if you touched it up with some black paint a little bit, it'd probably look pretty good. But they can decide that. Yeah, so I think the thing came out pretty good. So let's try to play it. It's the hardest game of all of the times. Didn't we do a video on this not too long ago? It's a very hard game, but we'll give it a go. Look at it in all its beauty. Pinball feature. So let's read the instructions, folks, so we know how to play it. Then we can't complain if we don't do good. To advance center arrows, hit center target. Go through lit side lane to complete maze. No, to advance center arrows, hit the center target. Go through the lit side lane or exit maze. Is that what it said? Bally presents Baby Pac-Man. Insert coins. Select one or two players. Free play. Game over. Copyright 1980, 1981, 1982. Bally Midway Manufacturing Company. Baby Pac-Man. Look how cute. Oh, that's why the burn-in was just at the one hand. That hand's moving. Pinball features. To earn energizers, spell Pac-Man. Loop the hoop ball. Advance fruits and tunnels by lighting the side lanes. To earn bonus baby light, center arrows. To advance center arrows, hit the center target. Go through the lit side lane, complete maze. To flash saucers, earn energizers. Losing ball, blah, blah, blah. Okay. For whatever reason, my mind can't process that. I can't see what the hell they're saying. It's a little confusing. And they're going too damn fast, in my opinion. They should slow it down. Let's try it one more time. High score is 33,000. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pretty bad ass. To earn energizers, spell Pac-Man. Okay, that's here. Loop the hoop ball, up at the top. Advance the fruits and tunnels by lighting the side lanes. I guess these here. To advance center arrows, hit the center target. Go through the lit side lane, or complete maze. So these little lights down here say, when lit, spot center arrow. If you complete the maze, I guess that also spots you with center arrows. The center arrows are gonna give us more points. All right, here we go. Now, the reason it's so damn hard is because the freaking ghosts are much smarter than they were on the original Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man. Basically, you can't get away from them very easy. That left drop target, I don't think that the switch worked. I'd like to hit it. There we go. So see how I have, mm, they got me. See how the exits were gone? So now you're stuck and you don't have any energizers because you didn't do good enough on the bottom. And these little bastards will cut you off. They just, they're smarter. Screw the cheese, let me out of the trap. Oh, didn't get hardly nothing that time. So things like that will happen where you can't figure out where to go. See how he double tracked and decided to come over towards the direction I went? I mean, they, you know, they're much smarter. You just gotta figure out their strategies, I guess. But I'm not so sure that they have patterns like they did in the previous games. I think they just, I think they just come at you. All right, we didn't do that good that time. Ah, let's try it one more time. So I wanna clean up as much of this as I can before they all go start getting mad. They got me already. I was trying to get up to the top. I guess it might be smart to actually wait till you get the energizers to go to the top. All right, let's try it for some energizers. I'd like to hit the ball and loop it. I don't know that that left in-lane worked either. See, all these you can do and then escape down the tunnel if the tunnel was open. Oh, no. Look at that red one. Like a heat-seeking missile. Trying to hit that left ball. Ooh, that one bricked. Whoa, I escaped. Look at my energizers. Come on, you suckers. All of you, get out of there. Oh, sorry about your situation. Oh, sorry about your calamity. I hate that that happened to you. Oh, look what, look, oh, how to turn tables. Oh, look at this, got them four in a row. Oh, look at this. A little graphic glitch for you. Stay away. Leave me alone. Look at them. It's embarrassing. Look at them, all they want to do is kill me. Look at that, horrible, horrible. They should be ashamed of themselves. Look at them, coming right for me. Look at them. This will not leave me alone. Death, that's all I like, death. Screwed a trap. Screwed a cheese, let me out of the trap. Right into the open gall. All right, well, that one's good enough. I might put my name on that one. That's pretty cool. Got to the second board. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So if that left in lane switch was working and that left drop target switch was working, I probably would have beat the game, but we'll never know. All right, so I'm gonna work on that a little bit, but I think it's pretty good. I like test playing them a little bit, just seeing, make sure everything's working. Found a couple of things there that aren't working quite perfect. We will adjust those, clean those, and then it'll be ready to go. So I hope you enjoyed the video. I hope you enjoyed us working on yet another Baby Pac-Man. What a beautiful game. It sure looks good, even if it's tough. I love it. So we'll see you on the next video. Hope you enjoyed the series. We'll be back next time with, I don't know what we're doing next. Maybe a little Golden Tee action. We had something else we worked on. We got some stuff that we've got in the pipeline that we'll get up for you soon. We upload videos every Tuesday and Friday, if you don't know about that. And we appreciate everybody watching for all of these years. We're gonna keep at it.