May/June 2009.

Not a really exciting story to be told.

I started off fixing the CPU board.

I got a copy of the schematic here

http://www.flippers.com/

Basically the manual is the same for all the Allied Leisure Cocktail Pins.

I started off by trouble shooting the displays.

Some of the segments were toast and some of the 7447 driver chips. I l also replaced the shift-register chips on some boards. I made an order to Digi-key and got the chips but the displays were hard to find. I ended up using a display from NTE. I think there was one on-line place that still had some of the displays in stock. The display dropped into the existing footprint but it's not 100% the same as you can see in the picture. But close enough!

Here is the CPU.

One of the 6520 PIO chips was bad and it caused the serial data stream to the displays to not work. A quick swap with another chip determined that the PIO was indeed toast! I got replacement parts on eBay! $5 each. not a bad price.

I did some other cleanup on the board too.

Next I debugged a bunch of bad transistors in the driver section. Once again I got the parts off of eBay!

I also replaced all the 7404 driver chips and put the new ones in sockets. There was actually at least one bad chip but I figured I'll make it easy for the next person to work on this board. One of the symptoms that the 7404 was bad was a solenoid activated when the power was applied. The big cap to the right is part of an RC circuit that protects the coil from staying on too long.

I cleaned all (well most) of the light sockets and shined up anything metal to give the underside a nice clean look. I did a repair on one of the pop bumper coils. The coil was a bit melted but not shorted. I drilled out the insert and put a new one it. Works perfect!

That's the end of the story! Feel free to email me if you have any questions.