Technical info
Dear reader,on the internet you can find a lot, certainly schematics and methods of working on pinball machines. On this page I'll present some methods I use to repair, and give some addresses, you will have to decide yourself what's possible and what not for you. I can't know what capabilities thoses who visit this site havend...
COSMETICS: All about the visible parts on a pinball machine.
Clean the playfield often, dust and other dirt works together with the steel ball and destroy your playfield....
NEVER repaint the cabinet, the value of it will only become lower.
To clean and change light bulbs and rubber
there's a good manual by the Dutch Pinball Association:
..............
( out
of use for the moment )You'll find
there "Make your pinball machin as new".
To replace lost instruction cards , you can
print them yourself, find them here.........
If your game is set to Free Play you'll want
to replace the card with a nice one, adapted for your pinball
machine, there's also a site for these cards:
...........
here's an example : 
TIP:
To make your own plastics please check my
page "Restauration of a head to head pinball machine",
.................
Flyers:
These flyers were and are used to promote new pinball machines.
For almost every pinball machine you'll
find its flyer here.. ... ...
Spinner Stickers .
Every thing you need
you will find here ........
Links:
For dutch pinball links check :
Pinball.pagina.nl ......
The most important Frenc sites ....... ....... .........
Other sites how are so kind to put my site on their "Links" well I return the favor...
Coinop Collector
............................
Silverball
..........................................
Dutch Pinball association
................
The German pinball association .....
Pete's excellent home-page ............
The German pinball-network ..........
Pinball News
....................................
Pinball Veire
....................................
Pinball Wizard
.................................
Active -Pinball
.................................
Mo Pinball
........................................
Pinballing.com
.................................
Popbumper.com ...... Good information
about the Gottlieb games ...
A German , English site with info and
schematics about LED display's ...
A very nice site , with a lot of
technical info, and a complete repair book for EM pinballs, in
Dutch , is shootmagain.nl ................................
Please notifiez me if I forgot someone..sorry!
Rom Images
I good site to download rom
images ...
You will find rom images on the site of Williams Bally
..........
Stern ....
For Italian pinballs look at Tilt-It ...............
here ....
Technical repair manuals
ELECTRO-MECHANICAL FLIPPERS:
A complete repair manual can be found at
marvin3m.com........
TIP:
Schematics are great, however if you have one for one specific brand you're one step further, because al lot of schematics are always the same. One very good tool is a test light (48volt, it'll still work on 28 volt) to follow a signal. This works more easy then a multimeter. You can make this test light easy by putting 2 long 24 volt 5watt car light bulbs in serie and mount them in a plastic tube with on one side a metal point and on the other side a wire, this is ok for older electro-mechanical pinballs. For electronic pinballs you need a electronic test-lamp..A made it yourself model can be found on this site under " Tips and Tricks " .
Free schematics for a lot of machines can be
found on here... and here ... and at the ftp manual:manual site , go there and
look if the server is "on line"if yes find two lines
down the link to the site.........
A German site with manuals .........
One of the most important ... look under support .
A site where some Gottlieb manuals are to
find ...
There is a new possibility , the principal
Frenc site has an FTP server to download A LOT of manuals , you
have to ask a password at the sitemanager first.. the site is
here , and mail Yann for a password ...
ALL schematics of Bally boards can be found
here ............
Original manuals for some pinball machines by Williams
.........................
For Indiana Jones, Scared Stiff, Startrek the next
generation, Twilight zone and Theatre of magic, you can find
technical info like light and switch matrix, fuses and error
codes on the site of Edwin Wolkorte....................
Play-matic,
Spanisch pinballs, you find good technical information on the
site of Aeneas Verhé ...
TOPPER !!!
Shiva site , you must register first... but it is free...!! Here
you will find really A LOT of flyers, schematics, manuals, and
MORE .When you go to this site you are busy for hours!! .........
PINBALL images and manuals
Do you want pictures of your pinball
machine, as well of the backbox as the playfield, and some extra
information, check the pinball database:.........
All pinball repair guides one adress...Marvin..
English....... French
translation...... for the translation
you choose on this site the section " Les manuels de
reparation"
EXTRA SITE FOR GOTTLIEB REPAIR ............
EXTRA SITE FOR STERN REPAIR................
TIP:
Repairing boards for solid state pinballs is not easy if you're not familiar with electronics, some repair people don't want to repair a board to which you've soldered yourself, so be careful !!
A solid state pinball works the same as your computer, each movement of your machine is read, one contact after an other, each item is set on the display, one thing afther the other..., at such a fast speed it looks like it happens all at the same time. If the cpu board has a failure nothing works, no flippers, displays, .. only some global illumination lights will (maybe) still work.
Luckily this doesn't happen very much, repairing coils, switches and so can be done by everybody who has some experience with electronics, and can use a soldering iron and multimeter. A lot can be tested with the self-test of the machine.
I'd like to give some advice to more experienced repair people: use a logic-probe to follow a signal, this is faster then a multimeter or scope. The test-light gives 3 logical positions, 0, 1 or alternating, even when pulses are very small..
Also very handy to repair is to take the board outside the pinball machine on a workbench, with a power supply and connectors for displays. It takes some time to create it but once it's done you're able to test very fast, an in a easy position......In the repair methods, witch you can find on this site , I give the exact points to connect the power.
I even went this far that I'm able to check
all addresses and check outputs to coils and light bulbs on my
test bench. I've replaced the coils with a row of led's put
directly on the connector so I can see when they're activated. Since
a wile this on this site,for Bally and Stern boards......Look
here...
And on this site you find the a repair method for the most pinball cpu-boards. The method I realised always use a test-eprom that run a non-stop program , so you can measure and verify every signal of the cpu and the chips needed to start up the pinball.
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