6/23/13 Update
First, an update on the virtual pinball cabinet: the third coat of finish has been applied and is dry. Here's the finished product:
Looks really good! (The photo on the left appears to show blotchiness but it's just a trick of the light.)
Next, I'm digging into my White Water reset issue further. I decided to take a closer look at my fuses to see if they were blown. Imagine my surprise when I found this:
Aha! Now we're getting somewhere! In the photo on the left, you can see fuse F112 was blown. The previous owner bypassed the fuse by soldering a wire across the fuse, and when that wire broke a second wire was soldered across. This effectively renders the fuse useless. F112 is the secondary solenoid, which I replaced with a 7A slow blow from Radio Shack. I have no clue why this one was having problems, so I'll keep an eye on it and cover it more in depth in another post.
Same story for F902 pictured on the right. This has also blown and been rigged as a bypass. This provides a little more information, since F902 is the fuse for the upper right flipper. Since the game is resetting when the flipper buttons are pressed, this confirms that there isn't enough power to the flippers. This fuse was replaced with a 3A slow blow from Radio Shack. Next step was to check the voltage output at the Power Driver Board and the CPU board:
The voltage at the Power Driver Board is a nice even 5.0 volts. Okay...
The voltage at the CPU board is 4.97. Hmmm...
Normally these voltages are perfectly fine for a game. The problem here is the power hungry third flipper. The game really needs a little more than 5V to operate all the flippers cleanly. Next up I'll cover boosting the 5V circuit to try to help the flippers and fix the resets once and for all.
Looks really good! (The photo on the left appears to show blotchiness but it's just a trick of the light.)
Next, I'm digging into my White Water reset issue further. I decided to take a closer look at my fuses to see if they were blown. Imagine my surprise when I found this:
Aha! Now we're getting somewhere! In the photo on the left, you can see fuse F112 was blown. The previous owner bypassed the fuse by soldering a wire across the fuse, and when that wire broke a second wire was soldered across. This effectively renders the fuse useless. F112 is the secondary solenoid, which I replaced with a 7A slow blow from Radio Shack. I have no clue why this one was having problems, so I'll keep an eye on it and cover it more in depth in another post.
Same story for F902 pictured on the right. This has also blown and been rigged as a bypass. This provides a little more information, since F902 is the fuse for the upper right flipper. Since the game is resetting when the flipper buttons are pressed, this confirms that there isn't enough power to the flippers. This fuse was replaced with a 3A slow blow from Radio Shack. Next step was to check the voltage output at the Power Driver Board and the CPU board:
The voltage at the Power Driver Board is a nice even 5.0 volts. Okay...
The voltage at the CPU board is 4.97. Hmmm...
Normally these voltages are perfectly fine for a game. The problem here is the power hungry third flipper. The game really needs a little more than 5V to operate all the flippers cleanly. Next up I'll cover boosting the 5V circuit to try to help the flippers and fix the resets once and for all.
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