What does it take to restore a pinball machine?

In case you are curious, this series of articles go into detail about how to restore a “solid state” pinball machine. The Nine Ball machine in VECTOR now and Kelly’s Dolly Parton machine are from this product family.

http://techniek.flipperwinkel.nl/ballyss/rep/index1.htm

http://techniek.flipperwinkel.nl/ballyss/rep/index2.htm

http://techniek.flipperwinkel.nl/ballyss/rep/index3.htm

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About 10 years ago I got my first pinball machine. It was a working Bally Silverball Mania that I paid too much for at auction but I did not know better at the time. I only wanted 1-2 pins… Within a week I found a non-working Bally Mata Hari about a block from where I went to elementary school for $200. Within about 5 minutes of finding the listing I was standing in-front of the game. It had been in the house since about the time I was in elementary school and had not worked since the late 80’s. I bought it and within two weeks had taught myself pinball repair and troubleshooting on the Bally/Stern 1977-85 generation hardware. In two weeks time and a few parts orders from Marco Specialties I had the game up and running. These guides were what I started with and still refer to on certain parts of troubleshooting. After fixing my first game I was hooked and I went crazy from there. By the end of the first month I had 4, 6 months I had 12, a year I was over 20. Currently at 99 pins and have owned probably a total of 260-270 over the last decade. About to thin out my collection to a more reasonable 60-65 games. And this does not include all of the EM arcade games I also own…

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Currently the Stern Nine Ball has a whole list of issues but slowly they are getting found and fixed. Will probably have 30-50 hours of labor in the electrical and mechanical repair and restoration. Playfield will likely be sent out for professional restoration and clear coat. The paint is so dry and flaky and there are areas of wear that would rapidly increase if played heavily until it is protected under automotive clearcoat.

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All you wanted to know about Bally/Stern solid state pinball machines but was afraid to ask…

http://pinwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Bally/Stern

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Here is some information and software
https://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=1678

I’ve tested this … here is an emulator that will emulate many pinball game hardwares with the zip files from the other site above.

http://pinmame.retrogames.com

Looks like the source code is here https://github.com/vpinball/pinmame

Shawn had turned me on to that site. Unfortunately, the manual they have for Nine Ball does not include schematics. I noticed the copy that Shawn has with his game does, so I will have to see his.

That emulator only covers the electronics and not the physical playfield. Is there an open source pinball simulator which can be merged with it? Microsoft included a pinball game with Windows 95 and there was the Pinball Construction Set before that.

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Here is a different game with the same MPU board and it does have schematics of that board.

But you might just look through the emulator for how it works …it seems to run the ROMS

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According to this chart http://pinwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Bally/Stern#Stern, many of the Stern games use the same circuit boards. What is critical when trying to figure out what the code does is the schematic showing what switches, bulbs and solenoids are connected.

An amusing bug has been reported for that game:

http://pinwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Bally/Stern#Stern_Meteor

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Free Cheat Code … :stuck_out_tongue:


All of the games with the same board listed
https://www.ipdb.org/search.pl?searchtype=advanced&mpu=34