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Great. Now I have to restore these things...


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Hi everyone,

 

Greetings from the beautiful mountainous eastern suburbs of Melbourne. I stumbled across this forum while practicing my google-fu, I was looking for a new hobby. Since I've developed an interest in retro gaming, think arcade machines look cool around the house and have always been pretty good with my hands, I decided to dive straight into the deep end. I just purchased two machines, a Taito Speed Race (1974) arcade and a Pinball - "Space Riders' (Atari 1978), for what was probably too much money. Neither are functional. The Taito has an unknown generic 'dead monitor' fault, the pinball is in 'not working' condition. I don't really know anything more at this stage, I'll have to wait until the weekend when I actually get my hands on the things.

 

Whatever the case turns out to be, I figure there can't be anything inside these machines that is too hard for the average bloke to understand. Either I can fix it, or I can wait until the parts I need turn up for sale. In the mean time I certainly plan to delve the depths of this forum to obtain whatever wisdom I can and I'd certainly be grateful to any old heads that might be able to send a word or two of advice my way.

 

Cheers guys.

Edited by SeaJay
bad grammar
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Got that right. I daily drive a 35 yo sports car, so yeah, I tend to have an unusual amount of dedication to objectively pointless pursuits... My interest is certainly piqued though, what is the trouble with these machines? Going off my total lack of knowledge, I would have assumed it was all electro-mechanical and some straight forward Atari circuitry... This is probably a 'noob' question, but has anyone gone down the route of retrofitting some modern computing power to run these things? Edited by SeaJay
for clarity
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Welcome to pinball, sit down in the corner over here and prepare yourself, this rabbit hole is deep.

 

Atari machines are known for being massively difficult to repair due to a whole bunch of custom boards and chips. Finding parts for them is difficult, when compared to Bally/Williams/Stern machines of the same era. While there are lots of mechanical bits under the playfield, it's the circuit boards in the backbox that need to be working well if you want to boot up the pin.

 

As for retrofitting new computing power, that's where you are moving into serious territory. That's homebrew pinball turf and requires a whole lot of knowledge and experience.

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So, fundamentally a parts supply issue? I assumed that I wasn't going to be heading down to Jaycar for some off the shelf logic... Homebrew pinball wasn't something I knew existed, I'll definitely be looking into whats happening in that scene. Certainly wouldn't be simple but I can't foresee anything insurmountable.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Checkout https://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=2258

In the pictures you will see the main board, my understanding is if this has issues it can be difficult to fix or get someone else to fix it.

All other electro mechanical bits are normally available or fixable.

Should be an interesting project.

 

 

Thanks, that will be pretty handy when it comes down diagnosis. I'm no expert but confident of being able to at least isolate the issue. I wish everything I bought came with documentation like that.

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