G’day all, After reading the thread by swinks with the issues with his Skateball game, and not wishing to hijack his thread I thought id mention a similar (but not identical) problem I had with my KISS about the same time..
Interesting to me is that he mentioned he had had a lot of heavy rain and that his shed had some moisture in there as a result.. well I have a similar situation here.. steel shed and some dampness after a lot of rain, I am in the process of insulating and lining the insides to help combat this problem and to cut the heat down in summer, but it’s a work in progress and I can only do it a bit at a time as I can afford to do so.
Anyway onto the problem I had with Kiss.. I came home last Saturday and we’d had a heap of rain here, I turned the game on and started playing and noticed the rh bumper double firing when the ball hit it.. well the fault got worse to a point where the bumper was constantly on (actually it was pulsing on and off but appeared stuck on) Another observation I made while checking switches was that I could simply touch the solder terminals on the switch and the bumper would fire!! Also when all this was going on, the startup tune would only play a few notes instead of the full tune, and nothing would score on the pf while the bumper was stuck on.. WTF
I could reboot the game and add credits and all was normal (had coin tune etc) but soon as I pressed the start button the bumper would lock on and nothing else would happen.
I tried swapping boards at this point, MPU (tried my spare Alltek board), solenoid driver board (borrowed the board out of Black Pyramid), and unhooked the lamp driver boards and sound boards one at a time incase one of these was causing the problem (I was getting desperate by this stage) lol .. all to no avail, the problem persisted. It was only when I pulled the switch matrix connectors (with the game on and after starting a game) that the bumper would go off! Well I ended up finding out that with just the cab switch matrix connector J3 removed after starting a game the game would work normally and could be played. I checked the switch wiring and could find nothing obvious wrong. But soon as I attempted to plug the J3 back in the bumper fired straight away, just touching the pins 15 and 16 on the connector was enough to start the fault , not even removing the coindoor connector made any difference which ruled out those switches.. In the end I worked out it was pin 15 (the tilt connector wire) if I removed it from the housing and refitted J3 the game worked perfectly (just with no tilt) lol I played the game for a day or so like this.
Then yesterday I decided to try my theory that it was a moisture thing and refitted the pin for MPU J3-15 back into the housing.. worked perfectly so I’m now guessing that moisture had got in SOMEWHERE and it had now dried out? Also interesting to note that my Black Pyramid that is sitting beside Kiss worked seemingly normally the whole time…
Swinks if you read this maybe try removing MPU J3 after adding credits and starting a game and see if anything changes.. maybe worth trying??
Hope that this was of interest and that I haven’t bored anyone silly
Cheers…Mitch
