Data East Tommy —
Came in not booting at all. The board had corrosion damage from the batteries on it that I had to clean up, pull affected parts, sand down the preformal coating, neutralize, repopulate and seal. I opted for a lithium coin style battery socketed for battery backup as I tend to have mixed results with NVRAM on Data East machines. The power supply had multiple bad caps on it including the 4x C4’s that are in parallel for the filter cap. I replaced all of those and cleaned any residual electrolyte which got me solid voltages out.
This got the game booting, but I also had to repin the PSU GI connector, replace F5 and Q4 which was shorted on the PPB, and replace the VUK coil associated with Q4 as well. One TIP102 and a 9 pin male connector on the CPU had trace corrosion and needed to be swapped out as well for posterity.
After I got it functional, I shopped it with black perfect play rubbers, orange perfect play flipper rubbers, and Comet 2SMD LEDs, replaced burnt incandescent flashers with new, rebuilt all 3 flippers, replaced one missing post, replaced the VUK plastic which was badly damaged with new, installed 6x new shiny balls and 1x captive ball, and dialed in for good play.
This one, like most, was missing the original silver ball topper. I got an 8 inch garden gazing ball and adhered it up top. It’s 2 inches larger than the original and I actually prefer it. I’ve had the 8 inch gazing ball on mine for years and later acquired the original DE topper and opted to keep the larger gazing ball.
