This one came in with general illumination issues and a ground short issue keeping the game from booting and playing.
The general illumination circuit was in pretty bad shape. I ended up having to repin the female 12-pin input connector at J115 with a new .156 molex and trifucon crimps, as well as both J120 and J121 GI output connectors. On the driver board, J120 and J121 needed new male pins as well. C4 had been replaced at some point, but C2 was original. I replaced it before it is a problem. C5, the main filter cap, was original too, so I replaced it while the board was out as well and reflowed all of the weak points I usually do on WPC89 driver boards.
The CPU in the game is a Rottendog but the battery pack had fallen off and had already beginning to leak alkalines in it. For posterity and since Rottendog RAMs are already socketed, I just got rid of the battery pack and put in a RAMTRON NVRAM.
In putting the game back on legs, I was having a hard time getting the bolts to take and they felt like they might strip the leg plates (which are a huge pain to swap out). All of the bolts’ threads were pretty rough, so I opted for a new set of 8 bolts for the legs. On booting, there was a U6 checksum error. Sometimes this is random and goes away next boot, but it didn’t with this one. There was an older version of the U6 ROM in there anyway, so I burned a new 27C4001 with the H-6 home ROM.
The game was partially LEDed. There were no LEDs in the backbox, so I put Comet 2SMD natural whites in there. On the playfield GI’s, there were a lot of reds and blues which made it pretty dark. The client wanted to keep some of the color accents, so I left them in opportune places, but replaced others to bring up the game brightness.
The under playfield opto board and claw motor board had their original 100uf electrolytics on them which are just ticking time bombs the same as C2 on the driver, so I pulled both of those boards and replaced the 100uf, as well as reflowed all of the connector points. In the process of game testing, everything worked well, but I got the infamous WPC reset.
I noticed this game still had it’s Z-connector which can be a weak point in the logic line. Since I had already given some attention to logic line items while the driver was out, I removed the Z-connector and direct lined the logic out of the driver. It improved the reset time, but it did eventually reset again. So, I pulled the driver and replaced the LM323K which is a fixed 5v voltage regulator and replaced it with a PSU5 No Noise replacement which I was able to dial the pot to a nice 5.05vdc off the driver. Test played several more games and everything is working well and holding in properly across the board.