I was contacted by some good friends/clients that had this game come in to take a look and see if I could get any life out of it. This runs on the Pinball 2000 system which integrates a heavily modified obsolete Cyrix Media GX Motherboard, a more traditional Williams driver board, and a Wells Gardner k7203 (sometimes a Ducksan) CRT monitor for gameplay.
This machine would fire up to some degree, monitor would come on, but no life beyond that. The old AT power supplies can fail, but this one had already been upgraded to a new ATX and was putting out good voltages. Sometimes, the PRISM cards can die, batteries on the PRISM and/or motherboard can go bad, capacitors on the motherboard can fail, etc. I took the box back with me and did about everything imaginable to try to get life out of it, but I couldn’t even get it to POST which ends up pointing towards a bad failure on either the motherboard or PRISM.
Finding a replacement computer for these is nearly impossible, and expensive even if they do pop up. Back in the day, there used to be two emulators that would allow you to play these machines off a more standardized PC box — Nucore and Pinbox. The files for both are still floating around on the net, but the sound element was always weak and both were built on pretty dated versions of Ubuntu at this point.
A non-working computer on one of these makes it, essentially, a very expensive paper weight. So, I wanted to see if I could save it since everything else was present. Erikie, a Pinside member, recently released his own emulator that runs off of Ubuntu 24 and uses one core of the processor to run the DCS sound through the original amplifier board as intended! I messaged him for the files and set out trying to save this machine. Here’s the thread for his emulator:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/pinball-2000-emulator
I used a Dell Optiplex 7810 PC for this build. The loading of Ubuntu and the emulator were pretty straightforward and easy. I tied in the amplifier board and added a cheap ground noise loop isolator which Erikie recommends for the best sound quality. The original driver board had a blown lamp matrix fuse, so I had to repair that issue before proceeding. It ended up being a shorted rectifier diode that I had to replace.
My biggest hurdle was purchasing a parallel port that ended up not being compatible. Most PCie ports are compatible, but the one I purchased I just couldn’t get to communicate right with the driver board. Once I purchased a port with the same driver chip as the known working Delock 90412 Erikie confirmed was good (CH382L), it synced up and was a breeze. His emulator menu allows for easy updates too which I put to the latest 1.4 code of the game.
The emulator supposedly can work with the original CRT, however it is a much more involved process. You have to make sure to have a video card that supports 15.7khz standard resolution output, a converter cable, and work with timing and emu generators to get it perfect. Some people on the Pinside thread still say there are some issues tough to work out, so I opted to just go to an LCD for this build.
Probably the most difficult part of the whole endeavor was getting all of the new components back in the head. There is no room in the lower cabinet. Through a little backyard engineering, however, I was able to get everything in and secured rather cleanly.
My part of this process, making the machine functional was complete. An led marquee light will be added in, a shroud for the metal frame of the LCD monitor, and any other little playfield tweaks/clean up will come from here. Mission successful, and the next time I have to do this, it’ll be all the more quicker a process. I’m so happy and thankful this option exists for these machines as they age and the original motherboards become harder and harder to save.