Midnight Amusements

See ya next year Texas Pinball Festival , it was awesome!

It's not often that you get to free a dragon. What fun!

At Texas Pinball Festival

Tonight I worked on my personal Ghostbusters Premium pinball machine. About three weeks ago, I went to turn it on and the boot sequence stated that both Node 8 AND Node 9 were not responding.

I swapped in a Spike-2 48V Core node board I had on hand (always have a spare), configured as Node 9. Booted the system, it downloaded code to the node and the system rebooted.

On reboot, Node 8 was still not responding. So an order from Marco Pinball later and I had a Spike-1 board. Installed it, rebooted it and the code downloaded.

Just like that, we're back in business. What did I learn? A couple of things.
- it is possible to lose more than one Node at a time, though it's statistically unlikely
- Spike-2 and Spike-1 nodes can co-exist in a Spike-1 pinball machine, I called Stern to confirm

Now to ID the (heavily) damaged chip on each board, maybe I can figure out how to repair both.

No play-by-play on this one. I've had a custom printed Game Boy Color case in the box for some time, and it was time for Wario to escape!

This console has a bad power switch, so today I replaced it with one of these nifty (and tiny!) switch boards from Helder Game Tech. They are an inexpensive fix for a very common problem.