Williams High Speed (Williams, 1986) New owner, display screen problem :(

[jsolheim]

Hello, I just got my first pinball machine, it is a Williams High Speed. I have waited 25 years to buy a machine and am very excited.

Only problem is that i am having issues with the player 1 and 2 displays. They display scrambled symbols. The bottom right credits screen does too.

PLayers 3 and 4 and the left credits screen all work fine. All sounds function and all mechanics fire properly.

I do not have the AA batteries in it right now because the box was destroyed from corrosion. Will be installed a remote battery box.

Corrosion may be affecting the SRC2 and SRC5 units right above the battery box.

I have the manual and a great repair guide for williams units, i just need to know where to start. It is slightly overwhelming the more i dig into the repair manual.

I do have decent electronics repair skills and am comfortable working on this, i just don't know where to start. Reseated the ribbon cables already.

Sorry for the long post, just wanted to be thourough in explaining the issue.

Thank you for reading all this, i hope somoene else has had similar problems.

Jeff Solheim

 

[spalmer]

Hi Jeff!

It could be a bad ribbon cable but since you have both Alpha Numeric displays acting out, I am going to bet that it is one of the chips on the display driver board. Problem is that these chips are just about obsolete and very expensive if you can find them. If that is the case there are three options. Figure out which chip is bad and replace if you can find it. See
http://hansbalk.home.xs4all.nl/rep/s...x3.htm#display the section on More Segment Problems: the UDN7180 chip. Will show you how to chech the chips with a logic probe. Not very difficult but as I said, finding the chips will be a bear.


or

http://www.pinballpcb.com/System11DisplayDriver.html

$85 replacement drive board. Your displays look nice and bright so this should fix you up. I have never personally used this board so I do not know what kind of support you would get.

Option 3:

http://www.marcospecialties.com/prod...?ic=PS-10877-P

This is a bit more expensive at $199 but this would replace both the board and the displays with LED displays. Less stress on the power supply because it eliminates the need for the High Volage 100 volt for the displays. You can completely remove that fuse all together. This will also create less heat. I personally know Brett Davis the creator and designer of these boards. His customer service and support is second to none. I but a set in an old Firepower and it made a big difference.

As to which route you want to go, depends on the overall condition of the machine. I have owned a High Speed in the past and this in one of my favorite machines. Look at your Private Messages for my email address.

 

[knelson1969]

When it comes to repairing electronics or anything on a budget you have to keep it simple. if you dont want to start hanging boards on your machine you have to fix to obvious things that are wrong first. repair the corrosion and replace the back up batteries. look for bad solder joints on every board, ribbon cables are easy to test with a dvom if repairing as suggested keep your work to one board at a time then test to keep from causing other problems. look for bad capacitors if you dont have a onboard cap checker buy one it is cheap you can also look for the electrolitic leaking from them however this is sometimes less obvious. You have your work cut out for you but keep it fun the more time you take with this the longer you will be able to play trouble free.
Note when checking for cold solder joints use a bench mounted lighted magnifiing glass and have a hand held magnifiing glass at the ready just incase. when doing this type of repair DO NOT BRIDGE YOUR SOLDER CONNECTIONS use a fine point soldering iron if you are worried about solder splash on to different areas of the board that you are not working on you can tape off sections of the board that you are not working on at the moment.
I understand that none of what I have posted may fix your pin however this is a process of elimination the work that you put into this will cause your machine to be more reliable. and if you find some bad solder joints and repair them now you may have saved your self from a burnt part.
If you have solder experiance you will know not to solder too much in one area solder a little here then move to another part of the board so you dont overheat your board, from the symptoms that you have posted to me it sounds like the conductive material from the batteries has leaked on to several circuits and it may have caused some parts to have short out if this is the case you may have to replace some IC's transistors and diodes etc so be prepared to test these items some delicate electronics can be damaged just by testing them so be careful not to bridge the terminals with your DVOM leads while testing them.Good luck I hope my post atleast gets you a starting point.
just remember have fun while working on it.

 

[jsolheim]

Thanks for the good info, just ordered new src's and remote battery kit, i believe the src's control some of the power for the displays, so hopefullt $12 in parts fixes this.

I'll post some updates as i repair it.

 

[jsolheim]

Well, it's the mainboard thats bad. Have to do remove and replace 3 SRC's and the battery pack. Also 2 of the grounding traces on the board spopped off, i should be able to replace the parts and jump the traces with wire.
If it still doesn't work, anyone have a good source for system 11 cpu boards?