Pinball 2000 Repair

Note: This page is a work in progress. Please help get it to a completed state by adding any useful information to it.

1 Introduction

Pinball 2000 was the answer to a failing pinball industry. This was the last system used in a pinball machine before Williams ceased production of pinball machines. The reasons for why Williams ceased production is highly debated and more information can be found here.

This system was a hybrid of normal pinball with a video aspect. Using a 19" arcade monitor and special playfield glass that is tinted to reflect the image, creating the illusion of holographic images. To be able to handle both the pinball and video aspects of the game, the designers of Pinball 2000 used an off the shelf, commercial PC, adding 2 proprietary pieces, the PRISM card, which contains the roms and booted the PC without a hard disk, and an audio amp. The PRISM card requires the Cyrix GX, a specific CPU and GPU to function, making the PC inside Pinball 2000 hard to replace. The biggest problem is that the PC component was already obsolete when Pinball 2000 was created in 1999 to reduce costs of manufacturing the game.

2 Games

• Revenge From Mars
• Star Wars Episode 1
• Wizard Blocks *
• Playboy *

* Denotes a game that was never produced

3 Technical Info

Pinball 2000 was run using a commercial PC with the Cyrix GX CPU, which was required by the PRISM card. The PRISM card is a PCI card that held the ROMs and took over the basic boot process of the PC to run Pinball 2000. Along with the PRISM card, the PC contained a custom audio amp to drive the stereo speakers and subwoofer. Optional pieces of hardware available for the Pinball 2000 system would be the XXX ethernet card and a barcode reader. These worked to be able to access bookkeeping info over the internet and also host tournaments involving barcode based "login" to the system. Currently working on this, including adding pictures

4 Problems and Solutions

4.1 Power Problems

The AT power supply in the PC case is a common failure. If your power supply fails, you have 2 options: 1) find another AT power supply, or 2) Put an ATX power supply into your machine. The first option is becoming extremely hard to do because of how long AT power supplies haven't been used, it is hard to still find one. Option 2 involves cutting 2 wires out of the molex connector and connecting them to each other to force the motherboard to boot.

4.2 PC issues

One of the issues with the PC is that the fan on the CPU heatsink is prone to failure. Once the fan stops working, the CPU overheats and over time will eventually fail. A big factor that causes the fan to fail is the foam piece that goes across the lid. Due to heat, the glue gives up and it sags right down on top of the fan. The best thing to do is to trim it back to just over the PRISM card, which is the foam's original purpose.

Another tip for prolonging your PC's life is to underclock the CPU., which will be detailed here once I pull up my info for it.

4.3 Solenoid problems

Be sure connectors are on coil lugs tight. Vibration can loosen them and burn the lugs, or on flipper coils if a connector slips off - they aren't insulated and can short to the next lug and take out a transistor for the flipper coil.

4.4 Lamp problems

With Pinball 2000 came some methods to help make operator maintenance easier. One of those features is a burnt out lamp detection. The only problem with this is that if you put LEDs in your machine, they draw to little current to be detected as good and will report as bad to your machine.

4.5 Switch problems

The switches are a common failure on these machines. Most switch related problems are the switch itself not the switch matrix. There are 2 common switches in a Pinball 2000 machine which are XXX and XXX.

4.6 Monitor problems

The monitor inside a Pinball 2000 machine is a normal, low-res, arcade monitor. Two different brand monitors were put in Pinball 2000 machines, a Wells-Gardner 19K7302 or a Ducksan XXX. At this age, most of these monitors could use adjusting, if not a cap kit.

Another option for Pinball 2000 monitors include purchasing an LCD and mounting it place of the CRT. This option will require a signal converter to convert the low resolution signal to something a normal computer monitor can handle.

4.8 Flipper problems

It should be noted that the E.O.S. switches are normally open.

5 Repair Logs

Did you do a repair? Log it here as a possible solution for others.