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

5 Game Specific Problems and Fixes

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. LTG :)

6 Repair Logs

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