Another Coney Island

I just bought another Coney Island. And compared with this one my first was in almost excellent condition, well, almost, at least… The good thing with this one is that it still has its CPU and SDU, and even better, some wise guy removed the battery before putting the game in storage. The CPU looks almost like brand new. I haven’t powered it up yet, so I do not know if the ROM IC’s are in working order or not. Other Game Plan CPU’s I have been working on had all faulty ROM’s and had to be rebuilt for EPROM’s. But before I can test the boards I have to assemble the first playfield, I do not want to run the boards against this one. There are also a lot of other useful parts in this game which will be handy to have when assembling the other playfield.

 

The cabinet of this game are really ugly. At some point in time someone has clear coated it and it have become yellowish by the age. It is dented, scratched and pieces of wood are missing. But it is a good candidate for a first try of repainting. Which means that I can keep the old cabinet’s original painting as it is. It’s just like have one's cake and eat it too.

Star Trip completed

The Star Trip is now finally completed and turned out quite god, even if it isn’t the most fun game to play. The playfield are cleaned and polished and got new rubbers and also a new ball since the old one was a bit rusty. The coin rejectors also needed a little adjustment, they didn’t accept modern coins.

Star Trip electronics up and running

I have finally got the electronics to work properly in the Star trip.
The MPU from the Coney Island worked without problems but the SDU, also from the Coney, gave me some problems. When I first started the game, with the playfield connected, the game start tune was played at the solenoids instead of the sound card. The cause turned out to be the MPU connector end of the cable connecting the MPU to the SDU. One address bit was missing, probably due to oxidation in the connector from the battery leakage. Unfortunately I didn’t have this type of connector in stock instead I solved it by soldering the MPU end to the board.
After the first boot with the playfield connected the sound card started to give a continuous beep, also when starting a game and testing some switches some solenoids was pulled instead of the proper beep from the sound card. The cause of this was that the SDU board was modified at several points by interrupted traces and wire jumpers. It looked like someone made a mistake when writing the software addressing the wrong solenoids and instead of correcting the software they modified the board. I removed the wire jumpers and repaired the traces and then most of the game worked as it should. The Coney SDU wasn’t equipped with all driver transistors and the missing ones were used for the sound and one of the slingshots. Five driver transistors later all was working except for the continuous beep from the sound card. One of the jumper wires I had removed from the SDU connected a solenoid to one of the sound card inputs causing the +24 V to be routed to the sound card through the coil causing a capacitor at the input to be shorted. After replacing the capacitor also the sound worked properly.