skeeball repair

[lilshawn]

Got a place a few hours drive out of town that picked up a pair of Skeeball (I believe model S machines) and they wanted me to check them out and get them going.

so I did, took some work on the switches and whatnot and a bit of a stumbling on the programming, but got them going. (there is a bit of a disconnect in the programming between the two...IE the machines where not built/bought together so the default programming is different between them)

the default programming on one machine had the machine set to have the ticket dispenser disabled while the other just used default programming so you could enable and disable the dispenser with the dipswitch set off or on.

so, i did get them both going by setting the one to factory default, and programming the other to match (the ticket payout levels etc.)

the machines ran great for a couple months, then one stopped paying out tickets. we happened to be heading out that way so i'd stop in and check them out.

i look into it and there is no fault with the dispenser. (swapping it to the other machine, it operates fine) i reprogrammed the machine but it seems it wont hold settings.

hard to tell since there is no real feedback from the game, but turning on the ticket dispenser in the payout setting (as well as all the other settings) changing the dip switch from programming mode back to normal mode, and then power cycling the machine to reboot it, still wouldn't run the ticket dispenser

looking more into it, the motherboard has a DS1220AD non-volatile ram chip to save settings in. this chip with a date code of the first week of 1990, I am going to assume the battery in the chip is toast... the settings are no longer being retained, and that is it's primary issue.

so my plan of attack is... I will order 2 new DS1220 chips for the 2 machines to futureproof them, then copy and dump the ROM (27128) from the one machine with the proper default settings and erase, and burn that rom image into the rom of the other machine so they match. my thought is that either way it goes, it's covered, and they both should continue working.

does this seem like a viable plan? i'd hate to go way out there and miss something.

note: there is a rom version difference between the machines. i'm not sure which is newer or how the version nomenclature goes, but they are definitely different. one auto enters the programming mode, the other requires you to press the programming button to enter the mode otherwise it times out and boots into the game mode)

[lilshawn]

finally finished this project off.

I ordered the 2 DS1220 chips and replaced them both in each machine. I also cloned the ROM from the one machine onto a blank 27c128 chip and installed it into the other machine so they now match. i also dumped the data off the one "good" DS1220 chip and copied the data onto the 2 new ones.

they operate perfectly.