Atari Pinball Games

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Atari Pinball Games - Troubleshooting

Atarians & Airborne Avengers:- These games used "motor" flipper coils and the process to replace the flipper body shell is to loosen the two set-screws that are accessed through the body of the plastic shell at the fattest part of these shells. Counterclockwise to loosen! Then the shell lifts up off the top of the shaft.

Common problems on pre Superman/Hercules games:

A common problem on these games is for someone to plug the solenoid connector to the switch inputs - blowing a number of TTL gates and taking the MPU down in the process. If that was the case then you have to replace all the Switch matrix TTL and a couple of others as well, I find you can often identify these with a Diode Check function on the digital meters. A normal gate is something like 0.500 to 0.800 volts relative to common, a bad gate is under 0.500...

Common problems on Superman/Hercules games:

One problem with late model Atari Pinball games (Hercules and Superman) is the factories use of a single sided printed circuit board for the Power Supply. (We won't talk about leaky batteries just yet) The common issue that develops over the years is fractures of the traces at the rear of the interconnect plugs (Molex) and the game then fails to work correctly. So a simple check on these machines is to remove the Power Supply board and resolder the pins

Atari Power Supply

Atari Power Supply lifted connector

Atari Power Supply cracked traces - J4 in this case.

> Hi All,
>
> Can anyone direct me to finding a pair of Atari Flipper unit's from an
> Airborne Avenger? (1977) The later Atari machines went to a standard
> coil but this one has a rotary style flipper unit that makes them
> flip. Any direction would be much appreciated! Thank you :)

Hi Scotty,

Atari replaced the rotary units with regular flipper assemblies and provided kits for operators to do this as the motors broke down. I have a few of these kits left (somewhat expensive) but you can often repair the motor assemblies with a bit of brazing or other repairs as required.

What is your problem? Is something actually broken or is it weak? Weak is a problem with the mircoswitch (EOS) or the resistor or associated wiring to these two items.

As I said earlier, broken parts can often be repaired - if you have a MAPP gas torch you can braze otherwise I would use a bit of silver solder and a regular propane torch. Silver solder is usually strong enough for this repair and you do not need to overhear the metal and risk ruining the strength of the metal - you just need to heat it up enough to melt the silver solder, way below red hot!

John :-#)#