Teething Troubles – part 3

Thing wasn’t playing ball today either.

Firstly I had to adjust the height of the hand to ensure the pinball was picked up cleanly from the playfield. However no amount of adjustment would allow the hand plus pinball to clear the side of Thing’s box meaning it would always snag against the box and the side of the ball rail. But it was still able to perform its function fully, so I left it.

Secondly, I continued to get an error message at start up saying to check Thing’s UP opto. Now I had already replaced the connector to Thing’s opto-board with a new Pancon IDC connector and checked/repaired all wires to it, so this wasn’t the problem. Also Thing’s hand was passing all tests in the test menu. So why did I have the error message still? So I ignored it.

I then played a game and tried to get Thing to come out, but he refused. Was this because of the Opto-UP error? Time to check the opto-board again.

Putting the machine into switch test, I checked the Opto UP opto with a toothpick. It worked fine. So I switched the machine off and on again and the error had gone. The machine needed to know that the switch was working (in switch test mode and NOT in Thing test mode) to recognise the fact. Strange. So my problem was solved. Or was it….

I played a game and tried to get Thing to come out of his box, but he continued to refuse. I was now really stumped. And then I remembered.

Way back, over a year ago, I had taken Thing out of the machine and continued to play the machine. To prevent any problems, I deactivated Thing in the relevant menu. I had forgotten this. Having re-enabled him and started a game, I managed to coax him out of his box.

This of course begs the question, that if he had been enabledĀ at the start of a game previously, as I had my Opto UP error (which actually wasn’t an error), would the problem have thenĀ been corrected automatically?

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