Bram Stoker's Dracula — dead to fully functional

The Game

This Williams BSD (1993) came in completely untested to sort out, and ended up having a handful of common BSD issues — a non-functional mist magnet, no display, and various switch problems. BSD is a notoriously unreliable game when it comes to software and the mist magnet system. The original MPU had been completely destroyed by corrosion after sitting in storage for 20+ years in Houston (supposedly).

MPU problems

Upon receiving the game, the MPU was instantly thrown out as it was completely destroyed from battery corrosion. With replacement MPU installed, the front cabinet switches were MIA, and upon inspection of the harness at the MPU, corrosion had also gotten into J212, with one wire completely breaking off after pulling on each wire some. After cutting out the old J212 connector, repinning with a .100 Molex connector, all switches were back to registering.

24 Opto Board

The mist opto was completely unresponsive upon intake. BSD uses a dedicated 24” opto board to determine if the ball is on the magnet as it moves across the game, and is essentially a glorified TV remote sender/receiver circuit. Of course, both capacitors had leaked and damaged the board, needing a few new passives and 2 new caps installed. Afterwards, the opto board was back in action, although I still recommended replacement to the customer as these original boards even when working are fairly unreliable and failure prone.

DMD Driver Board

The original DMD driver board gave no display at all on boot. The DMD driver board generates the high voltage rails needed to drive the DMD, and one failed transistor had taken out the -110V and -98V rails. I also noted that both zeners that control the -125V rail voltage had been extremely overheated and had poor quality solder joints, so the pads were cleaned and reflowed. Swapping Q5 (2N5401) then brought the rails back and the display came back to life, and checking the thermal camera showed nothing was getting too hot.

Playfield

With the boards sorted and the game now playing, attention turned to the playfield. A few rollover switches were dead or sticking and needed cleaning or replacement. The drop target switch was completely missing its actuation arm, so was replaced. A few wires were broken under the game that needed addressing. The slingshots and pop bumpers were very lazy, the pop bumpers and slings were very inactive and just needed to have their switches adjusted to activate much earlier. Around 50 lamps and flashers were replaced in the game that were burned out.

Result

After around 8 hours of work, and a full hour of gameplay testing, this game was ready to be taken away and cleaned up by the owner at their own pace. I imagine this one will clean up pretty nice once you take it apart, get rid of the layers of grime and polish the metal.