Hack of the month!

So my new Popeye is nice but it did have a few tiny problems, one of which is the escape button on the coin door wasn’t working.  There is a set of four buttons on the coin door that allows you to navigate the setup menus.  The escape button is important because without it you can’t go back to game mode without cycling the power.

Cycling the power works but that is not the solution.  I started looking into the issue and the first thing I did was the ground some of the pins on the CPU board to see if this was a CPU issue.  After grounding pin 6 I found that the CPU was fine because the Escape button worked up there.  I was next going to trace the wire to the coin door interface board and I discovered this:

This might be a problem

Yup that is the wire that leads to the escape button.    So I start tracing the wire up the line and I find this:

Well wadda ya know...

That orange and green wire leads to pin 6 on J205 on the CPU board (the escape button).   This is a pretty smart hack IMHO… what am imagining happens here is if a service technician opens the game to work on it this little DIN connector prevents someone from pressing the escape button to get back into game mode.  You would have to have some sort of “KEY” that makes the connection between the ground wire and the orange wire within the connector.  Here is the interior:

The best parts is whoever hacked this in didn’t cut away the orange wire leading to the coin door, they bunched it up and wire tied it to the harness so I was able to reverse the hack pretty easily.  Now Popeye is 100%!