I really wasn’t planning on selling Popeye, honestly!!! I really liked the game but I had a first time pinball buyer come by the house. At first the interest was in my Space Shuttle but that drifted over to the Popeye. It’s not hard to fall in love with a DMD pin over an older Solid State machine like Space Shuttle. The voice calls, the animations, the music; the entire package is much better on a DMD in my opinion. I also recommend DMDs for first time buyers because the menu and setup is so much easier to navigate.
So now I am off to find another game. What should I get this time? I has to be less than $1500.
I am really enjoying Popeye. It really gets a bad rap with the other pinball enthusiasts but I think it is an excellent game. My friend Taylor came over and put the Grand Champion score on it (like he does on all of my games!) at 404 million. I’m working my way closer, I got up to around 300 million last night.
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%!
I just can’t stop tearing down games! The Popeye I just picked up was in nice clean shape but it had some old black rubber on it that was disintegrating. I like only white rubber on my games so I decided to do a mini shop job. There isn’t that much rubber on this game so I decided to tear it down last night and get rid of the black rubber. I’m glad I did because there was hidden dirt around and under the plastics. Now the game plays much faster with the new rubber.
