Williams Pinball ASIC Troubles – Twilight Zone (WPC)

WPC ASIC socket replacement

From the world of arcade repair… as the cold of winter hit a few of my pinball machines started acting up. On game nights with friends, it was creeping up to a 75% failure rate! Ouch!

This one took me for a bit of a ride. Twilight Zone was getting random resets. Sometimes, I was getting audio and graphics errors, as if the ribbon cables between CPU and Audio PCB needed reseating. But things weren’t adding up. It turns out that tapping the ASIC chip would cause all sorts of issues.

I attempted to do a sloppy job prying out the ASIC and cracked one corner of the socket. My goal was to carefully deoxit the legs of the IC and maybe pins of socket. Oh well. Found some sockets on eBay, ordered them and thanks to Hakko 808 desoldering tool it took about 15 minutes total to remove the old ASIC socket and solder in the new one.

So far, things seem good. I won’t believe the game reset issues are solved — that seems to be an issue with the AC input connector on the power driver board, but time will tell.

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