So here’s part 2 so to speak on this Bally Beat the Clock pinball. I have a part 3 that I’ll post in a few days.

On this game a few of the LEDs are flickering. An Alltek board isn’t available for the 6803 system game and the two pinballs before it which are Grand Slam and Gold Ball. Both of those games and the entire 6803 system games use a unique feature to drive the feature lamps.

Gold Ball and Grand Slam are the last two games to use the MPU boards with Grand Slam using the -35 and Gold Ball using the -133. These two games also use a different power driver board in that the lamps are driven by a combo power/solenoid/lamp board.

The 6803 series games use a logic board that also drives the coils and the lamps, but they both function the same way in how they drive the feature lamps. I wrote a 3 part series on a Gold Ball that had a hack job done to make the feature lamps work. You can start with part one here.

But on this Beat the Clock, only a few LEDs would flicker and trying to add a resistor to curb the flickering would only cause more problems. Past experience taught me that the problem wasn’t with the game, but with the wiring in the building. You can watch the video below to see what is going on.

I have another video that shows how the feature lamps are driven compared to how other games do it. That video goes into greater detail. Check back for that soon.

Hopefully this will help you troubleshoot your feature lamp issues on your early Bally games

Frank