Pinball

My pinball problems started when I bought a non-operational 1980 Williams Flash at an auction. Not knowing what I got myself into, I took the contraption home and started tinkering. Man cannot live with one pinball alone so a few more came along. I realized that the Williams games from the early '80s use technology that I'm very familiar with. 6802 CPU, 6820 PIA, 2716 Eprom etc. So now I have a collection of five happily crowding the dining room.

What can be said about Flash, EVERYBODY knows this machine and I believe that it is the 2nd highest selling machine in Williams history.

Back in 1979 when it was released you could find a Flash pinball machine just about anywhere, every Arcade had one, every movie cinema complex had one and a lot of milk bars and corner stores had them too. I loved this machine as a teenager, when I think back about pinball's Flash is ALWAYS the first one that comes to mind.

Flash was the first pinball machine to have continually rising background sounds that helped to add to the general atmosphere of the game during game play, I am sure that these new sounds also attracted players to the machine as well.

Flash also has the typical lightning fast Bumper section that were installed on most Williams machines from this era, as well as having an awesomely fast spinner shot available to fire the ball back up to the top 1-2-3-4 rollover lanes where you can increase your X Bonus.

The champion players on Flash were able to score 50,000 points by knocking down the centre 3 targets 3 times to receive "Super Flash", the 5 drop targets on the right could be hit using the lower right flipper or the extra right flipper mounted midway up the playfield.

Dropping those 5 targets eventually lights the right eject hole for 10,000 points and then Extra Ball, dropping them again lights the outlanes for Specials.

Restoring the machine was a different story. First I had to get all the tools. Oscilloscoop, Eprom programmer and desoldering station. Luckily there is a good supply of used equipment on Ebay at reasonable prices. Since the chips are now over 30 years old, the start to fail and have to be replaced. In the old days, pinballs were repaired by board swappers. Just replace the CPU board and you are back in business. No such luxury for me. I desoldered most of the sockets and replaced them with a reliable brand. The ROMS can be replaced with a single EPROM after some mods to the address lines. Then you can eliminate the databus buffers. Finally replace the CPU with a 6808. That CPU has 64KB scratch memory onboard, eliminating the unreliable memory chip on the CPU board. All these mods result in a reduced power consumption and increased reliability.