Okay, first let me apologize for the delay in responding. Since I have returned from the Pinball festival I have had to catch up at work, taken my kids to Washington DC on Spring break (Smithsonian!!!), was sick for about a month, purchased and restored a 1950's Vendo 39 coke machine and currently in the middle of refinancing my home. Everytime I walked past the Spectra IV I told myself, tomorrow I'll have time. Tonight I took the time.
Now, let me say THANKS to Leeeeee and others who have helped debug the game so that I could bring it to the Texas Pinball Festival. Because of the rarity of this machine and all the work that had gone into making it work and keeping it going during the show...
The Spectra IV was award 1st place in the Most Original Machine category!
Here's a link to the award page:
http://texaspinball.com/tpf/previous-shows/tpf2012/Now, back to the business at hand.
I traced the wires as requested. The Rotational Tilt signal circuit traces to J1 edge connecter to Pin 4. The test signal circuit traces to J1 edge connecter to Pin 3. The actual circuitry matches the schematic in my documentation.
In my tracing of the rotation tilt circuit I discovered that the signal wire had been cut at sensor board. I repaired that and hoped that would solve the problem. But it made no difference in the game. Now that I think about it, does this indicate that the machine is acting goofy even though it never senses a tilt error?
Currently the machine is in the following state:
1. Test process works flawlessly. However, activating the Rotational Tilt does not display a switch number in the switch test mode. The plum bob tilt does display the correct switch number. However, there is no switch number assigned to the Rotation Tilt in the manual so this may not be an error... it just may not function in test mode.
2. Set up process works flawlessly.
3. When set to play mode the machine will go into Attract mode as expected.
4. Activating the coin switch adds a credit as expected.
5. Starting a game causes the machine to 'reset' but it immediately starts to cycle the feature lane and running up the score.
While at the festival, the machine into this mode and it was only after I pulled the battery and shorted to the battery connections to drain the memory caps did it reset. I have not done this yet but hope to do so soon.
A thought about the currently feature lane cycle problem. In previous instances when the machine 'freaked out' I found erroneous values in the various configuration variables, it number of players = 6, number of balls = 7, etc. I'm wondering if the variable that retains the number of times the feature lane was activated is corrupt and this makes the machine do funky things once a game starts. I do know that the feature lane eject hole switch is working properly.
Well, there we go. Hopefully with the information I provided above, Leeee can complete the documentation process which would then lead to a more intelligent diagnosis of the problems. Again I can't says thanks enough for all the help I have received and I am very excited about the prospect of getting this machine and the 15 or so others known to exist up and running at full potential soon!