Williams Blackout Pinball with No Sound

Introduction

I recently got an email stating that a Williams Blackout pinball had no sound. I told the owner that I would stop by and give it a quick look. When I got to his house, he was right. T e sound was not working and game continuously was scoring points even though the ball was still in the shooter lane. I gave him an estimate for the game, and he ended up bringing it to my shop to fix. A few Williams games that I have repaired from this time period are Flash and Gorgar. I also created a playlist on using a test rom (Pincoder) for system 6 boards.

Repair

The sound board and speech board needed updated as they both had original capacitors, Scanbe sockets, and header pins that needed reflowed. I started the repair by doing those, and also found that the speaker was bad. I bought one off of Amazon (affiliate link) and was a direct replacement for it. You can test ohms on the two lugs of the speakers, and the reading was open on the two lugs. In the video below, I tested a different speaker to double check. The other problem to sort out was the switch error problem. I was getting sporadic reports on column 1 (plumb bob tilt, ball roll tilt, credit button, right coin switch, center coin switch, left coin switch, slam switch, and high score reset) in the switch test mode.

I originally thought the switch error problems was on the driver board, but ended up being coin door switches that needed adjusted. Once the switches were adjusted the errors went away.

Conclusion

The pinball repair didn’t take too long and was happy to have sound back on the Williams Blackout. I have played Blackout a few times in the past, I was happy to play this one for a bit. Good game with drop targets, stand-up targets, and spinners.