My Haunted House pinball machine

I've been looking for a Haunted House pinball machine ever since my brother and I played one in Lusern (Switzerland) in 1984. Finally saw one for sale in the 2000-10-05 Junkmail, and of course I just had to have it. I contacted Raymond Vaughan (I got his name from Mr Pinball (Daina Pettit)'s Pinball Collector Register), he had a look at the machine and told me that it was in good condition. Alright! :-)

I think I paid a bit too much, but I thought the chance of another HH coming my way was extremely remote. The machine cost me R5000, plus R500 to transport it from Boksburg to Bellville, plus another R500 insurance.

Machine condition: Hey, it works :-) The battery is leaking, but there's no functional damage to the PCB yet, the lower playfield is worn where the ball falls down from the upper level, and the playfield under the pop bumber mylar circles is also quite worn. This machine has been fixed before, not all the serial numbers on the various boards match up. The machine serial number is 10313.

2001-01-09: I removed the CPU board to clean the battery damage. Replaced the battery with a 3.6V nicad from an old 80386 motherboard. I downloaded the Black Hole user's manual from the Stork's Nest -- it contains a circuit diagram of the System 80 CPU board.

System 80 CPU board reverse engineering.

The CPU board has two large chips which I initially thought are RAM chips, but they're actually ROM. This is in addition to the game ROM, i.e. the one that changes for each game. The RAM is contained in a 5101 chip, which holds 256 nibbles (4 bits only). In addition to this, there's some memory (128 bytes) in each of the three RIOT (6532) chips. The 5101 is battery backed up and obviously used to store the high scores etc.

I'm disassembling the ROMs using d65. If you really need to see what this looks like (useless right now) look here.

System 80 Sound board reverse engineering.

The "Sound Board" was only used in early games. I don't have one, this bit of reverse engineering is based on the circuit diagram only.

The sound board uses a 6530 MIOT chip, which has 1K ROM, 64 bits RAM, and I/O ports similar to the 6532 RIOT. The ROM on the sound board is used to store the sound information, but the program is contained in the 6530.

This, of course, is a serious problem if you manage to blow the sound board -- you have to get hold of a programmed 6530, which of course will only be available on another sound board. So be careful out there...

System 80 Sound/Speech board reverse engineering.

The Haunted House uses the later type"Sound / Speech" board, but without the speech chip ( Votrax SC-01, I recall Steve Ciarcia playing with one of these in BYTE magazine) being fitted.

This board, like the CPU board, uses a 6502 processor and a 6532 RIOT. In addition to this, there are two 1408 D/A convertors (the one seems to generate the clock for the SC-01 chip, the other generates all the sounds except for speech).

On this board, memory and I/O decoding is handled by a 74LS138, which breaks up the memory space into 8 memory blocks of 4K each. Since A15 is ignored, the top and bottom half of memory are copies of one another. A11 is used to select between the two EPROMS which both occupy one 4K block (top and bottom).

A9 is still used to select between RAM and I/O in the RIOT, the same as on the CPU board. This arrangement is as good as any, and a programmer familiar with the CPU board would probably find this arrangement easier than something a little more "neat".

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hits since 2001-01-09.