The EM logic is just amazing when it comes to doing a lot of things with very limited hardware. What actually causes the machine to dispense a new ball onto the plunger lane?Looking at the schematics page that has the ball release coil, it has 2 conditions: out hole relay must pull and switch 4B in the score motor must be active. The score motor runs during the gameplay, but as long as the out hole relay isn't pulling, the path will never be complete for the ball release solenoid to fire.Once you lose the ball and it's sitting on the out hole switch, the circuit finally completes as the score motor rotates as part of the end-of-the-ball tasks and then new ball is released.But naturally it's not THAT simple. The out hole switch isn't directly running the similarly named relay. The more I drill into the schematics, the more incredible this thing becomes. As someone who can write code, all this jungle of wires would easily fit into a Nano Arduino which would happily run a software-reimplementation of the whole thing.Anyway, this game is slowly running out of things to fix, which means we can take the playfield topside apart and clean it up!
