Whirlwind Progress!
Woo-hoo! Our Whirlwind is not a complete piece of junk! I swapped the CPU boards with our [working] Police Force, then the ROMs, and finally the power supply and… viola!, a mostly-working Whirlwind! Auf Deutsch.
Next steps are probably to get English ROMs and repair the CPU and power supply boards (the main display wasn’t working). I might be able to fix the power supply, but the CPU is probably going to professionals.
Very exciting. So exciting, in fact, that upon seeing that it looked like it was actually working and ready to start a game, I pressed Start and shot the ball out, only to see it get stuck a moment later underneath some plastic. It was then I remembered that I’d stripped all of the foul, sticky, dirty rubber rings off of it before, leaving all of the places the ball isn’t supposed to go exposed. Oops. Good thing it didn’t take out a lamp…
This also means the Police Force High Scores are reset. Now maybe Colin can make it back onto the board. If I can get Police Force working again, that is.
November 28, 2008 at 9:15 am
Nice blog, I read quite a bit of it and it almost makes me want to start my own pinball blog ;-)
Just commenting on the German Whirlwind, isn’t it possible to set the dipswitches to US to change the language to English? I had the same issue with a French Cirqus Voltaire, and setting the switches to Europe fixed it for me (check the manual for a dipswitch table ;-))
Regards,
Eric
November 28, 2008 at 3:43 pm
It was a couple years back now so it’s difficult to recall exactly, but you are probably right. I did in fact end up sending the CPU board off to Coin-Op Cauldron and when it came back it was in English, so Clive may have just flipped a few DIP switches.