The Addams Family

My brother Pieter was the main Addams Family fan, although I must say that I've become a convert since getting this machine.
It's a classic. Especially if you liked the movie (erm, that's *film* for the people across the pond :-)

I bought this machine (Serial # 20017-593365) for R6000 (US$800-ish) from the junkmail, it's been played a lot, the working
coin counter reads 132158 and there's a disconnected counter reading 59885. Assuming two coins per game, that's still a lot...

Somebody tore the FCC sticker off the back, and the playfield date is illegible, but the coin door sticker reads "Feb 18, 1992".
I later found the torn off FCC sticker inside the cabinet, "92084" = 24th March 1992. Two days after my 25th birthday. Would
have been nice to have a machine made two days earlier :-) (BTW I bought the machine on 2001-03-26)

When I got the machine it would randomly start a new game in the middle of play. I thought it was resetting itself for some
reason, but I later found the problem. Or at least, I know what the problem was, but I can't explain it fully. The left outlane
switch was stuck closed, and I think the combination of this and one of the swamp switches would cause a phantom
"START" switch event. And for some reason, when you press START in the middle of the game, a new game is started. I
consider this a bug in the firmware, but it's there in TAFG LX3 as well.

Before I found the problem with the outlane switch (which I should have checked first, since it was coming up in the error
report), I removed the driver board, resoldered all the molex pins, and made the PinballHQ mods to the driver board just
in case. I also added a few additional jumpers.

I replaced the GI connector on the cable side, the connector was badly burnt.

[Driver Board mods]

Still far from 1.4B, JIM

The machine had L-1 ROMs, I upgraded it to TAFG L-3 and played
that for a while. Got this score one morning, I doubt if I will ever get
there again :-) [Note: I like many things that I am not particularly good
at, pinball is one]

I don't like the "randomness" of TAFG, for example, I got the gold
pinball to reach this score, if the random number generator came up
with some other award the score would have been lower.

I'm currently using standard TAF L-5 ROMs.

ROM	Size	Type	bin	zip	strings output
TAF L-1	2 Mbit (256kB)	27C020 / 27C2001	af-l1.bin		af-l1.txt
TAF L-5	4 Mbit (512kB)	27C040 / 27C4001	af-l5.bin	addam_l5.zip (167k)	af-l5.txt
TAF Sound	4 Mbit (512kB)	27C040 / 27C4001	af-s-l1.bin
TAFG L-3 Export	4Mbit (512kB)	27C040 / 27C4001	ag-lx3.bin	afgo_lx3.zip (197k)	ag-lx3.txt
TAFG Sound 1.0 U15	2 Mbit (256kB)	27C020 / 27C2001	ag-u15-l1.bin	afg_snd.zip (621k)
TAFG Sound 1.0 U18	4 Mbit (512kB)	27C040 / 27C4001	ag-u18-l1.bin	afg_snd.zip (621k)

Note on downloads: These ROM images are freely available on the net. Not only can you download most of them from
the Williams pinball site, but there are people out there [1] [2] offering ROMs for sale, which is against the WMS license.
So, I don't think I am doing either WMS or the pinball community a disservice by making the images available, after all they are
100% useless if you don't own an Addams Family pinball machine. (Except of course if you want to sell ROMs, and that's
happening already...) If you're a lawyer working for WMS, and you don't think I should have these ROMs here, let me
know and I'll remove them immediately.

Dreaded Previous Owners, Hacks and tricks

Very, very infrequently, I got a slam tilt. Eventually found that the coin door mechanism was drawing it's operating
power from the switch matrix, so if it drew too much current at exactly the wrong moment, *SLAM* *TILT*. The
coin door slam tilt switch had of course been disconnected.
The coin comparator is made by Sydelyne, a South African company based in Johannesburg. I phoned them to find
out how the comparator works, and they spend quite a lot of time talking me through the setup options. It turned out
that the unit requires 12V, and as such doesn't work too well when powered from the switch matrix :-)
The flippers... oh my, the flippers. Half the screws were gone, and the left main flipper coil was held to the bracket
with two large cable ties.
I managed to sort all of this out, using new #6 and #10 hardware I bought from Topfast. New sleeves, links, etc from
Indoor Amusements. Now I still need new rubber...

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hits since 2001-04-02.