Day 2

I spent a few hours inside the pin Sunday and Monday nights. This is a widebody pin, so this is going to be a big coffee table! As you can see in the photo, it's mostly gutted inside, but all the wiring on the playfield and most of the wiring harness is still present. That blue box is a video game power supply I wired into the cord and tried to tap into the GI lights. GI=general illumination, the plain white lights throughout a pinball playfield, usually located under the plastic playfield artwork and used to light up the playfield. Ideally this coffee table will be mostly lit up at the flip of a switch to showcase the pinball artwork.

First I just tried messing around, tapping into the GI lights with 5 volts from the power supply. Most pins will have all these lights tied together by two wires running around to all of them, so it should be easy to light the whole string. It would be just my luck Atari didn't do this, they seem to be grouped in sets of 3 or 4. So I've already come to the first decision point in the project, how to wire the lighting? Do I run 15 different wires from the power supply into the harness to light all the GI lights? That seems like a lot of work and something that would never be able to run off a battery, which would be desirable at times when I don't want' people to trip over a cord.