As I watched various things physically happening I formed ideas in my head about how those things were controlled. And stuff.' I had looked at the workings of the machine and the schematic but I had no clue about how it actually worked.įor no reason other than curiosity I started trying to figure out how things worked. My friends would look at it and say 'how does it control everything with no circuit board, no CPU, no memory, etc?' I just opened it up and showed them and answered 'it's all done by relays. I was intrigued about the operation of an EM machine. While playing the machine for fun was a major point of getting it, right away I also wanted to poke around the machine. It was in really good shape and all working when I got it. I liked the idea of getting one of the older machines, and ended up getting the BV via Ebay which turned out to be a local Pinsider. Then I realized it was possible to get the older ones for far less than that, even a few hundred dollars. I had an idea that people had them in their homes and I knew that new ones cost $5000-8000 which seemed pretty high. The Bon Voyage or BV for short was my first pinball machine, bought before I knew about Pinside. I am not sure how well the information will translate over to other brands such as Gottleib which may use different schematic layouts, but the general ideas should be somewhat consistent. If you want to know more about how an EM works this could be a good illustrative example. Many of the sub circuits use the same logic from machine to machine. If you have a Bally EM of similar vintage this should help to understand how it works. You will be able to quickly troubleshoot practically any problem that comes up. If you have a Bally Bon Voyage, you are golden. Part 6, 1 / 2: Ball Drains (Balls in Play).Part 5, 5 / 5: Game Play (Tilts, Flippers).Part 5, 4 / 5: Game Play (Collect Lit Value Hole, Spinner Disc).Part 5, 3 / 5: Game Play (B-O-N-V-O-Y-A-G-E Special).As the sections are added I will come back and add links to the section headings to make the TOC more useful. Once everything seems complete for that section, then the next one will go up and this will continue until the end. There may be questions, inputs, corrections, criticisms, etc. I will post one section and then wait for an unspecified time for comments. The circuit descriptions with pictures will be posted in sections as shown below.

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