Goin' Nuts (Gottlieb, 1983): the 10-unit prototype, and System 80A boards

Looking for help with a Gottlieb Goin' Nuts that will not start, resets, or shows missing digits? Read the next section first, because Goin' Nuts is not an ordinary machine. Ten were built, all of them engineering prototypes, and it never reached production. If you genuinely have one, the electronics underneath are standard Gottlieb System 80A and everything below about faults and replacement boards applies exactly as it would to any Gottlieb of 1983. If you have arrived here from The Pinball Arcade, a virtual table, or a half-remembered machine at the Pinball Hall of Fame, the history is worth your time — this is one of the strangest games Gottlieb ever designed.

About the Goin' Nuts (Gottlieb, 1983)

See it: full photo gallery for Goin' Nuts on IPDB (#1021) · Goin' Nuts on Pinside

Goin' Nuts was dated February 1983 and then never released. It was designed by Adolf Seitz Jr., with music by Craig Beierwaltes; the artwork credit is not reliably recorded in the databases we can check, and we would rather say so than guess. Ten machines were built as engineering prototypes. Pinside's records suggest eight survive, with six Pinsiders listing one in their collection and around forty more with it on a wishlist.

What makes it remarkable is the rules. In 1983, almost nothing played like this. The game starts as a three-ball multiball, launched by an auto-plunger — not as a feature you work toward, but as the opening state of play. When you drop to a single ball, a countdown timer starts, and when it reaches zero the ball ends regardless of where it is. Knocking down drop targets scores and buys back time. It is, in effect, a timed game wearing a pinball machine's clothes, and the squirrel theme runs right through it: the balls are "squirrels" and the drop targets are "nuts".

The layout is as odd as the rules. It is a widebody, four-player, single-level game with seven pop bumpers, five banks of three drop targets, four flippers — and no outlanes at all. You cannot drain down the sides. On a game where the clock, not the drain, is the enemy, that is coherent design rather than generosity.

• Manufacturer: D. Gottlieb & Co. (a Columbia Pictures Industries Company)
• Dated: February 1983
• Production: never released — 10 engineering prototypes, of which roughly 8 are believed to survive
• Electronic system: Gottlieb System 80A
• Displays: alphanumeric, 4 players
• Sound: MA-309 sound board — no speech
• Design: Adolf Seitz Jr. · Music: Craig Beierwaltes · Art: not reliably documented
• Cabinet: wide body
• Playfield: single level, 4 flippers, 7 pop bumpers, 5 banks of 3 drop targets, no outlanes
• Rules: opens in 3-ball multiball; countdown timer during single-ball play ends the ball at zero

Why it was shelved

No source we can find states Gottlieb's official reason, and we are not going to invent one. What is widely reported is a design problem: a skilled player could bank so much time off the drop targets that a game stopped ending. For an operator paid by the play, a machine that a good player can ride indefinitely is a commercial problem, whatever else it is.

The timing did not help either. 1983 was the year the ground moved under Gottlieb. The company had been owned by Columbia Pictures since 1976, and in the middle of the upheaval around the sale, prototypes simply stopped moving forward. Michael Gottlieb has recounted — at a Black Hole designer seminar, as related by collectors — that on his father's last walk through the building, two Goin' Nuts and one Krull prototype were still sitting in the back of the place. Two of the great might-have-beens of solid-state pinball, parked in a corner, on the day the lights went out.

Where you can actually play one

Goin' Nuts has had an unusually long afterlife for a machine that was never sold. It was shown at the first Pinball Expo in 1985. It was included in the 2006 versions of Pinball Hall of Fame: The Gottlieb Collection, and recreated for The Pinball Arcade in 2013 — collectors report that a real machine was loaned to the developers to make that recreation. It is also a popular Visual Pinball table. The one place generally cited as having a publicly playable original is the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas.

All of which is worth knowing before you get excited about a listing. If you have found "a Goin' Nuts", it is overwhelmingly likely to be a virtual table, a digital recreation, or a different System 80A machine wearing reproduction artwork. There are only about eight real ones.

What one is worth

Pinside estimates roughly 46,000 to 54,000 US dollars, and a recent asking price of just under 50,000 dollars has been seen in the US. Collector discussion also recalls two selling at around 21,000 dollars each some years back, which gives you the shape of the curve rather than a contradiction. With eight machines in existence there is no market in any meaningful sense — a Goin' Nuts changes hands privately at whatever two people agree, and rarity lists are a better guide to its standing than any figure.

Common faults across System 80A

Goin' Nuts runs ordinary System 80A boards, so the family fault list applies. This section is also why most readers are here, because the same boards sit in tens of thousands of other machines.

The NiCd battery on the CPU board is the first thing to check, every single time. It was soldered straight to the board, it leaks with age, and the electrolyte travels along the traces and into the nearby IC sockets — the damage concentrates around the 5101 CMOS memory. Left in place it eats the copper, and the job turns from "remove a battery" into "rebuild a board". Take it off before you power anything up. This is the one that catches owners of rare, lightly used machines: a battery leaks on the shelf just as happily as it does on route.

The 6532 RIOT chips — combined I/O and RAM devices — fail with age, and on System 80 they divide the work usefully: U4 reads the switch matrix, U5 drives the displays, U6 handles coils, lamps and sound calls. A machine that boots but ignores a block of switches points at U4; dead displays with working coils point at U5. The game program lives in 2716 EPROMs, and a bad image announces itself as a 7641-X error on the displays, X being 1 or 2 for which PROM failed its checksum.

Grounding causes most resets, and it is a design flaw rather than wear. Gottlieb chained the board grounds in series through Molex connectors, so one tired connector takes the ground away from everything downstream. The "ground mods" run a separate ground wire from each board to a common point on the power supply board's mounting screw — abrade the coating first so the screw actually makes contact. A companion mod jumpers the negative lead of the big filter capacitor to the regulator's metal frame, and runs a second wire from there to cabinet ground.

Power supply. The 5 V logic rail must arrive at the CPU board at a true 5.0–5.1 V under load. The same supply also makes +8 V and +60 V for the displays and ±12 V for sound, and the big orange filter capacitor in the bottom of the cabinet is decades old and should simply be replaced.

Displays. Missing segments or whole missing digits are, in the large majority of cases, the edge connectors — not the display and not the CPU. Clean and reseat first, re-pin to fix it properly, and never plug or unplug a display with the machine powered on.

The reset board (A24, MA-980). System 80A onwards carries a small board that watches the CPU's digit strobes and restarts the processor if they stop, so a hung CPU cannot sit there holding a coil on. Its electrolytic capacitors dry out, and when they do the board itself causes boot failures and mid-game resets. Its traces lift very easily if you recap it. Remove it entirely and the CPU needs a 3.3 kΩ pull-up between pins 7 and 11 of the TC1 connector. On a machine as rare as this one, leaving a working reset board in place is the safer choice — it exists precisely to stop a locked-up CPU cooking a coil.

Spurious slam tilts are usually the slam switch on the coin door, which works outside the switch matrix, or a floating ground — not a logic fault.

Goin' Nuts-specific issues

Here we have to be straight with you. With ten machines built and six owners recorded on Pinside, there is no body of owner fault reports for Goin' Nuts — no long repair threads, no accumulated wisdom about which component goes first on this particular game. Anyone presenting you with a detailed Goin' Nuts fault list is describing a different machine. What can honestly be said comes from the design itself and from how these prototypes have lived.

It carries the heaviest coil load Gottlieb put on a standard System 80A playfield. Seven pop bumpers and five three-bank drop target assemblies is a great deal of solenoid traffic for one Driver board — a typical production game of the era has one or two pops and two or three banks. That shifts the odds toward driver transistor failures and toward the pop bumper driver board, and it makes the ground mods more important, not less. If a bank buzzes, sticks part-way or keeps blowing a fuse, suspect a shorted driver transistor before you suspect the coil.

Low play hours do not mean healthy electronics. These were effectively home-use machines for most of their lives, and surviving examples are often described as cosmetically close to mint. That is genuinely good news for the playfield, plastics and cabinet. It is no protection at all for the CPU board: battery corrosion, dried electrolytics and oxidised connector pins are calendar faults, not mileage faults. A machine that has not been switched on since the 1990s needs more care on first power-up, not less — bring it up slowly, check the 5 V rail before anything else, and pull the battery first.

Documentation is thin. A game cancelled before production never got a distributed service manual, wiring diagrams in circulation, or an operator's parts list. Anyone working on one is using generic System 80A documentation plus the machine in front of them. That is a strong argument for diagnostic tooling over guesswork.

Nothing game-specific is replaceable. The playfield, the plastics, the backglass and the cabinet decals were never produced in quantity and have no reproductions. Electronics can be replaced; the rest cannot. Keep the original boards, labelled, in a dry box — a prototype with its original boards preserved is worth more than one without, even if those boards never go back in.

If you own one and you have found something specific, we would like to hear it. There is almost nothing on record, and a note from an owner would be the best source on this page.

Replacement boards compatible with the Goin' Nuts

Electronically this is a standard System 80A, so the usual System 80/80A replacements fit. One game-specific point: Goin' Nuts runs the MA-309 sound board, which it shares with Haunted House, Spirit, Super Orbit, Royal Flush Deluxe and Krull — and none of those talk. Its 1983 stablemates Devil's Dare, Rocky, Striker, Q*Bert's Quest and Caveman do have speech. Do not assume a Gottlieb of this vintage must be a speech machine; order the non-speech configuration.

• GottFA80_Plus (Light) — all-in-one CPU + Driver + power supply board, without sound.
• GottFA80_Plus (Full) — the same board with integrated sound.
• Gosof — replacement sound board. For Goin' Nuts, the MA-309 non-speech configuration.
• Godri80 — replacement Driver board. Worth serious consideration on a playfield with this many coils on it.
• Lisy80 — CPU board with web-based diagnostics, which is useful precisely because this game has no repair literature.
• GoPOP80 — pop bumper driver board, replacing the original MA-922 / A-19741. With seven pops, this one earns its place here more than on most System 80A games.

An honest caveat for a prototype. Pre-production machines can carry board revisions, ROM revisions and wiring that never made it into any production documentation, because there was no production. We will not promise a drop-in fit on a Goin' Nuts sight unseen. Send us photographs of your boards and the numbers on them and we will tell you what fits — and say so plainly if we are not sure.

The Lisy80 and Gosof designs come from LISY, an independent developer's free DIY project — credit where it is due. We test the boards we ship and we support them afterwards; installation is Plug & Play, battery-free, with tutorials and free help if you get stuck.

Step-by-step diagnosis (System 80A)

1. Powered off, visual inspection: find the NiCd battery on the CPU board and remove it before testing anything. Photograph the boards and their numbers first — on a prototype, that record has value in itself.
2. Power supply: measure 5 V at the CPU board under load, not at the supply. Replace the orange filter capacitor in the bottom of the cabinet if it has never been done.
3. Grounds: apply the System 80 ground mods between CPU, Driver, power supply and sound boards. Do this before chasing any reset.
4. Connectors: re-pin oxidised Molex connectors, especially the CPU↔Driver link.
5. Displays: clean and reseat the edge connectors. Never plug or unplug a display with the machine powered on; test with a known-good one.
6. Coils: with seven pops and five drop target banks, test every coil individually and note which share a driver before assuming a board fault.
7. Rules check: remember the ball ends when the countdown reaches zero. A ball that ends "for no reason" during single-ball play may be the game working correctly, not a switch fault.
8. Final test: start-up, credits, the opening multiball, every target bank, sound and displays. If anything remains, contact our free support.

FAQ — Goin' Nuts (Gottlieb, 1983)

How many Goin' Nuts pinball machines were made?
Ten, all engineering prototypes, dated February 1983. The game was never released. Pinside's records suggest around eight survive, with six owners listed.

Why was Goin' Nuts never released?
No official reason is on record. The problem widely reported is in the rules: a skilled player could accumulate so much time off the drop targets that the game effectively stopped ending — a serious issue for an operator paid per play. Gottlieb was also in upheaval in 1983, and prototypes stopped moving forward.

What is a Goin' Nuts pinball worth?
Pinside estimates roughly 46,000 to 54,000 US dollars, with a recent asking price just under 50,000. Collectors also recall two selling at around 21,000 dollars each some years ago. With eight machines in existence, sales are private and negotiated — there is no real market price.

Where can I play a Goin' Nuts?
The Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas is the place generally cited as having a publicly playable original. Otherwise it appears in the 2006 Pinball Hall of Fame: The Gottlieb Collection, in The Pinball Arcade from 2013, and as a Visual Pinball table.

What makes the rules so unusual?
The game opens in three-ball multiball rather than building to it, and once you are down to a single ball a countdown timer runs — when it hits zero the ball ends. Drop targets buy time back. It also has no outlanes at all, which makes sense when the clock, not the drain, is what ends your ball.

Which boards does a Goin' Nuts use?
Gottlieb System 80A: CPU board, Driver board, power supply, and an MA-309 sound board with no speech. Because it is a prototype, confirm the numbers on your own boards before ordering anything.

Does Goin' Nuts have speech?
No. The MA-309 board it shares with Haunted House, Spirit, Super Orbit, Royal Flush Deluxe and Krull produces sound and music but no voice. Order the non-speech sound configuration.

Can I still get parts for one?
Electronics, yes — the boards are standard System 80A. Anything specific to the game, no: the playfield, plastics, backglass and decals were never produced in quantity and have no reproductions.

Does a battery-free board keep the settings and high scores?
Yes. Modern replacement boards use non-volatile memory: no battery, no corrosion, and settings and scores survive being switched off.

See also

• Krull (Gottlieb, 1983) — the other Gottlieb prototype of the same moment, also about ten built, also MA-309.
• Royal Flush Deluxe (Gottlieb, 1983) — also MA-309, and a game you can actually buy.
• Super Orbit (Gottlieb, 1983) — also MA-309.
• Q*Bert's Quest (Gottlieb, 1983) — a speech title, by contrast.
• Amazon Hunt (Gottlieb, 1983)
• Rack 'Em Up (Gottlieb, 1983)
• GottFA80_Plus: the all-in-one board for System 80/80A/80B
• GoPOP80: pop bumper driver board (MA-922 / A-19741)

Sources & further reading

• IPDB — Goin' Nuts (#1021)
• OPDB — Goin' Nuts (February 1983, widebody, alphanumeric, 4 players, IPDB #1021)
• Pinside — Goin' Nuts: 10 produced, 8 surviving, owner counts, value estimate
• Pinside forum — "Goin' Nuts" (surviving examples, past sale prices, the loaner used for the digital recreation)
• Wikipedia — Goin' Nuts: Adolf Seitz Jr., Craig Beierwaltes, 10 engineering prototypes, the countdown timer and the no-outlanes layout
• Digital Pinball Fans — Michael Gottlieb's account of two Goin' Nuts and one Krull left in the building in 1983
• LISY — GOSOF80 user manual (MA-309 game list: Goin' Nuts is not a speech title)
• Multibille wiki — Gottlieb System 80 repair: RIOT U4/U5/U6 roles, ground mods, supply rails, 7641-X ROM error
• Pinside forum — Gottlieb reset boards: what the A24 board does, failed electrolytics, the 3.3 kΩ TC1 pull-up
• Flippers.com — System 80 tips: cabinet filter capacitor, regulator ground jumper, display recharging
• PinWiki — Gottlieb System 80 repair guide
• Pinball Hall of Fame, Las Vegas — game list
• VPUniverse — Goin' Nuts Visual Pinball X recreation
• OPDB — Open Pinball Database

Own a Goin' Nuts? Send us a photo and we'll add it here with credit — get in touch.