Ready Aim Fire! (Gottlieb/Mylstar, 1983): faults, diagnosis and System 80A boards

Your Ready Aim Fire! no longer starts, resets mid-game, shows incomplete scores or has gone silent? Those symptoms are almost a signature of Gottlieb System 80A machines, whose original boards (CPU, Driver, power supply, sound) are now past forty years old. The good news is that none of it is terminal. The bad news, on this particular title, is that you will struggle to find a second one to compare against — only 390 were built.

About Ready Aim Fire! (Gottlieb/Mylstar, 1983)

See it: full photo gallery for Ready...Aim...Fire! on IPDB (#1924) · Pinside machine page and owner photos · the machine at the Pinball Hall of Fame

Written properly, the title has ellipses in it: Ready...Aim...Fire!. It is a four-player System 80A game on a shooting-gallery theme, with the carnival and circus styling that databases also tag it under. The artwork is by David Moore, the music and sound effects by Craig Beierwaltes, and Pinside credits the game design to Adolf Seitz Jr.

The reason you have probably never seen one in the wild is the production run: 390 units. Both Pinside and the Kineticist database give the same figure, and it puts Ready Aim Fire! among the genuinely scarce solid-state Gottliebs. The Museum of the Game census is blunter still — across more than ten thousand surveyed members, it records no known examples in member hands at all. One does live at the Pinball Hall of Fame, which is where most people get to play one.

Gottlieb or Mylstar? Both, and it matters

If your cabinet, backglass or paperwork says Mylstar rather than Gottlieb, nothing is wrong with your machine. Columbia Pictures had owned D. Gottlieb & Co. since 1976, and in 1983 — after Coca-Cola acquired Columbia — the company was renamed Mylstar Electronics. Columbia closed Mylstar in September 1984, and in October 1984 a management group under Gilbert Pollock bought the pinball assets and founded Premier Technology, which went back to selling machines under the Gottlieb name.

Ready Aim Fire! sits exactly inside that window, which is why sources file it differently: IPDB lists it under Mylstar, while OPDB, Kineticist and most sellers list it under D. Gottlieb & Co. Neither is an error. Expect to search both names when you are hunting for parts or a manual.

Two details the sources disagree on

We would rather flag these than quietly pick one:

• Release date. OPDB and Kineticist both say January 1983; Pinside says November 1983. Everyone agrees on the year.
• Gottlieb model number. Kineticist gives 686; parts suppliers catalogue the game's spares under 692. If you are ordering playfield parts by model number, quote the title as well as the number.

• Manufacturer: D. Gottlieb & Co. / Mylstar Electronics
• Year: 1983 (January per OPDB/Kineticist, November per Pinside)
• Model number: 686 or 692 depending on source
• IPDB: #1924
• Production run: 390 units
• Electronic system: Gottlieb System 80A
• Display: alphanumeric, 4 players
• Art: David Moore · Music & sound: Craig Beierwaltes · Design: Adolf Seitz Jr.
• Theme: shooting gallery / carnival / circus

What a 390-unit run means when something breaks

This is the one fault profile that really is specific to Ready Aim Fire!, and it is not electronic — it is supply. On a Gottlieb that sold in the thousands you can buy a used playfield part and move on. Here you often cannot.

In practice:

• Plastics are the hard part. Owners on Pinside have gone looking for scans of the Ready Aim Fire! plastics rather than the parts themselves, which tells you how thin the supply is. If yours are intact, photograph and scan them now, before one shatters.
• Backglass is replaceable. Reproduction backglasses for the title have come up for sale among collectors — one of the few bright spots.
• The manual and schematics do surface. Original Gottlieb manuals including schematics for this game appear on the second-hand market. Buy one when you see it; on a game this rare the schematic is worth more to you than to the next owner.
• Boards are the easy part. This is the useful asymmetry: the electronics are not rare at all. Every board in the backbox is shared with the rest of the System 80/80A family, so a dead CPU or Driver board is an ordinary, solvable problem even though the plastics are not.

Common faults on Gottlieb System 80A

Because the machine-specific record for this title is so thin (more on that below), the System 80A fault profile is what you should work through. It is well documented and consistent across the family.

1. The NiCad battery, first and always

The original CPU board carries a rechargeable NiCad battery soldered to the board. After four decades it leaks, and the electrolyte creeps along traces and under chip legs, corroding as it goes. This is the number-one killer of System 80 boards. Deal with it before you diagnose anything else — and note that corrosion damage you can see is usually less than the damage you cannot, because it wicks under the solder mask.

If the battery has already been removed by a previous owner, inspect how. A sloppy battery mod with loose or badly tacked wiring is a recurring finding on these games, and it causes faults that look like something else entirely.

2. Grounds — the fault that is not a fault

Gottlieb connected its boards through single-sided edge connectors that oxidise and lose spring tension with age. The result is a floating, unreliable ground, and the symptoms are maddening precisely because they are not repeatable: random reboots, lights misbehaving, sound cutting in and out, coils firing when they should not.

The fix is the well-known System 80 ground mod: run an extra 18-gauge wire (green, by convention) from each board's ground — conveniently picked up at a capacitor leg — back to a single common ground point, usually the metal bracket the power supply mounts to, with the paint sanded back for real metal-to-metal contact. Tie the head and cabinet grounds together too. One critical caveat: keep the 45 V solenoid ground separate, so a coil short cannot dump into your logic boards.

Experienced hands on these machines say the same thing repeatedly — do the ground mods before chasing anything else, or you will be diagnosing your own wiring.

3. Power supply

Measure the 5 V and confirm it actually arrives at the CPU board rather than just leaving the power supply. The usual suspects are the bridge rectifier, the regulator, Q1 and cold solder joints on the connector pins. The large filter capacitors are also simply old; on System 80A power supplies it is common to replace a pair of tired smaller capacitors with a single 10,000 µF unit.

4. Logic chips

The System 80A CPU board runs on 6502-family silicon with 6532 RIOT chips handling I/O. The RIOTs are a known weak point, and a dead one will leave you with no boot, a dead switch matrix, or displays that never light. Battery corrosion and RIOT failure often travel together, since the battery sits near them.

5. Displays

Missing digits and missing segments are frequently nothing worse than a dirty or unseated connector — clean and reseat the edge connectors and the J2/J3 links before you condemn a display. Beyond that, the Gottlieb seven-digit display units themselves fail, both the glass tubes and the small boards behind them. One hard rule: never plug or unplug a display with the machine powered on.

6. Sound

System 80A machines of this era carry the MA-309 A6 sound board. It is electrically the earlier MA-216 with the VOTRAX SC-01 speech chip and its support circuitry deleted to save money — so these games have sound effects but no speech, and a replacement board does not need a speech option. The MA-309 is long discontinued as a new part. Leaking capacitors and an overheating on-board regulator are the usual failures, and before you condemn the board, reseat the sound ROM: it is a known fix on 80A games and costs nothing to try.

Issues specific to Ready Aim Fire!

Here we would rather be straight with you than invent detail. There is almost no machine-specific fault literature for Ready Aim Fire! With 390 built, the title's forum threads are about plastics scans, reproduction backglasses and sales — not repairs. Where sibling System 80A titles have threads dedicated to one stubborn fuse or one dead bumper board, this one does not.

What that means for you, practically:

• Diagnose it as a System 80A, not as a Ready Aim Fire! Everything in the section above applies directly, and nothing in the game's design puts unusual stress on any one board.
• Your own notes have real value. On a game this rare you are likely to be the first person to write up a given fault. Keeping a repair log is not vanity — it is the documentation that does not otherwise exist.
• The lamp driver circuits are worth a look. System 80 lamp and "Christmas tree" driver boards are a recurring discussion across the family, and nothing exempts this game from them.
• Diagnostic tooling exists. Community CPU diagnostic tools for System 80 are discussed on the title's own forum, which is a faster route to a verdict than swapping parts hopefully.

If you own one and you have fixed something on it, we would genuinely like to hear about it — we will add it to this page with credit.

Replacement boards compatible with Ready Aim Fire!

All of these are System 80/80A/80B boards, so they fit this machine as they fit its siblings. We test every board before it ships and support it afterwards.

• GottFA80_Plus (Light) — all-in-one CPU + Driver + power supply board, without sound.
• GottFA80_Plus (Full) — the same board with the sound section integrated.
• Gosof — replacement sound board. For this game the no-speech configuration is the correct one, since the original MA-309 has no speech circuitry.
• Godri80 — replacement Driver board.
• Lisy80 — CPU board with web-based diagnostics.
• GoPOP80 — pop bumper driver board, replacing the original MA-922 / A-19741.

LISY is an independent, free DIY project by its own developer, documented at lisy.dev — full credit for it belongs there, not to us.

All of these install Plug & Play, run without a battery, and come with free tutorials and support. Contact us if you are unsure which your machine needs — tell us what is silkscreened on your existing boards and we will tell you straight.

Step-by-step diagnosis

1. Powered off, look before you measure. Find the NiCad battery on the CPU board and look for creep and green corrosion around it. Remove it if it is still there. If it has already been removed, check the quality of the modification.
2. Do the ground mods. Yes, first. 18-gauge wire from each board to one common ground point, head and cabinet grounds tied, 45 V solenoid ground kept separate.
3. Power supply. Measure 5 V at the power supply, then measure it again at the CPU board. If it sags between the two, you have a connector or a Q1/regulator problem, not a CPU problem.
4. Connectors. Re-pin the oxidised Molex connectors, especially the CPU-to-Driver link. Edge connectors get cleaned, not sanded.
5. Displays. Power down before touching any display connector. Reseat, then test against a display you know is good.
6. Sound. Reseat the sound ROM on the A6 board before anything else. Then check for overheating on the board's regulator and leaking capacitors.
7. Final test. Boot, credits, coils, displays, sound, each in turn — and write down what you did. On this game, nobody else has.

FAQ — Ready Aim Fire! (Gottlieb, 1983)

How many Ready Aim Fire! pinball machines were made?
390. Pinside and the Kineticist database agree on the figure, and the Museum of the Game census records no examples among its surveyed members — it is a genuinely rare title.

What is a Ready Aim Fire! pinball machine worth?
Pinside's estimate sits around $2,400–$2,800, but with only one confirmed sale on record in roughly four years, that range is thin data rather than a market price. Condition and completeness — especially the plastics — will move it more than the model name does.

My Ready Aim Fire! won't start. Where do I begin?
The CPU board battery. Four decades of NiCad leakage is the single most common cause of a dead System 80A, and it needs dealing with before any other diagnosis is meaningful. After that, grounds and the 5 V supply.

Why does my machine say Mylstar instead of Gottlieb?
Because it is the same company. Gottlieb was renamed Mylstar Electronics in 1983 under Columbia Pictures, and this game falls inside that period. IPDB files it under Mylstar; most other databases say Gottlieb. Your machine is correct either way.

The displays have missing digits.
Clean and reseat the edge connectors and the J2/J3 links first — that is usually all it is. If a digit is still missing, suspect the seven-digit display unit itself. Never unplug a display with the power on.

I have no sound, or the sound is weak.
Reseat the sound ROM on the MA-309 A6 board; it is a known fix on System 80A games. If the fault persists, the board's capacitors and regulator are the next suspects, and the Gosof board replaces it. This game has no speech, so you do not need a speech option.

Where do I find plastics and parts for such a rare game?
With difficulty, and that is the honest answer. Reproduction backglasses have appeared, and original manuals with schematics do come up second-hand, but playfield plastics are scarce enough that owners trade scans. Scan yours while they are whole. The electronics, by contrast, are shared with the whole System 80 family and are easy to source.

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

Useful guides

• GottFA80_Plus: the all-in-one board for Gottlieb System 80/80A/80B
• How to install a replacement pinball board: the Plug & Play guide
• Repair or replace your pinball machine's board: which should you choose?
• How much is my pinball machine worth? Value, pricing and appraisal guide
• How to restore a vintage pinball machine: the complete guide
• Understanding the Lisy80 board for Gottlieb System 80 in 5 minutes

See also

• Rack 'Em Up (Gottlieb/Mylstar, 1983)
• Q*Bert's Quest (Gottlieb, 1983)
• Royal Flush Deluxe (Gottlieb, 1983)
• Jacks To Open (Gottlieb, 1984)
• El Dorado City of Gold (Gottlieb, 1984)
• The Games (Gottlieb, 1984)
• Striker (Gottlieb, 1982)

Sources & further reading

• IPDB — Mylstar "Ready...Aim...Fire!" (#1924)
• OPDB — Ready...Aim...Fire! (Gottlieb, 1983)
• Kineticist — Ready...Aim...Fire! (production run, credits, model number)
• Pinside — Ready...Aim...Fire! machine page (production, credits, value estimate)
• Pinside forum — Ready...Aim...Fire! (plastics scans, repro backglass, diagnostics tooling)
• Museum of the Game / KLOV — Ready...Aim...Fire! census and rarity
• Wikipedia — Gottlieb, Mylstar Electronics and Premier Technology timeline
• Pinball Help — recommended Gottlieb System 80 ground mods
• Flipprojets — history of Gottlieb audio boards (MA-216, MA-309, SC-01)
• Pinball Hall of Fame — the museum's Ready Aim Fire

Own a Ready Aim Fire!? Send us a photo and we'll add it here with credit — get in touch.