Beyond the CPU Board: The Wider LISY Ecosystem

Most people meet the LISY project through exactly one board. Their Gottlieb will not boot, someone on a forum says "get a Lisy80", they fit it, the machine plays again, and that is the end of the story.

It is worth knowing that the CPU board is a fraction of what is actually there. Open the project's index and you find displays, driver boards, power supplies, sound boards, a rack of test equipment, and a drawer of small adapters for problems most owners solve badly or not at all. All of it published free.

This is a tour of the rest of it — the ecosystem around the board, and what the community has done with it.

The CPU boards are the tip of it

Two families, and the coverage is wider than the Gottlieb reputation suggests.

The Linux-based LISY boards — LISY1, LISY80, LISY35 — are the ones people know. Sitting beside them is a whole FPGA line where the original processor is reproduced in hardware rather than emulated in software: GottFA1 and GottFA80 for Gottlieb, BallyFA and SternFA, WillFA7 for Williams System 3 to 7 — and then two that surprise people.

WillFA11 covers Williams System 11 and Data East games. Recel3 covers Recel System 3 — the Spanish machines built by Petaco, which almost nobody supports. There is an AtariFA for Atari's short-lived pinball line. Several of the Gottlieb boards also come in "PLuS" form, where CPU, drivers, power and sound collapse onto a single board.

If you want the comparison across makers rather than within one project, our roundup of who makes replacement CPU boards sets LISY next to Alltek, Flippp!, Ni-Wumpf and Pinball PCB.

Displays

A dead score display is the second most common complaint on a 1980s machine, after the board that drives it. Original gas-discharge displays fade, and NOS stock is finite.

The project publishes LED replacements for Bally seven-digit displays, for Gottlieb System 1, 80 and 80A, for Gottlieb 80B, and for Atari. There is also GODISP_DMD, which puts a dot-matrix display into a Gottlieb — a genuinely odd and rather lovely idea, since Gottlieb never shipped one on these systems.

These are not a side project. There is a published comparison of having the seven-digit display boards made by two different PCB houses, and a walkthrough of ordering the Williams display from one of them. That is the level the documentation runs at.

Driver boards and power supplies

The CPU decides what should happen; the driver board makes it happen, and it is usually the board that took the battery damage second. The catalogue covers GODRI1 and GODRI80 for Gottlieb System 1 and 80, BallyDri for Bally solenoids, and Bally lamp drivers in two sizes — BallyLA_28 and BallyLA_60 — because not every machine needs sixty lamp outputs and paying for them is silly.

Power supplies get the same treatment: PSY1 and a large-format PSY1_LG for System 1, PSY80B for 80B, and a System 80 supply. Brownouts and unexplained resets on these machines are very often the power supply rather than the brain, which is why we push people through the won't-turn-on diagnostic before they buy anything.

Sound, four different ways

Sound is where the catalogue gets unusually thoughtful, because it offers to repair as well as replace.

• GOSOF — an FPGA sound board for Gottlieb
• GOSOMU — designed to repair your original Gottlieb sound board rather than replace it
• Gosowav — a WAV-file based sound system
• System 1 Chime Board — for the early machines that chimed rather than spoke
• pHAT Soundboard — a DIY soundcard for the Raspberry Pi based boards

That GOSOMU entry is the tell. A commercial operation has no incentive to publish a design that keeps your original board alive; an enthusiast does. If you would rather buy the assembled FPGA route for a System 80, the Gosof sound board with speech is what that looks like built and tested.

The test equipment nobody expects

This is the part of the project that quietly changes how you work on a machine, and almost nobody outside the community knows it exists.

There are switch testers for Gottlieb and Bally. There is a Bally MPU tester and a System 80 driver board tester — bench tools that tell you whether a board is dead before you fit it. Gorat80 tests RAM and ROM on a System 80. And there is a family of LCD test displays — one each for Gottlieb System 1/80/80A/80B, Bally, Williams and Recel3 — which hang off the machine and show you what the CPU thinks it is outputting.

Fifteen-odd diagnostic tools, all documented, all free to build. For anyone who fixes more than their own machine, that is arguably worth more than the CPU boards.

Adapters, and the small indignities of old hardware

The "misc" section is where forty years of accumulated annoyance gets solved one small board at a time.

FRAM5101 and PIC_5101 replace the RAM chip that the battery used to back up — the change that finally removes the reason batteries were ever fitted. MAN8610_LED_Adapter lets a modern LED stand in for an obsolete display part. The Bally LED anti-flicker solution addresses the specific misery of fitting LEDs to a machine designed for filament bulbs, which is a real problem with a real fix and not something most guides bother to explain. There are ROM socket adapters, a 6503 adapter, a rectifier board, a PIC programmer, and instructions for building your own USB Blaster so you can program the FPGA boards without buying one.

There is also, for no reason other than the fun of it, a clock built on the LISY platform and an Aladdin's-lamp LED project. Someone was enjoying themselves.

What the community has built on it

Publishing under a share-alike licence has two consequences, and both have played out.

The first is that boards get built by people who never speak to the author. Designs are shared on PCB fabrication services, so ordering five copies of a display board is a file upload and a fortnight's wait. Assembled boards circulate through Pinside, through Flippermarkt in Germany, and through shops — ourselves among them. That is the intended outcome, not a leak.

The second is Mission Pinball Framework support. MPF is an open Python framework for writing pinball rules, and it lists LISY1 and LISY80 as supported hardware alongside commercial controllers like FAST and Multimorphic's P-ROC. The practical effect is that a forty-year-old Gottlieb becomes legitimate homebrew hardware: you can develop new rules on a machine you already own instead of building a cabinet first. Living with that day to day is covered in our LISY owner's guide.

Where it appears to be heading

An observation, not an announcement — the project makes no roadmap promises and neither will we.

Reading the catalogue in order, the direction of travel looks like breadth. The early work was Gottlieb. Then Bally and Stern. Then Williams System 3 to 7, then System 11 and Data East, then Recel and Atari. Each addition takes in a family of machines that had no modern answer at all. The Spanish and Italian makers have historically been served worst of anyone, so a Recel board is a bigger deal than its download count suggests.

The second visible trend is toward SMD versions of existing boards — designs laid out so a PCB house can populate most of the components, leaving the builder a handful of sockets. That lowers the skill floor considerably, and it is the difference between a project you can attempt and one you cannot.

Neither of those is a promise about what comes next. They are just what the last few years look like from outside.

What this means if you own one of these machines

Practically: before you conclude a part is unobtainable, check whether it has been solved already. The answer for a display, a driver board, a power supply or a sound board on a classic Gottlieb, Bally, Williams, Recel or Atari machine is more often yes than owners expect, and the documentation is free whether or not you ever buy anything.

Then decide honestly whether you want to build it. Some of these are an evening with a soldering iron; the FPGA boards want a programmer and patience. If the answer is no, assembled versions are available — from us and from others — and the right thing to do alongside buying one is to go and read the project that made it possible.

FAQ

Does the LISY project only make Gottlieb boards?

No. Its CPU replacements cover Gottlieb System 1 and 80, Bally, Stern, Williams System 3 to 7, Williams System 11 and Data East, Recel System 3, and Atari. Beyond CPUs it publishes displays, driver boards, power supplies, sound boards and test equipment.

Can I get a replacement score display for a classic pinball machine?

Yes. LED replacement display designs are published for Bally seven-digit displays, Gottlieb System 1/80/80A and 80B, and Atari, plus a dot-matrix display for Gottlieb. They are DIY designs; assembled boards circulate through the community and through shops.

Are the LISY test tools worth building if I only own one machine?

Probably not all of them. A switch tester and an LCD test display earn their keep quickly if you diagnose faults regularly; if you own one working machine, the diagnostics built into a LISY CPU board already cover most of what you need.

Can I use a classic pinball machine for homebrew rules?

Yes, if it runs a LISY1 or LISY80 board. Both are supported hardware in the Mission Pinball Framework, so you can write your own rules in Python and run them on the original playfield.

Is any of this a commercial product?

The designs are not. The LISY project publishes everything free under a Creative Commons licence and its author sells nothing. Shops, including this one, sell assembled boards built on those published designs — which is what the licence permits and what the author expects.

Sources & further reading

• LISY project — the full catalogue of MPUs, displays, drivers, power, sound and test equipment
• LISY project — FAQ, licence and DIY statement
• LISY project — the MPU range
• bontango on GitHub — LISY source code
• Mission Pinball Framework — LISY hardware support
• Flippermarkt — German pinball forum and marketplace
• Pinside — the long-running LISY development thread