James Bond 007 (Gottlieb, 1980): faults and System 80 replacement boards

Your James Bond 007 by Gottlieb won't start, resets itself, blows the solenoid fuse, or gives you no flippers and no ball in the shooter lane? These symptoms are typical of Gottlieb System 80 machines, whose original boards (CPU, driver, power supply) are now more than forty years old. The good news: modern replacement boards — Plug & Play and battery-free — give the machine a second life, and several of the faults below cost nothing but an hour with a pin extractor.

About the James Bond 007 (Gottlieb, 1980)

See it: full photo gallery for James Bond 007 on IPDB (#1286) · owner photo gallery on Pinside

James Bond 007 is Gottlieb model 658, a widebody four-player machine built around the then-new System 80 electronics. Sources agree on the year but not the month: Pinside records an October 1980 release, while some databases simply list 1980. Production ran to 3,625 units — a respectable number for a licensed title of the period, though well short of a hit.

The design is by Allen Edwall, with artwork by Doug Watson. The art leans on the Roger Moore era and draws heavily on The Spy Who Loved Me — the amphibious Lotus, the Bond girls, and Jaws looming off the backglass. The playfield carries three drop target banks, standups and four flippers.

The thing that makes this machine unusual

James Bond 007 does not count balls. It counts time.

You start a game with 50 time units and lose five of them every time a ball drains. Play well and you keep the clock alive; play badly and it runs out fast. It was a genuinely bold idea, and it did not work. Beginners never banked enough time to feel they'd had a game, while good players could stand at the machine more or less forever — which is the one thing an operator earning by the coin cannot tolerate. Operators pushed back hard enough that Gottlieb issued revised software allowing the game to be set for conventional 3-ball or 5-ball play.

That matters to you as an owner far more than it sounds. It means there are effectively two James Bond 007s in circulation, running different code on the same hardware. Before you order a replacement CPU board, find out which one your machine has — a timed game and a 3/5-ball game play nothing alike, and you want the board loaded with the code you actually want to keep.

• Manufacturer: D. Gottlieb & Co. (a Columbia Pictures Industries company)
• Year: 1980 (October, per Pinside)
• Model number: 658
• Production run: 3,625 units
• Design: Allen Edwall
• Artwork: Doug Watson
• Electronic system: Gottlieb System 80
• Type: solid-state, widebody, 4 players, 4 flippers
• Displays: alphanumeric / numeric gas-discharge
• Known code variants: original timed play; later revision allowing 3-ball / 5-ball play
• Theme: James Bond 007 / espionage (licensed)

What it's worth

At the time of writing, Pinside's market data put the trimmed median asking price around $1,213, in a range of roughly $1,110–$1,290. Treat that as a rough guide only: condition, playfield wear and whether the boards are alive move the real number a long way in both directions. A Bond with a corroded MPU and a dead sound board is a project, and priced like one.

Common faults across Gottlieb System 80

Before the machine-specific list, the family traits. Almost every System 80 problem traces back to one of these:

• The NiCad battery. Soldered to the CPU board, it leaks, and the alkaline residue eats traces, component legs and — crucially — connector pins. This is the number one killer of System 80 boards. If yours is still fitted, remove it today, whatever else you do.
• Connectors and grounds. Gottlieb used .156" Molex headers whose pins lose tension with age. Combine that with a grounding scheme that relies on the connectors themselves and you get the classic System 80 behaviour: everything works, then intermittently doesn't. Repinning with bifurcated edge connector pins and fitting the standard ground mods fixes more System 80 faults than any single board swap.
• Tired logic. 6532 RIOT chips and the CPU's support logic fail with age: no boot, frozen displays, dead switch columns.
• Displays. Missing segments or whole digits are often just the J2/J3 connector. Never plug or unplug a display with the power on.
• The unfused transformer. Early System 80 games have no fuse on the smaller transformer, so a display wiring fault can take the transformer with it. An 8–10 A slo-blo fuse is cheap insurance.
• The orange capacitor. The large orange capacitor in the bottom of the cabinet is a known early failure — repair guides say replace it before chasing anything else.
• Slam tilt. An open slam switch gives you rolling displays at power-up and a game that won't start — a symptom that looks far more serious than it is.
• The sound board's 6530. The 6530 combines RAM, ROM, I/O and timer in one masked part containing Gottlieb-specific code. It can be destroyed by voltage spikes on its input lines, and it is not available new.

James Bond-specific issues owners actually report

This is where a Bond differs from a generic System 80. The threads behind this section come from owners working on this machine, and the same handful of faults comes up again and again.

1. No flippers and no ball fed to the shooter lane — the Q relay

This is the single most reported James Bond complaint, and it catches people out because it looks like two faults. You start a game, nothing is kicked into the shooter lane, and if you drop a ball in there by hand the flippers are dead too.

They are one fault. On System 80, flipper power and the ball-feed solenoid are both gated by the Q relay. If Q doesn't pull in at the start of a game you lose both at once — so don't go hunting the ball trough coil and the flipper coils separately.

What owners found: grounding the Q relay's driver transistor by hand energised the relay perfectly, which proves the relay and coil are fine and the signal to it is missing. The culprit was degraded pins on the MPU side of the A1J5 interconnect between CPU and driver board — the 5 VDC signal simply wasn't getting across. Repinning A1J5 with bifurcated pins restored it. The same owner repinned the switch matrix connector A1J6 and cleaned stuck drop target switches, which were throwing spurious signals into the game.

Start with a continuity and pin-tension check on A1J5 before you buy anything.

2. Pop bumpers firing on their own at power-up

Another documented Bond fault: pop bumpers firing uncontrollably as soon as the machine is switched on, the game-over relay misbehaving, and tilt relays locking on until a fuse blows. That combination looks like a catastrophic CPU or driver board failure.

It usually isn't. By disconnecting circuits one at a time, the owner isolated the problem to the pop bumper circuit itself — the separate pop bumper driver boards (Gottlieb part MA-922 / A-19741) that sit under the playfield, one per bumper. Unplugging them cleared the game-over relay and the runaway firing. The main driver board and the CPU were innocent.

These little boards are cheap, they age badly, and because they sit under the playfield they collect dirt and heat. Treat them as an early suspect on any System 80 behaving strangely at power-up.

3. Drop target banks that won't reset

Bond has three drop target banks, and they work hard. Owners report banks failing to reset and individual targets not registering — commonly the second target from the left, and the slingshots. Two separate things are usually going on: stuck or dirty target switches feeding false closures into the matrix via A1J6, and the drop target reset drivers on the driver board. One thread names transistor Q63, the green drop target reset driver, as a specific suspect.

Work in order: clean and adjust the switches, confirm each target reads correctly in switch test, and only then go after the reset coil's driver transistor.

4. Solenoid fuse blows the instant you power up

Displays light, scoring works, and the solenoid fuse goes immediately. That's a shorted coil or a shorted driver transistor holding a solenoid permanently on. Pull coil connectors one at a time to find the offending circuit before replacing anything — the fuse is telling you something is drawing current it shouldn't.

5. Battery damage that has reached the connectors

Where the battery leaked years ago, the damage is rarely confined to the board. One Bond owner with heavily acid-damaged boards found the corrosion had eaten into the connector pins themselves — the A1J6 switch connector and the coin door credit connector among them. Symptoms were a game that wouldn't take credits, then dead jets, side bumpers and flippers once a ball was in play.

The lesson is one you'll hear from every System 80 owner: replacing the boards without repinning the connectors fixes nothing. A new CPU board plugged into forty-year-old loose pins behaves exactly like the old one.

6. Missing 12 VDC bridge rectifier

On some units the 12 VDC bridge rectifier under the playfield has been removed or bodged by a previous owner. Worth a look before you start diagnosing anything downstream of it.

Replacement boards compatible with James Bond 007

James Bond 007 is a straight System 80 game, so the standard System 80 board set applies:

• 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 (with or without voice). The answer to a failed 6530, which cannot be bought new.
• Godri80 — replacement driver board, for blown coil drivers and relay drive faults.
• Lisy80 — CPU board with web-based diagnostics, which is genuinely useful for chasing switch matrix faults like the ones above.
• GoPOP80 — pop bumper driver board, replacing the original MA-922 / A-19741. Directly relevant to fault 2.

A note on the two code variants. Because your Bond may be running either the original timed software or the later 3/5-ball revision, tell us which one you have when you order a CPU board — or tell us which one you'd prefer to end up with. It's the one machine-specific thing worth checking before you buy.

About Lisy80: LISY is an independent developer's free, open DIY project — full credit to its author. You can read about the project at lisy.dev. We supply the Lisy80 as a ready-to-use board, test every unit before it ships, and support it afterwards.

Every board is tested before it leaves us. Plug & Play installation, no battery, free tutorials and support. Get in touch.

Step-by-step diagnosis

1. Power off, look first. Check the CPU board for battery residue and corrosion. If the NiCad is still fitted, remove it now. Then look at the connector pins — not just the board.
2. Power supply. Measure the 5 V and confirm it reaches the MPU, not just the power supply board. Check the bridge rectifiers and fuses, and replace the orange capacitor in the bottom of the cabinet if it's original.
3. Grounds. Fit the System 80 ground mods between CPU, driver, power supply and sound boards. Do this before you conclude any board is faulty.
4. Connectors. Repin the oxidised Molex connectors with bifurcated pins — A1J5 (CPU↔driver) and A1J6 (switch matrix) first. This alone resolves a large share of Bond faults.
5. Switch test. Run every drop target, standup and slingshot through switch test. Stuck closures cause faults that look nothing like switch problems.
6. Q relay. If you have no flippers and no ball feed, check whether Q energises at game start. Ground its driver by hand: if the relay pulls in, the fault is upstream in the signal path, not in the relay.
7. Pop bumpers. If anything fires by itself at power-up, unplug the MA-922 pop bumper driver boards and retest.
8. Displays. Never plug or unplug a display while powered. Test with a known-good display.
9. Final test. Start-up, credits, coils, displays, sound. If you're stuck, our support is free.

FAQ — James Bond 007 (Gottlieb, 1980)

Why does my James Bond pinball have a timer instead of balls?
Because that's how it was designed. The original software gives you 50 time units and takes five away per drain rather than counting three or five balls. Players and operators disliked it, and Gottlieb later released revised software allowing conventional 3-ball or 5-ball play. If your machine uses balls, it's running that later code.

My James Bond has no flippers and won't kick the ball out. Where do I start?
With the Q relay, not the coils. Flipper power and the ball feed are both switched by Q on System 80, so a single relay fault kills both. Owners most often trace it to worn pins on the A1J5 connector between CPU and driver board. Repin it before replacing anything.

The solenoid fuse blows as soon as I switch on.
A shorted coil or a shorted driver transistor is holding a solenoid permanently energised. Disconnect coil circuits one at a time to identify which. The Godri80 driver board (or the all-in-one GottFA80_Plus) replaces a failed driver stage once you've found the offending coil.

My pop bumpers fire on their own when I turn the machine on.
Suspect the individual pop bumper driver boards under the playfield (MA-922 / A-19741) before the CPU or main driver board. Owners have isolated exactly this fault to the bumper circuit by unplugging it. The GoPOP80 replaces those boards directly.

My drop targets and slingshots aren't registering.
Usually the switch matrix: stuck or dirty target switches, and tired pins on the A1J6 connector. Clean and adjust the switches, repin A1J6, then check the reset drivers on the driver board — transistor Q63 drives the green bank reset.

Do I have to remove the battery on the CPU board?
Yes, and sooner rather than later. A leaking NiCad is the number one cause of dead System 80 boards, and the damage spreads from the board into the connector pins. Modern replacement boards run battery-free and keep settings and high scores in non-volatile memory.

Which replacement board do I need for a James Bond?
It's a plain System 80 game, so the full System 80 set fits: GottFA80_Plus (all-in-one), Godri80 (driver), Gosof (sound), Lisy80 (CPU), GoPOP80 (pop bumpers). The one extra thing to check is which software revision your game runs — timed or 3/5-ball.

How much is a Gottlieb James Bond worth?
Pinside's market data has recently shown a trimmed median asking price of about $1,213, in a range of roughly $1,110–$1,290. Condition dominates: working boards, an unworn playfield and an intact backglass are worth far more than the average, and a machine with a corroded MPU is a project.

How long does it take to fit a replacement board?
The installation itself is Plug & Play — a few minutes, no soldering. Budget the real time for repinning connectors and fitting ground mods, which is what makes the result reliable.

Useful guides

• Gottlieb System 80 ground mods: why and how to do them
• Leaking battery on a pinball machine: damage and the permanent fix
• GottFA80_Plus: the all-in-one board for System 80/80A/80B
• GoPOP80: pop bumper driver board replacing the MA-922 / A-19741
• Installing a replacement board: the Plug & Play guide
• How much is my pinball worth? Values and estimates

See also

• Time Line (Gottlieb, 1980) — the same designer, the next model number, and a near-identical board set
• The Amazing Spider-Man (Gottlieb, 1980)
• Counterforce (Gottlieb, 1980)
• Star Race (Gottlieb, 1980)
• Circus (Gottlieb, 1980)
• Black Hole (Gottlieb, 1981)

Sources & further reading

• IPDB — James Bond 007 (Gottlieb, 1980), machine #1286
• Pinside — James Bond game archive (production run, credits, market data)
• Pinside — "Gottlieb System 80: Q Relay / T Relay, James Bond issues"
• Pinside — "Gottlieb James Bond tech help: coils and switch problems"
• Pinside — "Gottlieb System 80 James Bond not kicking out ball"
• Pinside — "Tech help needed on a 1980 Bond Gottlieb System 80"
• John's Jukes — Tips for the Gottlieb System 80 series
• Kineticist — James Bond 007 (1980) specifications
• VPForums — James Bond 3/5 Ball (on the revised software)
• OPDB — James Bond 007 (Gottlieb, 1980)

Own a James Bond 007? Send us a photo and we'll add it here with credit — get in touch.