Spirit (Gottlieb, 1982): faults and replacement boards System 80A

Is your Gottlieb Spirit refusing to start, resetting mid-game, booting with dead displays, or grinding away with a noisy backglass motor? None of that is unusual. Spirit is a Gottlieb System 80A machine, and its CPU, Driver and power supply boards are now past forty years old. Almost everything that goes wrong is ageing rather than design — and a modern battery-free replacement board, Plug & Play, takes the worst of it off the table permanently.

About Spirit (Gottlieb, 1982)

See it: full photo gallery for Spirit on IPDB (#2292). There is a second, larger set of owner photos in the Pinside image gallery for Spirit — worth a look if you are matching plastics or checking how a playfield should be laid out.

Spirit is model #673, built by D. Gottlieb & Co. — by then a Columbia Pictures Industries company — near the end of 1982. Sources differ slightly on the month: Pinside records it as October 1982, while Clay Harrell's pinrepair.com notes November 1982. Everyone agrees on the number that matters to collectors: 1,230 machines were made. That is a small run even by early-1980s Gottlieb standards, and it is the main reason Spirit is hard to find today.

The artwork is by Terry Doerzaph and the sounds by Craig Beierwaltes. Pinside credits the game design to John Trudeau; note that Kineticist's entry for the machine lists the artist and sound designer but no designer at all, so treat that one credit as less firmly established than the rest.

What makes Spirit interesting is what it inherited. It is a two-level playfield game in the lineage of Haunted House and Black Hole, with an upper playfield above the main one, and it carries a motor-driven spinning disc in the backglass — the same trick Black Hole uses. pinrepair.com rates it as generally the better-playing game of that family.

The sound is where Gottlieb economised. Spirit uses a Haunted House-style sound board with the speech chip left out, so the machine has sound effects and no voice. That is worth knowing before you go chasing a speech fault that was never there.

How Spirit plays

The game is built around locking balls and opening the Stargate. There are three captive holes on the main playfield. Ball Save spot targets, when lit, open the Stargate; roll a ball through it with none or one captive hole occupied and you get 2-ball multiball, with all three occupied you get 3-ball multiball, and playfield scoring is multiplied 2x or 3x to match.

Around that sit two banks of three drop targets — 4,000 points each on the upper playfield, 2,000 on the main one — which spell S-P-I-R-I-T; complete both banks and they light for Special. A progressive B-A-L-L spot target sequence awards an extra ball, numbered spot targets 1-2-3-4 complete the Roundabout sequence, and the bonus multiplier advances on the three top-left rollovers or the lit right rollunder.

• Manufacturer: D. Gottlieb & Co. (Columbia Pictures Industries)
• Year: 1982 (October per Pinside, November per pinrepair.com)
• Model number: #673
• Production run: 1,230 units
• Electronic system: Gottlieb System 80A
• Displays: seven-digit, 4 players
• Design: John Trudeau (per Pinside)
• Artwork: Terry Doerzaph
• Sound: Craig Beierwaltes — Haunted House-style sound board, speech chip omitted, no voice
• Playfield: two levels, upper playfield, three captive holes, Stargate, 2- and 3-ball multiball
• Backbox: motor-driven spinning disc behind the backglass
• Known ROM revision: #673-2 (see the target bug below)

Common faults on System 80A

Before the Spirit-specific material, here is the shortlist that applies to every System 80 and 80A machine. If your game is misbehaving, the cause is very likely on this list.

The NiCd battery on the CPU board is the number one killer. It leaks, the electrolyte creeps along the traces, and it eats the copper and the IC legs near it. On a machine this age you should assume damage until you have looked. After that come tired RIOT 6532 chips and dried-out capacitors, random resets from floating grounds and oxidised connectors, displays with missing segments or whole digits (very often nothing worse than the J2/J3 edge connectors), spurious slam tilt, and a power supply whose voltages have drifted out of tolerance.

Gottlieb's edge connectors of this period are genuinely fragile, and the factory grounding scheme was marginal from new. The ground mods and a full repinning are not optional extras on these games — they are the baseline that makes everything else behave.

Issues specific to Spirit (what owners actually report)

Spirit has a handful of quirks that are genuinely its own. Working through Pinside's machine forum, these are the ones that come up again and again rather than once.

The noisy backglass motor

This is the complaint owners raise most often about Spirit, and it is mechanical, not electronic. The spinning disc behind the backglass is turned by a small gear motor, and after four decades the gear train is loud — loud enough that new owners regularly arrive on the forum asking whether something is broken.

What owners have tried: freeing a stiff motor with a light oil sometimes buys time, but the consensus on Pinside is that rebuilding rarely fixes the noise for long — one owner reported being warned that rebuilt motors either stay noisy or go noisy again within a year or two. The more durable answer people land on is replacing the motor outright with a modern 12 V DC gear motor at roughly 2 RPM. Owners specifically recommend worm-gear motors, on the reasoning that there are fewer gears involved and the gearbox is enclosed in metal, both of which cut the noise. The same motor type is used as a Black Hole replacement, which is why the two games' solutions keep cross-referencing each other in threads.

Before replacing anything, check the disc is not rubbing on the glass or the mask — a rub sounds a lot like a bad gearbox.

The #673-2 ROM target bug

This one is worth knowing because it will otherwise send you hunting a fault that does not exist. On ROM revision #673-2, the four numbered spot targets (1-2-3-4) on the main playfield behave incorrectly when unlit. Per the rules an unlit target should award 1,000 points and nothing else; a lit one should give 5,000 plus a bonus increment. On #673-2 an unlit target awards its 1,000 points and advances the bonus, which it should not.

If your Spirit is scoring bonus from targets that are not lit, that is the software, not your switch matrix. Check your switches by all means, but do not rebuild a working target bank chasing it.

Stand-up and spot targets that do not register

Separately from the ROM bug, genuinely non-registering targets are common — the switch closes mechanically but the game never scores it. On System 80A that points at the switch matrix, the switch gap and the wiring back to the CPU, and it is tedious to chase blind. A CPU board with proper diagnostics turns it into a short job; our walkthrough of target troubleshooting on System 80/80A shows the method.

Boots up, but no displays and no game start

A recurring Pinside thread on exactly this fault is a useful template. The owner had reseated every backbox connector and every display, checked the fuses and confirmed three balls in the trough — and still had a dark machine that would not start. The diagnosis path that came back was:

1. Measure the display voltage on the right-hand connector of the power supply, referenced to ground. Displays run on AC, unlike the logic, so do not expect a DC reading there.
2. Confirm 5 V and 12 V are present and healthy at both the power supply connector and the MPU connector.
3. Check the trough switches — balls sitting in the trough but not properly seated on the switch contacts will stop a game starting with everything else working.
4. Defeat the slam tilt if the displays are showing error codes rather than nothing at all.

That order matters. Reseating connectors is the reflex, but on a machine that boots yet shows nothing, the display supply is the more likely culprit.

Sound faults and the missing speech chip

Sound board failures are common on Spirit, and several owners have gone looking for replacement sound boards. Remember the machine has no speech chip by design — if you have effects but no voice, nothing is wrong. Weak or absent effects usually trace back to leaking capacitors on the sound board.

Mechanical complexity and setup

One experienced owner on Pinside put it well: on games of this family it is the mechanics, not the electronics, that cause the most grief, and the mechanisms must first be adjusted correctly and then watched during play. Another recalled an arcade that bought these games new and could not keep them running on location. That reputation is real but dated — the same thread's most experienced voices are clear that with ground mods, repinning and reproduction boards a System 80A game runs for years without drama; one reported keeping several going for over twenty years once the mods were done.

Replacement boards compatible with Spirit

Spirit is a standard System 80A machine on the board side, so the whole System 80/80A/80B family of replacements applies. Nothing about the two-level playfield or the backglass motor changes board compatibility — the motor is driven from the Driver board like any other solenoid-class output.

• GottFA80_Plus (Light) — all-in-one board: CPU + Driver + power supply, no sound.
• GottFA80_Plus (Full) — the same, with the sound board integrated.
• Gosof — replacement sound board, with or without voice. For Spirit the non-voice configuration matches the original machine.
• Godri80 — replacement Driver board.
• Lisy80 — CPU board with web diagnostics, useful for switch and target faults.
• GoPOP80 — pop bumper driver board (replaces MA-922 / A-19741).

The Lisy80 is built on the independent, free LISY project by its own developer — we did not create it, we supply, test and support boards that run it.

Every board is tested here before it ships, and support afterwards is free. Installation is Plug & Play — no soldering. Contact us if you want the configuration checked against your machine before you order.

FAQ — Spirit (Gottlieb, 1982)

My Spirit won't start.
Start at the CPU board battery. Corrosion from a leaking NiCd is the single most common reason a System 80A machine is dead, and it is visible — look for green or white crust and lifted traces around the battery position. A battery-free replacement board removes the cause rather than repairing the damage.

Why is the motor in my Spirit backglass so loud?
Because the original gear motor that spins the backglass disc is forty years old. Owners report that rebuilds rarely stay quiet for long; the usual fix is a modern 12 V DC gear motor at about 2 RPM, ideally a worm-gear type with an enclosed metal gearbox. Check first that the disc is not rubbing on the glass or mask.

My Spirit boots but the displays stay dark and no game starts.
Measure the display supply on the right-hand power supply connector — it is AC, not DC — then confirm 5 V and 12 V at the power supply and MPU connectors, then check the trough switches are actually being closed by the balls.

My spot targets are awarding bonus when they aren't lit.
That is the known bug in ROM #673-2, not a fault in your machine. Unlit targets should give 1,000 points only; on that revision they also advance the bonus.

Does Spirit have speech?
No. Spirit uses a Haunted House-style sound board with the speech chip omitted, so it has effects but no voice. If you have effects and no speech, the machine is working as built.

How rare is Spirit and what is it worth?
1,230 were made, which makes it genuinely scarce — reproduction backglasses have been organised through community pre-order lists rather than sold as stock. Asking prices vary far too much by condition and country for us to quote a figure you could rely on; the Pinside machine page tracks recent classified prices if you want a current sense of the market.

Will a replacement board work with the two-level playfield and the backglass motor?
Yes. Spirit is an ordinary System 80A on the board side. The upper playfield and the backglass motor are driven through the normal Driver outputs, so the standard System 80/80A/80B replacements apply.

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

Step-by-step diagnosis

1. Powered off, look before you measure. Inspect the CPU board for battery residue and corrosion. Remove the NiCd battery if it is still fitted, whatever else you decide to do.
2. Power supply. Measure 5 V and 12 V and confirm they reach the MPU. Check the display supply separately on the right-hand power supply connector — remember it is AC.
3. Grounds. Apply the ground mods between CPU, Driver, power supply and sound board. On System 80A this is the single highest-value hour you will spend.
4. Connectors. Re-pin the oxidised Molex connectors, especially the CPU-to-Driver link and the display edge connectors at J2/J3.
5. Displays. Never plug or unplug a display with the machine powered. Test against a known-good display.
6. Trough and switches. Confirm the balls are seating on the trough switch contacts, then work through the switch matrix for any target that closes but does not score.
7. The motor. With the game running, check the backglass disc turns freely and is not fouling the glass before you condemn the gearbox.
8. Final test. Start-up, credits, coils, displays, both multiballs. If anything is still off, contact our free support with what you have measured.

Useful guides

• GottFA80_Plus: the all-in-one board for Gottlieb System 80/80A/80B
• Ground mods on Gottlieb System 80: why and how
• A leaking battery in a pinball: damage and the permanent fix
• Pinball electronics explained: MPU, driver, power supply and sound board
• How much does it cost to repair a pinball? The price guide
• What is my pinball worth? Values and estimates

See also

• Devil's Dare (Gottlieb, 1982)
• Rocky (Gottlieb, 1982)
• Punk! (Gottlieb, 1982)
• Striker (Gottlieb, 1982)
• Krull (Gottlieb, 1983)
• Q*Bert's Quest (Gottlieb, 1983)

Sources & further reading

• IPDB — Spirit (#2292)
• Pinside — Spirit machine page
• Pinside — Spirit image gallery
• pinrepair.com — Gottlieb Spirit — production date and run, playfield, backglass disc, sound board
• Kineticist — Spirit (1982) — model number, units, artist and sound credits
• pinball.org — Spirit rule sheet — rules and playfield layout
• Pinside thread — "SPIRIT (#673 - 1982) bug with spot targets bonus"
• Pinside thread — "Noisy Spirit Motor"
• Pinside thread — "Sys 80A - Spirit - Boots up but no displays and doesn't start a game"
• Pinside thread — "Are games like Haunted House, Black Hole, Spirit hard to maintain?"
• Pinside thread — "Spirit Backglass Pre-Order List"
• Arcade Museum (KLOV) — Spirit
• OPDB — Open Pinball Database

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