Touchdown (Gottlieb, 1984): faults, diagnosis and System 80A replacement boards

Is your Gottlieb Touchdown showing flashing lamps, no longer keeping the high score, stuck on game over, firing its pop bumpers on its own or resetting? These are the classic symptoms of a Gottlieb System 80A machine whose original boards (CPU, Driver, power supply, pop bumper driver) are now past forty years old. The good news: almost every one of them has a known cause, and modern replacement boards — Plug & Play and battery-free — will put a tired Touchdown back on route.

Touchdown is also a slightly unusual case in the System 80A family, for reasons that have nothing to do with football. It was built right in the middle of the most chaotic year in Gottlieb's history, and only a few hundred were ever made. That history matters when you open the backbox, so it is worth a moment before the fault list.

About the Gottlieb Touchdown (1984)

See it: full photo gallery for Touchdown on IPDB — backglass, playfield, flyer and cabinet shots. There is also an owners' Touchdown gallery and game page on Pinside.

Touchdown reached arcades on 1 October 1984 with an American football theme — grid markings down the playfield, a scoreboard backglass and a drive-the-ball-downfield scoring idea. It was designed by John Trudeau, with artwork by Larry Day and sound by Craig Beierwaltes. Trudeau would go on to design some of the best-known machines of the 1990s, which makes Touchdown an early entry in a notable career.

Then there is the company history. Gottlieb had been renamed Mylstar Electronics in 1983 under Columbia Pictures ownership, and Columbia shut Mylstar down at the end of September 1984. A management group led by Gilbert Pollock bought the pinball assets that same month and formed Premier Technology, which went back to selling machines under the Gottlieb name. Touchdown lands exactly on that seam: the flyer still carries the Mylstar name, the game was developed at Mylstar, and per designer John Trudeau it was the first pinball machine produced entirely in the Premier facility.

That seam shows up in the databases too, and it is worth knowing if you are searching for parts or manuals. IPDB files the game under Premier, while the Arcade Museum entry and the flyer credit D. Gottlieb & Co. / Mylstar. Both are defensible, which is why you will see the game called a Gottlieb, a Mylstar and a Premier depending on where you look. Everyone agrees on the year and on the electronics, and those are what matter for a repair.

One more thing to keep straight: there is more than one pinball machine called Touchdown. Gottlieb made an electromechanical Touchdown in 1967, and both Williams and Bally used the name too. If you are buying boards, ROMs or a manual, check that the listing says 1984 and System 80A.

Specifications

• Manufacturer: D. Gottlieb & Co. (developed at Mylstar, produced by Premier Technology; IPDB lists it under Premier)
• Release date: 1 October 1984
• Production run: 711 units — a genuinely low number, and the main reason the game is thin on the ground in Europe
• Design: John Trudeau
• Artwork: Larry Day
• Sound: Craig Beierwaltes
• Electronic system: Gottlieb System 80A, 7-digit scoring displays
• ROM set name: touchdn
• Players: up to 4
• Playfield: 2 flippers, 4 pop bumpers, 1 spinner; no ramps, no multiball, no captive ball
• Cabinet: standard upright with the System 80A narrow ("skinny") head
• Theme: American football

Owners describe the layout as fast, open and spinner-driven — closer in feel to a quick, colourful electromechanical than to the ramp-heavy games that came a few years later. On the second-hand market it stays modest: a 2015 auction recorded a median of about $517, and owners on Pinside talk in the $500–600 range for a working, presentable example. Rarity and desirability are not the same thing, and Touchdown is a good illustration of that. Prices move, so treat these as a reference point rather than a quote.

For the repairer, the spec list has three practical consequences. Four pop bumpers means the pop bumper driver board does a lot of work on this game. One spinner carrying much of the scoring means its switch gets hammered. And 711 units means you will not find a parts machine, so the original boards are worth either repairing properly or replacing with something supported.

Common faults across System 80 and 80A

Before anything Touchdown-specific, these are the failures that turn up on every System 80/80A machine. If you have just bought the game, work through this list first — most "dead" boards are not dead.

• The NiCd battery on the CPU board. It leaks, and the electrolyte eats traces, sockets and chip legs. This is the number one killer of System 80 CPU boards and it must be neutralised before any other diagnosis. Corrosion often travels under the board where you cannot see it.
• Connectors and grounds. PinWiki is blunt about this: connectors are the top cause of failure on System 80. Boards are grounded through daisy-chained connectors rather than a proper ground plane, so one tired contact in the A1-J4 / A3-J1 interconnect harness can make lamps, coils, relays and sound all misbehave at once. Doubling the 5 V and ground wires with bifurcated crimp pins, and running each board's ground to a common point at the power supply and on to the cabinet ground strip, is the single most effective fix you can do. Poor grounding does not just cause odd behaviour — it burns out solenoids and their driver transistors.
• The CPU board chips. A 6502 at U1 and three 6532 RIOT chips: U4 reads the switches, U5 drives the displays, U6 handles solenoids, lamps and sound. The symptom usually tells you which one to suspect. The battery-backed 5101 CMOS RAM at Z5 is its own source of trouble, and test 20 reports it as "5101" on 80A.
• Power supply. The big orange filter capacitor (6800 µF / 25 V) is past its service life on every one of these games. C1 (470 µF / 100 V) is a common reason the ¼ A high-voltage fuse keeps blowing, and the CR7 zener is usually replaced with a 1N4738 with a matching change to R10. Cracked solder joints on the header pins cause voltages that come and go.
• Heat. The big pass transistor on the System 80/80A supply runs hot enough to shorten the life of everything near its heat sink. Expect to find dried-out parts in that corner.
• Displays. Missing segments or whole missing digits are very often just the J2/J3 edge connector. Never plug or unplug a display with the machine powered on.
• Driver board. Lamps are driven by 74175 flip-flops and MPS-A13 transistors; sound passes through Z13 (a 7404). A dead bank of lamps or a silent game with everything else working points here.
• Slam tilt. A maladjusted or failing slam switch produces behaviour that looks like a board fault, and it will also kick you out of the diagnostics.

Faults owners actually report on Touchdown

This is the part worth the read. The items below come from owner threads and restoration write-ups on Touchdown specifically, plus the System 80 reference documentation where it explains the mechanism.

Pop bumpers firing on their own, or not at all

With four pop bumpers, Touchdown leans on its pop bumper driver board (the MA-922, Gottlieb part A-19741) harder than most System 80A games. Two complaints dominate. The first is "phantom" or "ghost" pops: a bumper fires with nothing near it, usually when another coil releases. The second is a bumper that has simply gone quiet.

The documented rebuild is well established. Replace the board's 47 µF capacitor with a 100–200 µF part; add a small 4.7 µF / 10 V capacitor on the underside of the board, which is the standard cure for phantom pops; reflow the header pins and clean the oxidation off them; and test the driver transistor, replacing it with a TIP102 if it has failed. Older boards should be brought up to the revised version. A full Touchdown restoration documented on Pinside did exactly this — "factory recommended updates" to the pop bumper driver board, plus repinning the pop bumper board plugs — which tells you how routine the work is on this title.

If the board is too far gone, the GoPOP80 is a drop-in modern replacement for the MA-922 / A-19741.

Playfield wear around the pop bumpers

The same restoration notes playfield artwork damage around the pop bumper areas, and calls it typical for Gottlieb machines of this era. It is not an electrical fault, but it is the thing to inspect before you buy: lift the apron and look at the paint around all four bumper skirts. Repairs there are cosmetic work, and on a 711-unit game there is no donor playfield waiting for you.

All lamps flashing with a clack at power-on, flippers dead

Every lamp on the playfield and in the backbox flashes, you hear a single clack, and nothing responds. Nine times out of ten this is the power supply board's edge connectors and ribbon cables: reseat them with the game switched off, after cleaning the contacts. There is also a known System 80 quirk behind the clack itself — the CLEAR pins (pin 1) of the 74175 ICs at Z1–Z5 are tied straight to +5 V, so the outputs come up in a random state and fire something at power-up. The published fix lifts pin 1, ties those pins together and adds a small reset circuit (a 10 K resistor, a 100 µF / 10 V capacitor and a 1N4001). If the supply itself is drifting, an all-in-one replacement brings a modern power supply with it.

High score lost every time the game is switched off

The score holds while the machine is on and resets to zero when it is powered down. On a machine that has already had the CPU battery removed, this is nearly always the remote battery holder: a broken wire, a corroded clip or a flat cell. Worth saying plainly — this is the fault that disappears for good with a battery-free board, because the settings and scores live in non-volatile memory instead.

Stuck on game over

The game takes credits and even counts points, but no solenoid fires and no ball is served. Look at the game over relay (Q) under the playfield, its coil and its diode. A relay that stays energised keeps the machine in game-over state and inhibits the outputs. A failed diode across the coil can take the driver transistor with it, so check both.

"000000" on the displays and a dead start button

A specific and very satisfying one to find: the coin lockout wire can jam into a coin switch, which makes the machine show zeros at power-up and ignore the start button entirely. An open slam switch or ball-roll cage switch produces a related symptom — rolling displays, no start, no coin-up. Check the switches before you suspect the CPU.

Dim or inconsistent displays

Touchdown uses 7-digit System 80A displays. Dim displays are frequently tired rather than faulty, and there is a known rejuvenation trick: apply 12 V DC briefly across the outer pins (leftmost positive, rightmost to ground) for seven to twelve seconds. Repeat roughly once a year. Keep it to 8 V maximum on 4-digit displays. Ghosting or dim characters more often trace back to a shorted zener on the display board. And again: clean and reseat the edge connectors first, and never hot-plug a display.

The spinner switch

Owners consistently describe Touchdown as a spinner game — that is where the scoring lives and that is what makes it fun. It also means the spinner's leaf switch sees enormous use. Erratic or missing spinner scoring is usually contact wear or a bent blade, not electronics. Clean, re-gap and, if needed, replace the switch; it is a cheap part and it transforms how the game feels.

Silent or broken sound

The 6530 on the 6503-based System 80 sound board is both failure-prone and hard to find now. The documented protection is a set of five 1N400X diodes at the 7404 outputs, a surge suppressor and an added ground wire. If the chip has already gone, a modern sound board is the realistic route.

Random resets

Floating grounds and oxidised connectors, almost always. Do the ground mods properly and re-pin the Molex connectors — especially the CPU↔Driver link — before replacing anything.

Missing or replaced backbox

Worth knowing when you view a machine: System 80A heads are the narrow type, and at least one documented Touchdown was rebuilt with a fabricated head and a donor light board after arriving with no backbox at all. If the head looks wrong or the stencilling looks recreated, that is why.

Variants, ROMs and what they mean for boards

There is no documented export-only, cocktail or conversion-kit variant of Touchdown, and no second ROM revision in common circulation — the set is simply touchdn. What does vary is the generation of System 80A CPU board fitted at the factory: on the fourth-generation board, U2 and U3 are socketed and the PROM 2 socket is left unpopulated. That changes what you are looking at when you lift the board out, not what fits. Every board listed below covers Touchdown as built, whichever CPU generation is in your cabinet. If you find anything unusual in your machine, send us a photo of the board and its part numbers before ordering.

Replacement boards compatible with Touchdown

• GottFA80_Plus (Light) — all-in-one CPU + Driver + power supply, no sound. The simplest answer to a machine with several tired boards at once.
• GottFA80_Plus (Full) — the same board with the sound section integrated.
• Gosof — replacement sound board, with or without speech. The answer to a dead 6530.
• Godri80 — replacement Driver board, if the lamp or solenoid drive stage is the problem and the CPU is healthy.
• Lisy80 — replacement CPU board with web-based diagnostics, which is a real help on a game you cannot find a parts machine for.
• GoPOP80 — pop bumper driver board replacing the MA-922 / A-19741. On a four-bumper game like Touchdown, this one earns its place.

All of these install Plug & Play, run without a battery, and come with free tutorials and support. We test every board before it ships and we support it afterwards. The Lisy80 is built on LISY, a free DIY project by an independent developer — you can read about the project at lisy.dev; we supply and support ready-to-run boards based on it. Not sure which board your Touchdown needs? Get in touch with a photo of your boards and we will tell you.

Step-by-step diagnosis

1. Powered off, look before you touch. Inspect the CPU board for a battery or any corrosion trail. Remove the NiCd battery if it is still fitted, and neutralise the residue. Check the underside of the board too.
2. Safety. Confirm the mains cord has a proper earth and that the earth actually reaches the cabinet. Replace a two-wire cord before you go any further.
3. Power supply. Measure the 5 V and confirm it arrives at the MPU. Replace the orange 6800 µF filter capacitor, and look at C1 and the header solder joints if the high-voltage fuse keeps blowing.
4. Grounds. Do the ground mods between CPU, Driver, power supply and sound, and run a wire to the cabinet ground strip. Do this before chasing intermittent faults — it fixes many of them outright.
5. Connectors. Re-pin the oxidised Molex connectors, the CPU↔Driver link above all, and double the 5 V and ground pins in the interconnect harness.
6. Switches. Check the slam switch, the ball-roll cage switch and the coin switches — including that the coin lockout wire is not fouling one.
7. Displays. Clean and reseat J2/J3. Test with a known-good display. Never plug or unplug one with the power on.
8. Pop bumpers. Rebuild the MA-922 driver board (bigger filter capacitor, the 4.7 µF phantom-pop capacitor, reflowed headers, TIP102 driver if needed) and overhaul the bumper mechanisms themselves.
9. Final test. Start-up, credits, each coil, each lamp bank, each display, and a full game on the spinner. If something is still wrong, contact our free support.

FAQ — Gottlieb Touchdown (1984)

How many Gottlieb Touchdown pinball machines were made?
711 units. It is one of the lower production runs of the System 80A era, which is why spare parts machines effectively do not exist and why the original boards are worth saving or replacing properly.

What is a Gottlieb Touchdown worth?
Modest, for a rare game. A 2015 auction recorded a median of around $517, and owners discuss the $500–600 range for a complete working example. Condition, a correct backbox and an intact playfield around the pop bumpers matter more than rarity here. Prices move, so check recent sales.

My Touchdown's lamps all flash and there is a clack at power-on.
Reseat and clean the power supply board's edge connectors and ribbon cables with the game off. The clack itself is a known System 80 power-up quirk from the 74175 CLEAR pins at Z1–Z5, for which a published reset-circuit mod exists. If the supply is unstable, the all-in-one GottFA80_Plus includes a modern power supply.

My Touchdown does not keep the high score.
Usually the remote battery holder: a broken wire, a corroded clip or a dead cell. Battery-free replacement boards store settings and scores in non-volatile memory, so the fault cannot come back.

My Touchdown is stuck on game over.
Check the game over relay (Q) under the playfield, together with its coil and its diode. If a driver output has failed, the Godri80 replaces the driver stage.

Why do my pop bumpers fire on their own?
Phantom pops are a documented MA-922 pop bumper driver board fault. Fit a 100–200 µF capacitor in place of the 47 µF, add a 4.7 µF / 10 V capacitor on the underside, reflow and clean the header pins, and check the driver transistor. The GoPOP80 replaces the board outright if it is beyond rebuilding.

Should the original battery be removed?
Yes, without hesitation. The NiCd battery is the single biggest cause of dead System 80A CPU boards. Our boards run without one.

Which board does a Touchdown need, and how long does it take to fit?
If the CPU, Driver and supply are all tired, the all-in-one GottFA80_Plus is the straightforward route; if only one stage has failed, replace that one. Fitting is Plug & Play — a few minutes, no soldering — with free tutorials and support. Send us a photo of your boards if you want it confirmed before ordering.

Useful guides

• Gottlieb System 80 ground mods: why and how to do them
• A leaking battery in a pinball machine: damage and the permanent fix
• Pinball electronics explained: MPU, driver, power supply and sound
• GoPOP80: the pop bumper driver board for System 80/80A/80B
• Installing a replacement board: the Plug & Play guide
• How much is my pinball machine worth? Values and estimates

See also

• Jacks To Open (Gottlieb/Mylstar, 1984)
• Alien Star (Gottlieb, 1984)
• The Games (Gottlieb, 1984)
• El Dorado City of Gold (Gottlieb, 1984)
• Ready Aim Fire! (Gottlieb, 1983)
• Rack 'Em Up (Gottlieb/Mylstar, 1983)

Sources & further reading

• IPDB — Touchdown (#2610) — photo gallery, flyer and machine record
• Pinside — Touchdown game details — production run, design and sound credits, playfield specs, Premier facility note
• Arcade Museum — Touchdown (D. Gottlieb & Co.) — manufacturer attribution, flyer title, 2015 auction median
• Pinside — Gottlieb Touchdown restoration thread — pop bumper board updates, repinning, playfield wear at the bumpers, fabricated head
• Pinside — Touchdown owners' thread — layout, spinner-led play, production figure and market value as owners see it
• PinWiki — Gottlieb System 80 — connectors and grounds, CPU chip roles, 5101 RAM, power supply components, display driver
• Flippers.com — tips for Gottlieb System 80 — 74175 power-up thunk mod, coin lockout fault, display rejuvenation, 6530 protection
• Pinball Help — rebuilding Gottlieb pop bumper driver boards — phantom pops, capacitor values, TIP102
• Wikipedia — Gottlieb — Mylstar renaming, September 1984 shutdown, Premier Technology buyout
• OPDB — Open Pinball Database

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