Does anyone happen to know how realistic it is to try and repair old pinball machines these days? I've got a Star Wars machine that I got for Christmas as a child but it doesn't work now 15 years later (when I try to turn it on it tries to boot up and never does). Whenever I looked around on the internet about fixing it it almost felt like I would need an electrical engineering degree to even get started.
Okay, I did work on servicing pinball machines during the mid 90's, I never did have any electrical degree, but I was trained quite well before starting and also had other experienced managers etc to ask if I got stuck. The bulk of pinball repair came down to fixing the effects of wear and tear, from heavy use. 9 times out of ten you could find the problem by eye. See the loose wire or broken part and then its a removal and soldering job. So a bunch of spare parts is needed.
But like I said that was 9 tenths of the time. The other tenth got harder. There were even times when we needed to remove and replace chips out of the big circuit boards up behind the main display. You needed to trace the issue back using the big schematics in the manuals (hope you have that).
Now to your problem, not being very familiar with the machine makes it a bit hard. It could be as simple as the power supply isn't putting out enough current. We did need to replace those things quite often, they run for hours a day for years and it slowly kills them. So the pinball machine might look like it's starting up, lights & fans will come on, but the low current will make it so the board can never power up fully. If you can get (borrow) a multimeter and check that the power is a solid 5V, put one connector on the earth and the other on one of the 5V DC outputs at the power supply (manual will tell you which is which - if you have no manual it's likely raised letters on the power supply, as long as you're only touching with the multimeter connectors you can't damage anything machine-wise.
THIS IS IMPORTANT - Be careful though that you're only touching the output part of the power supply. This will be the only work to do inside the machine with any power running, lean in and touch the connectors to the output side of the power supply and touch nothing else. The danger is only where the mains supply runs into the cabinet, but you've got to be careful. For all other work have the machine turned off and remove the power cord from the mains supply. Totally remove the outside power supply. Why?? A simple thing like dropping a small screw when you're working on some other part of the machine. You think damn, and reach down to pick it up without looking where it's sitting. So totally remove mains power.
A new power supply should be find-able on Ebay I guess.
If the power supply is good then its possible that the issue 'failure to start up' is due to some kind of diagnostic test, that is failing due to some problem. Which could be anything, still it could be visually seen, have a good look about (get right in there with a torch) and use the multimeter to check that you're getting continuity (tracing the wires back through the system). Sort of a big job, perhaps be methodical and go through bit by bit. Good luck with that.
Oh and pic for the FSR gods.