Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Bench check

Boards, playfield, toys and the trip home

Boards and batteries

T2 is an early WPC game on the WPC-089 CPU, with 3 AA batteries on the board. When they leak, the electrolyte drips onto the switch matrix circuits and can leave the board unrepairable. Burned GI connectors at J115, J120 and J121 on the power/driver board are especially common on early WPC games like this one, so ask for photos of the CPU and of those plugs.

Display

T2 was the first game Williams designed around a dot-matrix display, a high-voltage plasma panel whose dots fade with age. Sparkles, clouds or ghosting in the display test mean the voltages are running high, so ask for a photo of it.

Playfield

Ask for raking-light photos of the flipper area, inlanes, the five-target bank and the area in front of the skull. Worn inserts and bare wood show as dull patches.

Toys and mechs

The cannon is the toy. A kicker under the skull sends the ball up a habitrail to the cannon, which swings to aim at the targets on the left, and the trigger on the gun grip fires it. The single drop target in front of the skull relies on a thin violet/orange diode tieback wire, and if that's lost the driver transistor fails and the coil can lock on and melt.

Cabinet and art

Doug Watson's backbox art shows the T-800 in Schwarzenegger's sunglasses, added at his request. The T-1000 isn't in the art apart from one small photo of Robert Patrick on a light shield. Ask for a lit photo of the backbox and photos of both cabinet sides.

Moving it

One weighed in at 258 lb with legs. Take the legs off and use a pinball dolly with two people.

Parts and code

The paperwork runs to a manual, a parts list and service bulletins 32 and 33, and L-8 is the last game code on record. Replace burned GI connectors as a set, header pins and housings both, because damaged pins burn the new housing too.