Some pinball machines manufactured by Data East apparently have a typical problem with an obviously undersized connector on the power board. The problem causes spontaneous rebooting of the machine on the situations when the current peaks are high. With my Checkpoint this happened usually when 3-ball multiball was starting, when the autoshooter had to launch two balls in a row and almost at the same time another coil had to throw the balls up to the ramp and a lot of lights on and flashing. The connector stays quite hot all the time on it's the upper side (in Checkpoint).

Jarkko Kuoppamäki has found the same problem in his Star Trek 25th Anniversary, another pinball by Data East. (Jarkko's page about that in Finnish). I didn't have to change the connector yet, because it was not burned to black as in Jarkko's ST25A. Cleaning it was enough (for now). If the connector shall melt, I will change the two hottest pins of the connector to Anderson Powerpoles. They will not melt.

The connector can be found easily. In Checkpoint there's only one connector like that. It is 12-pin (3x4) .093", manufactured by Molex. The housing is apparently Molex number 03-09-1126 and the board side is 03-09-1125. Remember you will need the terminals too. This connector should stand 9.5A. Go to www.molex.com and use the part number search.

Here are some photos for locating the connector. Probably the circuit board looks about the same in another Data East machines too, but it can be located somewhere else in the backglass cabinet.