Description: Midnight Marauder, Bally, 5/84, a very cool combination of an EM style Dale mechanical gun game and the Bally pinball MPU-133 solidstate board system (like Baby Pacman used). Has speech from several pinball games like Flash Gordon and uses a Squawk and Talk sound board. Uses one 6-digit display (which displays "backwards" because it is seen through a mirror) for the scoring. MPU board flickers than flashes eight times (instead of the usual seven for -35 Bally MPU boards), with the LED staying lit on the eighth flash. The solenoid/power module is the same one used in Gold Ball and Grand Slam.

A major problem with this game is on one of the motor controller boards, just to the left of the solenoid/power board in the back of the game. It uses a custom 40 pin chip. If this chip fails, the game is useless junk. And since it was a custom chip, there's really no replacements available. Note the manual doesn't even show this board. But it's right there, and it's the potential downfall of the whole game.

Has three motorized tanks and two drop-down spacemen ("Marauder") targets. And a motorized command ship target. Across the back panel there are spaceship target that don't move but that have light animation. As the lit spaceships move down toward the base, if there get down to the bases, the game ends (the game says "warning" as the ships get close to the bases). If the command ship is hit, it freezes the light animated spaceships for about 4 seconds, and the gun goes into automatic fire mode for this period. If a tank is hit, it destroys all spaceships above that base. There is endless time and shots for the shooter to prevent this. Gun shots semi-automatic mode unless the command ship is hit, then it goes automatic machine gun style. It's sort of like the video game Space Invaders, but in a mechanical gun game. The longer you can prevent the spaceships from landing at the bases, the longer the player can continue to play. The gun itself is a light ray (not visible). Each target has a light sensor (not IR or regular light triggered).

A rare game, probably never put into large production, certainly less than 100 made. The one shown here has no serial number, and has some indications that is may be a "sample" game. The manual for this game is available here.

Please contact me if you have this game for sale at cfh@provide.net