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For new people : Repairing PCBs yourself


Mrvfone

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Hello,

 

Just wanted to add a sticky note to this section, I`m not having a go at anyone, But i think this needs to be said espicaly for new people thinking about buying cheap boards that don`t work and want to repair them.

 

Generally arcade boards arn`t cheap to repair!!!

 

If you buy a non-working board from e-bay for $30.. You may have to spend that again just getting it to work or even trying to diagnose it.. And i`m not including the hours of time this might take!

 

Unless you have a stash of old boards you can grab parts off, Parts will have to be bought new, Sometimes they can only be sourced from the US. This can get expensive and time consuming as you can see.

 

I`m not putting anyone off :)... I have helped new people get into it and still help new people... But i think it`s a common misconception that they are easy and cheap to fix.

 

Can an admin make this sticky as i don`t think i have permissions to do it.

 

Thanks,

 

Mrv.

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It really depends on the bootleg, they range from well made to appaulingly badly made, a good bootleg can be as well made as an original, but bad ones are pretty bad.

 

Positives

No custom ICs

 

Negatives

Any doco will probably not be relevant

Silkscreening missing or wrong

ROM sets may not match MAME at all, once a game is up and running in MAME the urge to add every and all bootleg versions in is not there, so if you have bad ROMs and the MAME set ones dont work you are kinda on your own. Also have to know if the ROM is bad if the checksum is not a known one, ie is it bad coz its bad, or is it just not known coz its a bootleg version?

Edited by Womble
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There are some really good bootlegs like the gallag board sets which plays identical to the original, Bombjack bootlegs are identical to the original, Defence command (Defender clone) I admire the bootleggers ingenuity on this pcb. They condensed the massive Williams 5 piece board set into a neat little 2 layer jobby. I worked out how to convert it to defender which is a bonus.

 

I have an R-Type bootleg here that was given to be by Brad, the thing is massive. I actually got it working but it had graphics issue which for the time it would take me to track down the fault it just wast worth it.

An original R-Type has a lot of custom chips which take up a small amount of room compared to the TTL equivalent the bootleggers had to use to reverse engineer them. This made the bootleg version of the game 4 times bigger and 4 times the amount of IC's to fail.

I have a good collection of Irem M72 games and plenty of spares to keep them going, so I'm not worried about customs failing :) The same goes for any game you really want to keep going, spare parts are ESSENTIAL!

Eventually all this hardware will fail so all we can do is enjoy it while they are still going.

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Is there any value in original boards from an authenticity point of view? I have recently replaced my cpu on pinball pool with a pascal board on account of the fact that my original board had corrosion from the battery. Is it worth keeping or is a board with leaking battery corrosion to much trouble to fix
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Is there any value in original boards from an authenticity point of view? I have recently replaced my cpu on pinball pool with a pascal board on account of the fact that my original board had corrosion from the battery. Is it worth keeping or is a board with leaking battery corrosion to much trouble to fix

 

Gottlieb CPU's are notorious for failing and being 100% unrepairable due to the "spider chips" that are totally unobtainium. Battery damage is the LEAST of their worries!!

 

The best you you could have done is exactly what you did - throw away the original - in fact better, smash it with a hammer to prevent some poor sod wasting days of their life in a vain attempt to repair it (it NEVER works with these boards).

 

Other machines and boards are a different story and I alway prefer to repair rather than replace where possible and practical.

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Is there any value in original boards from an authenticity point of view? I have recently replaced my cpu on pinball pool with a pascal board on account of the fact that my original board had corrosion from the battery. Is it worth keeping or is a board with leaking battery corrosion to much trouble to fix

 

dont smash them. sell them. most of the people with the skills to repair them cant do it economically as a service for their normal hourly rate (its cheaper to just buy a new one) but they will sell if you put a fair price on them. A lot of us tend to burn hours meditating over old boards doing our own repairs after hours for the sheer enjoyment of it.

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Hello,

 

If you buy a non-working board from e-bay for $30.. You may have to spend that again just getting it to work or even trying to diagnose it.. And i`m not including the hours of time this might take!

 

Unless you have a stash of old boards you can grab parts off, Parts will have to be bought new, Sometimes they can only be sourced from the US. This can get expensive and time consuming as you can see.

 

 

This is the problem I have right now.

 

I bought a Revolution X 3 Player arcade machine and everything on it is broken.

 

Sound Board: The sound board caps had puked all over the PCB... I fixed this by replacing the caps and repairing the corroded traces. Actually fixed it.. Woohoo!

 

Video Board: I thought this would be easy to fix but it's been doing my head in for for the past 18 months. When you turn it on it says some of the VRAM modules are faulty. Okay... so just order some more. Nope can't find them anywhere. So I ordered the NOS next model chips from the U.S hoping they would work... parcel get's "lost" by customs. Forced to order a 2nd lot. 2nd lot arrive, try and solder on, extremely difficult as they are Surface mount and the pins are under the chip. Still doesn't work. Pretty sure it's because it's not the exact same model. So I unsolder a working chip to move it to one of the other spots to see if it's some sort of trace issue. Can't get it to work either. Try putting it back into original spot.... now IT doesn't want to work.(think it's my bad soldering though) Argh! Meanwhile 6 months later customs "finds" my original chip order and I receive it. So that's about $70 or so in postage. Looks like I need to find a board with these exact chips now.

 

CRT Chassis: Meanwhile all this is happening, my CRT Chassis which was working decides to die. I checked the fuses, fuse is blown. Replace fuse. Fuse blows. I take the chassis out and check it... someone has gone to absolute town with this thing, it's covered in old flux, it's got bodge wires galore, sloppy solder joints fixing up broken traces, corrosion on the component legs and some of the caps aren't even in both holes on the board. Consider this one a write-off so order a Wei-Ya universal replacement(I know, I know, Wei-Ya are terrible, fix your original... only problem is my original IS a Wei-Ya!) so that's another $220 shipped

 

I don't even know if the Gun coil board works yet until the Video Board works, so it may need replacing yet.

 

My plan is also to turn this machine into a Rev X/Terminator 2 Hybrid machine so I'll also need Terminator 2 video board, sound board and possibly gun coil board(maybe able to use Rev X one for both).

 

Seemed so cheap when I bought this machine off Gumtree!

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Knowing how to solder is a board fixer 101, but few people know how to do it properly, or have the equipment, as result junk unreliable boards, if they work at all...And the equipment involved OMG, I would not wish that on my worst enemy, On my bench for example I have over 5K in just the Fluke 9010a (2) and pods, that's not couting the scopes, and whatever else involved...And obsolete parts, unless you have a full understanding of what you are fixing, it just ain't going to happen.
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Knowing how to solder is a board fixer 101, but few people know how to do it properly, or have the equipment, as result junk unreliable boards, if they work at all...And the equipment involved OMG, I would not wish that on my worst enemy, On my bench for example I have over 5K in just the Fluke 9010a (2) and pods, that's not couting the scopes, and whatever else involved...And obsolete parts, unless you have a full understanding of what you are fixing, it just ain't going to happen.

 

My main pieces of test gear are a logic probe with audio beep (modified with IC grabbers for power tapping), a Radio Shack DMM with transistor test mode, an HP 10529a logic comparator, and an ESR meter. Those help me fix 99+% of things. I have a crapload tied up in chip testers, Fluke 9010a/pods, Fluke/Keysight/Agilent DMMs, Tektronics/Agilent/Keysight oscilloscopes, and Pace soldering/desoldering stations on my three shop workbenches, but I started with that RS meter and am very used to it.

 

http://www.datasheetarchive.com is your friend when working with obsolete parts.

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Well that doesn't sound cheap,and you have been at it awhile, especially with that 9010a, That alone puts you on a whole different plane than most of the world...Not used much, I get that, and complicated as hell, but nessesary in fault finding on gear that was only designed to last 10 years, and here we are 50 years after the fact...Problems arise that were not even foreseen back in the day.
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howdy.  I've been a pinball guy previously, but have found myself balls deep in arcades  as I started working at 1UP Arcade. I've found it really difficult finding a solid contact list of repairer's that can take on PCB repair work, especially for  80's, 90's era games, which we have a really really big amount of.  Since kicking back up from Covid, we have gotten about 220 machines running on the floor atm, but we have some real crackers we can't get out. We try to handle some minor board repairs inhouse, which we have had some nice wins with recently, but ultimately we don't have anyone competent enough to attempt a complex repair, especially when involving, more often than not, a really a really rare PCB.  We use JoMac where we can & he has been endlessly helpful, despite being a very busy guy. Are there still people around who take on paid PCB repair work?

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1 hour ago, RaoulJuke said:

howdy.  I've been a pinball guy previously, but have found myself balls deep in arcades  as I started working at 1UP Arcade. I've found it really difficult finding a solid contact list of repairer's that can take on PCB repair work, especially for  80's, 90's era games, which we have a really really big amount of.  Since kicking back up from Covid, we have gotten about 220 machines running on the floor atm, but we have some real crackers we can't get out. We try to handle some minor board repairs inhouse, which we have had some nice wins with recently, but ultimately we don't have anyone competent enough to attempt a complex repair, especially when involving, more often than not, a really a really rare PCB.  We use JoMac where we can & he has been endlessly helpful, despite being a very busy guy. Are there still people around who take on paid PCB repair work?

I think you will find most people are in the same position as you. Joey is simply the best at what he does. Joey and I are best mates, and I have been helping him out as much as can in recent months as my own business has been quiet, but the big issue is that many of these older boards from the 80's to the 90's are now 30+ years old and if you can find or have the parts to fix them, they can take days to repair. In the last few months, some of the boards which I have repaired have at times taken anything up to 3  days to diagnose and repair. So there comes a time when you have to draw a line and say its not worth it. Boards that are still working but have faults are typically not such an issue, but when they are completely dead, or stuck in reset etc they can be a nightmare to diagnose, even with all the right tools.

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9 hours ago, RaoulJuke said:

howdy.  I've been a pinball guy previously, but have found myself balls deep in arcades  as I started working at 1UP Arcade. I've found it really difficult finding a solid contact list of repairer's that can take on PCB repair work, especially for  80's, 90's era games, which we have a really really big amount of.  Since kicking back up from Covid, we have gotten about 220 machines running on the floor atm, but we have some real crackers we can't get out. We try to handle some minor board repairs inhouse, which we have had some nice wins with recently, but ultimately we don't have anyone competent enough to attempt a complex repair, especially when involving, more often than not, a really a really rare PCB.  We use JoMac where we can & he has been endlessly helpful, despite being a very busy guy. Are there still people around who take on paid PCB repair work?

Eldorado, and Arcade Doc (Classic Arcade repairs) are both quite reliable.

Edited by CandyLand
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