Category: Arcade Tech and Repair
-
Pac-Man With Strange RAM Issue
So I was working on a Pac board for a friend that was dying at boot with symptoms of bad VRAM. I swapped out all of the RAMs only to have the problem persist.
-
It is not Lag, That is how it Played!
So I was taking with someone about the Arcade1Up units and admitted that I really liked the Capcom fighter ones (upright and cocktail) ones because they included the original Street Fighter. He said they he hated it because of the “lag” in Street Fighter, and how he does not like most multiboards because of the…
-
Spies Cross Reference List
There is an old cross reference list archived on Spies and replicated by a few arcade-related sites. I took this list and reformatted it, removed empty entries and made some items clickable for easy searching.
-
Family and Arcade Versions of Pandora’s Boxes
So recently there have been these different versions of PBs becoming available that are very popular with those little self-contained panels that house a two-player setup with a game board and a speaker inside the panel. These used to come with the “real” PBs that used a JAMMA connector: But now they use these newer…
-
Machine Pin Sockets – What Are They REALLY Good For?
So another debate about machine pin sockets vs. standard (dual-wipe) sockets came up on one of the arcade repair-related groups I am a member of. And it, like just about every other older discussion about them, centered around not knowing our understanding what they are really supposed to be used for, and without fail, someone…
-
Can you “Bulletproof” an Atari AR-II Power Supply? I Think I Can…
Well, like the title initially asks, can you really “bulletproof” an Atari AR-II board? From what I have found on the Internet, and older material like Star Tech Journals, the answer really is no. Pretty much all sources that mention “bulletproof” and “AR-II” on the same page are only taking about performing the Sense mods,…
-
WG6100 w/Tempest Showing a Tangled Mess in the Bottom Right Quadrant
So this is basically the second part of a previous post about a tempest that lost deflection. After running for a while that Tempest’s display changed into something that can only be described as a tangled mess: That is something that I never had seen before. The owner turned the game off and back on…
-
WG6100 w/Tempest Showing a Multicolored spot in Center of Screen
So I was helping a newly minted arcade game owner when his first purchase, which is his favorite arcade game: Tempest. Shortly after getting it the X-Size pot fell apart and the game ended up only showing a Multicolored spot (larger than a just a “dot”) which changed depending on what the game was doing. …
-
How a Screen Full of Garbage can be a Diagnostic Indicator
(This is essentially a copy of something I posted in a Facebook arcade repair group not too long ago.) I was replying to a post that had to do with a game that was showing garbage on screen but was otherwise not working. The type of garbage you see on screen can actually be a…
-
Lithium Battery Replacement for Williams and other CMOS Systems
So you have decided to reduce the risk of battery leakage damaging your precious Williams arcade or pinball board by replacing the existing AA batteries with a lithium (CR2032) replacement. Great! Lithium batteries like the CR2032 tend to leak much less than alkaline batteries so this is a good generally a good idea. Note that…