Nice work, when you write up a post like this it makes it look easy. The reality is often fraught with frustration, not in the least thanks to the excruciating wait for parts to arrive once you've painstakingly found the next fault in the chain.
In the end though, I think it's all worth it, if only for the feeling of getting it done and over with. I've repaired a handful of such machines in the past and it's remarkable how available the schematics and parts tend to be, there are whole businesses dedicated to selling cap kits and parts for old arcades.
Seeing as this post might draw some useful attention, I'm going to piggyback and ask - does anyone have any resources for finding manuals for arcade machines?
I've spent several hours in Google and haven't come up with anything useful... I'd be willing to pay for a copy of the manual, especially if I could post it somewhere others could find it.
Unfortunately the machine I'm dealing with isn't on any of those pages that I saw, though I'm going to go through again looking for different keywords...
I'm afraid this might not be a common machine, due to the size of it mostly (I'm working on the smallest version, which is still 11' long and over 400lbs - probably takes up as much space as four regular cabinets, so I'd guess most hobbyists would go for those...).
Are there suggestions on any guides or what I could read to understand chips and graphics?
I've never worked electronics or electrical engineering for that matter but have always been curious how an enlarged lego block with metal spikes can hold graphics; produce sound.
What's inside the casing of one, I know its something to do with transistors but what are those and what's inside them.
Let's say you have an old VGA monitor, it needs 4 things:
Red, Green, Blue, Sync
And you need to deliver them at a steady pixel clock rate. Horizontal sync is between each scanline, and Vertical sync is between each frame. There are official standards to follow here, with things defined such as voltage ranges for RGB, voltage levels for Sync, "Front Porch" and "Back Porch" (how much blank space you have before and after Sync), horizontal frequency, vertical frequency (refresh rate), etc, etc.
Look for a video on Youtube called "The world's worst video card" for an example of constructing such a circuit.
To see literally what's inside electronics, the book "Open Circuits" is enlightening. Many pictures of electronics carefully sliced open with explanations of the internals: https://www.opencircuitsbook.com/
Off-topic but adjacent: Craigslist geek missed-connections time.
If you bought a stand-up Atari Gravitar machine from me about 22 years ago, I finally found the manual. Email me at mike @ my HN handle .com. Tell me where the transaction happened and how you got it home so I know it's really you, and I'll arrange to send it to you. Sorry it took so long.
How does one even figure out which chip has gone haywire? If a board breaks and I don't see a bad cap, a cluster of moths, or other obvious problem, I bin it.
Last week I did resurrect my dualie 400GB DDR3 Supermicro beast.. it had been infested by moths. After cleaning them all out with tweezers, to my amazement, the thing works again.
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[ 45.1 ms ] story [ 887 ms ] threadIn the end though, I think it's all worth it, if only for the feeling of getting it done and over with. I've repaired a handful of such machines in the past and it's remarkable how available the schematics and parts tend to be, there are whole businesses dedicated to selling cap kits and parts for old arcades.
Seeing as this post might draw some useful attention, I'm going to piggyback and ask - does anyone have any resources for finding manuals for arcade machines?
Specifically I'm working with a 2004 Pro-Striker Bowling Machine Game - very similar to the one shown here: https://www.pinrepair.com/bowl/pstrike.htm
I've spent several hours in Google and haven't come up with anything useful... I'd be willing to pay for a copy of the manual, especially if I could post it somewhere others could find it.
Unfortunately the machine I'm dealing with isn't on any of those pages that I saw, though I'm going to go through again looking for different keywords...
I'm afraid this might not be a common machine, due to the size of it mostly (I'm working on the smallest version, which is still 11' long and over 400lbs - probably takes up as much space as four regular cabinets, so I'd guess most hobbyists would go for those...).
I've never worked electronics or electrical engineering for that matter but have always been curious how an enlarged lego block with metal spikes can hold graphics; produce sound.
What's inside the casing of one, I know its something to do with transistors but what are those and what's inside them.
All cool, none the less.
http://www.forrestmims.org/publications.html
https://www.nand2tetris.org/course
If you want more detail about how transistors and logic gates work, the Art of Electronics is pretty definitive.
https://artofelectronics.net/
Red, Green, Blue, Sync
And you need to deliver them at a steady pixel clock rate. Horizontal sync is between each scanline, and Vertical sync is between each frame. There are official standards to follow here, with things defined such as voltage ranges for RGB, voltage levels for Sync, "Front Porch" and "Back Porch" (how much blank space you have before and after Sync), horizontal frequency, vertical frequency (refresh rate), etc, etc.
Look for a video on Youtube called "The world's worst video card" for an example of constructing such a circuit.
Well explained and the parts used are not unobtainium, so one can follown along at home with real hardware, if one so desires.
If you bought a stand-up Atari Gravitar machine from me about 22 years ago, I finally found the manual. Email me at mike @ my HN handle .com. Tell me where the transaction happened and how you got it home so I know it's really you, and I'll arrange to send it to you. Sorry it took so long.
Last week I did resurrect my dualie 400GB DDR3 Supermicro beast.. it had been infested by moths. After cleaning them all out with tweezers, to my amazement, the thing works again.
Thank you, X9DRi-LN4F+.