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Comment by jackhack | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but wonder what sort of maintenance might these machines require before starting up again? I imagine, at the very least, cleaning corrosion from the contacts of all mechanical switches and changing out the filter capacitors in the power supply and CRT. What else? Would every capacitor be suspect? Are the boards salvageable or would the cabinets just be gutted and a modern (MAME?) machine be substituted (or is this just sacrilege?)

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Cabs from this vintage would have lots of individual components with probably a lot of through hole mounting. With the water damage being more recent I'd expect most of them to be serviceable. It would be most exciting if there were some for which no ROM dumps already exist. A game could be returned from the grave.

Since these games were grabbed by collectors I'd expect most of them to be fixed up like new. No need to go to all of this trouble if you are just making a MAME cabinet.

The Atari SUBS game in particular would be potentially difficult to emulate (at least trivially) due to its dual-monitor configuration, and without redisplaying it on opposite-facing monitors wouldn't be much fun lol

Restoration just requires logic for the most part. before switching on a game that's sat somewhere for 30 years, start with power. Is the machine getting 240v (or 120 depending where you are). Then check the transformer/power brick - is it doing its job converting 240v AC to DC voltages. Measure those. Is the monitor getting power and working. Then you can plug in your PCB (assuming it's not corroded to hell). Then go from there. There's so much info out on the web these days, someone has usually documented most problems you're likely to come across.

Well, that's a bit of logic, and whole lot of domain knowledge about electronics.

But yeah, the documentation you mention will help.

>> I can't help but wonder what sort of maintenance might these machines require before starting up again?

I used to have a small collection until I moved recently and sold most of them. The ones in my basement never degraded much, but suffered some common issues which are reasonably fixable. One sat with a monitor problem in my garage for 17 years. I'm in the US midwest, so that meant cold winters to thermal shock things when I'd open the garage door and such, but no direct exposure to the elements. When it came time to move, I fired up that game and it worked exactly as good or bad as the day I set it aside in the garage. My vector games were sold to a friend at lowish prices because I wanted them to go to a good home and they needed a little work - but they are physically in almost the same condition as when I got them 25 years ago. A box of boards I gave to the guy you fixed my monitor just because I had no use for them and again wanted them to go to a good home. My guess is most of those will work just fine. The one from the garage is the one I kept and it's beautiful in my new basement.

It's an interesting hobby. One I mostly gave up, but I had to hang on to one cabinet and a few boards that were most important to me.

> changing out the filter capacitors in the power supply and CRT. What else? Would every capacitor be suspect?

Given the timeframe the article quoted for the most recent cabinet (1980-1981), they all predate the capacitor plague [1] by nearly two decades. It is possible that the capacitors in the PSU's of these games might still be close enough to spec. to not need any replacement. But given the folks who picked them up, they are likely to test everything extensively and then decide what to replace based on that testing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

I knew this happened, but I never knew why it happened so often- or that it was actually coded into a word(Capacitor Plague) with a timeframe.(99-07) I just thought we quit buying dirt cheap caps in consumer electronics. I have not seen a motherboard pop caps in a long time.

Nice to know a true root cause and better understand all those boards I trashed long ago.

Pretty exhaustive wiki on the topic, thanks for that.

That's more true for early 1980's and earlier electronics with through-hole caps (though a shorted cap could easily ruin your day), but I've seen a lot of mid-80's and newer vintage computers and game systems destroyed due to leaky SMD electrolytics.

I recently fired up an old Mac Plus that has stayed in the family and everything seemed to work fine until it started smoking, the display started to go wonky, and then it quit... Almost certainly an old-capacitor issue

That sounds like the RIFA brand AC line filter capacitor blowing. Cheap and easy fix provided you have a soldering iron and the long Torx driver to get at the screws in the handle. :)

Do you have a guide or something on how I can DIY this? I know soldering from my past military experience. The Mac has been in a shop for 8 months now "waiting on a part", I'm considering reclaiming it and repairing it myself, but I know nothing about the details.

There is a lot of nostalgia invested in that thing, it was my family's first computer and my own personal first experiences gaming and programming.

Pretty much. Our house came with a mid-80's arcade game because the previous owners didn't want to be bothered taking it with them. It works fine. I replaced the coin acceptor with a switch so you can play until boredom sets in. Everyone's already lost interest.

The best part of getting the game is that it came with full (hand drawn!) schematics!

There's a good series of articles on the restoration and maintenance of a pinball machine, which has many of the same characteristics as video games, plus a few more mechanical issues.

https://blondihacks.com/johnny/

A lot of them have been brought back to life. As mentioned by the other poster capacitors weren't such an issue, and the ship had been reasonably weatherproof for a good while.

This video was recorded around the time the stash was first identified and you can see the cosmetic state of a lot of the machines isn't bad!

https://youtu.be/ZcyevQFzFWk

Speaking as a guy who grew up in a family of boaters, the nearby presence of seawater seems to greatly accelerate the degradation of electronics on ships, probably via salt corrosion.

Not to mention the cabinets themselves. Almost all of them were made from varying types of plywood, which hate moisture. Atari was notorious for using MDF, which disintegrates in the presence of water.

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