Repairing a buggy board arcade machine

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.

This should totally read "buggy boy" not "buggy board", even though the buggy boy board is a buggy buggy boy board, apologies!

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.

This kind of component level repair always feels like magic to me. Great post.

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.

Thank you, X9DRi-LN4F+.

As others have said, great write-up.

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.

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.

All cool, none the less.

Loved this game. Never was quite sure what made it so much more attractive to me than other driving games at the time.