Behind the scenes: How much work goes into making the arcade games you enjoy playable?

It’s not easy maintaining a collection of games – there are always things to repair…. I thought I might take a quick walk through our arcade space and discuss what I usually do after a party and what happens to the machines and what needs to be done to the games to get them working for the next event. Some machines hold up; some break down. Take a walk with me and see what work needs to be done?

When a broken switch isn’t a broken switch?

Sometimes what you think is wrong isn’t what’s really wrong. This is why our eyes and our mind are the best tools we can use to repair machines. In this video, I take a look at what appears to be a broken switch in the shooter lane of a Data East Guns and Roses pinball machine. The switch appears to be flaky and intermittent and manual testing of the switch seems to indicate that it won’t work properly and needs to be replaced, but all is not as it seems…

Making a pinball board test rig using a PC power supply

Here’s a quick video that shows how to take an old PC power supply you may have laying around and use it to power up pinball boards for testing. I use the Bally-35 MPU board as an example of how we can set this up to do board work on the MPU while it’s outside of the actual pinball machine. This is great for testing things while you’re refurbishing a board that’s been giving you problems.