Atari POKEY Chips Failing more often these days???

CudaSales

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I go through a lot of Classic Atari Game Boards that use POKEYS and have noticed more and more original POKEYS are failing as of late.

I had 4 Tempest board sets repaired recently and as you know each AUX PCB uses 2 Pokeys so a total of 8 with these 4 board sets. Out of the 8 POKEYS, 4 were bad.

I have noticed POKEYS going bad more often on other Game Boards that I have had over the last couple of years as well.


Just curious if others have noticed more original POKEYS going bad recently and any thoughts as to why other than age?
 
I'm curious how your games are operated. Are they on for long periods of time, or not?

So far, I'm at 0 failed POKEYs, although I believe of my Atari games, only Tempest has them.
 
They seem to be a higher failure component sure, but I haven't observed a huge uptick in their failure. My sample size is fairly small though. I don't think have any higher of a chance of failing than say a CPU or RAM.

Although, I often wonder if they are more sensitive to voltage spikes. People don't maintain their machines and the AR2 goes nuclear. I wonder if maybe the POKEY is the most sensitive to that type of failure. Just speculation I suppose.

Just my $.02.
 
You put that evil out there now. You better triple check your tempest...

I'm gonna triple check mine too while I'l thinking about it.
Good idea. I have gone through and replaced all the N23055's just for starters anyway.
 
I consider myself very lucky. I service 4 retro arcades,
and here's the list of what we have. Our first location
opened in 2011. I've had only one Pokey fail since then.

APB (2)
Asteroids Deluxe (2)
Battle Zone (1)
Centipede (4)
Championship Sprint (1)
Crystal Castles (1)
Gauntlet (2)
Gauntlet II (1)
Marble Madness (1)
Millipede (3)
Missile Command (4)
Paperboy (3)
Red Baron (1)
Road Blasters (1)
Space Duel (1)
Tempest (4)
Tetris (3)
 
I'm at 0 as well, and I've been in the hobby over 20 years with many atari games.

I bought a few as spares a long time ago just in case.
 
I just did a Super Sprint repair and installed 2 pokeys from my stash of "working" and one of them was dead. I hope the rest of my stash didn't catch whatever that one had.
 
I've fixed maybe 25 Atari boards over the last couple years and next to RAM and some TTLs, pokey is the most defective chip. PROMs fail a lot too.

I think I've replaced about 8 pokeys so far. I have never replaced a CPU.

I don't have the history to say if it's more often these days.
 
Other than age, the two factors I can think of are:
1. The uptick in people "repairing" POKEYs by baking them, which as I've mentioned previously is a dubious practice that likely "temporarily" gets them working for a short time.
2. More people "repairing" boards by scavenging good parts from other boards then selling the boards with the bad ones as "untested". I know this may be cynical but when I get "untested" Astrocade cages where every single board is bad and 95% of the "untested" boards I've bought are bad It's hard for me to believe those results are reasonable statistics if they truly are just "untested".
 
I'm curious how your games are operated. Are they on for long periods of time, or not?

So far, I'm at 0 failed POKEYs, although I believe of my Atari games, only Tempest has them.
None have failed in my personal games so far (Fingers Crossed). My personal games dont stay on for more than a couple of hours at a time and they dont get turned on every day.

These are all failed Pokeys from Game Boards that we received non-working. They were eventually gone through, repaired and sold over the years but I have noticed more and more failures just in the last couple of years.
 
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2. More people "repairing" boards by scavenging good parts from other boards then selling the boards with the bad ones as "untested".
Totally agree. I assume the pokey is bad and try to set my buy price with that in mind. I do think people are knowingly passing the buck.

I long for the $5 BallBlazer days.
 
I was talking to a buddy of mine today that does board repair for a living so he has a very large sampling size to go off of. He said something interesting which I never considered.

"For the Pokeys, yes they have been failing at a high rate, especially the brand/labeling of the failed Pokeys AMI labeled"
 
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