Pinball Wizard
Well-known member
You just have to wonder if any engineer who worked on designing and building these PCBs (or even the components themselves) ever imagined a bunch of guys arguing over the statistical data (or lack thereof of ACTUAL hard numbers) 40+ years later 
My (not so) hot take on this whole debate comes down to difference of careers. What ATGW is asking about and being persistent about is something that is very relevant in his career. Nuclear has to be correct (and optimized) not only to keep costs down and to make sure the *thingamajig* works, but in his case make the difference of life and death. Andrew's background (assumed based on observation but fully conjecture) is more on EE and service. In specifics to 80s game board work, hard concrete numbers are not usually "feasible". The research data is less critical in this instance. No one dies, and the longer term potential cost savings is outweighed by the slowed down work. Andrew has basically said without saying that he does not catalog every data point of every repair. Do you know how insane it would be to record every single test point of data while diagnosing a board? A 1 hour service job turns into 5 hours.
I stand by the point this is semantics and not much more. If Andrew had said "in my experience while working on boards, I've never seen XYZ go bad", this debate wouldn't be happening. We are nitpicking him because he said "this never fails". Is it not just assumed that he means from his experience? Common sense tells us that he hasn't touched every single Atari board that ever existed, collected data on each one, and catalogued it.
My (not so) hot take on this whole debate comes down to difference of careers. What ATGW is asking about and being persistent about is something that is very relevant in his career. Nuclear has to be correct (and optimized) not only to keep costs down and to make sure the *thingamajig* works, but in his case make the difference of life and death. Andrew's background (assumed based on observation but fully conjecture) is more on EE and service. In specifics to 80s game board work, hard concrete numbers are not usually "feasible". The research data is less critical in this instance. No one dies, and the longer term potential cost savings is outweighed by the slowed down work. Andrew has basically said without saying that he does not catalog every data point of every repair. Do you know how insane it would be to record every single test point of data while diagnosing a board? A 1 hour service job turns into 5 hours.
I stand by the point this is semantics and not much more. If Andrew had said "in my experience while working on boards, I've never seen XYZ go bad", this debate wouldn't be happening. We are nitpicking him because he said "this never fails". Is it not just assumed that he means from his experience? Common sense tells us that he hasn't touched every single Atari board that ever existed, collected data on each one, and catalogued it.







