Galaga Video Board

Galaga007

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Galaga, one of the most popular video games of all time. Why are the video baords such a pain to work on. Doesn't make sense to me.
 
Bad resister packs.
bad single wipe sockets cuasing bad contacts..
Chip legs that turn black and brittle in time.
Thin Lines and small eyelet holes. traces breaks easily.
Poor design due to bean counters removing by pass caps.
And thats just the tip of things.
 
Because like most things, the bean counters made the engineers cut corners and build it cheap. THEN it became popular. :)
 
And the techs who repair these POS ( always said in the most nicest way laughs )
Figure out how to add that 2 or 3 dollars in parts to make it work stable.
 
And the techs who repair these POS ( always said in the most nicest way laughs )
Figure out how to add that 2 or 3 dollars in parts to make it work stable.

HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

It's more than that to replace all the 24/28/40/42 pin sockets and the crappy resistor packs.
 
2 or 3 dollars was refering to what it would have cost them to fix these issues in the frist place.

Now it like 20 or 30 dollars to fix it and a Heck of alot of time.

How much would it have to increase the pads and traces?
How much would it cost to buy dual wipes instead of single wipes?
A hand full of .1?
production costs should not have gone up that much.

Now good stable boards can go as high as 200 plus..
 
Bottom line is these boards were not built to last 30 years. They were intended to work for a year as that was usually the life cycle for most games....most just a few months. The custom chips are the biggest problems on these boards. At some point they realized the problems with the leg rot on these because some are made with tin plate instead of silver and they are still in great shape today.
 
i have the Namco board ,[ green ] , the Midway board [ blue ] is a poor version , the solder tracks delaminate , plus the nice namco board has reverb on the explosions , the midway doesn`t
 
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