Had a party, had a crash...

Scott C

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Yesterday was the work Christmas party at my house, so naturally I opened the arcade for everyone to enjoy. I invited most of the games to play, but a couple were down for repair, such as Astron Belt (anyone have a working Hitachi LD player for sale/trade?). All in all, I had about 10 people play the games pretty hard. This time around, Robotron, Stargate, Quartet 2, Satan's Hollow, Asteroids Deluxe, and Space Ace got zero play, but Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga (60-in-1), Donkey Kong, SW:E1 pinball, Tempest, BattleZone, Mario Bros., Centipede, TRON, Galaxian, etc. got the bulk of play. Seems different every party... Of course, I got the typical requests for "Gallagian", "Galaxaga", and the other Galaga variants! :)

During the party the Asteroids Deluxe went dark and started smelling badly (burnt electronics), it was probably dark for 20-30 minutes before I saw it down, so I turned of it. Today, I open it up expecting the monitor to be smoked and instead find the game PCB edge connector is partially off. I look at the typical burnt resistor on the ARI board to find it totally fried, but after reattaching the edge connector the game starts up. The smell was so bad I assumed it was the monitor and something bigger that smoked. I was prepared for a chassis rebuild and am happy to see it will only be a single resistor. I will definitely need to determine why the wiring harness came loose (the game was locked, so no players did it) and how to prevent it in the future.

Merry Christmas and Happy gaming.

Scott C.
 
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The edge connector on my asteroids cocktail was sometimes not making good connections and found the connector was so loose fitting it could have easily came partially off just from some jarring of the machine. I painted thin coats of solder on the pins. It fits much tighter now and have not had any more connection issues.
 
The edge connector on my asteroids cocktail was sometimes not making good connections and found the connector was so loose fitting it could have easily came partially off just from some jarring of the machine. I painted thin coats of solder on the pins. It fits much tighter now and have not had any more connection issues.
Thanks for the advice and I'll look into that. Thanks.

Scott C.
 
The edge connector on my asteroids cocktail was sometimes not making good connections and found the connector was so loose fitting it could have easily came partially off just from some jarring of the machine. I painted thin coats of solder on the pins. It fits much tighter now and have not had any more connection issues.

Please don't do this to edge connectors. The correct solution is to order a replacement connector from Bob Roberts with the appropriate pins and repin the harness.

While your solution seems to work, it is actually a very bad way to fix a relatively simple issue. You might spend a couple of hours at the most redoing an edge connector or two on a harness but you will be set for another 30 years.
 
Please don't do this to edge connectors. The correct solution is to order a replacement connector from Bob Roberts with the appropriate pins and repin the harness.

While your solution seems to work, it is actually a very bad way to fix a relatively simple issue. You might spend a couple of hours at the most redoing an edge connector or two on a harness but you will be set for another 30 years.

+1

Oh so true!
 
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