Pole Position questions

loupgarou21

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I don't yet have any arcade cabinets, but have been slowly looking. A non-working pole position cabinet has come up in my area, and the price is within what I'm willing to pay, but I've seen some references to pole position being difficult to repair and prone to failure.

For cosmetics on the game, I'm not too worried, I'm pretty sure I can assess that part myself and determine if that's something I'm willing to dive into, but I'm hoping someone might be able to help shed some light on what I might potentially be running into for issues and potential expenses on getting the game up and running, as far as boards, controls, power supply, etc. What should I be looking for when I take a look at the game for potential show stoppers?

Also, sight unseen, knowing it's non-working, what would be a reasonable price range to expect?

Thanks!
 
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Simplest answer is to look at the boards and edge connectors, see if anything looks heat damaged. Then pull the power block up, flip it over, and look for heat damage on the underside. Look at the fuse block for heat damage. The amount of burned wires and contact points are going to determine the majority of the functional work on a Pole Position.
 
Pole Position is indeed a game that is more often not working than it is working. The huge majority of its problems are power related: it's a two board set that is relatively complex and is really power hungry (in fact it has a separate power supply for each board, which is unusual). All the power to the boards goes through one edge connector on each board, and as that connector became dirty or loose it would overheat and that led to all sorts of issues. I've seen PP boards where the edge connector is completely burned away, and when the power is doing stuff like that the ICs on the board can get damaged quick. This is on top of typical, run-of-the-mill arcade issues like a non-working monitor, dead power supply, etc.

Once you have a PP that is working, the modifications to make it reliable and keep it working are not too difficult and can be handled by anybody with a passing knowledge on how to work on electronics. It involves bypassing the single edge connector on each board and getting power to points on the board in another manner, which keeps that connector from overheating and also delivers power more reliably to the entire board. Once you do that, it's actually a fairly reliable game, but getting a non-working PP board working is on the difficult end of the spectrum, and it's not a good choice for your first pcb to try to fix.

Your best bet is probably to send the boards for repair or buy tested working boards. Either way you're looking at a couple hundred bucks probably. If you do buy it, there are a few things you can test on your own and the community can help you with that, but after a certain point PP boards should be repaired by somebody with experience.

As for price, if the cabinet is complete and in good condition, I'd probably offer $100-150 or so. Working it's worth much more than that, but without knowing what it needs to get it working you don't want to spend too much.

Things to check: the game should have a monitor, a two-board pcb set inside a cage mounted to the side of the cabinet, two smaller power supply boards, and a power "brick" on the bottom of the cabinet. On the two-board pcb set, I would remove the wiring connectors to each board and examine the edge connectors of the boards themselves. If the connector pads on the boards are nice and clean, that's good. If they appear burnt (it won't be all the pins, just a couple), it may be a board that will be difficult to fix.
 
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