Museum of the Game® & International Arcade Museum® Forums

Looking for opinions on arcade PCB re-creation.

I've been toying around with schematic capture and board layout. My goal is to get an electrically equivalent circuit working with same board pinouts and connectors. I am *not* trying to duplicate the original PCB geometry/gerbers. The idea is that you can drop the new PCB into an existing machine (with existing harnesses) and it doesn't know the difference. I have a EE degree and am more than comfortable with schematics, soldering, and debugging hardware.

The more I go down this rabbit hole the more I see a million small improvements I can make to the original circuit. I am now leaning towards getting rid of DIPs and through hole parts wherever possible and move to surface mount parts. The form factor is smaller, meaning I might be able to cram two boards worth of ICs into one board. Smaller boards should mean less EMI/EMC problems, etc. Also newer parts should get me better performance and life. Not going crazy small, QFP etc. as I want to be able to solder by hand. SO package seems ideal.

So... thoughts? Is this a terrible idea? I don't know what I don't know, and so there might be very good reasons to avoid this path.