"Turn 'em off"

roothorick

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It's no secret that the conventional wisdom here is you should only have your games on when you're playing them.

Do we have anything better than anecdotes and hunches to base this on? My gut instinct says that if the game is on for even a few hours a day, as long as it doesn't have defective capacitors or heat problems, the stresses of thermal cycling will quickly outpace any gains in useful life from the reduced running hours. In the realm of IT, this holds VERY true -- some people claim that simply leaving workstations on overnight reduces hardware failures by as much as a third!

So what makes arcade games any different? At the end of the day, it's the same materials in a different configuration. If you have your games on a lot (say, 4 or more hours a day), and don't care about your power bill (or, alternately, are presently relying on electric heat), why shouldn't you just leave them on?
 
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I can't afford the electric bill to leave 15-20 games running 24/7. So They are on mostly on weekends for a few hours then off during the week unless I have friends over.
 
Do whatever you want -- but make sure they're attended in case something happens. I had a Ms Pac monitor blow a flyback this summer at a party and fill my house with smoke. These are old machines that can fail (catastrophically) at any time.

The power bill sure isn't negligible. Games are 250+ watts. Even if you generate heat as a side effect it's a wasteful way to do it. Put another way -- do you leave your electric oven turned-on constantly even if you're not cooking something? I mean... it warms up the house.
 
I leave the arcade machines turned off when not in use. I don't play them enough to leave them on.

But as for leaving a PC on, I agree with that. I work at a business and the PCs are left on 24/7. They do last a lot longer then powering on and off everyday. But the problem I have seen, when powering them down to clean or upgrade, they might not power on again. The problem is the capacitors. They had enough power staying on, but when they die and are drained of power, they will not charge up again which makes the PC not power on again.
Hard drive failures have been minimal in the 4 years I've been here. Over 100 workstations and maybe replaced 5 hard drives.
 
For the most part, I only turn on the games when I'm going to be playing them.

Biggest reason: preventing CRT burn-in.

Neither arcade games nor computer hardware is really designed with a time horizon of more than a few years. But one possible reason that thermal cycling may outweigh heat history on PC parts but not arcade games: PC parts are typically much better designed. They're designed for being manufactured in quantities of 100 or 1000 times greater than arcade hardware, so I expect they get greater scrutinty in the design phase.

Another apples-to-oranges issues is the era of the hardware involved. To compare fairly with your Pac-man or Donkey Kong, you'd need people to say that it's better to leave your Commodore 64 or IBM PC-XT on 24/7 than to turn it off when not in use...

It's no secret that the conventional wisdom here is you should only have your games on when you're playing them.

Do we have anything better than anecdotes and hunches to base this on? My gut instinct says that if the game is on for even a few hours a day, as long as it doesn't have defective capacitors or heat problems, the stresses of thermal cycling will quickly outpace any gains in useful life from the reduced running hours. In the realm of IT, this holds VERY true -- some people claim that simply leaving workstations on overnight reduces hardware failures by as much as a third!

So what makes arcade games any different? At the end of the day, it's the same materials in a different configuration. If you have your games on a lot (say, 4 or more hours a day), and don't care about your power bill (or, alternately, are presently relying on electric heat), why shouldn't you just leave them on?
 
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Can't expect a 30 year old CRT or XY monitor to have the same reliability as any new component of today. And an old tube just will burn out that much faster, since most already have many hours on them.

Just like hot resistors will burn boards badly and will just continue to burn the baord if left on all the time.

I turn mine on when I want them on but that's just me and I've not had any issues.
 
Most electronic components have a a relationship between how much they are powered on to how long they will last until they fail. Left powered on, heat is being generated which is reducing the life on those components. With pc's the same was true but one difference is that they all had hard disks. And hard disks did tend to crash more on power on or power off....at least they used to. Not sure that's true any more though. Now they are designed to power off automatically every time the machine goes into sleep mode.

But I have to believe that a machine being powered on for 24 hours straight will cause more stress on a typical component than powering it on for an hour or two and then turning it off.

I think you would be insane to leave your games on all the time.
 
I can't afford the electric bill to leave 15-20 games running 24/7. So They are on mostly on weekends for a few hours then off during the week unless I have friends over.

Unless you have more than a dozen games on 24/7, this really isn't a valid argument.

I did some math on this a few days ago - a dozen games and a few pins and a change machine cost me I think about $3 to run for 8 hours straight. 9 bucks a day is like $3K a year, so yeah, that's a lot.

But 1 game? That'd be like $250 a year. You spend more than that on coffee. (and likely more than that on the game.)

That said, leave em off when you're not playing them. Electronics experience wear and tear too.

Better yet, unplug them - lightning sucks.
 
To echo what many have said, I don't see why you'd leave your games on 24/7 unless you have them in service. It's just unncessary wear/tear on your games, additional electricity costs and cost to replace/repair parts.

Good example: I've had DK for almost three years, never serviced the monitor and it's one of my nicest. I only turn it on for an hour or two at a time when I play it. It's still looking great.

Bad example: My work has two games that are on a timer and they are on 12 hours a day including weekends (not by my choice or recommendation). Both are now off and unplayable because the monitors went out (with heavy screen burn). Both monitors were crisp and working just fine a few months ago when we first got them. I have a feeling this has more to do with them being on 84 hours a week than anything else.
 
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I take it one step further since kids are around and dogs in the house when we are out.

I've got the switches rewired so there is no power at all going to the power block when the game is off, (ie aux power plug).
And when we leave I unplug the machines.
I don't trust any old electronics for any reason.

reminds me of an old refigerator my dad sold the neighbors in the early 70s. the dang thing caught on fire and burned their house to the ground. eeeek. thank gawd it was on a back porch and everyone got out safely.

old electronics means unsafe to trust in my book.
 
I found out that my Crazy Climber was costing me about $8/month to run continuously. That's about 5% of my non-HVAC portion of my electric bill.

My desktop computer and monitor was sucking down about another $12/month. I had been leaving the computer on all the time because the power supply was flaky and it was a chore to get booted after sitting. I replaced the PS for $40.

My laptop, by comparison looks like it is burning an average 22W, which translates to under $2/month. It's staying on while the other two are staying OFF when not used.

Kerry
 
It dawns on me now that me being more interested in 90s stuff means I'm dealing with substantially different hardware. All of my games are early surface mount era -- and SMT is a LOT more sensitive to thermal cycling. On top of that, they use newer, hotter processors with more severe thermal gradients, which means bigger thermal cycling stresses on their fragile SMT legs. Power supply design changed a lot too -- switching power supplies rose to power, and switchers are notorious for exploding on startup. Everyone knows 1985 and 1995 were very different, but... wow. It's really incredible how much electronics changed internally in just ten years.

CRT burn-in is a good point too. I can't believe I didn't think of that. Even before widespread adoption of LCDs, PCs were deploying screen savers practically from the start, and then DPMS came out which let them literally turn off the monitor automatically when idle for a while.

Do whatever you want -- but make sure they're attended in case something happens. I had a Ms Pac monitor blow a flyback this summer at a party and fill my house with smoke. These are old machines that can fail (catastrophically) at any time.

Damn! Did it blow suddenly with no warning or did it look/act kind of flaky for a while before exploding?
 
my games only go on when friends come over really or I want to play a game, but my DK went out on location and for nearly 5weeks was on continually I believe in an arcade airport, never missed a beat, and worked as good as the day I took it there, chances are now it will fail, as I have typed this?!?!?!
 
A friend of mine unfortunately had his house burned to the ground (total loss). The culprit? The 1970's calculator in his home office.

Think about it.
 
One of the projects that I am building for a friend of mine is a hardware screen saver. Basically if the control panel is not getting any inputs for about a minute it just power down the monitor. If you press the player one or two button it turns on the monitor waits for 20 seconds and than allows normal game play.

This is just to prevent monitor burn in on a ms pacman.
 
In case you didn't know (since I didn't, until last month) -- there's a ROM modification available at http://arcade.souzaonline.com/ that will run the attract mode on freeplay. Your solution goes further in solving the problem, but those ROMs were enough for me.

Great to know thanks. I did talk about modification on the roms to prevent burn but that still doesn't slow down the electrolytic caps from drying out.

Once the project on my bench. I going to post a DIY..
 
One of the projects that I am building for a friend of mine is a hardware screen saver. Basically if the control panel is not getting any inputs for about a minute it just power down the monitor. If you press the player one or two button it turns on the monitor waits for 20 seconds and than allows normal game play.

This is just to prevent monitor burn in on a ms pacman.

I've been contemplating doing the same thing for a Double Dragon cab that I'm going to set up at work to play various boards! I'd rather not have to train folks to do the right thing with power and have it do the right thing automatically. Is easier to say "move the joystick and it'll come on" instead of teaching them to turn off and on as appropriate.
 
In case you didn't know (since I didn't, until last month) -- there's a ROM modification available at http://arcade.souzaonline.com/ that will run the attract mode on freeplay. Your solution goes further in solving the problem, but those ROMs were enough for me.

I suppose that's good to prevent burn... of the freeplay screen. But a pac will still burn a really nice "HIGH SCORE", maze, and fruit in a CRT, even cycling attract mode.
 
I've seen this question come up many times over the years and i still have to ask why? Higher electric bills, screen burn, potential fire hazzard, exhausting the life out of a 30 year piece of equipment that was exhausted long before you got it and having to spend money to repair something earlier than you would have had to had you left the games off makes no sense at all.
 
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