LOL!
Pacman has to be the best documented and easiest board to work on.
Anyone who can't replace a socket has no business in this hobby.
I'm in the Pinball Repair group on Facebook. as probably everyone should know, pinball is a rich man's game, and at the beginning of the year when I had one of those Rottendog MPU327-04's crap out in Firepower at work I got to thinking about this. one of those costs $500 new, and in the event it breaks nobody on the planet really knows how to fix them or wants to fix them. despite their asking price, I came to the realization that they really are disposable junk. anytime someone posts in Pinball Repair with a mere hint of something wrong with an MPU or driver board, of the 40 some odd comments (a quantity above 5 is grounds for me to not even touch it) I would say half of them are along the lines of "buy a Rottendog combo board!" and every time I read that, to me, it's cringe, because I know how to fix those MPUs and driver boards on the early solid state games... but the people making the posts don't. the question I had about those Rottendog replacements was answered back in January: there's just a collective of people that have money and want to be able to play their games. they could probably save money paying someone like a Chris Hibler to fix their original boards, but it's just easier and more time effective to get the Rottendog board. I wound up reverting that Firepower back to original hardware, the first time I ever did a restoration-esque deep dive on one of those, and I did 3 more games at work over the next several months. for me it was gratifying because it was a new thing I hadn't yet done, and I've done many over the last 18 years.
but back to the point about people's unwillingness to just learn how to fix games, like I said, they just have money and want to play their games. they want to socialize with people and drink beer or whatever it is that they would rather do instead. I don't judge those people for it, I remember a point in my life where I wish I could just play games without all the gravity of everything needing to be perfect. every arcade I've worked at full time I committed myself to making 100% of the games work as much as I was capable of doing. because in this current age of the last 15 years or so where people go places and have what they consider a negative experience, the one thing they won't be able to do then is critique a bunch of broken games (like so many other arcade Google/Yelp pages do) because then that would reflect poorly on me. to date I've only sent a Spy Hunter to cdjump to fix a few years ago because I came to another realization that I'm not in my 20s anymore and my time not being allocated to a thing I don't have intimate understanding of how it works is the more valuable thing at a minor hit in what he charges.
unlike a lot of the specialist people here, I never had the luxury of just concentrating on a handful of hardware platforms. I'm a game technician, I don't discriminate; it was always expected of me to just magically be able to fix anything and everything. on one hand it was a dream that 4 year old me had of wanting to learn how to do it; on the other in the real world it's at times an element where I wish I could put the toothpaste back in the tube.
I support
@nerdygrrl with whichever next step she takes, because she's a model citizen outside of this stupid arcade world we exist in. stay gold, Mark.
