Why Do People Remove Test Switches?

KidVidiot

Thread Manager
Joined
Aug 9, 2011
Messages
7,646
Reaction score
525
Location
Los Angeles, California
Can someone explain this to me? Why do I buy games and look inside and the test or service switch is gone? WTF am I supposed to do about that? Why was something as integral as that removed in the first place?

It's always the little unforseen stuff that get me. Spend a couple hours installing a new monitor and plexi and getting everything right in a frogger I recently picked up and now want to put the finishes touches on it by switching the game settings, taking it off freeplay etc, but I can't because a) brasington's website doesn't tell you how to get into the hss kit settings, b) there is no service switch on this frogger, c) the freaking player 2 start button isn't wired up and none of the three extra wires coming from the harness seem to be it, and the board is going through some kind of jamma adapter so Im having a hard time tracing it back, and the for-some-reason 100 page manual is no help either

gahhhhh
 
If I had to guess I'd say it was improvisations on the arcade ops part. Maybe he needed the switch on a bigger earning game and couldn't be bothered to run to Radioshack.
 
If I had to guess I'd say it was improvisations on the arcade ops part. Maybe he needed the switch on a bigger earning game and couldn't be bothered to run to Radioshack.

Maybe but more likely laziness. People trying to shit conversions out of the warehouse. It's very annoying to deal with when trying to fix a game.
 
if the wires are there you can probably just wire in a cherry switch or short the wires to get it to enter test mode.
 
Or the Ops didn't want the record-keeping reset on location before they could get there themselves and audit the coin box.
 
Well I know on a bunch of my machines I thought the test switch was missing. Because there was a spot for a switch, near the volume control, that was empty. However the switches ended up being on the coin door, behind a bunch of wires. This was apparently a Europe vs. US thing for Atari.
 
I picked up a machine recently that had the switches still in place, but for some reason the wires had been cut to them. I reconnected the wires and everything was fine, but I can't imagine why anyone would bother to disconnect them like that.
 
Or the Ops didn't want the record-keeping reset on location before they could get there themselves and audit the coin box.


Thats exactly what a operator told me!! There were a few other reasons dont remember now, all six games I got from him had no test switch..
 
I bought a Star Wars UR cabinet that when the operator said to take everything out of the cabinet his wing nut of an employee took the wiring harness, bracket of all service switches and some of the wood supports out of the inside of it. It's almost like his name was Chumlee.

Grrr
 
The summer of '98 when I worked for Aladdin's Castle we received orders the cut all service credit switches out of the games.

1: so that employees couldn't play free games on the clock.
2: to force us to properly log comp tokens given when a game "ate" the tokens.
 
Well I know on a bunch of my machines I thought the test switch was missing. Because there was a spot for a switch, near the volume control, that was empty. However the switches ended up being on the coin door, behind a bunch of wires. This was apparently a Europe vs. US thing for Atari.

This right here....I asked the same question a while back and then was embarrassed because the switches had been there all along. Just in a different place.
 
I have two conversions where it's obvious the test switches were just not installed. I'm sure the operators had reasons at the time but it pisses me off every time I think about it. I have a skins game converted from a MK3 cab and a Major Havoc Space Duel conversion.

In the skins game the test switch is just gone along with its harness. I'm sure it was just removed to use in another game or removed so people didn't have a chance at free play. The major havoc's test button wasn't even wired up at all. The Major Havoc won't page through the test pages without the test button...grrr.
 
Back
Top Bottom