Quoted from Who-Dey:So I guess anytime that I have questions or concerns about a product that instead of trying to find the answers to my questions, that I should “just not buy” that particular product? This doesn’t concern me enough to put me in the insane asylum or to derail my purchase of a spike system game, nor is it going to bury me financially in the event this happens but its definitely something worth trying to get answers for in my opinion. I’m confident enough though that there will be some very intelligent people out there to come up with solutions to repair these games down the road if Stern is not still in business.
the problem is, with surface mounted components. no schematic means, no fixing. With boards from older games. If you wanted to know what a resistor value is, you looked at the bands on the resistor. Want to know what diode is, it's printed on the diode. Same for caps, same for transistors. All nice and labeled for you if you didn't have a schematic. (but schematics were always available in some form).
Now with surface mounted components. They really don't say shit on them. They all look the same, and you have these tiny mini little bricks. Every component looks the same. Very difficult to tell one thing from another. Add that with no schematics, and you now have an unserviceable part. Not only that, but there are so many revisions of different node boards, that seem to be game specific. If you got one that shows up on your work bench, you have no idea what the hell you are even looking at. For anyone that doesn't have ADD, and keeps there games more than 6 months, and works on their own games. This is VERY alarming. Put aside the fact that the boards are super tightly packed, making repairs (if you even could) very difficult.
The ONLY way Spike games will not be disposable in years to come is if....
They can make universal Node boards that work on all games (new and old)
They release schematics for those universal node boards, and schematics for all the different revisions of current and past node boards.
If these 2 factors do not happen. Spike will be a disposable technology.