Modern boards WAY more reliable. There is huge value in that alone.
Nvram.weebly.com
Every time.

While I acknowledge increased performance and reliability with a new board, I prefer to keep and maintain the original. Of course this kind of maintenance is not for everyone.

There are situations where an original board is toast and finding another is unlikely, so I have no problem with an aftermarket board in that case.

I also prefer the look of original incandescent bulbs, BTW.

If the OG can be repaired, I prefer that. If not, all the aftermarket boards are pretty solid with a few exceptions.

The gulf pinball Dr who opto boards for the time expander
Some of the rottendog boards can be problematic

Eh. Originals all the way...except rectifier boards in classic Bally and Stern games.

I'm all for it so long as they work at least as well as the original board. Sometimes they have bonuses like nvram and other things.

In this order.

Originals if possible.
Dumbass if not.
Other Quality replacements third
Rottendog if absolutely desperate with no possibility of alternatives.

Ever owned a Gottlieb System 1 game? The spider chips on the CPU board haven't been made in decades. Good luck finding those if your CPU goes down. Sometimes you don't have a choice.

Poor design is also a consideration. Most all manufacturers had issues with power supply and rectifier board design. New aftermarket boards are designed much better and are generally relatively cheap, compared to other boards. All still working original Gottlieb System 1 power supply boards should be removed immediately and dumped into the ocean. Horrible, horrible boards.

Also, you be you, but remember that your guests don't care what boards your games have. Just that they're working and they're having fun.

I prefer original boards for most situations.

They are well documented, schematics are readily available, and most aren't too complicated to repair. Aftermarket boards are hit or miss for those things.

Some exceptions where I will often use aftermarket boards:

Gottlieb system 1 boards, Bally/stern rectifier boards, system 3-6 add-on fused bridge board & special solenoid fuse board, TZ clock board, various magnet boards...plus various other aux boards that were poorly designed and problematic.

For classic Bally/stern, if I have to go with aftermarket, I'll go with barakandl's boards from nvram.weebly.com. They're designed well, have eyelets for through hole parts for future repairs, and you can add modified game code, unlike with the altek boards.

For WPC MPUs that are too damaged, I have no problem with aftermarket--they're pretty inexpensive. Other than battery damage, there's only ever really a couple of common trouble areas with those MPUs.

For most systems that are known for leaking batteries, clean original boards have become difficult to find.

I generally try to have a stock of repairable boards on-hand in case I find a project game that is either missing boards or has boards that are too badly damaged (by batteries or burn marks).

I avoid rottendog aftermarket boards if at all possible.

I have installed rottendog boards in over 30 machines they seem as reliable as the originals. However we have run into an issue where they use the minimum transistor and have replaced a couple for flippers.

It's goofy stuff like that why I prefer to avoid rottendog.

Don't forget Data East power supply boards with their burnt input/ GI connectors, fuse clips that explode if you look at them too long, and electrolytic caps drier than Death Valley. Sure, it can all be fixed, but if a better designed new board is ~$120, the choice is easy. Not worth my time to repair.

If a person is trying to sell it as "collector quality" you'd want/expect original boards but I do think there are also times a person should be happy to see a non OEM board present such as the WPC fliptronics board. They literally cook/burn up.
Honorable aftermarket boards that make things better:
Pinsound
Color DMD
GILED and OCDLED boards - relieves power strain on connectors.

Most of the early Bally Solid State games I do I install Alltek boards and or NVRAM.weebly.
Often the CPUs on those and the solenoid drivers are unserviceable due to corrosion and according to some repair experts difficult to repair because the traces become resistant to soldering.

Um ok. Did you delete the second half of my quote intentionally, or did you just hit reply without reading it all?

--------------

True. You be you, and worry about your guests. I'm not running an arcade.

Good thread, I prefer the originals and have them in my 4 classic SS games beacuse in general they are well understood and easier to fix than aftermarket. I do have Weebly backups to troubleshoot or for shows which I have not had to use much. I like Weebly because you can use original parts to fix if something breaks. I have had very frustrating experiences helping friends with RD and Altec where you have to reverse engineer what the components are because they are different.

If they work the after market are fine but I think are harder to fix if they dont.

I like weebly for ballys. If the original has alkaline and resets.when tapped I replace it.

On the wpc stuff and system 11 I prefer the originals if they can be repaired. I don't like the rottendog for this application.

Gottliebs system 1 I use the Niwumpf . Trouble free.

My clients want games that work and are reliable. I can see if hobbyists have several games they may want to save $ by repairing originals.

I always rather have factory boards, mismatch numbers, even if they lived a few years at cape Canaveral as tile one a launchpad. The documents are out there for repair. I will accept new boards if rock solid and full documents with it. Generally a factory power supply that has been rebuild right/mods shouldn't have issues. The factory one run hard for 20 to 40+years proving it worked.

I know this will ruffle some but these switch mode supply boards in the long haul will not outlast the old one. Their only hope long term the game has had full led conversion. I'm not going down the led road here there are other threads on this.

I look at the aftermarket boards as a positive on older games like classic bally/stern. Sometimes repairing the old boards can be a headache between acid damage, burnt out chips and janky 40yr old components. A weebly mpu and rectifier goes a long way towards bullet proofing a game.

The original board if possible but I have no issues at all installing a new board. To the awesome pinball brains out there producing new boards at a reasonable price, I thank you.

Originals when possible.

Originals

classic Bally/Sterns, a new MPU really seems like a no-brainer. They are incredibly cheap for what you get, and, they include a free play option.

The lamp/solenoid boards are also a great value and good boards, but usually not necessary unless the ones you already have are totally trashed.

Originals except early SS. Then the repos are far better.

People are trying to make 'it comes with all the original boards' a selling point.

Thus far, I haven't seen any interest among buyers to pay a premium for a pinball with all the same serial number stickers on the boards.

It's FAR more about (first and foremost) availability. They want the machine they want, and as long as it's a Stranger Things Premium with the UV kit installed, they aren't asking to see if the serial numbers match on the node boards.

Or they want a Kiss Bally pinball.

There was another thread about this and somebody said something that I agree with. If it's an 80's Bally/Williams/Stern, I value the machine HIGHER the fewer original boards it has in it!

I've had people mention that the Funhouse pinball they are selling has 'all original boards'. This is absolutely not a selling point when you are selling to me for machines this age. I don't care if it's got replacement parts, I care if it's working all the way and the condition is good.

So.

Older? I want FEWER original boards.

Mid-old (90's pins)? I don't care, nor have I seen anyone interested in paying a premium for all original identical serial number boards.

New pins? Nobody has asked for this, nor have I seen anybody care.

Finally, if you have modded the pinball, I don't care how much you spent. I'm interested in a 'bare bones' pinball price. The $750 or $2000 you spent on modding means nothing to me and I'm not going to pay you for that.

And I'm probably going to pull your clown puke LED kit and all your mods off as I prep your machine for resale.

If you'd rather have a Funhouse with all Rottendog Boards than working original boards, I would have to disagree with you.

Depends on the machine and what's available. I'd definitely view a Bally/Stern with all Allteks as a better value.

Same with a Gottlieb and Pascals.

After that it gets murky.

I think making original or aftermarket boards a selling point is silly either way. Some collectors/buyers are simply going to prefer one over the other.

Personally, when I see someone advertising a game saying "all the boards have been replaced with aftermarket boards" that simply means the game is going to need some work and the seller spent way too much money on boards unnecessarily. On a few occasions, I've worked it out with the seller to take back the aftermarket boards and just give me the originals and knock a bit off the price.

$200-$400 board vs the original that can be fixed for something like $20 or less in parts? I'll take the time to fix it.

Now granted, in some situations, there's simply not going to be a way to avoid that with certain MPUs that have extensive battery damage. But often times, sellers don't even make the attempt and just automatically slap a new set of aftermarket boards in a game.

I would disagree. Properly refurbished original boards can be perfectly reliable.

Understand, and somewhat agree.

However, am I going to pay even a $200 premium on what I'm willing to pay for a good quality Funhouse because it's serial numbers are all identical on all it's circuit boards? I'm probably not even going to look at the serial numbers on all the boards.

Am I going to pay $200 less to you because I found out that you've got a Rottendog board in the game you are selling me? Probably not.

If EVERY board was a Rottendog, well, I've never run into that. Again, depending on how the negotiation goes, I have an idea what I'm willing to pay for a Funhouse working all the way in good/great condition, and I would probably buy your game 'as is' at that price... whether or not it had aftermarket boards, original boards with different serial number stickers.

I agree that rottendog can be harder to repair over the lifetime of the game, but pinballs are SCARCE in good quality. So I'm not likely to try to talk you down on the price if you have a perfectly running machine in great condition, just because somebody replaced your power driver board with a rottendog replacement.

(shrugs)

No, I wouldn't value personally the machine with lesser (rottendog) parts higher, but I personally am not thinking about that when I'm determining the price I'm going to pay. If there were two identical funhouse machines in perfect condtion and one had all rottendog parts and one had all original parts, and they were being offered to me at exactly the same price, I'd take original boards machine. But that is never what I'm looking at.

I just picked up a game with no boards whatsoever. I could've spend time scouring the web for old boards (and then probably have to fix things anyway) or I could spend the money on an Alltek and use my time to repin the stinking connectors. That's what I did and no problems so far.
(If the guy that only upvotes people that say original boards only doesn't give me an upvote, so be it.)

Do you have any freaking idea how many fewer working vintage pinball machines and how much more expensive they would be it there were no aftermarket boards? Aside from Stern keeping the pinball line going in the early 2000s its the best thing thats happened to the hobby. Thank you Rottendog, Altek, Weebly and others. Thank you Marcos and Pinball life for keeping the spare parts coming. Thank you Color DMD for making plasma burnout of pinball a worry of the past.

Aftermarket boards are why many of us can afford the hobby today.

(nods)

I think we DO agree... that there isn't anything wrong with 90's pinball boards. Very repairable.

80's pinball boards?

Well, unless this is a very unusual situation, I'm looking at a lot of connector work before the machine is ready for me to sell, because it is VERY unlikely that all the original boards have had their connectors replaced. So I'm agreeing with you! If the original boards in a 80's pinball have been properly refurbished (many connectors replaced), I'd value that as high as new Rectifier board, Alltek CPU, Solenoid Board, and Lamp Board.

I'm never offered an 80's pinball with properly refurbished old boards, while I'm occasionally offered 80's pinballs with Alltek replacement boards, or a replacement rectifier board.

While on a 90's machine, I'm less likely to care, on an 80's machine I'm thinking about the extra hours of labor involved in properly refurbishing those boards.

And I might offer a bit less money for a working 80's machine with all original connectors on all boards.

Other technicians may find this work trivial, but I find it to be quite a bit of work nowadays to get 80's machines reliable enough to offer a one-year bumper to bumper warranty. Some technicians are just flat out better at this level of machine than I am.

(shrugs)

Thus if all those unreplaced connectors aren't any problem for you, feel free to buy an 80's machine at a higher price than I'm probably going to be interested in paying, but I'm definitely not considering original boards a 'I'll pay a premium for that!' on 80's machines.

I wish I could upvote this higher.

With my HUO Black Knight, the boards are all super clean and have never been touched (except I finally recapped the power supply and sound boards), so I'd always prefer to stick with the originals. On the other hand my EBD had a rough life (I put in an NOS pf though) and the second hand mpu was getting old and flakey so I went with an aftermarket for reliability. Same with my Lightning. I kept the original mpus but I doubt I'll ever work up the initiative to do an overhaul on them when the replacements are relatively cheap.

I appreciate a newer board, especially over some acid damaged repaired board, I'll go replacment everytime. Same goes the other way around, if I can't find a new board I really appreciate the magic the guys that repair boards can do. If your price pumping a pin for orginal matching boards or any such nonsense your the last person I want to buy from.

I don't care if the boards are original or after market. As long as my game is working 100% you could use rubber bands for the slings and tooth picks for posts. If my game works 100% with no error codes, I'm a happy camper.

All my games have original boards except my Indiana Jones Williams. Initially I replaced the sound board with a Pinsound board and Endprodukts mix which was an incredible upgrade. Then, when my power driver board started getting flakey, I replaced it and all the other boards with Rottendog's. It was like a new game. It's hard to describe but the game had new energy with the new boards. I kept all the original boards and they're all packed up for the next owner, WHEN I'M DEAD AND 6 FEET UNDER!

QSS

Original boards in almost all cases. Exceptions for some early power supply or rectifier boards (such as Gottlieb Sys1 or Bally/Stern rectifier boards) because newer technology allows the aftermarket boards to run more efficiently (lower power draw and therefore cooler (as in lower temperature)).
There was a time about 20 years ago when it was difficult to find original MPU or driver boards for Gottlieb, Bally, Stern. But now that so many originals are being replaced by aftermarket, originals are much easier to find.
Used to be that about 80% of the Gottlieb Sys1 MPU boards on the market were unrepairable due to blown spider chips. But now I'd say that number is only about 20%. People are pulling good working boards or boards with minor issues and replacing them with aftermarket.
Used to be that a large percentage of the Bally MPU boards on the market were badly 'acid' damaged. There's still a lot of those for sale, but there is now a decent percentage of repairable boards for sale.
I appreciate the new features of the aftermarket boards.
I appreciate that the availability of aftermarket has driven down the prices of original boards.
I appreciate that if I buy a machine that has an aftermarket MPU or driver board, I can sell the aftermarket board on ebay and use the proceeds to buy 3 or 4 functional or easily repairable original boards.

I have a mix of original and aftermarket in my early SS Bally machines. It's nice to have a universal MPU to swap around quickly and diagnose issues or get a newly acquired machine up and going. I only replace with aftermarket boards after the stock boards have issues. LED displays are okay so long as they have real commas, but I prefer the look of the stock high voltage displays. Displays are about the only thing I will repair. Mr Mrs Pacman looks tons better with an LED Pacmaze. And, of course, all my machines have the aftermarket geeteoh sound boards .

I like original boards on Classic Bally, Stern & Williams SS games including rebuilding the original rectifier boards. I can understand how most people replace of the original rectifier boards as they generally look pretty bad from hacks, but I find once the rectifiers are rebuilt, they are perfectly fine for years if not decades in a home use situation.

Also I have a complete set of spare boards to swap in for troubleshooting & when a board is out being repaired. I felt I spent so many years learning about these boards to be able to repair, as well as I like to keep everything original where possible, I'm sticking with them. Any acid damaged or rough boards have been replaced with nice originals over the years.

For early Ballys I like the DASH MPUs a copy of the originals that look and perform like the original, I have them in 4 of my restored Ballys and have been problem free for years now. I always repair/recap and use the originals for all system11 and WPC boards when possible.

I like how those (two bits) DASH-35 MPU boards are just like the originals, my Flash Gordon came with one of those, strangely it did not run right with it though.

As someone who has repaired close to 30,000 boards for this industry I can tell you that collectors overwhelmingly prefer original boards with matching serial numbers and they want their boards back, -- not exchanges. While there are some great 3rd party board manufacturers out there, there are also those who have introduced more problems into games with their products, I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader (which will involve Google) to determine.

Williams early solid state boards were so well made that they are pretty much bullet proof in a home environment when repaired and refurbished. There are age-related issues with the failure of solder to bond to the copper with early Bally and Stern boards if they're not already eaten up with corrosion and therefore an Alltek board or two would be the way to go. The same with Gottlieb System 1 due to obsolete chips. The Pascal Yanin boards are another great product and there are other great manufacturers out there supporting old games through obsolescence (sorry if I didn't mention you).

The said, it appears that the current generation cares little to nothing about the above and they'll quite happily throw just about any board in a game. LOL.

As for Stern SAM and Spike systems; those boards are only going to be around until Stern stops supporting them due to the use of custom microcontrollers and CPLDs.

Clive

Out with the old...in with the new.

In my Sys11 and WPC era games I highly prefer the original boards over any aftermarket one.
I want to have the games close to original-don't want to have boards with a differnet look or even SMT components in them.
I can repair the boards on my own though

I remember calling Jim out on this kind of thing and his response was going off on a rant. Bad for business.

For me, after market PC boards are a last resort. I've always been able to
repair original boards or find fixable boards others have given up on cheap.
The last pin I bought locally (Lost World), project, had a full set of
after market displays and CPU board. Works just fine. I'm glad after market
boards and displays are available, just won't use them unless there
are no other options.

Do they take away value from an otherwise original pin? Not IMO.

New boards are the way! Old original boards with jumpers and acid burns and ready to fry caps are not apeeling to me. I am a fan of nvram to replace leaking batteries. I love my Wpc89 Dumbass boards. I really appreciate my Pinsound boards and new speakers.

Pinside_forum_7459752_0 (resized).jpg

No thanks on Rottendog; the quality isn't there.

It goes both ways with saying "brand new boards!" That doesn't really add value either

I don't want to sound crass here but "ready to fry caps" isn't any specific design issue and sounds more like a general bias. Heck, I've even had a friend where a Rottendog WPC driver board caused a burning smell in one of his games.

Each to his/her own, but for me it’s 100% originals. Properly serviced, they are, at least, as reliable as modern replacements. I even run only genuine Sys 1’s in my Gottliebs.