Wow! I’ve had some really roached boards fire up for me as well. Salvaged some that had been rotting in a unheated, partially flooded basement. They were literally submerged under 7 inches of water seasonally, as the cabinet had disintegrated into a pile of mush. Gathered them all up, threw them in my game at home to see what would happen... Damn if I haven’t been playing my machine with those rusty, junk boards for over 2 years! Crazy how this stuff used to be built to last.

I am always surprised when I go through the hoops of repairing corrosion damage on the old Bally CPU boards and they fire right up.

I have a -17 I need to get back to poking with a stick, just an utter wreck.

Same here. Back in my early days of repair, I spent a lot of time replacing IC sockets on a Williams System 3 board and a System 6 board.

I was sloppy back then, and didn’t do as good a job as I could do today, but I’ll be damned. Those suckers booted right on up without a problem, and have been running flawlessly since then.

I’d like to think that electrical tolerances weren’t nearly as tight then as they are now, and the reason these old boards are still working is because things are “good enough” even if they’re really not.

I was on a service call for a pinbot a few years back. The board was called in alkaline everywhere. Was surprised it still worked 100%