Poor reliability of spike games could have a detrimental effect to value of games. If they turn out to have some chronic flaw that shows up in all the games 5 years now (ie wpc resets, burned GI, etc), but the flaw is on a board not manufactured anymore and not easily serviced could result and games turning into giant paperweights starting a free fall of game prices. No one pay 8k for something that might fail and be unfixable.

My early feeling about the spike system is not good... I hope I am wrong and it is a solid platform.

Which is fine, just not what pin heads are used to.

Say in 5 years from now, Stern comes out with a new system called SPUNK instead of SPIKE. How long does Stern keep making SPIKE node boards. How long did they sell WhiteStar boards?

People can make a new replacement classic Bally MPU because of the schematics and servicing guides Bally provided. If no detailed info on Spike is available, the future repairability of the games 5-15 years from now is questionable.

It sounds like Stern has already advance the board design. Does anyone know is "Spike 2" boards are backwards compatible?

Case in point with "micro electronics". I worked with Ricoh and Canon copy machine for a while. They are big beefy devices with lots of room. They had the most rock solid well designed boards in them, pretty much with lots of through hole design. Nothing was crammed. The boards where not intended to be field serviced, BUT where not so damn cramp small for no reason. A field service guy would pull a board and send it back to be serviced and then put back in the field (re serviced parts had a special part number)

RICOH even used the FM1608 dip28 part up until RAMTRON discontinued it (the fm1608 chips i sold was pulled from ricoh copy machines).

Example of a modern cannon circuit board. (robbed the heat sinks off of them).

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