(Topic ID: 312184)
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Quoted from CrazyLevi:There's almost zero chance the MPU isn't covered in green battery corrosion and will need to be replaced. And DE games do not hold up nearly as well as Bally/WIlliams stuff from the same era, almost everything is built with that little extra touch of shitiness.
You mean battery damaged MPU's just like every other manufacturer on the planet?
No one is exempt from this problem and yet you can be counted on to shat on Data East at every opportunity.
DSC_7359-Custom (resized).jpgpb-0323 (resized).jpgQuoted from CrazyLevi:I didn't mean to offend anybody personally with my opinion on DE games, just sharing my experiences. In my 22 years of experience and having owned/gone through dozens of DE games, I've found them to be fairly shitty. Certainly not beyond repair or refurbishment, they just didn't seem to make them as well as the Williams / Bally stuff. Everything seems to be designed and fabricated just a little bit shittier.
I certainly didn't mean to intimate that you'll only find battery corrosion on DE games. I was pointing that at this point in time, decades after they were built, you are almost certain to find it on ANY "as-is" game, even if the guy keeps a fresh coat of wax on his tractor. I started to notice this about 10 years ago...before then, I'd say more often than not the games were fine, and batteries hadn't damaged the boards. These days it's probably more like 80 percent.
If your experiences have been better than mine on DE games and you think they were built really well and age really well, I'm glad to hear it. Congrats! You've had better experiences than I.
I have owned over 20 DE pins at this point and the only "common failure" I have seen on a number of them has the been GI 9 pin connectors at the Power Supply Board and the Playfield Power Board. Age, resistance and loads take their toll.
That's it; And DE is hardly alone with this problem as I'd be happy to show you a Space Shuttle in the shop that had smoked the GI connectors in the exact same manner. And it was fixed the same way- New Molex connectors and Trifurcon terminals & Comet LEDS.
DE flipper mechs are tanks (crack a walnut with them kid!), slingshot mechs so robust the Stern is still using them to this day along with the removable popper mechs. The early DE pins actually used Williams spec boards for interchangeability. Hell Data East was ahead of Williams in fusing the bridges so the wiring doesn't catch fire! Williams did not fuse the bridges till ironically "Fire"
The vast majority of DE problems I have seen were related to utter hacks done by operators to keep the change rolling in or utter calamity caused by people "working on pins" who had no right being under the hood in the first place.
I'd say my ownership in DE is no worse or better than any other pin in my collection. The Bally's have crappy linear flipper mechs and the lamp sockets utterly suck, more often than not you are buying a dead one off CL and the MPU battery has shit the bed and wiped out a bunch of lamp drivers for good measure. Gottlieb will drive you insane with edge connectors, popper boards and particle board cabinets. Early Williams single wound solid state flippers utterly suck and have all the power of an 80's Yugo, not to mention that lovely 40 pin interconnect that has to be replaced and undersized diodes on the power board that let the magic smoke out.
Data East is the ONLY pin manufacture in the bunch who largely stayed away from particle board in the cabs, thank God.
I have all of them; Data East, Williams, Gottlieb, Stern (old and new) Bally and even a Chicago Coin for good measure. Aside from Black Hole poking me in the eye periodically because it's an evil son of a bitch, all are reliable. At Pintastic Seawitch and DE Playboy both saw over 500 plays (EACH) in 48 hours, neither one so much as got a ball stuck despite being hammered to death non-stop by the general public.
Sorry for the wall of text, going back to work on my scratch built Quicksilver now.
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Quoted from pinzrfun:Holy Christ, some of these paragraphs are like War and Peace size..
Have to admit I used proper paragraph and punctuation though. It's all good.
Quoted from PoMC:I don't even know what a Rocky & Bullwinkle is supposed to be? Lame theme for sure. Was it something popular in the 90s?
Not that I'm aware of, I think at best it was on the air here in late 70's (North East) which was clearly syndication since it went off the air in 1964!
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