Why did it take 30+ years to get batteries off boards?

By The_Director

7 years ago

Topic Heartbeat

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70 posts
32 Pinsiders participating
Latest reply 3 months ago by HoneyBadger
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#24 7 years ago

JDB

Joe_Blasi

Pinside member

Des Plaines, IL

11y 39,900 2,401

OP
Quoted from The_Director:
Working on a really clean Bally board for a client today and just thinking about how much of a shame it was that, with all of the technical prowess and creativity of the design engineers of these games, why in the world did it take over 30 years to get batteries off the damn boards?
Most old Bally MPUs I'm fighting some form of corrosion and diagnostic has to go completely out of the realm of typical failure of the hardware because of corrosion. This one was so easy to diagnose and repair being a clean board. Seems they could have easily implemented an alternative to alkaline or ni-cad batteries on the board well before they did. Gottlieb Sys 3 and Capcom were smart enough to use lithium coin style, but seems it would have caught on a long time before. Stern's even had AAs on the board until just a few years ago.

PC's moved to them years ago. older systems used the leaking ones.

#26 7 years ago

JDB

Joe_Blasi

Pinside member

Des Plaines, IL

11y 39,900 2,401

Quoted from ForceFlow:
That's a bit of a false equivalency arguement.
The point was that batteries leak, they are well known to leak, and have destroyed countless boards by leaking.
There are inexpensive alternatives (NVRAM), which don't leak and will never leak, and will likely last for the lifetime of the pin. You will never have to worry about batteries ever again.
Again, why risk a leaking battery? It doesn't make sense to me to install a known flawed product that is well documented for causing damage, instead of using something you only have to install once and never have to worry about again.

But does that run the clock when the game is off?

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