Will 80's arcade pcb's be obsolete soon / mame more popular ?

[rlemmon]

Hi guys. So I'm Thinking about how the PCBs from 80's games are now in there 20's with some being up to 28 years old. I wander how long we have until it gets to the point that they will no longer be repairable. What will this mean for arcade game collectors ?

will everyone be running original cabs with a pc and mame to play there game. Or maybe some will forget about dedicated cabs and go mame or multi cabs. What are your thoughts on this ?

[diskoboy]

They'd better not.





And I've always said, if you convert ANY pre-1984 game to a MAME machine, you should be shot on general principle.

[Kevin H]

I own about 13 arcade games and none are mame. i think people will always want the older ones for collectors stand point at least.

[DefaultGen]

.....

[NE146]

Well the physical hardware aspect is what makes these things collectible... something Mame will never be able to recreate unless you actually take those particular cabinets and install a pc & monitor in them.

I mean come on.. despite the "primitive" game, you'll never see a generic Mame cab recreate this very effectively for the most part unless you go out and specifically recreate the cardboard cutouts, overlays, mirrors, etc.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v48/b2stoys/top_bowler.jpg

[InsaneDavid]

Mame will never be able to recreate unless you actually take those particular cabinets and install a pc & monitor in them.

That's what I did with my internally trashed Pole Position (speaking of a game with boardsets that were a pain in the ass to keep running, even back in the early 1980's), it's all stock on the outside and all MAME on the inside.

[Flack]

Hi guys. So I'm Thinking about how the PCBs from 80's games are now in there 20's with some being up to 28 years old. I wander how long we have until it gets to the point that they will no longer be repairable. What will this mean for arcade game collectors ?

I'm not sure what you mean by "unrepairable," and how that relates to age. There are people out there who still work on 100 year old radios. As PCBs age, some of them need repairs. About the most common age-related repair I hear about are suicide batteries, batteries that power chips full of code. When the batteries die, the code disappears and the boards no longer work. Even these can be repaired, by burning new replacement chips -- or, in the case that the chips were holding encryption keys, replacing the encrypted chips with unencrypted ones.

As for MAME vs. the real deals, I suspect we will see more MAME cabs in the future as we begin to see arcade collectors who never played the real games on real machines. The reason I collect machines is because I remember them from my youth. If I didn't have any emotional attachment to them, it actually makes a lot more sense to just build a MAME cabinet or two and have every game on them instead of collecting large, expensive, repair-needy machines.

[PingvinBlueJeans]

About the most common age-related repair I hear about are suicide batteries, batteries that power chips full of code. When the batteries die, the code disappears and the boards no longer work.
Yup...like every Shinobi machine you come across these days that has no sound. :-/

[madman77]

MAME will be fine for those who just want to play a bunch of games and don't really care about collecting. I'm considering building a little MAME PC to put in my candy cab, as I live in a 1 bedroom condo and can't really put 15 vintage cabs in there. But, in my opinion, original cabs will always have a place. The original artwork is all part of the experience of playing a classic game.