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>Buy the machine for $300, and pay $100 to have the board repaired.
>If the cab is good shape, then that sounds like a fair price to
>me. I have an Asteroids in the Dallas area that I'd sell for $450;
>working all the way.
A working machine all the way for $450 is a better deal than a
non-working one for $300. Based on my experience with my Tempest &
Space Invaders projects, that $300 Asteroids could easily end up being
$600 & a lot of time and trips.
If you look through the newsgroups over the past year, you'll see a
bunch of non-working Asteroids far cheaper than $300 which is why i'm
waiting. But we'll see what I find. If I don't find a better deal
over the next few months, I might buy it since it is so close.
Here's a repost of a message I posted in the past explaining why I
feel that way. I updated it a bit.
I guess the bottom line is if you can do all repairs yourself, "and"
happen to have a bunch of spare parts laying around, maybe repairing
is more economical. For me, it hasn't been.
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$300 for a non-working machine seems like a questionable deal unless I
know exactly what is wrong. Could turn out both the gameboard & the
monitor need to be replaced. A couple years ago I passed up a working
one for $400 in my area.
I bought a Tempest for $125 in NH a few years ago. Then I spent $300
to buy a monitor & gameboard. Turned out neither worked, but I was
told they were working when last used. To repair them, I made a
200 mile round trip for a friend that could test it with a
working cab. He mentioned to change a bad ram chip, degaused the
monitor & resoldered everything on the board.
So I had another friend replace the ram chip for me since I wasn't
knowledgable enough "at the time". A display problem was still
present, but it worked better. I waited for him to find his scope &
make a trip to my house. He insisted not using a scope for a vector
game could damage the monitor. He looked at the schematic and
determined an amplifier chip was bad & we drove to Radio Shack &
replaced the chip. Then the game still had visual problems, but he
said he thought it wasn't the board. I ordered a $50 (with shipping)
get well monitor kit, and had yet another friend spend a couple hours
helping me install it. Thankfully the game worked fine after that.
But look at what the machine really cost me, and all I had to go
through! $125 for the cab+ trip 230 mile round trip, $300 for parts &
time to locate and order them, another 200 mile round trip for
testing, $50 to order a get well kit, some misc expenses, several
hours of my time & my friends time. And I could have spent even more
time & money if boards in the monitor needed to replaced or something
like that. Others may have paid even more for those parts. I had to
spend a lot of time to locate those deals.
At $125 for the complete cab minus gameboard & monitor it seemed like
a good deal on the surface, but once you figure out all the expenses &
time you might go through to get it going, it's really not the bargin
it appeared unless you happen to have a lot of parts laying around and
can do all the repairs yourself. The project took about 1 year & a
half to all come together also.
It would have made a lot more sense to spend $500 to buy a working
one. At least for me. Of course I didn't know i'd go through all
that at the time, andI do have a nice Tempest now. So the moral of
the story is non-working games better be cheap or at least reasonable.
It's hard to determine exactly what is wrong. So far i've followed
the same pattern on my Space Invaders I paid $125 for. I was told the
flyback was bad. I replaced the monitor for $75, and it still doesn't
work. After a friend installed the new monitor, it came out with
garbage on the screen. Now it doesn't even power up at all.
You can't take anyone's word for it as to what's wrong, and probably
in most cases they really don't know.
I did learn a bit about repairing machines, but my background is
computers rather than electronics.
My 2 cents.
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