Since these games were grabbed by collectors I'd expect most of them to be fixed up like new. No need to go to all of this trouble if you are just making a MAME cabinet.
But yeah, the documentation you mention will help.
I used to have a small collection until I moved recently and sold most of them. The ones in my basement never degraded much, but suffered some common issues which are reasonably fixable. One sat with a monitor problem in my garage for 17 years. I'm in the US midwest, so that meant cold winters to thermal shock things when I'd open the garage door and such, but no direct exposure to the elements. When it came time to move, I fired up that game and it worked exactly as good or bad as the day I set it aside in the garage. My vector games were sold to a friend at lowish prices because I wanted them to go to a good home and they needed a little work - but they are physically in almost the same condition as when I got them 25 years ago. A box of boards I gave to the guy you fixed my monitor just because I had no use for them and again wanted them to go to a good home. My guess is most of those will work just fine. The one from the garage is the one I kept and it's beautiful in my new basement.
It's an interesting hobby. One I mostly gave up, but I had to hang on to one cabinet and a few boards that were most important to me.
Given the timeframe the article quoted for the most recent cabinet (1980-1981), they all predate the capacitor plague [1] by nearly two decades. It is possible that the capacitors in the PSU's of these games might still be close enough to spec. to not need any replacement. But given the folks who picked them up, they are likely to test everything extensively and then decide what to replace based on that testing.
Nice to know a true root cause and better understand all those boards I trashed long ago.
Pretty exhaustive wiki on the topic, thanks for that.
The best part of getting the game is that it came with full (hand drawn!) schematics!
This video was recorded around the time the stash was first identified and you can see the cosmetic state of a lot of the machines isn't bad!
I'm assuming the owners had investors or loans or some other financial reasons that would prevent them from spending a lot of money and then simply parking it forever.
And wouldn't property taxes or city nuisance abatement fines nibble away at the property over the years? It can't be completely free of carrying costs, right?
Even if there is no ongoing cost for the ship, wouldn't the owners rather have sold the furnishings rather than leave them to rot?
I did some research and found that there was a huge court case that didn't go in the owner's favor. So perhaps the owner is too emotionally invested to cut their losses?
Or perhaps they are tremendously wealthy and using the loss to write off other business gains? Or maybe it changed hands through inheritance, so the owner doesn't care about recouping the initial investment? Or maybe I'm overestimating the remaining value, and the thing is already a total loss?
This is all speculation. But it would be very interesting to learn how such a large venture was left to rot...
For example via my employer I technically own a large multi-engine aircraft that is worth some $70 million dollars but requires significant repairs, engineering and refurbishment to restore to airworthy status, to say nothing of the cost of logistics to actually get the thing to a repair and overhaul facility. Even the cost to move it to a disposal facility (shredder) is prohibitive and requires significant logistics.
So it languishes in an aircraft grave yard providing a valuable service as a bird habitat.
Organizations with more lucrative things to spend their man hours on tend to let abandoned projects just sit rather then liquidate them because the ROI of whatever they usually do is better than the ROI of liquidating a failed project. Property tax and other upkeep costs often wind up buried somewhere in a long list of similar costs from all the other real-estate the organization owns or leases or has to otherwise pay for. Things tend to finally get liquidated when a property needs to be sold or turned over like happened here.
Maybe if you sit on it long enough the statute of limitations can expire and you can do something more interesting than incur the costs of transporting a massive thing only to have it cut up for scrap, especially if you own land where it can just sit idle in the mean time.
Literally half the page is covered by a massive photo.
I expected scrolling further down the article would rid me of it, but it doesn't - furthermore, it's aligned to the right instead of the left, which breaks my brain while I'm trying to read it.
I can't imagine any benefit to this layout. Shrinking the screen causes the article to display properly, I learned, and I couldn't find a Reader mode...
Great article - extremely poor formatting in Desktop mode.
Once readability is founded, their argument is "who gives a rats arse about the rest of the page?" It's not the BEST design philosophy, but it's far from the worst one.
With line lengths that are too long, the user may have a hard time tracking back to the next line. Line lengths too narrow, the user's pacing and rhythm is thrown off. https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
As for the ship, apparently in 2019 there were plans to host a zombie-themed event on it, but the plans are now delayed indefinitely: https://www.dailypost.co.uk/whats-on/whats-on-news/zombie-ev...
They were in a variety of conditions, some ended up being rescued for parts whereas others were up and running not long after.
Have a look on the forum: it'll be in the Operator Raids section and I don't recall whether you need to have registered to get access to that part.
Alaska, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, North Dakota, Utah, and Wisconsin.
If she met him in the States, it is entirely reasonable for him to first ask her what state she's from.
