POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

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Asayuki
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POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by Asayuki »

I see that the forum has become quite silent lately, of course due to the holidays and also to the hot sun making us sweat and not really willing to do anything else than relax and maybe play our games for once. So why not start some frivolous discussion to keep us busy like with crossword puzzles at the seaside?

Just as the topic says, tell us what were the hardware failures you experienced which impressed you the most.
They can be impressive due to any reason you want: were they hilarious? catastrophic? unexpected? hard to solve? etc.
It does not have to be a defect that you managed to solve, but if you did or someone else did for you then briefly tell us what was the fix.

A first one from my side:
I remember repairing a TV on which color decoding was coming and going randomly. The issue was affected by vibrations but the loose joint was nowhere to be found. It turned out that the color decoder IC had developed a loose joint inside and needed to be replaced. I have experienced loose joints inside ICs only twice in my life! :wtf:
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Re: POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by brad808 »

The first time I heard a capacitor blow up in a power supply aka the first time I thought I got shot at haha.
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Re: POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by cools »

Killing an original Windy 2 Toshiba chassis by feeding it an extremely out of spec frequency.
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Re: POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by nem »

By plugging in 100V cabs to 240V outlets I've killed:

1 Nanao MS9 chassis
1 5V & 12V PSU
2 Type X motherboard PSUs (managed to fix these)

Also, I fed 100V AC to two Sega sound amps that were expecting 12V AC.
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Re: POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by turntablism »

Plugged the jamma connector upside down :oops:
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Re: POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by nismopunch »

brad808 wrote:The first time I heard a capacitor blow up in a power supply aka the first time I thought I got shot at haha.
THIS! Not arcade related but happened while I was gaming on PC, 2am, and slightly drunk. Will never forget the panic until I realized what happened lol.
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Re: POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by Rossyra »

Plugged an out of spec arcade chassis into a TV tube, then connected it directly to the mains without an isolation transformer, tripped my entire house electrics after arcing like a van de graf generator.
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Re: POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by crunchywasp »

Those Robocop 2 prototypes :whoa:
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Re: POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by trev1976 »

Plugging my Japanese saturn into the 240v mains.. thought it was on fire with the amount of smoke that came out of it. Luckily I fixed it with a spare DC PSU I had lying around.
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Re: POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by Asayuki »

crunchywasp wrote:Those Robocop 2 prototypes :whoa:
What happened to them, if I may ask?
My 15kHz cabinet Peplos will never power up, with any item, and I am quite proud of that.
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Re: POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by crunchywasp »

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Re: POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by nem »

nem wrote:By plugging in 100V cabs to 240V outlets I've killed:

1 Nanao MS9 chassis
1 5V & 12V PSU
2 Type X motherboard PSUs (managed to fix these)

Also, I fed 100V AC to two Sega sound amps that were expecting 12V AC.
Oh, and I necked a Hantarex Polo by pushing a cabinet down the stairs.

I think that's all!
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Re: POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by fakeXsound »

Spliced the wrong cable on the power supply and fried my cheapo Jojo Special supergun, MVS motherboard, and somehow, my composite video input on my CRT :lolno:
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Re: POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by PappaLazarou »

I plugged 110Vac into the degauss switch input on a Nanao chassis so basically 110Vac into the secondary side! Vaporized the some of the surface mount components around the degauss relay circuit :lol:
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Re: POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by NoAffinity »

Failed flyback on a WG K7000 chassis, in my big blue. They were prone to failing about once year, which would cause them to arc to the metal frame of the chassis. The last failure went undetected for at least 20 minutes and did a real number on that chassis. Even though it was repaired and returned to a state of "normal operation", it was never quite the same. I've recently replaced with an exact replacement that a fellow collector put up locally.
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Re: POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by dj_johnnyg »

Built a supergun into an ATX PSU a loooong time ago.
Extra button connection not working properly, so with power attached wiggled the connector and threw 240v AC down the JAMMA ground.
Large flash, house plunged into darkness, changed pants, bought a cab shortly afterwards.
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Re: POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by dj_johnnyg »

Moving out of my mum's house, cleared the loft and as I was coming down the lights went out. My mum had an old fuse board that had fuse wire & was always doing this.
Found fuse, replaced wire, then put fuse back in while power still on (anyone spot a theme here).
Large flash, change pants, call sparky.
Turns out, one of the boards in the loft had been installed over a power cable and as I was going back down I'd put enough pressure on it to cause a short between live and earth. Sparky suggested I change fuse with the power off next time.
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Re: POLL: What are the hardware failures you will remember for your whole life?

Post by thegreathopper »

I once blew up Chippenham sewage treatment woks, one of my jobs was fitting standby generators for Wessex water board, This was generally done about 5 in the morning when no one was up and flushing things down the drain, due to being done early in the morning none of these generators were tested until an actual power failure happened.

there was one about 6 months later,, I received a phone call from my boss going crazy and saying the town was about to flood, light fittings had exploded, lots of electronics had blown up etc etc.

I had only gone and wired the change over contractor black, red, yellow blue instead of red, blue, yellow and black... what this did was send 415 volts to lots of 240 volt devices !!! ... still he was ok about it, we all make mistakes... 8-)

after doing that killing a couple of CPS3 carts seemed not so bad, if a little frustrating :wtf:
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