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Andy Palmer explains the work involved in keeping classic machines alive

Was the maintenance of the arcade machines something you were knowledgeable of and prepared for before opening arcade club?

It’s something I’ve tinkered about with over many, many years. There’s people out there that are far more knowledgeable than myself. We have a fantastic TV engineer, we have a great engineer with Mark as well, and we’re taking on some more engineers soon. But the maintenance side of it I wasn’t quite ready for, because there is a lot more maintenance than anyone would think on these machines. A lot of the time you’ll pick up one of these machines and it’s 20-30 years old, and either it’s not been switched on for 20-30 years or it’s been switched on infrequently. Once you ask them to do a duty cycle of 14 hours, that’s the real test for the machines, especially the monitors, and they will fall down. Whenever we buy a machine off a collector, very rarely they’ll last three or four hours without something going wrong because they’re not used to anything like that, they’re used to doing 20 minutes in someone’s house. So we do a lot to keep them going.

What sort of things would those be?

We recap – we rebuild absolutely everything, at great cost sometimes because we will have to replace parts which are very difficult to source, or we’ll have to salvage parts off a machine we bought that’s maybe not in the best aesthetic condition. We imported a Lunar Lander, for instance, from America, which had shocking water damage just so we could repair our own Lunar Lander and get it up to spec. We got a spare board out of it and a spare monitor, but unfortunately the actual wooden shell was a write-off – you would touch it and it crumbled.

So that’s something you have to do sometimes, you have to sacrifice a machine to save another machine.

is there anything you’ve had to take off the floor because it couldn’t be repaired?

Mostly modern stuff is the major problem, because it’s a lot of surface-mounted components. A lot of the older stuff’s quite easy to repair, like Pac-man, you can repair that forever believe it or not, because the components are large throughhole components. If you looked at the circuit board, you’d recognise resistors, capacitors, chips etc as a classic design for a circuit board. But if you look at a modern one, the components are so small that it’s very hard to tell capacitors from resistors, and the board’s lacquered over as well.

You’ve got two full-time technicians. how did you find them?

Julian, our CRT tech, actually came into the shop when we still had a few of the computer shops left, and came in for a networking job. On his CV it said he used to work at a TV repair shop, so I interviewed him at the arcade and he repaired three monitors that me and Mark had been Googling and going through Randy Frum’s flowcharts trying to fix. But because he knows the theory of monitors and it’s in his blood, if you like, he was able to suss out exactly what was going on without using those flowcharts.

So I said, ‘Would you like the job? It’s not in the computer shop, it’s in the arcade,’ and he was very grateful that his knowledge that he thought potentially was lost forever – he thought nobody would ever want to repair a CRT again – is being used. He’s got good, solid electrical engineering skills, too, so he can suss out most circuits, power supplies, etc and he’s just started to do PCB repairs too, so he’s starting to move into that side of things which is fantastic.

Mark is actually Gauntlet world champion, he’s been with us a bit longer than Julian, and basically he’s a hobbyist-turned-tech [engineer] but he’s very, very good. Now he can repair monitors, he services a lot of the machines, he’s taken on board repair as well. And they’re into it, they love what they do, which is what you’d ask of any employee and it’s what everybody wants in life, they want to do something positive and they want to love doing it.