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That Tuesday I had to fix a 1980s arcade cabinet with a truly bizarre short
The owner brought in a Ms. Pac-Man machine from his garage, and the monitor kept cutting out after exactly 17 minutes of play. I spent six hours tracing it to a tiny, corroded capacitor leg that was intermittently touching the metal frame only when the cabinet warmed up. Have you ever had a fault that was this weirdly specific with its timing?
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michaelw261mo ago
That "exactly 17 minutes" thing is wild. It makes you wonder how many old machines have faults tied to weird thermal expansion cycles. Like a solder joint that only cracks open at a precise temperature, or a chip that fails once a specific trace gets hot enough to change its resistance. Those timed failures are the absolute worst to track down.
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dixon.felix1mo ago
Tell me about it, spent a whole weekend chasing a ghost that only showed up after two hours of runtime.
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