It's ironically coincidental this thread was revived before I was able to get to it this month, as I guess I forgot to change the batteries in my pins since I last posted in this thread... guess what happened?
Fuck you Duracell, part 763
Sooooo.... Yeah, in the 10 games or so that I still had double A batteries, I hadn't changed them in several years ...or apparently 5 years. Oops. I know, my fault... I got busy, I forgot. Anyway, 7 of those games were Data East/ Sega/ Stern and they were fine... But two of them were 80s Bally's and of course the middle battery leaked In both of those. Fortunately one of those (that had the worst corrosion) was in a remote battery pack so I just switched the pack out, unfortunately one of them corrosion extended onto the circuit board a little bit, so I had to clean it up with vinegar and rinse it, good news is looks like it's saved and working fine... so I got lucky. All of these batteries were either Ray o vac (which I now prefer and most were fine) and a few Energizers (the ones that leaked in the Bally games). I've recently just been informed that the 80s Ballys originally came with rechargeable batteries and had a recharging circuit, so when putting traditional batteries in there that's why the middle one was corroding the most and leaking first all the time... good to know but I'm done with batteries fortunately...!
Episode IV: A New Hope
So, enough is enough. Fortunately modern technology has caught up with us, and since most of these 10 games I still have that used traditional batteries were Data East, I was able to simply replace the 1 ram chip in each game with the nvram battery replacement chips from Pinitech.com ... No more batteries, ever!
These chips are available for most games, fortunately since most of mine were Data East the RAM chips were already socketed, so I simply had to pop out one chip and put in the new nvram chip... And done, nice and easy. For games that don't have socketed ram chips (i.e. WPC), if you need to do that you have to cut the socket out and solder a socket onto the board and then install a chip... So that gets more involved and not as quick and easy. Fortunately I didn't have to deal with this. I did also get lucky and replaced the ram in Orbitor one since it was also socketed, an early Stern game. Apparently these will work for some video games that require batteries also.
When buying only single chips they're like $17 each plus shipping, but when buying 4 or more it just makes it like $12 a chip, so it's totally worth it. Check out the site and it has a list of all the different games and compatibility, as well as the ram location, as well as install difficulty for each pinball company. It was so easy even a tech dummy like me could do it. Highly recommended, no more batteries! Pinitech.com
In summary... Fuck you Duracell! And fuck you Ravens also!
