Retro Games Party

16/09/2020

Hello everyone. We’d like to share a little piece of news with you today.

Those of you who have been attending our expos over the past nine years may be aware that the arcade machines on display have been provided by one company – the brilliant Retro Games Party. As our events have grown, so has the arcade section and the RGP team have continued to excel themselves each year by adding new machines to each successive show.

Unfortunately COVID19 has had a devastating effect on the events industry and last month we were saddened to hear that RGP had lost their premises, were struggling to house all their machines and the future of the company looked uncertain.

However, after several weeks of negotiations with James and his team, we are delighted to be able to announce today that RGP will be merging into Replay Events with immediate effect.

So, what does this mean for everyone? Well, firstly it means that all the arcade machines you love playing at PLAY Expo are all safe and will continue to be taken to our events. Housing and maintenance of the machines will become our responsibility, which frees up RGP to continue to provide support to the wider arcade community through the repairs and refurbishments side of the business.

Those of you who know James and his team personally will be pleased to hear that they will continue to manage the arcade section at all of our future expos and other regular events such as NERG in the North East. In that respect nothing will change.

The only aspect we plan to change is the number and variety of machines we have at our events. We know that the arcades are one of the most popular aspects of our shows so we have already begun importing a large number of classic machines from overseas so that, once we are able to safely resume events we can bring an even bigger arcade offering to PLAY Expo and the other events we support.

And for the first time we also plan to be able to give you - the attendees - the chance to vote for which machines we bring to our shows via our social media channels. Our plan is to bring some of the more unusual machines to events and to give you a wider choice of arcades to choose from.

We hope you are all coping with the COVID19 crisis however you can. We can’t wait to get back to running expos and being able to expand on our already great arcade section. We really do hope to see you all very soon, until then, keep yourselves safe.

The Replay Events and RGP Team.

10/07/2020

We’ve placed a load of DVD’s and books in our eBay store go take a look. Some rare Dr Who and many others. All on buy it now. Combined postage etc etc...

Shop eBay for great deals on !

26/06/2020

Another repair yesterday but a quick story about how things fail unexpectedly.

I bought an Asteroids Deluxe PCB on behalf of a customer known to be not working, i toiled over the board for weeks on and off and got it to start up but with some vector drawing problems. In the end I sent it off to my great friend Mark at RetroClinic who just has a knack with these boards who fixed the last faults and sent it back. Mark, like us, does a quick private video to show a board working.

Board arrives back with us and we fit it to the cabinet and it doesn’t work - bear in mind we’ve tested the rest of the cab with another board so other than some cleanup it should have been good to go.

Using test mode the cabinet produces a constant beeping but nothing on screen.

I found an EPROM had died again and replaced that - at this age thats quite common so no big deal.

I spoke with Mark who was happy to warranty fix the board and he asked if i’d checked a couple of things. I decided to do a quick check and found that a signal (/STOP) wasn’t working, tracked it back and found the chip that made that signal and fixed it and the game works.

This is very common for a game to work and then stop working.

The industry runs on fixed fee repairs and this one has been going on for months but its finally over. We’ll be massively out of pocket on the job as our customer was quoted the cost of repair and we have to stick to that. If we’d been working on an hourly rate the customer would owe us thousands and the machine would be worth far less.

Its another one out of the door now once we agree a final cost or more to the point a final loss for us.

22/06/2020

A quick fix of a Capcom Gunsmoke PCB as well today.

Picture one shows the problem where background graphics repeat themselves.

No known schematics available for this board so had to use my video probe (video coming soon) to figure out what bit of the board was what.

I’d repaired a Black Tiger with a similar issue a few months ago so the hardware is fairly similar.

Looked for chips connected to the roms in column 1&2. Knew this would be the addressing to the roms as the output was bad on the video probe (if the picture is bad later down the circuit you know the input is good at least).

Found a bad 4-bit adder (LS283) at 11D with an output that didn’t look right. Piggybacked the chip and graphics went to normal.

Replaced and soak tested and told customer.

Result!

22/06/2020

Two Paperboy PCB’s sorted today. One needed just a general cleanup and test. The other had four bad EPROM’s - one on the CPU board and three on the video board.

19/05/2020

I want to update everyone on our business during the Covid19 pandemic.

We have now mothballed the entire business with a small exception until the government allows festivals and events to start taking place and additionally the public is not scared of going to them.

The exception is we are still performing PCB repairs via mail in.

We are not taking in machines at all as we have no workshop anymore.

We will only respond to enquiries via our website and the phone has very limited cover. The facebook mailbox cannot be turned off unfortunately and will not be answered - please use our website contact forms to get in touch with us.

We do not and have never repaired fruit machines. Please search for a leisure services provider for these - a list of known ones we have recommended is on our website in the repairs section.

We are not taking in monitors for repair.

We can repair the following PCB’s:

Space Invaders
Pac-Man & variants
Most ATARI boards upto 86
Williams boards (Defender, Robotron etc)
Most other early board sets upto 87/88
And many others.

We don’t repair: Konami Simpsons and same series (Turtles, Xmen), SEGA Model 1/2 etc. Anything riddled with surface mount custom chips, NAOMI system boards.

When our ability to help changes we will update facebook and our website.

Thanks

20/03/2020

Hard times ahead with the coronavirus C19 epidemic and the forced closure of social gathering places meaning our hire business is now officially dead until this eventually passes or we go bankrupt waiting.

In the meantime we will be still performing repairs to video games via courier/post.

Specialists in repair of many vintage PCB’s

Restoration of machines.

Builds of replicas of classic machines.

Use our website contact form (not the page messenger we don’t monitor it) or call us on 0330 088 5690 during normal office hours.

We do not repair pinball, boxing machines or fruit machines!