Still figuring out the hang of maintenance but everything is pretty good order. Fun game too.
Good for you on the purchase, I have wanted to buy one for years, but live in a 3rd floor apartment. Getting a machine up the stairs would be close to impossible, so it's a no go.
A lot of maintenance and repairs, you can do yourself. I used to work in a large arcade back in the mid 90's and serviced a lot of machines
** Important thing to state now - Unplug the power lead from the wall before opening it up!! Small things inside the coin door are okay, but as soon as you want to take out the glass or lift the playfield, you gotta be safe.
You realize after working on them that the power comes into the cabinet and on some of them the connectors and the connections to the power supply are right there, uncovered. It's inside the machine under normal use, so safe, 1990's safe. Don't just think that you're doing a small fix 'up over here' is away from that area and okay, I dropped a small bolt once and went fishing for it . . . lets just say we had good circuit breakers.
During my time working on them, I came up with a general rule, I called it the 90% rule. When there is an issue with the machine 90% of the time, the problem is visible, you can open the machine, have a look in the area ( sometimes you need a good search with a torch ) and you can actually see the problem and fix it in less than 10 minutes. The sort of problems that arise here are mostly due to the quite physical nature of the machine's operation / operating. Causing things like small parts to work loose and fall out of position, or solder points to break, or sometimes a part might have broken. These are easy to fix ( well, broken part might be harder in your position / we had a store of parts to get from ).
It's an area where you need to get a little confidence and get in there and get it fixed.
Of the remaining 10% of issues. There was 90% of that was an 'invisible' problem, that could be found by using a multimeter to find the issue, often a wire with an internal break. Continuity mode for that, or something like a failed electrical part. But these fixes took some more time.
And then the final 10% of that last 10% were the big problem ones. But in truth quite rare.