Response from Jonathan: Hugh,

First off, thank you for your kind words about the podcast. We’re glad you enjoy it. Hearing from people like you who listen makes all of the work we put into producing the podcast worth it.

As for your question, it could be a power supply or a board issue. We’re going to lean more towards a power supply issue just because of how you described the problem. The fact that it’s gotten worse over time seems to indicate that we’ve seen a bit of a voltage drop from your power supply over the time you have owned it. We recommend rebuilding your power supply and seeing if that helps the issue. This process basically consists of replacing all of the parts on it (especially the caps).

If the problem continues after the power supply rebuild, it’s probably an issue with some chips on the board (RAM if we had to guess). At this point, you could try some of the step we discuss in our post on Inspecting An Arcade Board to see if it makes a difference. You could also test the voltage on the RAM chips just to see if they are getting good power. Other than that, you will probably need some additional equipment and a whole lot of time to get this board issue fixed. It would probably be best at this point to send the board off for repair if you’re not comfortable troubleshooting these types of issues yourself.

Hope that helps. Thank you for your question and good luck with your repair.