3. The cooling fans are worthy of discussion and relevant because getting rid of them or redesigning them out is important to consider, because unlike a home computer, a WOZ machine is going to cost people close to $9,000.00 (9 grand plus) and unlike a $1500 home computer, people will expect it to last 10 yrs plus (like every other pinball out there has done/lasted since the 70's, 80's or 90's which fill most peoples collections...people expect 10 yrs minimum. If a fan fails, will it be Pin2000 all over gain with board excessive heat n replacement required...if it needs 2 x fans, things must be getting hot, why not redesign it with better self cooling....
Most pinballs since the 70's etc has lasted until now, but that does not change the fact that they were designed to last 5 - 10 years. Irrespective if they lasted 11 - 100 years = does not change anything. The only argument would exist if they lasted 1 - 10 years and failed (See WMS SYS 4 and GTB SYS 1). BTW - There are computers which cost a lot more than $9000, and they use the same fans as a $500 computer. In my former occupation I was setting up SANS with Servers that cost $60,000+. The fans in those servers were made at the same factories in China as clone PCs costing $500. What JJP should be looking at is a bank of smaller fans that are CPU controlled based on temperature, and have redundancy built in. So instead of one big fan designed to last 5 years, they could install smaller, modular, redundant fans (exactly as the servers I was talking about). When a fan fails, an error is reported, and the failed fan can be hot swapped over in 5 minutes. You can even configure a couple of fans to be "hot swap", so that if one fan fails, the hot swap kicks in. Exactly the same as RAID disks.
I'd be really surprised if this has not been thought of and implemented already.
Heat rises - So in an air conditioned home environment, it makes perfect sense to mount the PC hardware in the lower cabinet. Given the noise these fans could potentially make, they would be drowned out by the speaker system. Looking at the LCD on the game, there would be a lot of heat generated in the backbox, and limited space.
