I agree with this. And even more knowing that these pcbs eventually die due to their CPLDs...
We urgently need to make a replacement, or in the near future we will have a beauty $3000 unusable pcb....
This is only sort of half true. The A1010 and A1020 FPGAs are early polyfuse FPGAs, and do not use non-volatile storage (e.g. Flash) to store their configuration (which has a data retention rate of like ~20 years in
automotive graded parts, and likely less for consumer). Instead, the configuration has literally been burned in. These can die from internal die or bond wire damage, rust, corrosion, etc. but at least they are not slated to lose their data over time naturally. They can be compared to a mask ROM this way, and are on par with the reliability of the gate arrays that make most of these games work.
The MACH PLDs (which are really a few GALs in a trenchcoat) I managed to dump already, as they were unlocked. That leaves a handful of GALs, two of which are related to sound. They are locked, so they will require some craftiness. If those can be taken care of, we can consider the game "shelf stable".
Bakraid does not enjoy such a positive outlook, and instead has three Xilinx CPLDs doing the same work that the logic above did. One of them tends to fail, seemingly from ESD, but all three may eventually begin to leak their data and have invalidated configs. They are locked, so dumping these is a massive effort that requires an intersection of
time, ability, and
money.