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Yes - just as a note - those caps are connected to a hefty ground plane - so it takes a decent amount of heat to get them out of there.... outside of that - pretty easy to replace.
Yeah the Namco N2 is pretty similar with the ground plane on the caps being a pain, so atleast I got abit of experience when it comes to that atleast.
 
hahahahah - these systems are pretty solid. Once you replace those caps, it will be good for 20 more years!
....errr no: You'll need to change the CR2032 a few times and *make sure* that the video fan is working !! else you'll end up with a nice brick.
 
....errr no: You'll need to change the CR2032 a few times and *make sure* that the video fan is working !! else you'll end up with a nice brick.

interesting.... i do suppose if that video fan dies its not a good thing, but I have had 4 of these running in cabinets for years and outside of the coin battery, and the original caps needing to be replaced, they seemed really solid to me...

I think I also changed out the exhaust fan.
 
....errr no: You'll need to change the CR2032 a few times and *make sure* that the video fan is working !! else you'll end up with a nice brick.
The video fan dying out scares me the most, having to replace the GPU's on this thing would be a nightmare. As much as I hate PC based hardware like the N2, atleast your easily able to switch out parts if something like the GPU fails.
 
Also I believe the same Power supply/JVS cables I use to power up the Triforce should be the same for the Chihiro correct?
 
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Gonna try out the other motherboard in my N2 first and see if I get any results with that, will let you guys know how that goes.
 
The video fan dying out scares me the most,

may I suggest noctua:
 
If you have a pc you can even live-boot linux of some kind on (avoid using windows, you wont be able to mount the partition there anyways), and it has an IDE port or you have a USB -> IDE, easy way to check is to boot into linux environment with hard disk plugged in and running, run the following

sudo -s
mkdir /mnt/n2hdd
lsblk

Find 5th partition on the n2 hard drive (presumably this will be a seagate but few are also WD drives)
Then from same terminal execute below, replacing <hdd device> with the name of the partition (e.g. hda5)

mount -o ro /dev/<hdd device> /mnt/n2hdd
cd /mnt/n2hdd
ls -a

If you see a boot folder containing aeinitrd, aevmlinuz, aebootparams, prod.img and an exec folder within containing boot and v386 (assuming the drive is 3dx+), the hard drive is at least accessible. While this does not guarentee data integrity it will give a good indicator of if the hard drive is totally shot or not.
Just reading through this thread.

If you're at the point of connecting the hard disk to a Linux machine, try installing smartmontools and using something like smartctl --all /dev/<device> which should interrogate the disk and show all of its health counters; things like how many hours it's been powered on for, how many unrecoverable sectors there are, etc. which can also give you an indicator of how healthy it is.
 
Ya that other Namco N2 motherboard didn't work lol, was even worse then the other one. dongles didn't light up and no signal on screen.
 
Good news, seems that the Chihiro booted up and started the game just fine. Gonna throw it in the cabinet now to see how it goes. Also wasn't expecting the Chihiro to be smaller then the N2 so it should fit in there no problem.
 
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