A question about superguns for repairs and testing

[vholfx]

Hello,

I'm thinking about getting a single-board supergun mostly to be used in my workbench (testing/repairs), I find them convenient for my use cases.

However, I see most modern superguns have either a 5 pin molex connector or 20 pin connector to be used with a standard PC PSU. Given I have always used a dedicated arcade PSU, and I've heard bad things about PC PSU and their 5v rail, I'm wondering how safe are this superguns, especially while testing or repairing rare or expensive boards. I want a solid workbench environment.

So, are this things safe? What is the general opinion about them?

Some time ago I was interested in Retroelectronik superguns but I guess they are gone now? site is down.

Other than that one, I was looking at something like this:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003532721344.html

Any opinions or experiences with superguns?

Thanks!

[slickam]

From what I remember Retroelectronik had a warehouse fire and shut down. Their supergun had poor quality control, with some people reporting buttons not working and problems like that.

The ones I see recommended are the HAS, Axunworks, and minigun. I don't know if the HAS is available to order right now (the creator does a batch every few months or so). I've seen some recent reports of the Axunworks supergun having inconsistent voltage on the 12V rail, and it's difficult to get (multiple month lead time, and the creator isn't responding to messages right now). The minigun is an open source project that you'd have to build yourself.

I haven't used one like you linked to, but I've heard warnings that a lot of superguns don't properly attenuate video signals, so if you're using an upscaler you could be shortening its life or in some cases killing it immediately.

[vholfx]

Thank you for your input. I should mention I'm thinking of a pretty basic workbench, connected to either 19" arcade monitor or a small 14" TV with RGB input, that's what I use for testing and repairs. So no upscaling involved, this is not intended for usage on modern TVs or anything of the like.

What I currently use is a JAMMA wire in a wooden box with buttons and a standard arcade PSU. I want to make it more compact and tidy things up a bit, so I'm considering a supergun board just to make things cleaner.

I'm concerned about exactly the kind of comment that you made, about some supergun voltage problems in the 12V rail and thinks like that, that is the kind of issues I want to avoid.