Bad monitor day

So today has been a pretty crappy day for my arcade machine collection :-

The Hantarex Polo in Chase HQ is crackling and smells of burning.

The U5000 in Winding Heat is arcing

The K7000 in APB filled the machine with smoke, which started coming out of the coin door.

Trying to keep about 40 20+ year old monitors working all the time is what hinders me from getting everything working at the same time.

In adition to the above from today, I have the following monitors to catch up on.

Prize SI - Dry joints / jumping picture

Glutton - Needs manual degauss

Tempest -Regulator failure

Monaco GP - Vertical deflection fault

Dig Dug - Needs extensive rebuild

Road Blasters - Failed LOPT

Road Runner - SMPSU startup fault

Sheriff - No picture + burning smell

Afterburner video harness repair

I got sick of the intermittant colour problem and noticed that the RGB pins were in poor condition. Replacing them with solder terminals for reliability

Starship Troopers and Rocky & Bullwinkle

Having a big clearup, this id the first time I have been able to fire these up in months

Xybots working

Monitor fixed

Centipede working

Thankfully just a fuse was blown after a wire inside the coin door shorted out. Simple fix, but I have been waiting months to be able to move the machine out and work on it

This years geek presents

Star Wars Year by Year, Star Wars Scanimation book and Space Invader ice cubes :)

Coffeeeeeeee

I think everyone knows I am a coffee snob

Highscores

There we go, some decent Super Hang-On highscores

Super Hang-on monitor rebuilt

Picture looks perfect now

Retro Games Party

Super Hang-On fixed

For Retro Games Party

Electronic component restocking

A fudge load of capacitors and semiconductors that I have been waiting on for some repairs

Paperboy Fixed

So I found 3 corroded sockets on the CPU board and replaced those, but that made no difference. On the test bench I found a buffer that was randomly glitching between the main and sound cpu. I replaced that and it works :)

Repairing Paperboy

Lets see if I can get this cpu board working again

Champ Sprint Finished

All working now :)

Champ Sprint player 2 steering

Replaced the bad opto and player 2 now has steering. Just the player 2 accellerator to go

Champ Sprint PCBs done :)

Found and replaced two iffy EPROM sockets and the corrupt graphics on the highscores are gone. Player 1 iis full working, but I need to sort out the pot and optos on player 2 now. Finally I can play Champ Sprint at last

Champ Sprint - almost

Replaced buffers going to the colour rams that had static outputs. Now the title screen and game look great, but the highscore and workshop screens are corrupt, so possibly has some bad roms or bad adress selects. Happy to have this much progress at last

Champ Sprint progress

So replacing the colour drive transistors helped. The missing red colour is now back. I also found and replaced a bad RAM in the video circuits. Now I have a screen that is mostly white, looks like there must be something stuck high in the colour circuits. I only wish the PCB set was not so massive and hard to work on.

Champ Sprint progress

The output drive transistors on the Champ Sprint gave inconsistant readings between them so I replaced them all

Champ Sprint in progress

So the newly installed Franken-monitor is a big improvement over the previous monitor, but it is now clear that the PCB is not outputting any red, so time to pull the video board out

OMG Taco Bell in the UK

Twice the price, but reminds me of America mmmmm

Eaves filler

Time to end gamesroom draughtiness

Return of the Jedi - fixed

First easy fix I have had in years, found a bad graphics ROM when I inserted it into the EPROM programmer and it immediatly reported several pins as bad :)

Return of the Jedi - faulty

Time to bench this board and find out what is up

Pinball machines out in the wild

Southport, Silcocks amusements

Southport penny arcade

Vindicators - working

Gauntlet - working

Space Harrier - working

Asteroids - working

Vectory goodness

Gorf fixed

One for the Gorf Brigade ;)

New optos fitted in the joystick

So the Centipede monitor was driving me mad. I had fixed the monitor, but it was making some pretty nasty arcing noises. Originally there was some tracking around the anode cap, as the original lopts lead and cap were badly worn from previous arcing problems. I fitted a new LOPT and the tracking around the cap stopped, but it was making some even louder arcing noises, but I could not see any sparks even in a dark room.

Due to time constraints, I gave up with the first monitor and moved onto a second monitor (Euro MTC900E) which had bad vertical deflection and the red drive stuck on, both faults were reasonable easy to fix and the monitor was working, sat on the floor in the garage wired up to the back of the Centipede cab. I proceeded to fix the rest of the cab (such as stripping, cleaning and oiling the trackball, performing the AR2 sense mod on the power supply, cleaning up the cab and fitting locks) and I fitted the monitor into the cab. When I went to adjust the picture on the monitor, I noticed that the monitor was now making cracking noises...... Arrrrrghhhh. I don't know if it is the cold weather or I am just being damn unlucky or what? I am running a dehumidifier in the garage, so there should be no damp air. Anyway, looks like Centipede is not going to make it to Replay, I still have other stuff I need to work on. I will re-visit Centipede if I get time, but it does not look promising at the moment.

Centipede monitor repair part 2

Brand new HR6020 fitted, lets hope this is the end of it. Fingers crossed for a spark free powerup

MTC900E on the repair bench

Just finishing off a major repair

Pole Position - Ready for Replay

PCB fixed, power brick rebuilt, AR2s bullet proofed, extra 5v lines and commoned ground lines, new locks, steering and shifter mech stripped and rebuilt, new marquee bulb, new Atari big blue, new dip switches, NVRAM highscore saving mod, new cardboard monitor bezel. Phew that was a lot of work!

New Pole Position Bezel

Made out of mounting board. Was damn tricky to make but it turned out nicer than I had hoped for :) The original was a complete mess and had been cut by a previous owner

More goodies from China

Paperboy has gone faulty.

Stuck on the mostly blank highscore table with the soundboard making random noises.

You fix one machine and another one breaks :(

Pole Position reliability upgrade for Replay

As some of you may know, Pole Position gets a bad reputation for a few reliability issues. As I want this machine to survive the show without a hitch, I have performed several upgrades which should significantly increase reliability.

Firstly, due to the complex nature of the large PCBs ,they are very power thirsty. Atari had to add 2 AR2 power supplies to cope with this. I have added common ground wires to both pcbs and both AR2s. Next I ran crimped wires from the 5volt test points on the PCBs directly to the power supplies. This reduces voltage drop significantly and will stop the harness getting hot and the edge connectors burning.

Next I rebuilt the main power brick, including replacing the main "Atari Big Blue" as well as the rectifier and any corroded wires or crimp terminals

Next job was to remove the leak prone battery and replace the unreliable CMOS RAM with an NVRAM after modifying the PCB to accept it.

Lastly, several sockets were relaced with new on the CPU board as these are prone to being flakey.

With any luck, this should now be one of the most reliable Pole Positions in a long time.

Coming to a Replay show near you :)

Red Ghost Neon Sign (pacman)

I never get bored of unboxing cool neon signs. I think I will bring this one to Replay to hang on the Jammaplus stand.

Another Super Hang-On PCB back from the dead

So that is a spare for me and a spare for Replay now :)

Mini webserver up and running

Arduino + Ethernet shield

Electronic goodies from the wonderful people of China

Mmmmmmm gadgetry

Message Display Fixed

Ready for the Jammaplus stand at Replay

Another Super Hang-On PCB fix

Had to fix another one after the last one decided to have a PCM chip failure after 2 hours on the bench

Super Hang-On PCB fixed

Thats number 1 for replay, now need a second for spare

Krispy F**king Kreme!

Pizza Hut with the Enterprise guys

Someone mentioned WM2 and the power went out :)

Monaco GP video board fixed

Getting board of Monaco GP, but need a full set plus spares for Replay. This one was not too bad a 7427, a 7430 and a 7432 and time to move on to the next

Another Moanco GP scoreboard fix.

Highscore table was completely missing on this one. 13 bad chips replaced and it is fully working

Nasty Monaco GP scoreboard fix

I didnt think I would ever find this one.... An input to a 74151 on the scoreboard was sinking too much current and causing a 74191 on another board to miss-count. Damn that was a tricky one and no form of logic testing was helping.