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