10/30/07

As we were going to pick up the cabinet, my buddy told me the machines been in a friends garage for years, and never used. He thinks she said something about it having a bad vacuum tube. I figured a bad tube, probably a shot fuse in the monitor. should have it up quick!

Upon inspection, the tube had a broken neck, oh well, at least its a free cab.

I should have taken more pic's along the way, but I wanted to get the machine going, and as always, I forget to document until its over.

Basically, here I had a nice 25" paperweight. So, with nothing to lose, I decided to swap the tube!

I went dumpster diving behind a TV repair place, and came up with 2 25" TV's. A Citizen, and a Sony. Low and behold! The Citizen had a Toshiba A63ADG01X tube, which should work great to replace my busted A63ADG25X!

So I ripped into the TV, yanked the tube, the yoke didn't match up, so I pulled the yoke off the dead tube, swapped it onto the good tube, threw it into the frame and crossed my fingers. Now, there are a lot of good sites with information on how to swap a tube. I'm not even going to try to get into all the details here, so here's a few good sites:

• Randy Fromm's Arcade School  Great site, very informative on tube swapping and how to get your monitor going again.

• http://www.rcilink.com/arcade/TubeSwap_steps.htm Not sure who's site this is, or how I found it, but a well documented tube swap and how to do it.

Success! Well sort of. I got a nice raster, colors were all messed up, the yoke was loose,so I didn't follow the advice of the sites above and mark everything. Unless you are ready to fully redo the convergence, take their advice!

There was still something wrong with the monitor, the drive adjustments produced no pic, and nothing was working right, so, onto the bench it goes!

Well after going through it, a bad IC1 (upc1397c) turned out to be the culprit looks like the neck must have gotten busted off while the game was running, shorting out the gun, which caused one of the drive transistors on the neck board to short, sending ~130V into IC1, shorting its outputs. So all I get is a nice white screen. (well it would be white If I could converge it)

So, its off to Bob Roberts I write, to get a replacement chip (among other things). I'll write more when I get the parts for the monitor.

June 2004 -

The parts for the monitor came in! I just havent had a chance yet to put them in, more when I have the monitor going!