Re: Astroids Deluxe Monitor Troubles

>Simply stated, the problem appears to be w/ the monitor.

        Boy, there's alot of things that can go wrong with this particular
symptom, some of which are fixable by a capkit, and some of which are not. I'll
share with you what little I know about monitor repair, which ain't much more
than basic trouble shooting, and replacing parts that have obviously burnt out
or fallen off.

        1) Your Ast. Deluxe board might not be generating video signals. You
           could check this with a scope, or even with a multimeter (I don't
           know what the range of valid signals would be with a multimeter, but
           I dimly recall in the 6V range - anyone want to help)? Put your
           board in test mode (there should be a switch by the coin door) to
           make sure the board is trying to generate a nice crosshatch pattern.

        One aside - I left my game in test mode while I was doing some work on
        it, and my daughter came up and started pressing the buttons (they beep
        when you press them - big fun). Of course, in doing so, she managed to
        press the combination that erased all my high scores ;-P

        2) Your monitor might not be getting power. Does the heater element in
           the neck of the tube glow? Is the "spot killer" LED on the
           deflection board lit? You should be able to check the voltage
           on the monitor itself as well at one of the connectors - schematics
           for your monitor can be found at:

                http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/9862/page01.html

        3) Do you get HV? I don't have an HV probe, but I check for the
           presence of HV (maybe not the correct value, but at least present)
           by holding a neon bulb up to the HV transformer, and by listening
           for the "static" as the tube charges up. If you don't have HV, I
           don't know what to tell you - I haven't had this problem on any of
           my monitors yet (thankfully).

        4) At this point, it probably can't hurt to put in a cap kit - as I
           recall, the 19V2000 cap kits don't have many parts. Or you can have
           a friend with some electronics knowledge look at the schematics and
           help troubleshoot - the 19V2000 is actually a pretty simple beastie,
           compared to your typical raster monitor. It's just a couple of amp
           circuits and an HV circuit. If you have HV, you (or a friend) could
           probably look through the schematics and just measure voltages at
           various places on the deflection board, to figure out where things
           are going awry.
        
        Good luck! Let me know how it goes.

                        Drew
Received on Fri Sep 3 10:53:51 1999