What's the gooey mess? And spontaneous vector repair, and other pseudoscience

All the talk of the aquadag reminded me of this ... What exactly is the
gooey mess that surrounds the anode cup that seems to form on many of my
monitors with time? Maybe my basement arcade has been infested by something
out of the X-Files?

I've had three odd experiences with my video games in the last couple of
weeks. None with a satisfactory conclusion.

1) I turned on my Star Wars for the first time in a while and the video was
all shaky for the first 2 minutes. Then it settled out. I didn't have time
to troubleshoot it, so I ended up playing a few games on the machine over
the next few days with the same symptoms each day. And then as quickly as
the problem came, it was gone. The video is now back to being rock solid
all the time. Hmmm....

2) At about the same time as my Star Wars oddity, I played Lunar Lander for
the first time in months. This time, the left half of the screen was
warping on me. The right hand side was perfect, but the left hand side
would grow and shrink non-linearly over the left few inches of the display.
I decided to troubleshoot this last night, so I turned on the game, watched
it do it's thing and noted the failure. I powered off the game, unplugged
the monitor, and hooked up my scope. Scope image looks great. I hook up
the monitor again, and the monitor looks great, too! Doh!!!!!

3) Black Knight decides to have a melt down and it experiences a major logic
failure that renders the game inoperable. I let it sit for a few weeks, and
the logic works again, but now the SOUND is not working. I pulled out a
replacement sound board to test it, and the game works great with sound. I
measure the signal going to the audio amplifier on the good board to see
what it should look like. Take mental snap shot. I hooked up the original
board, and I get sound, too! Doh!!!!!

It's not that I mind having working games. Really. It's just that I don't
generally believe in spontaneous repair, and I'd rather the thing stay
broken long enough for me to fix it. I'm chalking up number 3 to a bad
contact on one or more of the cables. But #1 and #2 concern me... they are
probably likely to come back, probably as soon as I have friends come on
over. :-) Maybe it really is some slimey creature from The X-Files ...

Joel-
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Received on Fri May 3 07:24:21 2002