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

On the Star Wars and Black Knight I would be checking for cold solder
joints. ESPECIALLY on the Black Knight, on all the header pins of each
board. MPU, solenoid/driver, sound, and p/s. But then again this isn't the
pinball newsgroup. ; )

Lunar Lander sounds like some marginal deflection transistors, cold solder
at the header pins where they plug into the deflection board, etc.

Gooey mess? Don't call Mulder; aren't they bringing him back 1 more time so
they can kill him off?

Richard

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rosenzweig, Joel B" <joel.b.rosenzweig@intel.com>
To: <vectorlist@synthcom.com>
Sent: Friday, May 03, 2002 10:17 AM
Subject: VECTOR: 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 08:17:17 2002