Repair Log - WG 6100

Monitor was acquired in a Star Wars with no deflection board, but otherwise
complete. Game and monitor in unknown condition. Cabinet is beautiful,
though!

Symptom: No deflection board.
Solution: Replace deflection board. :)

Symptom: Game and monitor power up. Clear focus cannot be obtained by
turning focus knob. Screen is also very dim and jittery. Turning up screen
brightness doesn't help. After 1 minute picture goes *way* out of focus and
slowly fades to black, then comes back on at random intervals only to fade
away again. When playing the game, crashing into something or getting hit
by a fireball would restore the screen brightness, temporarily. Focus is
generally poor.

Attempt 1: Replacing HV with a known good one did not fix the problem.
Attempt 2: Voltages on the deflection board and HV looked OK.
Solution: One of the contact pins in the socket on the neckboard had
broken. I think it is pin 1, it's the one all by itself in the gap or the
"key" area. A pinout I found ID's pin 1 as "G3 (focus grid)", so it makes
sense. I replaced the neckboard and was able to adjust the focus and screen
brightness to a nice looking image.
Just a guess to the cause, but when the player gets hit or the DeathStar
blows up, the monitor gets driven really hard to produce the brightening
effect on the screen. I'm guessing that was enough to overcome the bad
connection for a bit and bring the monitor back into focus and brightness.

Symptom: Vectors are jittery. This is especially noticeable in small text.
Solution: Put the screen cover back on the HV. This made a big difference
in overall image stability.

2 Excellent sites that helped me (mostly) get my head around the XY monitor:

http://jmargolin.com/xy/xymon.htm
http://jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm

http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/F_VAtari1.html

Sean McLachlan Salt Lake City, Utah
rgvac@classi-find.net Video Game N00b since 2/2001

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Received on Fri Jul 2 13:21:06 2004