This Freakin Monitor!

[CRiMiNaL]

Hi everyone,

I have a 9" Hantarex MTC 9000 Monitor, and I'm trying to hook it up to my computer with a trident blade video card in dos with the Bladetsr.exe 15khz video patch. This isn't my first arcade built, so I'm pretty sure I've hooked everything up right.

I have the arcade video hooked into the video card with a hacked vga monitor  cable, so i started turning with all the pots trying to get a stable picture. But all I get is a red picture, as you can see, there is no green and blue, and also the picture is to small and I have it stretched all the way. And on top of that I can't get the picture stable, it just keeps rolling vertical and horizontal. Now I'm thinking I may have fried something because I hooked the monitor into my other computer (thats dead now) without an isolation transformer and it blew a fuse on the monitor. Could I have damaged something else in the process?















Dos

Mame Opening



Sorry for my crappy camera, I hope someone can help I've been trying to get this thing going for a month now..

Thanks

[Silver]

What syncs are you hooking up?
What kind of sync is the monitor expecting (composite/seperate etc...)

One of the shots seems to show a stable pic - is it stable?

Grounds - have you got the ground signal wires all hooked up?

[grantspain]

its unlikely to have caused any damage to the colour signal part of the monitor
the neck card has a number of pots for each colour
on the left next to the rgb input plug you have the contrast pot,if this is incorrctly set then you can loose colours
there is a sinc switch next to that
you can prove if its signal in or monitor by swapping the red input wire to the green or blue,if you swap red to blue and then get a blue pic then its signal
you may have to link the sinc

[CRiMiNaL]

I have the white and yellow sync from the arcade and the white from the video card (thats the only combination I can get a stable image with) yes, I have the black grounds connected.

The neck board has 3 color pots. I turn them all the way along with the contrast pot and still only a red picture.

When I touch the blue or green color wires coming from the video card to the red color wire from the monitor I get different shades of red. When I touch the blue or green wires from the monitor to the 2 reds connected the screen goes black.

Here are some pics of street fighter 2, as you can see another problem is the screen is cut in half and I've tryed to center it by turning the horizontal  pots but thats the best I can get it...


When I bought the monitor a few weeks ago it was pluged into a pac-man board and all the colors and the picture was perfect....

[CRiMiNaL]

anyone?

[SirPeale]

Be sure you have everything connected the correct way.  I have some oddball monitor, the pinout goes something like: Red, Ground, Green, Ground, Blue, Ground, something something sync.

All WG monitors (and most monitors) are like Red, Green, Blue, Ground Sync (either sync is the very next pin, or the very end pin after ground).

[CRiMiNaL]

I tryed all the wires, they are connected correctly but still no green or blue color and the screen is still over to one side 

[grantspain]

well you have pretty much proved the colour problem is down the monitor because each colour signal output when connected to the red input gives a screen
you should check for bad solder joints on the monitor especially around the signal input plug and the neck card
does the contrast and red neck pot have an affect on your picture at all?
is this a known good monitor from the start?

[CRiMiNaL]

yes this monitor worked, the guy I bought it from plugged it into a pac-man board and everything looked great. The contrast pot makes the red brighter, and the red pot makes the over all screen red, the other color pots do nothing.

I checked the solder joints and everything looks ok....

what in the world could be the problem??

[grantspain]

i am a little stumped over this,the trouble is i don't trust vga hacks and graphic cards.
i could understand you loosing one colour to some kind of fault but not two unless the colours shared some kind of decoder ic like in the polo monitors,the mtc9000 did not use a decoder ic(from what i can remember)
i am not sure where you can from here unless you can find another monitor to test the vga input or another signal to test the monitor

[CRiMiNaL]

anyone got any ideas? I'm really at my wits end with this thing...

[shorthair]

Maybe the dude you bought it from might have an idea. Perhaps something finicky about the monitor that requires something special that he forgot to mention?

[Xenepp]

As it happens, I have exactly the same problem. Kinda..

I too have an MTC-9000, a 26" version and the picture is very dark and has a red overtone. The Blue however, is working since my BIOS screen has a blue bar at the top which comes up ok, if not way dark. The grey of the menu however is reddish and very dark.

Now I know for a fact the monitor is good since I was running JAMMA games on it just before I hooked it up to my ArcadeVGA and it was bright and colourful. I'm using Ultimarc's VGA breakout cable too so I know everything there's good and the JAMMA connector's hooked up fine.. maybe I'll stick a PCB in there and see if that still looks good. It was only yesterday I ran one though.

What gives?

 -Joel

[grantspain]

perhaps a signal amplifier is needed

[Xenepp]

I guess your right. Didn't want to believe it but the bullet must be bitten.

I checked again and with the lights out you can see all the colours. Red is heavily dominant though..



Also, sorry to hijack the thread slightly, but can someone tell me what these do exactly (might help out CRiMiNaL too..)





I know what H AMP, V AMP and FOCUS does, no idea what the rest do though..

 -Joel

[grantspain]

screen volts is brightness,h shift is horizontal movement,v shift for vertical movement,h freq is for the horizontal lock or hold as its sometimes known
on the neck card you will find individual colour drive pots,maybe you can kill a bit of the red.
if you try disconnecting the red wire and then adjust the brightness and your other colours look good then maybe its possible to stick a pot in line with red input

[Xenepp]

Brightness! I'll have a crack at that and report back.

I used the ATI tool to jack up the gamma and tone down a bit of the red, hardly a good solution but yeah, fiddling round the back might produce better results. Thanks for the head up on the neck pots, I'll take a look.

Looking at the ArcadeVGA manual, the video amp is not used for Hantarex monitors. Maybe this model's the exception but I'll try a few of the things you mentioned and report back. It seems CRiMiNaL has the same issue as me so if I can rectify it maybe he can do the same.

 -Joel

[Xenepp]

Well that fixed it! Looks ace now!

Well.. it did untill the PSU popped. Now I just have to pray it didn't fry anything else!

Anyway, thanks grantspain, thanks!

 -Joel

[grantspain]

i don't think monitors as old as the mtc9000 like to run from pc's even with an avga,i believe criminal needs a signal amp,i would think that 60% of problems on the monitor forum involve cga to vga issue's

[Xenepp]

Just to clarify, it was the PC PSU that died in an unrelated issue, the MTC-9000 works perfectly with a little coaxing.

On my monitor PCB there is a little switch which made a huge diffrence in regards to colour, it was three pots in a row connected by one large plastic switch I assume raised the tolerance of RGB levels. The 9" version should have some form of this switch too I would think. After I switched this the colours were even and much brighter.

I can't see criminal's problem being that he needs an amp, if he's only getting one colour, they would all be there in some form, no?

Maybe he should try hooking up a standard JAMMA PCB and see if he still has problems. I know a Pacman PCB worked fine on it, but maybe since then something got damaged?

 -Joel

[CRiMiNaL]

Well it's been three years. I figured i'd give this old monitor another go. I got a double dragon 3 pcb game board off a friend and tryed it. the picture was still red. So i went through checking all the caps, resistors and diodes with a multimeter. so it turned out to be 2 dead diodes on the board (1N4148) next to the video input connector. So i replace them and i got the colors back. the color was very bright and vibrant, the monitor was in very good almost new condition judging from the picture.

when i first connected this monitor to my computer i never used an isolation transformer, when i had the monitor on and plugged the VGA cable into the video card, bang!. video card fried, then i tried another video card, same outcome. so i bought an isolation transformer. when connected to yet another video card the monitor worked.only there was only red on the screen no green or blue color, as u can see from earlier posts. 

anyway i had the monitor on for about 10 minutes, then the picture goes black, i smell something burning, i look over and theirs smoke coming out of the monitor, on closer inspection the smoke was coming from the big white rectangular 30w resistor. so i pull the plug out. wait 5 minutes plug it back in monitor doesn't come on and smoke starts coming from the resistor again.....

any ideas guys??

[grantspain]

yep,thats HOT,flyback and power transistor-maybe just the HOT which is a bu508a
do the resistor glow orange?

[CRiMiNaL]

i know what the flyback is (black block the anode cap wire is connected too). but HOT and power transistor, what are these?

also i put the multimeter prong on one side of the 30w resister and the other prong grounded to chassis, it then sparked and blew a fuse. (time-delay fuse 5MF 2A 250V)

[Thenasty]

while waiting for the Fuse, I suggest you double check your Hack cable (just to be on the safe side).
make sure all GROUNDS (RGB & GND) are all good and connected together.

A schematic could be found in B/S/F section.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=38228.0

[CRiMiNaL]

i actually have it hooked up to a pcb game board, not a computer this time around..