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Star Wars upright - restoration
Level42:
OK, I forgot, did you get this cab in one piece, I mean was the Amplifone separate from the cab when you got it ?
That could explain that the diodes are not there. If the diodes are not there the resistors are probably not there either.
You need to add them because the Star Wars game really stretched the Amplifone to the max. The big explosion of the BattleStar f.i. are actualy "overloading" the Amplifone a bit. Jed Margolin, who was the hardware designer explains why and how on his site.
Here's the quote:
In order to have the Death Star explode the way we wanted it to, it wasn't enough to draw lots of concentric circles. Note from Level42: This is kind of funny, because that is exactly what you see when you run it in Mame on a raster CRT !!!
We wanted to defocus the beam to fill it in. We briefly considered adding a vacuum tube to the monitor to control the Focus Voltage. Fortunately, the lead time for the part was too long. So what I did was to give the Vector Generator the ability to overdrive the monitor's color inputs. Overdriving the inputs causes the CRT to draw more current than it normally uses and drags down the High Voltage., which changes the normal ratio of Focus Grid voltage to Anode voltage, which defocuses the beam. This relationship is explained in The Secret Life of XY Monitors.
[end of quote]
From the moment I read that, I wondered if this could have played a role in the early death of the red original HVT's........what Jed is saying here is that he's overloading the HVT. Although not for a really long time, I guess it doesn't help. Atari also later put out service bulletins NOT to let these screens steady on the monitor. Via a dip-switch you can run the game fame-by-frame. I havent tried it yet, but it's nice (especialy to get good screen-shots I guess). If you'de advance to the explosion screen and keep it there for some time (let's say 15 minutes), I bet you're going to blow some parts, OR burn the CRT...
Anyway, that's all back-ground info.
I've heared about blue, green and beige PCB's, but not white one's. Could you put up some pics ?
shilmover:
--- Quote from: Level42 on November 02, 2007, 03:09:50 pm ---OK, I forgot, did you get this cab in one piece, I mean was the Amplifone separate from the cab when you got it ?
--- End quote ---
Yes... all together...
--- Quote from: Level42 on November 02, 2007, 03:09:50 pm ---I've heared about blue, green and beige PCB's, but not white one's. Could you put up some pics ?
--- End quote ---
Beige... I think its Beige... I will post some pics tonight.
Level42:
We just figured out that the Beige and Green PCB's have the resistors and diodes neatly on the component side :)
shilmover:
So I lied... my board is green... :P
As you can see on nothing on the back:
Here is VR1:
Here is VR2:
I will check the resistors... Any chance that the Diodes are bad? If so, how do I test them?
shilmover:
I also decided to start stripping down the cabinet so that I can clean the inside (its absolutely filthy) and give it a couple coats of paint inside to get rid of the dusty/musky smell.
As you can see, the back was in really bad shape, so I decided to remove them and rebuild them...
Here is the top piece/Handle. The screws holding it on were rusted, a couple broke, a couple came out and a couple would not move... out came the handy dremel and it made short order of that... I then found out that it is glued at the top (:hissy:) and stapled on the side... a bit of elbow grease and it came out (in many pieces!!). You can also see that at some point the door was forced open (the lock is broken) and the piece was broken:
The door was in worse shape, but it came out easy. :P
The bottom part was in really rough shape too. Not as noticeable in this picture, but the lip that held the door on was in terrible shape. Had the same issues removing this as the upper one. Good old dremel!!!
Here is the cab naked (NSFW!!) >:D:
Here is the replacement top made out of 3/4" Particle board (like the original). I have not sanded the opening yet, and was able to save the original cover that went on the inside and it can be seen on the left (did not take a pic of that, but will do so when its complete). I just need to sand, route the grove and paint:
Here is it in the cabinet. Notice that part of the top board broke, so I will need to fix that:
And here is the replacement bottom. Needs to be routed and painted. A piece broke near the power cable opening on the right, but its on the inside:
More to come...
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