D9400 to D9800 compatibility

[Undarated]

I recently purchased my first cab with a dead WG D9400 chassis.  Upon inspection it’s damaged to the point where it can’t be repaired. Having no luck finding a replacement, someone has offered a D9800 chassis but I’m not sure if it’s a drop in replacement for my existing tube.  Anyone have any insight on this? 

[lilshawn]

i'm going to go with a no, with a side of maybe kinda sorta.

see, the 98 is basically a boosted version of the 94 with additional capabilities.  problem is, the 9400 had a somewhat mismatched yoke thing happen that drove the yokes outside of their natural resonant frequency at certain resolutions. this caused them to basically fight being driven. so consequently they ran really hot causing multiple failures. (broken yoke plastics due to excess heat, internally shorted windings, chronically blowing HOT's, etc.) there was a mid cycle refresh of the 9400 that changed the regular old "clamped on" style yoke to a "bonded" style yoke that was epoxied onto the tube.

i believe the refreshed yoke CAN work with the 9800 chassis but not with the older style yoke but i'm not 100% on that...

yoke operation gets into some black magic/dark arts/voodoo shaman type stuff, where even a very small change makes a HUGE difference. kinda like RF radio stuff where putting 9 bends in specific places in a piece of wire used as an antenna.... somehow increases it's capability 4,000 times over.

i, personally, would take this question to wells gardner directly and ask them. an engineer there might be able to say, yeah, stick it on and put a 10k resistor here and a 0.047uf capacitor here in parallel across this thing and it'll work just fine.

not a cut a dry answer, but hopefully it helps out.

[Undarated]

Thank you for responding. You’re the only person I’ve had respond to any of the posts I’ve made on multiple forums.  I wish I would’ve gotten your response before going ahead with the purchase.  I read in different places where people referred to them as the same thing which is I thought it would work.  I’ve tried contacting Wells Gardner and they are no help at all on this situation. I’m pretty much left to my own devices with no certainty at all.  I guess when it arrives I’ll just have to see if it blows up or not. 

I guess if it doesn’t work out.  I’ll just toss the tube and the chassis and throw a tv tube with component in the cab and rock it that way.  I don’t know of any other 15k/31k screens that could replace the 27”. I appreciate your response brother.

[lilshawn]

TBH, there isn't a whole lot left to choose from. most of the manufacturers have ceased production, parts are getting pretty hard to come by.

also TBH, if you are going to be running 15k games, and you are set in running pure resolutions, it's best just to get a 15k monitor and run that. the 15k monitors like the wells gardner "K" series (k7400 k7500) or the "U" series (u2000 u3000 u5000 etc) are still a great workhorse and still tons of parts are available. they are single resolution analog monitors and work well as a set it and forget it setup.

digital monitors are okay in that you can switch resolutions and stuff on the fly, but have their own weaknesses. (often running hot and less than ideal at certain resolutions but okay in others.)

the digital monitors where basically end of life when they came out, so parts aren't as common.

secondly, just a suggestion...unless you are going to be running a lightgun game that requires CRT (not sure your plans) it's far easier to just toss an LCD in your cab and eliminate about 28 different problems and only have to deal with 2 or 3. i mean, take that advice with a grain of salt. I'm doing service in the arcade industry and unless a game specifically requires a CRT as mentioned above, it's getting yanked and replaced with LCD. games requiring the use of CRTs are getting these monitors while they still work... cause once they are gone, that's it...and i've had my fair share of grenade-ed unfixable CRT's (toast guns, flame enriched electronics, etc) with 100's of machines in our fleet, even i'm down to slim pickin's. Do what you like though, if you are set in running a CRT, go for it... but not running one is also something to seriously consider.

[Undarated]

Thanks for the advice.  Here's where I am.  I'm an old school arcade guy.  Grew up in the arcades playing pretty much playing anything I could get a hold of in the small town that I grew up in.  When Street Fighter 2 came along, I knew I had to have a cabinet.  I put the dream off until recently and just bought the only thing I could find that didn't cost 1,000's considering it would be a project to begin with.  With not having a lot of space, I'm heavy into emulation and don't really get into the debates surrounding its legitimacy.  Currently I have 3 different pcs setup to play different games from different eras in gaming.  So mainly I'm playing 15khz games and Naomi and Atomiswave games which are 31khz.  None which require a light gun.

Now the cab I have is a Dynamo HS-27 so I'm limited on how small I can go on the monitor.  If I can't get this monitor to work then I'm going to strip one the 27' Trinitrons I have in there and put my groovymame install in there and I'll just have to continue to play my vga games on my 17" trinitron pc crt.  I really don't want to do that but I guess I may have no other choice. 

As far as lcd's go, I've limited my gaming usage of them to the newer age stuff like Street Fighter 5 and such.  I guess I've just got to the point that I'm become hell bent on trying to play games in there correct resolutions. 

I have a question for you regarding vga monitors.  Whats the most common size monitor that accepts a vga signal? If I do end up having to put the GM setup in the other cabinet, maybe I can find another cab that will accept the monitor that I need.  Thanks again for responding. 

[lilshawn]

Whats the most common size monitor that accepts a vga signal? If I do end up having to put the GM setup in the other cabinet, maybe I can find another cab that will accept the monitor that I need.  Thanks again for responding. 

on the bigger side of things, mostly 27's and a few 25's accepted VGA, then it dipped down to 19 and 15 inches... which where basically repurposed VGA computer monitors.

by the time videogames hit 31k, 27" was the norm size for a cabinet....but there where a few manufactures that did 25's for retrofitting smaller cabinets with new games.

but lots of games came with dipswitch settings so you could set the resolution down to use 25k and 15k monitors... for those that didn't want to drop 500 or 600 on a new monitor. so the 25" 31k monitor is a bit on the rare side.

for modern LCD monitors, about 80% of them still accept VGA. usually a 26" widescreen monitor fits fairly well in most cabinets. Benq makes some pretty good IPS panel monitors that work good computers (obviously) but also sync good with xxx-in-1 boards and whatnot. (that is if you can put up with some stretching of a 4:3 to 16:9 and TBH, once you start playing, you don't notice it.)

if you are stuck on 4:3 you are going to have to shell out 600+ bucks for a 27" CRT. (xarcade SAYS they have some but who knows)...search for a 4:3 aspect LCD panel of appropriate size (suzo happ mentioned a 750 tag on some of their bigger 26" LCD monitors... and even then i think they are still 16:9)

[Undarated]

Thanks for the info man.  It looks like I’m left tearing down my groovymame 27” consumer tv and throwing it in for 15k games only. I’ll try to find another cab with a working vga monitor for 31k games. I’m stuck on native resolutions for some reason. Maybe I’m trying to recreate what I remember playing some of my favorite arcade games on.  I don’t think an lcd would satisfy me.

[lilshawn]

LCD's are a lot better these days than they used to be...if you have horsepower to spare, the software emulation of CRT scanlines and effects can make things pretty close.