Asteroids Deluxe Cocktail monitor fades out...

[ArtMAME]

Good day gentlemen.

I have an Asteroids Deluxe Cocktail with a Wells Gardner 15V2000. 

When I power up the game, no image but plays blind.    If I mess with the Contrast and Brightness pots on the monitor chassis, eventually the image comes up fine.  Sometimes the image will fade out after a couple of minutes.     Sometimes it will stay up with no problems.

If I get the image up, then it fades out, then it is difficult or impossible to get the image back up again no matter how much I mess with the pots, 

On a few ocasions when the image was up, I tapped the edge connector and the image flickered a little like it wanted to fade out.   

Does anybody recognize this problem or have any suggestions???

When the image comes up, it is nice and bright and beautiful.  The moitor chassis looks really clean.  The cabinet is in excellent shape, and has a tax license from 1983, so the game has probably been in storage, and/or seen home use only since that time.  Does not look like the electronics have been serviced for a while.  The board is clean but it does have a few jumper wires on the underside.

I have replaced the Atari Big Blue cap already.  I am thinking of doing a cap kit for the A/R board and maybe the monitor. 

I have done some research and I am not sure if a WG 19V2000 cap kit is compatible with a WG 15V2000.  I seem to remember not being able to find a cap kit specifically for the 15V2000.   

Any suggestions would be appreciated 

[grantspain]

have you checked for dry solder joints yet?
when the picture disappears can you bring it back up using the screen volts on the flyback?
i had a similar fault to this on a ducksan and it was the flyback faulty,i am not saying this is your fault its just a possibility its most likely some cap

[ChadTower]

Retin the edge contacts on every edge connector, repin the harnesses.  That will clear up a LOT of the issues in an Atari cab.

[ArtMAME]

Retin the edge contacts on every edge connector, repin the harnesses.  That will clear up a LOT of the issues in an Atari cab.

Thanks, for the reply.

Pardon my ignorance, but how do you repin the edge connector and harness?

Any tutorials out there, or is it just a simple process that could be illustrated in a few sentences? 

Any thing I would need to order for that?

Thanks again.

[ArtMAME]

Oh, you mean re-tin the edge contacts, I thought you said re-PIN...  OK that sounds simple enough. 

Now how would you re-pin the harness?

[ChadTower]

I can't really give a complete detailed guide but that is probably already out there.  Here's a quick one:

Each wire has a contact pin crimped onto the end and then inserted into a slot in the edge connector.  Those pins get old, the metal loses its spring tension, their resistance goes up causing heat causing failure.  Atari harnesses are well known for this.

The corrective action is to pull each individual pin out of its edge connector, remove the old pin, crimp on a new one, and place it back into the connector.  There are a lot of them and it will take a while.  The results will surprise you, though, as often this is all it takes to clear up many otherwise hard to find problems and will definitely head off future hard to find problems.

Or you could buy a new wire harness but be sure it is listed as having been re-pinned.

[ArtMAME]

Thanks for the advice ChadTower... I will look into re-pinning. 

I re-tinned the edge connector contacts, but no improvement.   

[ChadTower]

Yeah, only doing half of the connection doesn't usually fix much.

[castlesteve]

Hey Art... i sent you an email.

But i have a fully working cocktail monitor from an Atari millipede that you may be interested in

-Steve

[cw]

Hey Art... i sent you an email.

But i have a fully working cocktail monitor from an Atari millipede that you may be interested in

-Steve

umm millipede is a rastar standard res game... asteroids deluxe uses a vector monitor...

[ChadTower]

And there's no such thing as a cocktail monitor.  They're the same as standup monitors, just often smaller models.