Black tape on Battlezone crt

Lumonic

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I pulled off the gels off my periscope Battlezone to replace them and clean. I noticed there is black tape across the bottom of the crt. It definitely looks stock but I have not seen this on anyone else's BZ crts. Any idea why this is there?
 

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Maybe to hide the copyright date?

I had an Asteroids on my Omaha route that had a rectangle of silver paint over the copyright date on the CRT.
 
Maybe to hide the copyright date?

I had an Asteroids on my Omaha route that had a rectangle of silver paint over the copyright date on the CRT.
You mean where it says Atari 1980 or something? That's much higher on the CRT. All the burn in is from Battlezone graphics so I'm pretty sure it's the original monitor too.
 
You mean where it says Atari 1980 or something? That's much higher on the CRT. All the burn in is from Battlezone graphics so I'm pretty sure it's the original monitor too.
Yes, that's what I mean.

It may be there just to hide screen garbage. On Gottlieb Reactor, if you don't have the bezel in, you can see "stuff" on the right side of the screen. The same thing happens with Williams Stargate. Those are both raster games, but it could just be to give a clear bottom to the display or truncate any curvature at the bottom of the screen.
 
Black electrical tape is a common find on Atari vectors which used a mirror.
Why? Well, sometimes tape is needed for the cardboard surround (or colored overlay) to position it correctly, or other times to attach more black cardboard to stop light ingress into the viewing area. Not to imply this was a factory method ... likely more after-the-fact. YMMV
 
This looks stock and it was under the gels which appear to never have been removed. It's a paper tape, what we called camera tape. Black and non-reflective so you dont get light bouncing off stuff when you are shooting stuff,

Ill scrape it off, if it needs to be there I can always replace it, I have a roll of it somewhere.
 
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