I had another thread started but it was a bit of a freak out as I had just picked up the Tempest and was concerned because the monitor was acting up. I wanted to start a new, more organized thread to document fixing this and to get pointers along the way.
So, the story goes that I picked up a Tempest about a week ago. It played great at the seller's house, loaded it up in the back of my van and got it home. When I powered it up after I got it home all I was getting was a vertical line up the middle of the monitor. I found that if I wiggled the top card edge connector that plugs into the game pcb I could get the full screen back. Got the monitor size/shape adjusted so it looked good but I was getting a some pincushioning in the top and bottom. But the game played so I left it as is.
I played a few games over the next couple days until two days ago when I played the game for about 20 minutes, went to find something in our basement storage and came back and played a game of Mario Bros. Sometime during my MB game the Tempest screen apparently went black. It still coined up and made game sounds and I could hear the monitor making "raster" sounds at the back of the cab though the spot killer LED is lit. In the past couple days I've done a lot of reading as this is my first vector monitor to work on. Alejandromad had previously worked on this chassis and installed new transistors and the LV2000.
I read on a K6100 flowchart (http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/F_VAtari7.html#VATARI_001) that the first thing I should try is turning up the brightness control on the HV pcb. I assume that is the "screen" knob on what I would call the flyback (although I've been told it's not actually a flyback on vector monitors). In doing that I found out that I now have a horizontal line running across the middle of the monitor. You can see the colors moving and changing in that line so something is still happening. The next step asks if I see a dot in the middle of the screen. I assume this indicates that the spot killer is active and has shut down everything except the Z-axis(?). Anyways, since I see a line instead of a dot I would think the answer to the "do you see a dot" question would be "no".
Before I go any further I am going to do 2 things.
1) I'm going to spend some times looking at the wire connectors at the pcb since previously that changed things on the monitor. It's possible I have a broken wire or a pin that isn't making good contact.
2) I'm going to pull the chassis and do a search for any cracked solder joints. I already looked over the game pcb and did not see anything suspicious.
I'll leave it at that and report back with what I find in the wire connector and/or deflection pcb solder joints. Unless someone has an idea of something else I should look at first.
Lots of writing... I'll leave it at that.
So, the story goes that I picked up a Tempest about a week ago. It played great at the seller's house, loaded it up in the back of my van and got it home. When I powered it up after I got it home all I was getting was a vertical line up the middle of the monitor. I found that if I wiggled the top card edge connector that plugs into the game pcb I could get the full screen back. Got the monitor size/shape adjusted so it looked good but I was getting a some pincushioning in the top and bottom. But the game played so I left it as is.
I played a few games over the next couple days until two days ago when I played the game for about 20 minutes, went to find something in our basement storage and came back and played a game of Mario Bros. Sometime during my MB game the Tempest screen apparently went black. It still coined up and made game sounds and I could hear the monitor making "raster" sounds at the back of the cab though the spot killer LED is lit. In the past couple days I've done a lot of reading as this is my first vector monitor to work on. Alejandromad had previously worked on this chassis and installed new transistors and the LV2000.
I read on a K6100 flowchart (http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/F_VAtari7.html#VATARI_001) that the first thing I should try is turning up the brightness control on the HV pcb. I assume that is the "screen" knob on what I would call the flyback (although I've been told it's not actually a flyback on vector monitors). In doing that I found out that I now have a horizontal line running across the middle of the monitor. You can see the colors moving and changing in that line so something is still happening. The next step asks if I see a dot in the middle of the screen. I assume this indicates that the spot killer is active and has shut down everything except the Z-axis(?). Anyways, since I see a line instead of a dot I would think the answer to the "do you see a dot" question would be "no".
Before I go any further I am going to do 2 things.
1) I'm going to spend some times looking at the wire connectors at the pcb since previously that changed things on the monitor. It's possible I have a broken wire or a pin that isn't making good contact.
2) I'm going to pull the chassis and do a search for any cracked solder joints. I already looked over the game pcb and did not see anything suspicious.
I'll leave it at that and report back with what I find in the wire connector and/or deflection pcb solder joints. Unless someone has an idea of something else I should look at first.
Lots of writing... I'll leave it at that.

