Konami FLAK ATTACK unusual behavior

rexscar

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Hi

I have a cocktail cab which the innards have been butchered to fit a later jamma board. It now contains Konami's Flak Attack, rather than space invaders :(
The problem I have is that once the machine has been on for a while the CRT suffers interference and a smell of burning circuitry emanates from within.
• Can anyone advise on what course of action to take?
• I have located a variable resistor that I cannot fathom the purpose of, perhaps this may ease the load on the original circuitry?
• Would it be best to find and older jamma board and give up on flak attack?
• any advice on replacing the crt with a flat screen?

Thank you in advance
:)
 
Take pictures of the monitor boards and post them here. We need to know what we're dealing with.

Something's getting hot, huh? Look for burn marks or toasty-looking components on the monitor boards. Check the game board too -- it might be something in the video output screwing up sync.

I wouldn't mess with a pot of which you don't know its purpose -- you may never get it dialed back in again. It could be something as simple as volume though.

If the game plays fine, leave the board alone.

LCD arcade monitors are still pretty flaky territory, even if you prefer pixel array technologies. They tend to use panels with incompatible resolutions and upscale badly.
 
Where's the "hot" smell coming from? The monitor or the power supply? It's kind of hard in a cocktail because everything is so crammed together. Could be caused by any number of things, but start by doing the obvious, check your power supply voltages, and make sure there is adequate ventilation in the cabinet. I can't remember if the Taito cabinets had fans or not.

Remove the monitor and carefully examine the chassis for evidence of heat damage.

Also, it is normal for arcade games to smell like hot electronics... because they do generate heat, and they're usually very dusty inside. Cleaning the dust out of the monitor will reduce this smell. Again, it's worse in the case of a cocktail cabinet because of how little space and airflow it has.

LCD's suck in arcade cabinets. The resolutions don't scale right, they look blocky and crappy, have poor black level, and they're expensive. They double suck in cocktails, because of their inherent problems with off-angle viewing. Much, much, much cheaper, easier and preferable to simply repair the existing CRT monitor.

-Ian
 
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