Pinball Wizard
Well-known member
I just got home from scoring 2 vector games at a cheap price from CL. A tempest and a Star Castle are now in my collection. Pics coming soon....
I got there and the guy plugged in the star castle and it did nothing but light the marquee. Got the back ripped off of it and it has heater glow and that's it. Cabinet is done from water damage, it leans so badly that I feel as if I will look at it one time and it will be on its side. Board has issues, led on CPU board flickers. Checked voltage and it seems low maybe, since I couldn't find a volt meter and just used an o scope, so no exact reading.
Tempest looks really nice except for some minor scratches and one corner is cracked. Guy plugs it in and it appears to work except for one of the deflections are out. No biggie, these monitors never work anyways, and the guy says maybe a fuse and I hold in a laugh. I get back and unloaded, see that there are 2 fuses missing, one for main power (monitor still will work with only one of the 2 main power lines), and one for deflection. I slap the 2 fuses in and I have a sweet looking monitor color wise. The game is all garbled so I reseat one connector at a time and the main connector to the aux board fixes the issue of garble. Now I see the game for a split second and then it disappears like it is resetting in an infinite loop. At this point I check 5 volts and it is good, on the money. Don't know where to go next yet but it's coming together.
I got there and the guy plugged in the star castle and it did nothing but light the marquee. Got the back ripped off of it and it has heater glow and that's it. Cabinet is done from water damage, it leans so badly that I feel as if I will look at it one time and it will be on its side. Board has issues, led on CPU board flickers. Checked voltage and it seems low maybe, since I couldn't find a volt meter and just used an o scope, so no exact reading.
Tempest looks really nice except for some minor scratches and one corner is cracked. Guy plugs it in and it appears to work except for one of the deflections are out. No biggie, these monitors never work anyways, and the guy says maybe a fuse and I hold in a laugh. I get back and unloaded, see that there are 2 fuses missing, one for main power (monitor still will work with only one of the 2 main power lines), and one for deflection. I slap the 2 fuses in and I have a sweet looking monitor color wise. The game is all garbled so I reseat one connector at a time and the main connector to the aux board fixes the issue of garble. Now I see the game for a split second and then it disappears like it is resetting in an infinite loop. At this point I check 5 volts and it is good, on the money. Don't know where to go next yet but it's coming together.
