Arcade Otaku - アーケード オタク

Hi all,

I recently purchased my first candy cab, a stock Astro City. Apologies in advance for the long post -- just want to make sure I explain everything correctly.

The person who sold it to me noted a problem with the monitor, and that there was a "trick" to get it working. Upon initial powerup, the cabinet and board would boot up fine, but the monitor would stay blank. He thought it had to do with a failing capacitor taking time to charge. After a few minutes, you would cycle the power on/off, and repeat until the tube would come on. The boards booted fine and you'd hear sound and what not, just no picture. I verified this when picking it up, and figured I'd have it looked at later.

After getting the cabinet to my place, I plugged in a board and fired the thing up. No picture, as expected. After a few restarts, the tube came on, but the picture was distorted, lots of snow and fuzziness. I fiddled with the pots on the control board and was able to make out faint sprites from the game, but they were mostly lost in the snow.

I noticed the horizontal size didn't seem to go to the edges of the screen even when the pot was maxed, and kept fiddling with it. After a few minutes, the screen instantly snapped into perfect focus/picture. I twisted it again and it returned to snow, and then lost picture entirely.

Now the tube shows no picture no matter what I do. At this point, it doesn't even appear to be powering on (no whine/static). A friend who owns two Astro City cabs came over and brought a spare MS9-29 to install, but it was missing the control board so we weren't able to install it. We did however take out the monitor and look over it, dusted and cleaned it off. We checked for bad caps and didn't see anything, and attempted to power the monitor outside of the cabinet to no avail.

So as it stands, the tube doesn't appear to get a picture or power up at all. It's possible during moving something was knocked loose or the monitor was failing and finally failed (as evidenced by the pre-existing issue).

Does anyone have advice for troubleshooting or repair? What should my next steps be? Send the chassis off to be inspected/repaired? Recap it myself? Buy a new chassis?

FWIW, I'm in the New York City metro area. Happy to pay an experienced arcade monitor technician or candy cab enthusiast to check it out and fix it if you're nearby.

Thanks for reading!

PS: Going to cross-post this to a few other forums. Sorry if you've seen this post elsewhere!

Best bet is to send the chassis off for repair.

Could just be something simple like a dry solder joint or a failing component, but if you don't know what you're doing, there are lethal amounts of electrical charge in there.

could be as simple as the crt socket bad solder joints and the 250v cap on the neck card

Sounds like a bad cap in the PSU section of the monitor as it would explain the sparkles, H size two small and the not powering up. If it is sooner or later it could damage something else on the chassis.

It wont be the cap on the neck board as the chassis will run without that, all be it with a grey raster.

Nice to see you Craig, hope you are keeping well.

Here's an update...

I installed a new Nanao MS8-29 that I purchased from alienmame. Install went easily enough, powered it on and VOILA, picture!

Immediately noticed a high pitched tone. Not so much the normal CRT whine, but an actual tone that I've never heard on a monitor before. Seemed to go away after a few minutes. Adjusted focus/brightness/RGB on the boards and installed back in cabinet.

And then the same stuff happened as last time. Adjusted some of the pots on a new control board, and lost picture (tube turned off). Toggled power and was able to get it to come back on. Hooked up my MAME PC and noticed when switching resolutions from VGA (interlaced) to CGA, the tube would cut out or start displaying noise and rolling. Towards the end it was collapsing and finally cut out for good. Now I haven't been able to get it to come back on by toggling power.

Is it possible my cabinet is just frying chassis? Or the tube is going bad? The picture on the tube looked fine once adjusted, but I had this working for maybe 15 minutes max before it died in a similar fashion to my initial problem.

Are there any cabinet techs in the New York City metro area I might be able to call to take a look at it?

HI d00d,

I have a strong suspicion that MAME forced the monitor into a resolution it didn't support and then went POP! after a few moments.

Someone with more experience may wish to confirm.

HTH

Cheers,

Ralph.

Hooked up my MAME PC and noticed when switching resolutions from VGA (interlaced) to CGA

Ouch. Monitors generally don't like frequencies higher than they support. This could have easily killed the chassis.

It's hooked up to a J-PAC, so it was no higher than 640x480 interlaced @ 15kHz. And otherwise tested with an actual JAMMA board, so it wasn't that...

Dunno about MS8s, but MS9s do not seem to like ArcadeVGA/J-PACs sync or resolution changes. I was getting a garbled screen like you were on sync/res changes. I worked around it at the time by waiting till the PC fully booted before switching the cab on.

You didn't mess with the B+ did you? The squealing may just have been a resonating transformer, not a major problem.

Rossyra wrote:Dunno about MS8s, but MS9s do not seem to like ArcadeVGA/J-PACs sync or resolution changes. I was getting a garbled screen like you were on sync/res changes. I worked around it at the time by waiting till the PC fully booted before switching the cab on.

You didn't mess with the B+ did you? The squealing may just have been a resonating transformer, not a major problem.

Hm, it seemed fine. I don't think it was going wonky due to the resolution, it seemed more like the monitor was stressed out no matter what and having issues, and then finally went kaput.

I keep thinking the cab is "fying" them. Could it be a grounding issue/short?

alienmame wrote:HI d00d,

I have a strong suspicion that MAME forced the monitor into a resolution it didn't support and then went POP! after a few moments.

Someone with more experience may wish to confirm.

HTH

Cheers,

Ralph.

Not possible since the J-PAC/ArcadeVGA combo won't output more than 15kHz with the settings I have on it... Also this happened with a normal JAMMA game, and the previous chassis that I had. It's almost as if the cabinet is frying them :(

Are you feeding the cab 100v?

Rossyra wrote:Are you feeding the cab 100v?

US mains power, so 110-120V.

astrocitynoob wrote:

Rossyra wrote:Are you feeding the cab 100v?

US mains power, so 110-120V.

That would be a "no," then.
Remember that US mains can be as high as 126V (the socket my Blast is connected to outputs about 123V).

I think you might wanna to meter your mains...

not sure if you would require an isolation transformer for the monitor

We have two other Astro City cabs with Wei Ya chassis running off of the same mains -- would it really vary that much?

astrocitynoob wrote:We have two other Astro City cabs with Wei Ya chassis running off of the same mains -- would it really vary that much?

Per the wiki, "If you’re in the US, you can run the machine directly off the mains. Even though the US standard is 120V, mains voltage fluctuates more than you might think and power supplies are built with tolerances to withstand this. If you want to be extra cautious you can always use a transformer." http://wiki.arcadeotaku.com/w/Beginners ... Candy_Cabs"

Is this not correct?

astrocitynoob wrote:We have two other Astro City cabs with Wei Ya chassis running off of the same mains -- would it really vary that much?

the wei ya monitors if they are 666a have a switch mode power supply so can take direct mains from 90-255vac,with the ms8/9 they are 100-120vac but of course i have always run them using a stepdown,I would imagine they run direct from mains in Japan but nothing explains your issue-you have checked with a 15khz board so that rules out any frequency issue.
It is possible your tube/yoke has a problem.

grantspain wrote:

astrocitynoob wrote:We have two other Astro City cabs with Wei Ya chassis running off of the same mains -- would it really vary that much?

the wei ya monitors if they are 666a have a switch mode power supply so can take direct mains from 90-255vac,with the ms8/9 they are 100-120vac but of course i have always run them using a stepdown,I would imagine they run direct from mains in Japan but nothing explains your issue-you have checked with a 15khz board so that rules out any frequency issue.
It is possible your tube/yoke has a problem.

Yep, I've checked with a 15kHz game.