I have an old Cinematronics arcade game that I had to take the monitor out of and in doing so had to remove the connector that goes to the neck of the monitor. When I went to replace it, I found that it can go on any direction. There are 7 pins in a circular pattern (evenly spaced) and 8 holes in the connector, so one must go unused. But the question is, which one? The thing is not keyed in any way. There is a notch on the connector itself but no corresponding mark to show where it goes. I tried putting it on the way it "naturally" seemed to want to go but it didn't work. So then I tried pointing the notch toward where there was a "missing" pin but that didn't work either. So 2 questions: 1) how do I determine which way it should go? and 2) How likely is it that I have now fried something?
post this question on rec.games.video.arcade.collecting you will get an answer within seconds. those guys are great. i have some but not cinematronics, sorry.
An easy way is to trace out the heater connections at the connector. This should be 6 or 12 Volts depending on the CRT type. Then using an ohm meter, find the heater pins on the tube. Match these up, and it should work out, unless there are other problems.
Thank you all. I was able to get it back on the right way. But alas, I'm still having my original problem. Perhaps someone here can give me a pointer. It's an old vector monitor and the entire picture is way off center. To the point where it wraps around off the side. I've tried all the adjustments but to no avail. Someone suggested replacing the deflection transistors which I just did. But it's still not working. What would you check next? I'm strictly an amateur at this but have a bit of experience. So laymans terms please! Thank you!
those vector monitors are totally different animals that rasters. the guys in rec.games.video.arcade.collecting are the experts there. they been keeping those going for years.
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Vector monitors are line drawers, rather than raster scanned, where the beam intensity is modulated to produce a line of pixels. A true circle, for instance, can be drawn by applying the appropriate drives to the horizontal and vertical deflection output stages. Think giant 'scope tube. A good example of a game that used them, that you might remember, was Tank Battle. A stroke monitor was used here to be able to get rapid manipulation of the pseudo 3D image that the game produced. When the graphics system only has to produce endpoint co-ordinates for the lines or vectors, much less processing power and display memory is required. Downside is brightup points on the vector ends at direction changes etc. I used to work on a colour 3D graphics system for CAD work. Used another variation of the stroke writer display, called a beam penetration tube. Final anode voltage was modulated to produce the different colours of the strokes. AIR, it had three different phosphor colours, laid on top of each other. When the final anode voltage was at its lowest, only the phosphor closest to the gun was excited by the beam. Its light shone through the outer two phosphor layers. When the voltage was cranked up to the next level, the beam was accelerated harder, and penetrated the first layer of phosphor, to excite the middle layer, which then shone out through the outermost layer. When the voltage was at full, the outer layer of phosphor was lit up. The colour differences were limited, and not particularly spectacular, but for close up viewing by a CAD operator, were good enough to enhance the visualisation of a 3D engineering drawing of an aircraft part or whatever.
I also used to work on a true 3D visualisation unit called SpaceGraph. This used a stroke writer mounted above a vibrating plexiglass mirror, and produced true 3D wireframe images that floated in space above the mirror. Interestingly, the monitor that was used, could be put into a raster scan mode, where pixels were produced on multiple time divided rasters, synchronised to the mirror movement, to produce solid rasterised 3D images. There was a particularly impressive demo image of a skull in this format. These volume related pixels, were called voxels. We once showed the machine on a TV science programme, and I was amazed that the shoulder mounted 2D TV camera that they used to show the effect, was actually able to look round the image as it floated in space. I had assumed, prior to seeing that, that the effect was generated by a combination of stereoscopic vision, and brain-fooling.
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