Monthly Archives: February 2013

Mr. Do’s Failing Capacitors

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The board set from the $25 Mr. Do works in spite of the deplorable condition of everything around it. I pulled out the guts of the cabinet to test it in friendlier and less spider infested conditions. Ended up being able to run through diagnostics once and get a game to start before the Videomaster 13 I had the board attached to started to go dim, droop on one side, and start making some awful noise from the flyback transformer. It looked nice while it lasted!

I tried to hook the board up to a VGA adapter but can’t get the thing to sync for more than a second or two before it goes back to claiming no signal.

Next step is rebuilding some monitors I guess…

Nothing should have that many legs

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The gross bracket situation put a stop to any work on Mr. Do, but I still had the G07 to drop into Centipede. That one went in easy since the cab is as it came from the factory and the Atari engineers actually gave a damn about ease of service. I brought the machine up and the monitor showed nice picture. Unfortunately, it was a picture of total garbage.

I cleaned up the PCB edge connector with some Deoxit and removed all kinds of grossness there. Still nothing. Reseating the ROMs on the PCB was next. That got some results!

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Still need to adjust the monitor a bit and do a proper rebuild of the trackball. I cleaned it up a lot but the rollers and bearings were neglected long enough to have rusted and the movement is quite rough.

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Said to be playable with that crust on the rollers. Must have been a way tougher game that way!

They’re coming out of the walls!

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Went out on Friday to go pick up some working monitors I’d heard were available since I have a feeling the repairs on the ones I have are going to take a while. The price was good enough I took the whole group.

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One is a G07, another is a K4600 variant, but the third is kind of an oddball.

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I’ve never seen one of these before. Chassis board is labeled Videomaster13 and the tube is a Samsung unit.

I also noticed the interface board for the K4600 I just got is different from the one on the K4600 in the Mr. Do machine.

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Still need to research what the difference is (I know they take different sync signals at the very least).

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I was going to swap the new to me K4600 into Mr. Do but then found that it had the shittiest brackets ever installed when it was converted. Two pieces of angle stock with four bolts… No support for the rear of the chassis or anything for the monitor to rest on when it is unbolted. Definitely a two person job to remove.

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Also found this when I was having a closer look at the interior of the cab. Original Game Plan Inc. tag for Megatack.