Well, I finally got around to capping the two monitors on my Punch-Out!! game, and let me tell you, it is a serious pain in the ass!

It is bad enough that the Sanyo 20-EZ monitors are pains to cap in the first place, there are even more so when mounted horizontally in a narrow cabinet! Took more than three(!) hours for me to do the first (upper) one. The second one was a bit faster, clocking in at about 1 hour and 45 minutes.

A bit of hard work, to be sure, but the results speak for themselves:

Before: Top Monitor Before


After: Top Monitor Before


Also, note that there is screen burn from the collapsed line that was there before. This means that the game was in operation for a long time while it needed a cap kit!

While working on the monitor chassis boards, I was never more happy to have purchased a soldering and desoldering station a couple of years ago (shown sitting atop the Punch-Out!!):

Soldering/Desoldering Station

And here you can get a shot of how I had to work on the board – dangling out of the cabinet, wires everywhere:

PCB Hanging Out

Oh, and how do ‘ya like my nice little way of securing the PCB in the air while I work on it? :)

Much thanks go to The Real Bob RobertsTM for the cap kits (I purchased the 20EZ Plus kit, which has 9 additional chassis caps), and to Brien King (no, I did not misspell Brien), which has a step-by-step guide to getting the chassis PCB out of the Sanyo 20-EZ monitor at Arcade Restoration Workshop. I used the document for the first monitor, and tackled the second one from memory.

I also cleaned and changed the spring on the joystick. It is no longer as sticky as it was before thanks to getting all that old dirty grease out of it. However, it is still far too loose for my taste. It is playable, and I have played games in the arcade in far worse condition, but it still would be nice to have it a bit stiffer.

Also replaced the batteries in it so that the high score table works correctly again. Surprisingly, there is not a lot of corrosion in there.

OK – I think it may be ready to sell soon…!

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Problem: Stiff spinning steering modules and hard shifting between gears

(Quick little story – while bringing this beast into its location, I fell and got pinned under it for a few minutes. It is amazing how much having your chest compressed effects your ability to call out for help! :)

OK – onto the next issue… Its steering wheels were pretty stiff, and if you tried to give them a good hard spin they would come to a halt within a couple of turns. Removing and disassembling them was easy. Turns out the problem was that the old grease in them had coagulated/thickened so that it was about as viscous and sticky as cold honey!

Getting the grease out of the barrel and off of the shaft and sleeves literally took ~10 minutes (for each module) with some rubbing alcohol, elbow grease and rags. I had a friend helping me (Sean) and we each tackled one sterring wheel each.

After getting that old gunk out, a quick application of some light lithium grease on everything solves that problem – the wheels will now spin for at least 10 turns easily.

For the shifter modules, I just applied some powered graphite to the shifter “ball” at the opening of the shifter and after a few shifts to get it all around, the shifts are much easier now.

Solution: Cleaned and lubricated the steering modules, lubricated the shifter modules.

Note: One of the steering modules has a broken shaft/cone, which caused the wheel to be off-center, and it was being held in place strictly by the force of the retaining bolt that goes through the entire assembly. I managed to get it a bit straighter than it was before, but it still is broken internally. Not sure if I want to go through sanding down the two halves to try to get them melded or epoxied together – I am afraid of shortening the cone too much and causing problems. The wheel works and the game is playable, so I might just leave it as it is.

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Problem: Static garbage on screen

Purchased a Sprint 2 in non-working condition. Saw a picture of it, monitor worked – it showing what appeared to be static garbage on it. Got it home and confirmed that yes, it is showing static garbage (first image below). Turning it off for a couple of seconds and then back on again keeps pretty much the same garbage display, but sometimes gets some sounds out of it (engine and/or screeching sounds). Moving the self-test switch does nothing. First suspect that CPU is not running, because the screen is static (i.e. not changing while the game is on).

Sprint 2 - Before

After checking the usual suspects (voltages, loose wires, harness/wire burns because this is an older Atari game…), I yank the CPU to see if I get the same results (to narrow it down to the CPU). This causes a different effect, a screen filled with a single character and I get sound, so I presume for now that the CPU is working and the problem lies elsewhere.

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Purchased described as “dead”. Started by creating a JAMMA adapter (I hate creating adapters, it is tedious work). Well, the description was correct – she is dead alright: screen has static garbage and required some tweaking to sync correctly on my test bench monitor.

Watchdog is barking, disabling it has no effect on the screen’s contents. Board already had some previous work done in it, solder-side contains more than 20 jumps to connect some RAMs back onto the bus. The Parts side shows the missing/removed/blown traces being jumped.

Started by checking the daughterboard, seems OK. Next I remove, socket and replace the 74LS245s on the board because word has it that they tend to be the cause of most problems, the Galaxian Trouble Shooting Logic Board manuals lists similar symptoms connected to those chips, and the Fluke 9010 troubleshooter says that the address lines are tied. Other than that, I cannot come up with a good way to check them! :)

Gotta wait for some replacement sockets and chips to come in…

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