Recently acquired a Centipede Cocktail, S/N #312 so it was an early unit that had a hard life with lots of parts replaced. But it worked, so I did a cosmetic refurbish along with a full recap on all boards, rebuilt the trackball, and got it physically looking and playing great. Centipede was always my favorite golden-era arcade title, so it's funny and neat that this fell into my lap as my first arcade machine!

Buuut (of course!)...

Long story short, the 14" Matsushita / Atari monitor is shot.

Long story shared: when acquired, it had major convergence, purity, and tracking issues. In fact it wouldn't even display a picture but I got that sorted and went from there. Did a full recap which helped, then adjusting convergence and such helped a little more... but ultimately illustrated the green gun was incredibly weak. Red and Blue on their lowest settings were way above what green would output on max! Had to set tube brightness nearly max just to even see green, which then caused scan lines and other issues. Green was so weak you still couldn't converge to colors like white or even yellow, and if a room light was on nearby you couldn't see any of the "green" at all.

For diagnosis & troubleshooting, I swapped the drive transistors, then pots... no change. So I called a local-ish collector with decades of experience in arcade CRTs. He used a Sencore tester which confirmed the green gun was in fact extremely weak. So we ran the rejuve process, knowing the risks and caveats. And wouldn't you know it, the R and B turned out even more vivid than before! But now G is completely dead. Gone. Nothing. Made to black. There's other issues with this monitor too, that for brevity I won't get into so, bah: Probably need to cut my losses and find a new CRT to swap in.

But I've no idea where to begin seeing as how they're scarce these days.

Hoping somebody here knows a source (preferably nearby?)... or maybe has one to part with? Not looking for pristine perfection: just something with all three colors in balance, etc. And yes I can try recapping, converging, etc, if you have one that needs it and don't want to fool with it. Just needs to be a 14" to fit the cocktail cabinet.

Or maybe you know a miracle means to fix what I have but my understanding is that it's likely a fool's errand.

(If anyone needs a 14" Atari/Matsushita chassis, freshly recapped and verified good, LMK...)

Bah, we didn't catch that BUT the manual for his Sencore tester had the setup info for this specific tube listed (we got the ID from the Atari manual schematic: 370GHB22) so fairly sure that didn't cause us a problem.

But I appreciate your advice... beggars can't be choosers and all so sure, if I can only find a 120V tube then I guess I'll need to add the transformer, at least there's room in the cabinet

Bump for the evening crowd...

Wow! That looks way better than what I was dealing with for sure (such as burn in, and the fact the convergence ring slip yoke *shattered* once loosened, ugh - but I was willing to deal with those if I could get the colors right) and OMG there's *white and yellow*, they do exist!

So talk about serendipity: the proper CRT minus chassis, from a Centipede cocktail no less, to go with my now-CRT-less rebuilt chassis. It's like this was meant to be LOL... 'cept I'm almost afraid to ask what shipping that would cost. Charlotte's in "day drive" range (done it a few times) but would probably cost more. But dang, that looks like better than I could've hoped for.

I'm also kind of curious, what happened to the machine? Panels look in good shape and that speaker is way beefier than what's in mine ha ha.

Thanks and a PM will be coming your way...

UPDATE: On his way back from vacation, a retired friend picked up the tube from amxfc3s on Monday (all of 20 mins juked from his normal route!) and delivered it to me - some ~350mi away - yesterday. The swap into my rebuilt chassis was easy, and when I turned it on WOW I could not believe how fantastic it looks! This "new" old CRT may as well be "actually" new! It's insanely bright and vivid, with color I just couldn't coax out of the old... I mean I knew the old one was past its prime but man, it truly was a lost cause from the start.

A little fine tuning and degaussing may yet be in order but for now, it's grand. Oy but I forgot how pleasing the glow of a fresh CRT can be.

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What a perfect storm of happy coincidental little miracles! Big thanks again to amxfc3s and others who chipped in assistance! Faith in humanity: increased

Ha ha! I'm no monitor tech, but back in the 90's I often messed with old PC monitors. Didn't really know what I was doing, but I managed to eke a few of them back into usable shape, sometimes with very unorthodox methods So yeah, this Matsushita isn't convenient to work on at all. Even ignoring that Atari only barely made the harness long enough to banjo the chassis out of the cab, the chassis controls suck. Like, I get it on one hand because how often should you have to do it but dang, everything seems unnecessarily buried and risky.

But I will say this: when I swapped the new tube in I was so thrilled with its appearance being so immediately, significantly better, I didn't bother to tune it. Because if it wasn't obviously "broke" I wasn't going to fix because yeah, PITA. Yet after later/recently playing another Centipede at a show I realized "hmm, this one is better still" so I went back to mine and ran the adjustments. WOW but they made a next-level bump and the difference is amazing! No warm-up period, no scan lines, no bleed, and it turned out I was missing a couple of the finer gradient colors until I really dialed the drives and got them all in balance. On low brightness no less, so burn-in shouldn't be an acute worry either.

So yeah, PITA or not, it's worth trying to tune these things. To do that you really do need the official Atari-Matsushita CRT manual, and the game schematic that tells how to display the test pattern.

And worth it: IMO there is something downright magical about the color schemes in Centipede, with all the various contrasting neon outlines on the mushrooms, the poisoned ones, etc. Apparently I never outgrew kindergarten, or I have a secret fetish for Lisa Frank, but trying to see all the color schemes is a big draw to the game for me. The CRT glow just makes it perfect.