That's the neck-board of the CRT... that isn't where main power is disconnected from the monitor... you need not mess with that.

There should be a rectangular 3 pin connector... with three wires, white, black and green. Similar to what you see in this picture. Probably on the right side looking into the rear of the cabinet. The one you see in this picture is the power to the computer... but that's what your looking for.

Be careful messing around with that monitor.... especially if it has been powered up recently. The tube (where the HV cable connects to the cup) can hold a charge. If you are going to remove it, you need to disconnect the main power (what you are looking for) and the video cable that connects the monitor chassis to the computer (unplug it from the computer... leave it connected to the monitor for now)... AND the lamp tube power as it is attached to the monitor frame (it uses the same type connector). Once all the cables are disconnected, remove the 4 bolts and lift it out carefully.

Disclaimer on my instructions: I'm assuming it is 100% factory and hasn't been hacked or re-wired. People tend to make a mess of these things when they work on them or do any sort of conversion.

power (resized).jpg

No, that is the neck board. Be real careful around the CRT's neck.
There will be another board, where those wires are connected to. That's the chassis, and that will have the 120v plug.

Thanks for these responses. I was able to successfully detach the monitor.

It's located somewhere else. Easiest way to figure it out woukd likely be to trace the power cord from the PC and see where it goes. Barring that, look for a black, white green wire (line, neutral, earth) going to the monitor main chassis.

I am joining the club shortly!

Machines running nucore/pinbox can still accept quarters (are not home use only)?

They can accept currency; I've fixed a few on routes.

Picked up an RFM with a 16:9 lcd with the 4:3 image stretched that makes the game “not quite right”

What is the proper size 4:3 lcd monitor to use?

9

I picked up the ONN lcd monitor from Walmart and it looks great. I am also running Pinbox.

Mine has the onn 22” in it. Targets don’t line up.

What is the optimal 4:3 LCD screen size to have things like up like they are supposed to? 19 or a 20?

19” was too small, and I’d bet 20” will be too, since the 19” was so far off.
I put in the ONN after a recommendation in this thread, but to be honest, I don’t remember if it was a 24” or your 22”. Positioning is ALMOST perfect (WAY better than the 19” 4:3), but the monitor fit in there like a glove, so I called close enough and haven’t looked back.

Jeff

EDIT -looks like I used the 24” ONN monitor

What size was the original 4:3 crt monitor?

A 24” 16:9 monitor has a viewing height of 11.8”. Showing a 4:3 picture a 24” widescreen is roughly equivilant to a 19.7” 4:3 monitor.

22” 16:9 has a 14.4” x 10.8” 4:3 display
24” 16:9 has a 15.7” x 11.8” 4:3 display
19” 4:3 15.2” x 11.4”
20” 4:3 16” x 12”

A 20” 4:3 monitor is bigger than a 24” 16:9

I purchased the ONN 24” monitor and it fits perfect.
Anybody know the thickness of the glass for the translite? I ordered an 1/8” inch thick but it is struggle to get it to slide in the backbox.

Yup, 24” Onn fits perfect and has a 4:3 option in the settings and makes all the visuals aligned correctly with no adjusting.

That’s great everyone is happy with the onn’s.

What is as the size if the original 4:3 CRT?

It's a standard 19" crt.

Thank You!

So last night I was wiping down the pins and thought I'd check out the Test Report on my RFM. It reports that Fuse F107 is blown?? Odd, pulled out the fuse, looks fine. Metered it, has continuity. Slapped it back in...same thing. This time metered the leads that are on the fuse holder, still have continuity. Then I swapped fuses around just to see if that yielded something different. Nope, still reports that F107 is blown.

Any advise where to go next? Perhaps pull the board and re-flow the fuse connector?

Thanks!

Driver board issue

Any advice on where to start looking on the driver board would be greatly appreciated. Perhaps a corresponding diode or something?

Thanks

U37 & U38

Well alrighty then. Guess I better order some IC's

Thanks!

I fired up RFM the other day, and it came up fine, then blip, dead. No output on the monitor.

I've got an original PC in there still (with new power supply, CPU fan, etc). I'll do some debugging on it, but I'm wondering if it would make more sense to replace it.

What's the current state of things on that? Does anyone have a recipe for replacing with a more modern motherboard? Nucore was a thing for a while, but now long defunct?

I'm a computer geek by trade, so happy to dig into Linux.... but I'm thinking this is a problem that is going to keep coming up for folks. And I'm hoping someone else has (recently) solved this problem.

You can make a modern PC running nucore. I suck at Linux and made it work. A bit of time googling and you should find all that you need. Nucore is free now but no support. If you go on their website and search the forums there you will find the installation files and instructions to run on 64-bit Ubuntu. Can't remember the version but it's still available. You could also run Pinbox which was a 'stolen' version of Nucore however it needs very specific older hardware to run on - I never got it to work nicely with ArcadeVGA. I have that motherboard/HD with Pinbox available. No video card.

The only issues you will have is the need to convert the VGA signal from a modern PC into CGA. You can buy converters - I have one unused but don't know how well it works as it's never been used! lol

Or if you can find an ArcadeVGA card somewhere you could just use that directly with the original monitor.

I also have a complete original P2000 PC(without the case) that was working when pulled a few months ago running RFM 2.22. I no longer have the game however so can't test. Was thinking of throwing it on eBay. Have a spare NIB CPU fan, spare ROM board battery, separator tool, SWEP1 ROM daughterboard, as well as a spare NIB Power supply.

Here is a nice starting point for Nucore installation: http://www.bigguyspinball.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=17&p=5353#p5353
You will also need the ROM files which do not come with Nucore installation.

And to get it working on 64-bit:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt-get update -yq
sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libncurses5:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libsdl-image1.2:i386 libstdc++5:i386 libvorbisfile3:i386 -yq

You can find those on the illegal Pinbox installation. You're a self-proclaimed geek so you can find what you need.

https://pinside.com/pinball/market/classifieds/ad/112092

Original translite for sale...

Deleted, since apparently I somehow posted in the wrong thread. Nothing to see here!

I'd check for obvious issues first... Bad psus... Deer psus are notorious and were used in rfm cases.

Check for bulging electro caps on mono

Is it the CPU bad or monitor?
If not bueno, then nucore

Congrats, concerning Pinstadium pretty sure it would make the monitor hard to see.

Samsung made tube CRTs... Infact I think my CRT is a samsung.
That said; the driver boards are probably NOT samsung. Either wells garner or Duckscan. If the latter; I'm sorry... but in the same boat.

This guy get it. Lighting on Pin2k = bad idea.

I'm a huge fan of PinStadium lighting, but definitely on this machine it is a pass. You need to be able to see the monitor reflection so the back half the playfield needs to be darker.

Also careful with what kind of leds you get, since this game has dimming effects, they may look very flickery when they are supposed to be dimmed. I wish they did have LED and GI OCD boards for this game...

There is no gi with pinball 2000, it’s all controlled lamps. 2 matrix in fact. Read your manual

Also many of the upper playfield lamps are controlled differently at varying brightness depending on what mode you are on to harmonise with the graphics and screen. Pwm control is used for this which flickers horribly with leds

Just use regular bulbs

I want to go back to regular bulbs. It sounds like everything made these days is craptastic compared to the past. Does anyone have a recommendation for "least bad" bulbs to use?

Thank you rygar and MrMikeman - I'm playing around with this now. Going to have to see if I can find another motherboard onhand which will fit into the existing case.

I think the old nucore setup required a USB dongle, but it seems maybe they took away that requirement?

I do have an ArcadeVGA card already! Although it's in use at the moment, I could pull it (I bought to set up an arcade box to use an old CRT monitor, but as yet haven't gotten that working).

I think the interface with the Pinball2000 hardware is via parallel port?

So I need a motherboard which has both a parallel port, and a PCIe slot for the ArcadeVGA 5000 I have...

Yes you need a parallel port but remember that quite a few MB support it but do not include the external connector. Look for the LPT connection on the board. I used a super small (32gb) ssd to make it load fast. Worked great.

It is not necessary to use a motherboard with on-board LPT port with the latest nucore release. I am using a PCIe LPT card and it works like a charm with both my RFM and EP1.

johnstewart My experience with the copy of Pinbox that I had was that it worked fine with the MB I had and the AVGA card I was using, I just had to fiddle around to get the roms installed. I was not able to get a fresh install of Linux/NuCore and the AVGA card to play nice together, I had graphics issues that didn't exist with my original NuCore setup, so I backed up my original NuCore install before running the updates and upgrading to applejuice's code.

You may have better results than me, I'm not proficient with Linux.

Let us know how you make out!

I pulled my original RFM PC and got it on the bench to check out (I'm also exploring a nucore build; thanks all for info there!). The symptom is simply that it doesn't boot at all. No output on the VGA, no BIOS screen.

The CPU fan does spin (and it was replaced with a new one a long while ago; should not be heat damage since I got it).

This is something that actually happened over a year ago, where it would not boot until being powered on for 15-20 minutes. This was some info from my previous endeavour:

What happened way back then:

- It wouldn't boot until 15-20 minutes after power on (then worked fine).
- I replaced all the suspect capacitors. This actually didn't change the behaviour at all!
- After putting it back in, some weeks later, it started working normally (booted immediately).
Then months later:
- While powered on, it blipped out, and hasn't output a thing since.

I've gone through the P2k debug page. It looks like I have a MGX7520, which has a disturbingly low hit-count on Teh Google (no joy in finding any motherboard manufacturer manuals or troubleshooting guides).

Voltage on one of the molex cables coming out of the power supply is 12.35V, the other 5.13V, and it appears to be a new-ish PSU... so I am not suspecting power (though I wonder if I should test pins on the board somewhere).

I've got the old LCD that came with it hooked up (Suzo Happ K190NAD), which I know works with the RFM output frequency, and also with standard PC frequency (I just confirmed it displays fine hooked up to a laptop). So 100% not a video monitor issue.

I've pulled the PRISM card, and still no output to VGA. So it doesn't seem like a PRISM failure, if I understand correctly (we should be getting some output with the PRISM card removed, if the PRISM card is fried).

I'm going to leave this sitting on the bench powered on a while and see if anything happens, but I'm not optimistic.

If anyone has any suggestions on anything else to check, please advise. I hate to make this game less original, but it's looking more and more like I'm going to have to build a new Linux PC to replace this.

I had the opposite. Could not get Pinbox to play nicely with AVGA but Nucore/Unbuntu was a breeze (64 bit too).

I have the mainboard manual for the mgx 7520. Hope you can use it get your mainboard working again

M-mgx7520-A.pdf

I own RFM for about 2 months now and finally I've got some time to look at it.
I was wondering why the autolaunch couldn't shoot the ball up to the bumpers consistently.. Apparently the autofire bracket is broken, and the previous owner decided to make a fancy hack (drilling the metal piece next to the coil through the playfield) instead of buying a new one for 10 euro's
Will recieve a new one tomorrow, hopefully it'll fix the problem

Awesome; thank you @erikie! I'm not holding my breath, but will scour it.

I'm curious on the PRISM card. Is the expectation that if you do NOT have it installed, then a normal BIOS window / boot sequence should come up? I'd think it'd have to be something like this, unless they modified the motherboard further (which seems like insanity). And of course I never tried while it was working to see what happens.

Without prism card you get normal VGA bios boot sequence. With prism card it is better to use a nul modem cable attached to the serial Port and look at the output

Do you think it could be the power supply?

It's crazy how some people butcher a pin to "fix" it.
Glad you are able to get the correct part for it.

That seems to be a common culprit, @crashnburn, but it does appear to be a modern PSU, and I'm reading 12.35V/5.13V... so no evidence of that as an issue that I can see. But before I'm done, I may try a different one (which appears to be non-trivial given the age of this type of PSU, I'm gathering).

I just came home with a speaker to attach to the mobo leads to see if there is an error reported that way (a suggestion from one of the electrical engineer nerds I work with).

Edit: It looks like an Award BIOS: https://www.computerhope.com/beep.htm#award

It was continuous beeping, which is "RAM problem".

I re-seated the RAM chip and I have a BIOS screen!!!!!!