I just acquired a Revenge From Mars machine. Undisclosed to me but discovered last night, it has a 17 inch Dell LCD monitor installed. Now, I know a 19 inch is what the original CRT monitor had been and what seems the appropriate size for an LCD replacement, but I am hoping to get by with the 17 inch while I recover from the initial cost of this machine. The machine has a nice commercial metal bracket holding the monitor in place and a CGA to VGA adapter card installed so I should be able to work with whatever makes sense in the future for a monitor.

The first question that came to mind is whether the animations reflected from a 17 inch flat screen will line up properly with the appropriate playfield targets that had been designed to work with a 19 inch CRT. I didn’t find any utilities in the system to accomplish this - this machine is currently running version 1.4. I can set the game on Martian Happy Hour, which has aliens, I believe at each playfield target. I wonder and ask where the Martians are supposed to appear. Right now they are appearing slightly above the actual playfield targets. I can’t really tell if the animations are being compressed horizontally by the smaller 17 inch image.

What’s most apparent right now is that I have to squat down, lose about 8-10 inches of my 5’9” height while playing, for the aliens to appear brightly. In my full height stance, the aliens are pretty hard to see at all. I don’t know how much of this effect is due to the smaller monitor or to the different way a flat screen projects compared to a (slightly) curved CRT or some other cause. I tried tilting the monitor up and down to the limits of the mounting bracket adjustment and it didn’t seem to make much difference.

I want to get a better monitor at some point also to improve the contrast ratio so that the background around animations is truly black, i.e. invisible. I hate that gray rectangular halo I see now.

I also need to fix light leaks from the nonstandard fluorescent backlight of the translite and from playfield lights. The only cheesy part of the conversion to LCD was the use of thin droopy black cardboard as a mask around the screen.

Any help or suggestions with any of these issues will be greatly appreciated. Experienced Martian bug killers?

I am in the middle of a power outage at home, so I can’t play pinball but can discuss it.

Thanks for the heads up on that RFM club. I will check it out. I’m just getting used to Pinside, where there aren’t so many sub-forums but there are long long topics. That one’s 66 pages, without the single topic search capability, it would have been daunting.