Amplifone mod

Our "For What It's Worth" Department turned up the following drivel from
Matt J. McCullar:

In the late 1980's, when I fixed arcade games at Six Flags Over Texas,
most of our _Star Wars_ games were out because of the infamous flyback
transformer failure. Replacements were not available at that time.
Desparate for ANYTHING, I started doing a little research and decided to
try something drastic.

I noticed that the problem was simply No High Voltage. The deflection
board worked just fine, but of course with no high voltage for the CRT,
we couldn't see the results. How else could we generate HV?

I decided to try modifying a Wells-Gardner color XY high-voltage box to
work on the Ampliphone. You know what? It worked. Sort of.

When you get right down to cases, all you need to do is attach + and -
28 volts to the WG HV unit. I built the 35-to-28 volt regulator
circuit, using the same schematic that WG uses on their own deflection
board. The tube lit up! We saw graphics! We could make money with
_Star Wars_ again!

You couldn't help noticing, however, that the picture was a tad shaky.
You could play it. We did this mod for at least three of our _Star
Wars_ games. It wasn't too long after that that the replacement flyback
for the Ampliphone HV board became available.

I think I've still got my notes somewhere for this project... I actually
designed, etched and drilled a couple of PC boards from Radio Shack's
"etch 'em yourself" kit. Didn't look all that great, but it worked.

I'm curious to know if anybody else ever tried this. (Hey, we were
desparate!)

Matt J. McCullar
Arlington, TX
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Received on Wed Apr 12 22:48:16 2000