Wow…I haven’t posted in 7 days. I guess I’ve been busy actually working for a change. Anyways…

My Rampage had a monitor issue since day 1 when I first brought it home. It would work fine for a few minutes, and then the whole image would jump vertically for a split second accompanied with a scary crackling/zapping noise that sounded like a static discharge. If you can picture yourself wearing a big wool coat and rubbing your shoes on the carpet for an entire week, then touching the tip of someone’s nose, it sounded just like that (except without the screaming).

The picture jump was very quick, and looked like a flicker. It would usually take about 20 minutes for it to start acting up, and once it started – the jumping would get closer and closer together to the point where the game was unplayable and a bit frightening. For this reason, I had the switch on Rampage turned off. When I fired up the circuits in our game room, the other games in the arcade just laughed at it and called it names.

I finally got around to doing a cap kit on it. The picture became clearer, but that jumping problem was still there. I also noticed that if you left it on for a long time the focus would start to go out. I figured it probably needed a new flyback, so I put one in. That fixed the loss of focus, but that jumping was still there.

I picked up some control/contact cleaner at Ratshack. It’s labeled as non-flammable (sorry kids!), and looks like this:

I figured that maybe a dirty pot might have been causing the problem, suspecting that if so it would be either the V-Size or V-Position pots.

I sprayed every pot on the main chassis and the neck board. I rotated each one back and forth about 10 times or so, and then returned each to their original positions. I fired it up, and some of the settings were a little off (brightness, contrast, etc…). I tweaked the pots to get the picture looking good, and the vertical jumping seems to be gone!

You can see it in action here:

It’s hard to play Rampage with one hand!

I’ve had it running now for about 3 hours or so and haven’t heard it crackle once. I’m keeping my fingers crossed (which made it very hard to type this!).