It turns out that video signals are pretty easy to recognize once you’ve seen a few of them, but getting them to display on the oscilloscope would normally involve a bunch of fiddling with all those knobs. I rolled the monitor on its face so I could get to the bottom of the circuit board while it was running, hooked up a probe to the oscilloscope and started following the video signal through the board as I followed along on the schematic:
See that blue “AUTO” button? More on that in a minute… This was the perfect chance to try out the new oscilloscope I recently picked up from Amazon: To me that meant that for the most part the monitor was working since it was properly tracing out horizontal lines, but the input was somehow not making it through to be displayed. To fix the monitor I hooked up a known good video source: my 1973 Atari Space Race board:īoth monitors showed a pure white raster image that filled the majority of the screen. For example the entire chassis can be unplugged for easy access.
These monitors were made with repair in mind and have a few handy features. I fixed a 501 for an Atari Anti-Aircraft (1975) a few months earlier so I wasn’t too worried about working on the 701. The 19 inch XM-501 and the 23 inch XM-701 were the result. But with the success of Pong and the many clones that followed, Motorola saw an opportunity and began to produce monitors specifically aimed at this market. The earliest arcade video games made by Atari and others simply used a modified television as their display. (it looks like the game is running but that’s just the old image of the track burned into the monitor) Fixing the Monitor(s) This gave me two of just about everything, including the rare 23 inch B&W Motorola XM-701 monitors used in these machines.
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When Dave arrived he not only dropped off a complete (but completely not working) Gran Trak 10, but he also gave me a couple boxes full of parts he had salvaged from another Gran Trak years before. And, probably the first video game with a true 60hz interlaced display. First video game using “hybrid” security chips. First video game using a ROM (read only memory) chip. First video game with a steering wheel, gearshift and gas/brake pedals. This game has so many firsts it’s hard to list them all: First car racing video game. Fortunately I like “super old black and white games”, and, of course, rescuing and restoring these machines is the main point of this blog, so I told him to bring them on over.Īmong the haul was a game I really wanted to work on next: Atari’s “Gran Trak 10” which released in March of 1974.
“Super old black and white games” that if I didn’t take off his hands were going into the dumpster. Good games that never worked but could be fixed. Good games that worked at one point but might need a bit of fixing. If you wander over to the Internet Pinball Database you’ll see that the games we had in that office: “Twilight Zone”, “Addams Family” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, are among the highest rated pinball machines of all time.ĭave’s email divided his game collection into three categories: 1. Little did we know we were living through one of the greatest periods of pinball design in history. Back then we shared a passion for pinball and had several machines stashed away in an unused office at work.
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He had sold his warehouse in Seattle and all his games had to go.ĭave and I worked together as programmers on some of the early versions of Microsoft Word for Windows in the 1990s.
This project started with an email from my old friend David Oliver.
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