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I have a strange problem. After moving my IGT Fortune 1 from one side of the room to the other (carefully...just sliding the stand, no jiggling whatsoever) the cards have become "shrunken," They are still perfectly readable and the machine works fine but they got smaller. The only other thing I did notice was a slight flicker when I first powered it up after moving it. At that moment the cards got smaller! I've taken two pictures. One of the machine with shrunken cards, and the other, powered off. The powered off shot shows the burn in of the actual card size so the difference can be seen. Does anyone have an idea what I can fiddle with the get my card size back. I did do a quick check to make sure the chips were all seated correctly but that's all I've done so far

Look at the CRT chassis and see if it has a vertical size adjustment knob on the board. Picture looks like the raster's been pinched down a bit

Take extra precaution when turning those little knobs!  Turn very slowly and cautiously.  They're very sensitive, especially if the machine is a little older.  They can easily break their contacts and then you're stuck with the shrinking until you can fix the knob contact.  I found out the hard way.  I found that particular change to be the most sensitive.

Good luck!

Thanks cowboygames and Vegas Local!! I will get to this tomorrow and report back.

I can't seem to find the control! My IGT Fortune One manual says it's to the right of all the controls but when I pull out the CRT, all I see are

Vert Hold - VertLR - Horz Height - Horz Freq

There's nothing else to the right. To the far right an up are two more controls. One is FOCUS the other says SCREEN
The other problem is that I can't reach back to any controls when it's powered up. I can see the RGB controls on the yoke but I can't find any Vert size or raster, if that's the same term. When I removed the CRT I did do a gentle tap with a wooden handle on each pot just to see if that affected anything but nothing happened.

I've never seen that particular chassis before. Can you take a close up picture of the area where the contorls are? You may have a cap or resistor in vertical circuit going to crap on you also

Here you go!

The whole thing.

Down on the main chassis should be small pots for horiz and vert size control. Generally I would look for them along the rear edge of the board, but no guarantees on that. Best I can tell you is they SHOULD be labeled on the board next to the contorol. Those black controls on the back of the board near the flyback are for controlling focus and drive from the flyback, no vertical adjustments there

I looked everywhere and couldn't see anything! There is a small board on top of the CRT, which can be adjusted with the power on. The three seem to control brightness, contrast and tint. However, when I change the background to blue, something seems wrong. I did find two small pots next to those other ones but they also adjusted vert hold and horz hold. I think I better do a shot of what I'm seeing with the blue background and that should explain it better. PLEASE STAND BY

UPDATE: I just realized, when I bring up the blue (which I think is the default background), it shows the true vertical height. When it was black, it gave the illusion that it was full screen when it was, in fact, "squished." So I think I'm still stuck with finding vert height somewhere. I'll post the picture anyway.

Actually, those retrace lines at the top of the screen indicate a probable capacitor issue in the vertical circuit. Probably time to see if someone has a schematic they'll send you and start diagnosing that circuit.

I wonder if I should just replace all the electrolytic caps on the CRT? There's a link here with some troubleshooting help for this slot. I could just start with replacing the caps that are correlated to video issues.  Any thoughts?
http://newlifegames.net/nlg/index.php?topic=255.0 (http://newlifegames.net/nlg/index.php?topic=255.0)

I just realized that link shows mpu board issues... could this problem be there or is it more likely to be on the CRT?

It's a CRT issue for sure. What happens when you adjust the "Horiz Height" adjustment you mentioned earlier in the thread?

The problem is that I can't reach the pot with the CRT in position. I can pull it out only a little and am limited to the length of the cable. I guess I could just mark it, and tweak it, then try the other way. I'll try that tomorrow. Thank you.

There's no such thing as horiz height on a crt. That's a vertical problem on the crt chassis. On a picture tube, vert adjusts the top to bottom size and horiz spreads the picture out side to side

I've never heard of it either, but I'm going off of what he posted in Reply #4 above.

I guess when I read that I just assumed he meant Horiz Size as that was commonplace on the older boards. The only time they'd label it Horiz Height, I would assume, would be if they were mounting the CRT sideways for some reason like on the commercial video games before they made the tubes oriented that way.

If you enlarge the picture in reply#7, you will see three pots, one white plastic adjustment knob, two are metal. to the left of the 115vac connector plug.   could these be the ones you are searching for???


Jim

Those pots adjust the following:
Vert Hold - VertLR - Horz Height - Horz Freq
The problem is that I can't adjust anything with the CRT plugged in to see which one does what. I've never worked on a CRT before either.
Thank you though, everyone, so far.

the only wat to accomplish that is to make a cheater cord.  just duplicate the pinouts ,basically making an extension cable.

Jim

I should invent a little "grabber" - a shielded, bendable cable with a shaft and attachments fort tweaking different kinds of potentiometers. I could make a fortune!

I may have one, let me check tonight. I don't have a machine in the shop, so tell me how many pins are in the plug.

If I have one ,you are welcome to borrow it to get your  monitor squared away.

Jim

Thanks Jim!
I'm not home until late afternoon but I'll let you know. Earlier in this thread I mentioned electrolytic caps...should I replace those? I thought after 20 years + they start to go, although the general consensus I get here is to wait until I know it's a particular cap...not sure what to do.

Can you diconnect the monitor plugs from the receiver try inside the machine to get enough lengh to work on it? As far as caps, yes, you can shotgun the caps on the board, but until you know for sure it's a cap problem it may not do anything but put new caps on the board. The problem could be a resistor, diode or the vertical output itself so caps may not be the golden key to fixing it.

Or it could be just a crappy connection on a vertical size control potentiometer. Just saying you can't solve the problem till you know what's causing it

I can only slide the CRT about five inches back on the track before I run out of cable length but I might be able to reroute the plug below the main unit and troubleshoot, if I can prop the CRT on something. I'm not home though so I'll have to try all this tonight. I hope I'm understanding what you said! Thanks again everyone. I do have a pdf of my manual. I could post it here if anyone needs to see it.

You can start by looking for obvious stuff like a resistor that's got burn marks, a cap that doesn't have a nice flat top or obviously bad solder connections on the bottom of the board. You might get lucky with one of those, but if you can reroute those plugs to where you can futz with the differant controls to see what effect they have on the picture you'll make better progress towards figuring this out

Just a general warning since you said you've never worked with CRTs before: they can carry some extremely high voltage. Be careful not to touch anywhere inside the chassis or on the back of the monitor, even when it's disconnected.

I did know that but THANK YOU for the concern! I was an aircraft VLF navigation tech a million years ago and learned on the job, but I did have some electronics in school. I remember my electronics 100 teacher in high school would always leave a HUGE charged capacitor in front of the class for any unsuspecting students to fiddle with.  :72-
Of course, if that happened today...fired, lawsuit, jail time

Ya, In my high school electronics class we would charge big caps. Hold them by the can and throw it to your buddy....
Worked best by calling out their name first to get their attention and as soon as they turned around, chuck it to them. Natural instinct is to catch something coming at you.  :30- :30-

Today one would be expelled.

Where are you guys getting shocked touching a crt while it's on(or off)? Unless you're shoving your finger under the cap for the anode lead to the tube you should be pretty safe. :103- Where the Fortune series machines not wired well?

You right cowboy...but when somebody for the first time plays with those things...
the 1st thing they do is stick a screwdriver under that big rubber thing!  :72-


"Hey...what's under there?                         BOOM!


The screwdriver needs to be grounded with a lead
and clipped to the chassis with one of your hands in your pocket.....or else.

LOL, been there, done that, except it was a high voltage probe on a running tube and I'd knocked the ground off as I was reaching in to the anode lead. It's ticklish when you're just discharging a tube. It's a little more than that when the set is running :97- Anyway, point is, you gotta pay attention to what you're doing when the back's off the set :89-

There's a video on YouTube of a guy discharging a monitor by using a flyswatter covered in aluminum foil hitting the circuit board plugged into the neck of the tube -- lots of sparks until it finally loses all of its charge.  Not the way I'd recommend discharging a CRT.

While I know the risk of getting the shock of a lifetime is pretty small, especially on the newer CRTs that are self-discharging, I always treat them with a healthy amount of respect, and assume that they're holding a deadly charge until I've discharged them repeatedly with the grouded screwdriver method.

Okay I've checked everything I could. Can't see any obvious part issues. I did use my little vacuum and just brushed and vacuumed the interior but the problem still is there. So, for Jim, here's a picture of my plug and I'll take your offer on borrowing your cable! Thank you.

Got my extension cable from Jim...THANK YOU. Since I'm not a CRT tech, I just did a video of my tweaking and the results, which unFORTUNately didn't fix my Fortune One. Like my little play on the word? Sorry the video is shaky...I didn't have a way to prop it up anywhere. But you can clearly see what it's doing, or not doing I should say. Also that "wavey" dark bar isn't a problem. I think that's just something to do with the camera catching the way the CRT scans, if I'm saying that correctly.
Here it is. I hope there will be an answer. Again, I don't see anything obviously blown inside the chassis either. It all looks fairly clean.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrXm1LxkPqc&feature=youtu.be (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrXm1LxkPqc&feature=youtu.be)

UPDATE: The cards ARE bigger again! I don't know why...maybe just the tweaking on the back. But I still have the missing video portion at the bottom and the horizontal "noise" at the top. I could almost live with it like this but still I know there's something not quite right.  :103-

UPDATE AGAIN: I took the CRT back out again and fussed with the controls and with the brightness in the back. As you can see in the picture below, it doesn't look half bad!!! It's back to full size I think and I was able to just "black out" the lower area where there was no video and then adjust the colors to get rid of the bleed over.  I think this background was supposed to be blue (see reply#9 for blue picture) but when I make it blue, then the dead video area becomes visible. I think I like the black anyway...but as I said a few lines up...somethings not right.

     :37- Where did everybody go?  :37-

Now that you've got it out where you can work on it, cross-referance the part number on the vertical output IC with the ECG number to get the readings for what the differant input and output voltages are suppose to be. Use a multimeter to then check them with the machine running. If the inputs are low then trace it back to the cap or resistor that's changed value. If the outputs are wrong, replace the vertical output

How do I find the vertical output IC and what's an ECG number? What kind of voltage am I looking for? DC AC? I'm not a CRT tech...never worked on them before. I have a good multimeter so I can start looking once I know a little more on this. Thanks so far, though! Did you see my video?

If you google ECG you'll find they're a maker of electronic replacement parts and there'll be a cross-referance guide and chip diagrams on their site. Your vertical output, on that chassis, will be a 7 or 9 leg IC attached to a sheet metal heat sink probably close to the back of the chassis and the part number will be printed on it. Probably start with LA something. I've never held one of those so I'm going from what was common on chassis' from that time period. Anyway, when you get the part number off the chip you can then cross it on ECG's website and they'll provide diagram info with what each leg and what voltages should be there. Maybe someone will pop in here with the chip number and save a little time here

A friend of mine just found me this:
http://arcarc.xmission.com/PDF_Monitors/Electrohome%20G07-902_Manual.pdf (http://arcarc.xmission.com/PDF_Monitors/Electrohome%20G07-902_Manual.pdf)

interesting thread, did you ever get it fixed?

Well not really. One of the members here loaned me a cable to do some adjustments on the monitor with it out of the unit but I was unable to find anyway to "spread up" the picture. I don't have enough electronics knowledge to fix it myself so I just adjusted best as possible. It works but I know the cards could be bigger! CV slots also suggested I just send in the monitor to have it rebuilt, which I'm still considering.