Hang-On (1985 Sega Ent.)
Click on Marquee for KLOV listing.
The Story: To be honest, I never thought much about Hang-On. Dont get me wrong, its a good game and I have always enjoyed the home ports. But up until owning one, I had never seen or played the arcade game. As I have mentioned with a game or two in the past, sometimes you dont seek the game out, it seeks you out. This was one of those scenarios. A dead Hang-On had popped up on Craigslist and the price was low enough, I simply couldn't ignore it. Sega makes some of the best driving games and this one is no exception. It acually reminds me alot of Pole Position which was one of my childhood favorites.
The Score: I contacted the seller, and much to my suprise it was Slackers. I've done business with them many times, including selling games, fixing games and even trading one for another. Their story was that the game was working fine until it got hit with a power surge during a thunderstorm. Well heck, that could be as simple as a power supply, hopefully it's nothing serious. Although the game was apparently located at one of their Saint Louis locations, they have a warehouse truck that makes occasional runs to their locations down here to support merchandise. I was able to work out a deal, and they agreed to deliver the game to their Jefferson City location, which happens to be 5 minutes from my job. Nice. in exchange, I am giving them $50 in credit towards repairs when they need it. Can't go wrong there. Heres to hoping for an easy fix.
The Service: Obviously the first thing I suspected was the power supply. I discovered that it had a newer switching power supply installed and after poking at it with a multimeter, everything checks out, and it's feeding the proper voltage to the boardset. Unfortunately the game showed no other signs of life other than coin & marquee lamps. I was dealing with a dead boardset and a dead monitor. Great, those are "usually" a major expense.
Before giving up on the boardset, I thought I'd try to reseat all the chips. It was a bit of a chore since theres acually 4 boards in total, but I had nothing to lose other than time. After reinstalling the set, I was pleasently suprised to hear the game playing, albeit "blind", but at least I'm making progress. Hopefully the board is fixed with no graphical errors, but I still needed to address the dead monitor to be sure.
The monitor turns out to be a Nanao 100 volt model. After pulling the chassis I discovered it had a blown fuse. So the first thing I tried was replacing the fuse and keeping my fingers crossed. Nope, blew it again. This usually indicates a bad flyback and/or a bad "hot". The flyback sure looked bad to me. Part of it was "loose", and the knobs werent moving properly. Now theres bad news and good news here. The bad news is that the flyback for this particular chassis is hard to come across, and the cheapest replacement I found was in upwards of $80, ouch. But luckily, theres good news, I have a spare monitor, a working G07 that I recently aquired in a bulk trade. The Nanao had some pretty heavy burn, and the G07 I replaced it with has very light burn from another game. However the G07 is a 120 volt monitor taking the place of the original 100 volt. I feared the 100 volt output would now be too low. The only way around this would be to find another Isolation Transformer with 120 volt output and wire it in between the power supply and monitor. But heck, I might as well try the 100 volts already in the game first. My fears were quickly shattered when I saw a working game with a good picture and no graphical errors. And just to be sure, I went into the service menu and did a RAM/ROM check. Everything checks out and the game plays great. Other than the standard cleaning and fine tuning, there was nothing else this game needed other than some solid gameplay and a new start button which I also had handy. Not bad for a $50 investment, all it cost me after that was a little time and labor. Can't beat it.
Update: After a few weeks, the boardset showed issues once again. It would work after reseating chips, but only briefly. Basically, it was "tempermental". I bought an untested boardset for $40 shipped to my house. It also had a few issues, but I was able to make a good boardset out of the pair and it's been running smooth since. I also bought a spare control panel for parts. My panel was missing the original gauge insert and had some cracked plastic. So I now have a nice boardset, a nice monitor & a nice control panel with parts to spare if I ever need 'em.
The Score: I contacted the seller, and much to my suprise it was Slackers. I've done business with them many times, including selling games, fixing games and even trading one for another. Their story was that the game was working fine until it got hit with a power surge during a thunderstorm. Well heck, that could be as simple as a power supply, hopefully it's nothing serious. Although the game was apparently located at one of their Saint Louis locations, they have a warehouse truck that makes occasional runs to their locations down here to support merchandise. I was able to work out a deal, and they agreed to deliver the game to their Jefferson City location, which happens to be 5 minutes from my job. Nice. in exchange, I am giving them $50 in credit towards repairs when they need it. Can't go wrong there. Heres to hoping for an easy fix.
The Service: Obviously the first thing I suspected was the power supply. I discovered that it had a newer switching power supply installed and after poking at it with a multimeter, everything checks out, and it's feeding the proper voltage to the boardset. Unfortunately the game showed no other signs of life other than coin & marquee lamps. I was dealing with a dead boardset and a dead monitor. Great, those are "usually" a major expense.
Before giving up on the boardset, I thought I'd try to reseat all the chips. It was a bit of a chore since theres acually 4 boards in total, but I had nothing to lose other than time. After reinstalling the set, I was pleasently suprised to hear the game playing, albeit "blind", but at least I'm making progress. Hopefully the board is fixed with no graphical errors, but I still needed to address the dead monitor to be sure.
The monitor turns out to be a Nanao 100 volt model. After pulling the chassis I discovered it had a blown fuse. So the first thing I tried was replacing the fuse and keeping my fingers crossed. Nope, blew it again. This usually indicates a bad flyback and/or a bad "hot". The flyback sure looked bad to me. Part of it was "loose", and the knobs werent moving properly. Now theres bad news and good news here. The bad news is that the flyback for this particular chassis is hard to come across, and the cheapest replacement I found was in upwards of $80, ouch. But luckily, theres good news, I have a spare monitor, a working G07 that I recently aquired in a bulk trade. The Nanao had some pretty heavy burn, and the G07 I replaced it with has very light burn from another game. However the G07 is a 120 volt monitor taking the place of the original 100 volt. I feared the 100 volt output would now be too low. The only way around this would be to find another Isolation Transformer with 120 volt output and wire it in between the power supply and monitor. But heck, I might as well try the 100 volts already in the game first. My fears were quickly shattered when I saw a working game with a good picture and no graphical errors. And just to be sure, I went into the service menu and did a RAM/ROM check. Everything checks out and the game plays great. Other than the standard cleaning and fine tuning, there was nothing else this game needed other than some solid gameplay and a new start button which I also had handy. Not bad for a $50 investment, all it cost me after that was a little time and labor. Can't beat it.
Update: After a few weeks, the boardset showed issues once again. It would work after reseating chips, but only briefly. Basically, it was "tempermental". I bought an untested boardset for $40 shipped to my house. It also had a few issues, but I was able to make a good boardset out of the pair and it's been running smooth since. I also bought a spare control panel for parts. My panel was missing the original gauge insert and had some cracked plastic. So I now have a nice boardset, a nice monitor & a nice control panel with parts to spare if I ever need 'em.
