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CRT Monitor Replacement
Question from Mike: Hi Tim! I just watched about half a dozen of your great arcade videos on YouTube! I was wondering if you could answer a question or two for me about replacing an arcade monitor.
On Thanksgiving day, my son and I were playing my Super Ms. Pac Man cocktail video game. I had it setup temporarily in the basement, since I was refurbishing the game a bit and hadn’t finished my work. While opening up the top, I accidently cracked the CRT by the neck board (it hooked onto a box I had stored in the cabinet). I heard a “swoosh” sound as the tube sucked in air.
My question is: Can I replace this 19″ tube with a similar 19″ tube (Both are 9″ and made by RCA)? I guess what I should be asking is an RCA 19VMNP22 tube interchangeable with an RCA 19VLTP22 tube? If so, should I also swap out the chassis too? The extra CRT is in an upright arcade game (Dr. Doo or something like that) that has been taking up room in my garage for a few years.
Thanks for any help you can give!
Mike
P.S. Definitely HD!!!!
1 answer
Response from Jonathan: Mike,
We are not sure if the 2 RCA tubes that you have are interchangeable but there is a way to check them. As long as their yoke readings, neck size and socket pinouts are the same you should be in good shape. If the tubes are a match, you should just be able to swap them and leave the original chassis in the game. There’s some great information about how to get the yoke readings (measured in ohms) off your tube at https://web.archive.org/web/20080705201439/http://www.8liners.com/datatech/monitor.html. There is also a nice list of donor TVs for arcade pictures tubes here: http://junknet.net/donor-tvs. Unfortunately the RCA 19VMNP22 tube is not listed on this page but it is a good resource in case you need it for future use.
Now, if your extra CRT already has a working chassis on it then you could do a monitor swap. Check out our post on Replacing An Arcade Monitor for more information on this process. Of course, it might take a bit a rewiring to get the new monitor chassis hooked up as the connector maybe different from the chassis in the game now so you might want to try the tube swap first before going the monitor swap route.
Hope that helps. Thank you for your question and good luck with your repair.
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