Help with a Pole Position Power Suppy

[cj1104]

I have an original Pole Position in the original cabinet. The power suppy is also original and it is shot. I cannot find anyone in my area to have a look at it and it has been sitting in my game room for about a year unworking. I would like to change it to a switching power supply but I have read there are other changes that will need to be made along with it.

Can anyone offer any help/instruction on how to do this? Please understand I have not had to work on my games anything other than changing out controls, basic wiring problems and switching monitors, so nothing very in depth. In other words, you will have to explain it to me like I am a little kid if it is very technical.

 

Thanks for any help in advance.

Chris

Edited March 8, 2007 by cj1104

[TheBman80]

I have never worked on this game but it is similar to other Atari games power supply wise. You might want to replace the Big Blue capacitor on the power brick first and see were that gets you with the game. Fairly easy to do just match + wires on the positive terminal and - wires on the negative terminal of the cap take them off one at a time and the game has to be unplugged. You can get new caps here http://homearcade.org/BBBB/ this is Bob Roberts home page you have to send him a money order through the mail but he always sends stuff right away make sure you e-mail him and tell him what you need. Then next step would be to replace all the fuses if it doesn’t work it’s always a good idea to replace the capacitor anyways because it’s over 20+ years old and will probably fail soon.

[bjk7382]

This conversion is detailed in a back issue of Star Tech Journal. I don't have it, and you will have to look it up and probably pay 20 bucks for a few back issues (including the one with the pole position power supply conversion)

 

I have seen people ask this on other arcade forums and they always get directed to Star Tech Journal I guess they just want to keep it a secret or something.

 

On the other hand their fixes are very detailed and usually easy enough for a hobbyist to do. Not something you will get from a forum most of the time (especially one dedicated to atari)

[AlanD]

It is in the Jan 91 issue of Star Tech journal. I have the CDs but the scan on their CD is so bad it is essentially worthless. You should just see if you can track down a paper copy from somewhere. I'll attach the files and maybe the text is enough to figure it out.

Edited March 15, 2007 by AlanD

[Cassidy Nolen]

I don't mean to pry, but how are you sure its the power supply? Do you know what voltages you are getting from it?

 

Honestly, I have seen about three dead AR boards in the ENTIRE time I have worked on games. One was cooked, one had a bad resistor and the other I threw away and never thought of again.

 

Pole Positions are not easy boards to keep running. The onboard battery usually pops and corrodes the sockets. The encoders for steering go bad, lots of graphic glitches and weird sound issues. In addition, the most prevalent probelm is the edge connectors cannot handle the load of the boards and they burn up. I have never, and I do mean never, seen an edge connector on a PP boards that was not cooked. Most of the time, I solder a jumper wire right to the 5V trace on the board and one to the ground and then bypass the edge connector with a molex or just some spade terminals (you can wire straight but then you cant remove the board from the RF cage to reseat the chips that back out).

 

 

Do as you like to swap to a switcher. I would bet money there is something else going on there though.

 

C