Corrupted Graphics on ColecoVision

[toymailman]

Hi all, just wondering if anyone knows what may be going wrong with my ColecoVision. It seems to be that sometimes it works fine with no corrupted graphics, and sometimes it does not work.

 

Below are pictures of what I am talking about.

 

Aquattack both working and not. First pics has just some extra vertical lines, next is very bad, and the third is fine.

 

Next is Lord of the Dungeon with a bad title screen.

 

Next is one of the Fisher Price games; very bad graphics.

 

Generally, the most common artifact is extra vertical lines as observed in the first Aquattack picture. Many games have always worked fine, and others may work or not work.

 

I know it is not the games as they test fine on another system. I would like to get this system to work as it is A/V modded and has a nice crisp picture, just intermittently garbled.

 

Any ideas of what the culprit might be?

[AtariBrian]

Power supply ?

[+evg2000]

most common causes are dirty cart or connector, power supply, or need to rebuild the power switch. After that it could be ram chips. I rebuilt power switches on about ten CV and that has always fixed the graphics glitches

[NIAD]

Refurbish the On/Off Power Switch as a first step, but my guess is the Power Supply is slowly dying and will need to be replaced.

[ColecoDan]

lord of dungeon will always be the first game to go bad and the other games still play fine when your power brick is just starting to go bad. I would say if you do low power game to test and it works good then it is probably power brick. If the lower power game still has problems then you probably need to fix the power switch.

[AtariBuff]

lord of dungeon will always be the first game to go bad and the other games still play fine when your power brick is just starting to go bad. I would say if you do low power game to test and it works good then it is probably power brick. If the lower power game still has problems then you probably need to fix the power switch.

This!

Lord of Dungeon was the game that showed me, that the power supply was going ape.

[toymailman]

Thanks everyone, much appreciated! I'll try a different power supply to see if that fixes it. If not then I'm on to the switch.