Vectrex Vectors Wobbly/Unstable

[Gr8dane]

Hi everyone,

I'm hopeful that someone on this forum has seen a similar issue to the one I'm experiencing. The vectors near the middle of the screen are always scrambled, but outside of the middle area, the lines are mostly fine.

 

As for some history, the Vectrex worked great my whole childhood. It probably hasn't been played for 5-10 years. We turned it on over Christmas, and at first it didn't work. I read somewhere that if you leave it powered on sometimes it will work eventually. I left it on for about 10 minutes and it did start working. We played it for a few minutes, I walked away for less than 5 minutes, and when I came back the screen was black but it was still turned on. I turned it off and on again. That's when I smelled burning, so I shut it off and opened it up. We found a burn mark at capacitor C404. The fuse had also blown. After installing a new fuse and aftermarket capacitor, it works, but the screen is all screwy.

 

I have read about the 5 adjustment potentiometers and the 2 adjustment rings around the tube, but none of those seem to address the squiggly lines in the middle. I am thinking about getting a "cap kit" from console5 as a next step, but wanted to get advice here first.

[Gr8dane]

Hey, just in case someone sees this post someday, I did get the Vectrex working properly. It turns out I didn't notice that the plated through holes got stripped out on the top side of the board. I didn't have a plated thru-hole repair kit (they seem expensive), so I scratched off some of the masking on the top trace and soldered jumper wires from the top of the board to the legs of the capacitor. Hopefully this knowledge helps out another owner/DIYer/user someday.