I’ve got a collection of classic arcade games from the ‘golden era’ of the early 1980s. They’re not the whole wooden cabinets with flickering lights and cigarette burns, but just the circuit boards from inside. They are easy to store and easy to plug in to a joystick and monitor to play.

However, some of them have always been a bit tricky to see. The monitor I use, a spiffy Microvitec bought surplus from Display Electronics in 1990, has fantastic picture quality but is a bit fussy about its input signal. Specifically, it seems to expect that the sync pulses – the bits of the signal which indicate where lines and pictures start – must conform more-or-less closely to broadcast standards. Unfortunately, the people who designed the old video games weren’t too worried about complying with standards. The result is that, on my monitor, some games tend to flicker and roll, or require very finnicky adjustment of the controls.

There’s loads of information about what video sync pulses are supposed to look like on the web.  This link has plenty of detail. However, the important things here turned out to be that the horizontal sync pulses should be fairly close to 4.7 microseconds long, and the vertical sync pulses should be pretty much three lines, or 192 microseconds, long.

I compared the outputs of various games – one which had never given problems (Mr Do’s Castle) with three which were troublesome (Phoenix, Pleiads and Q*Bert). The results were interesting. Here’s the vertical sync period from Mr Do’s Castle:

In all the scope pictures, the red trace is the sync output from the game, and the blue line is the vertical sync from my electronics which I’m just using to trigger the scope at the right time.

In this case, the narrow red pulses are the horizontal sync pulses, and the broad area between the dotted lines is the vertical sync pulse. It’s six lines, or about 386 microseconds, wide, which seems to be good enough to keep the monitor happy.

Examining Pleiads and Phoenix, which have the same video electronics, here’s the horizontal sync pulse:

Oh dear, It’s only 3 microseconds wide when it ought to be 4.7. And the vertical sync pulse?

It’s a full eight lines wide, or more than 500 microseconds. Those numbers are way off what the monitor is expecting. The result is that the monitor refuses to give a stable picture, which makes playing the game very tricky:

Looking at Q*Bert, its horizontal sync pulses are nearly three times as wide as they should be, at 12.6 microseconds:

and Q*Bert’s vertical sync pulse looks like this:

It lasts more than a millisecond! That’s miles off. The effect on the picture looks like this:

That’s as stable as I could get it. Notice how the left hand side (which is actually the top – the monitor is rotated 90 degrees)  is curved and wobbly. It was fairly hard to adjust the monitor to get the picture stable enough to take a photo.

There are solutions to these problems which involve modifying the game boards themselves, but I didn’t want to do that. I think they’re interesting historical artefacts (even the bootleg ones) and I try to keep them as original as possible. I wanted to fix the sync problems outside the board.

After a bit of experimenting, I came up with a little circuit which regenerates the sync pulses to be a bit more standard.

Untangling the rat’s-nest of wires, the schematic diagram looks like this:

The circuit is simple and cheap, using two standard TTL logic ICs. It ought to work with 74HC series chips as well, but some of the resistor values might need changing. The diode is any common-or-garden signal diode: a 1N4148 or 1N914 is fine. It works like this.

• IC1B is a monostable which triggers on every sync pulse, generating a pulse 4.7 microseconds long. These become the new horizontal sync pulses.
• IC2B combined with D1, R3 and C3 form a sync separator which triggers the monostable in IC1C only on sync pulses which are longer than about 40 microseconds.
• IC1C is a monostable which generates vertical sync pulses about 200 microseconds long.
• IC2E combines the new horizontal and vertical sync pulses into a new sync signal.

The output isn’t what you might call broadcast standard, but it’s close enough to make the monitor happy. I’ve tried it on a few games and it works even on games which the monitor was happy with before. Here’s the results from Pleiads:

Nice horizontal sync pulses, with a vertical pulse 193 microseconds long. There are a few extra pulses around but the monitor doesn’t seem to mind.

The results from Q*Bert are also good, though the vertical sync looks even more odd:

The vertical sync pulse is a sensible length, but there’s a long pause after it before the horizontal pulses start again. That doesn’t bother the monitor, though, and all the wobbles have gone away. Here’s the test setup in use.

Sorry about the mess, but at least the display on the monitor is tidy. Mission accomplished.