Embed Notice

You never, ever see a Baby Pacman with the right colours on the monitor.

This is partly down to pinball guys not being good at monitors, but it's also because monitor guys are not good with Baby Pacman monitors.

Your arcade guy, he comes in and goes "Oof yeah that Baby Pacman monitor has its colour balance all outta whack, let's see what we can do about that." So he opens up the back and he finds the knobs and gives them a twiddle.

There's the screen voltage pot on the flyback (which acts as a brightness control by encouraging electrons to hit the phosphors harder), and there's also individual controls for each colour. Two each in most monitors, the cutoff and the drive, affecting the highs and the lows. In old monitors like in baby pacman one colour will lack a drive control, usually green, you use this colour as a base reference.

So your monitor person, they've done this a thousand times, they hold a hand mirror round the front of the game and twiddle those knobs like they've always done.

And it looks Worse.

"What the hell," says Monitor Toucher, "Can't get this bloody thing adjusted up right, it just doesn't want to cooperate." Maybe the hamfisted pinball guy in here last had a go and screwed it all up - let's abandon the idea of a quick minor-adjustment tune-up and set all the knobs to the centre mark and get a sense of how the tube's ageing and do a complete ground-up rough-in and see where we go from there.

At some point, later on, the tube rejuvenator might make an appearance.

Some time later, the monitor guy will angrily shove the back door closed and write on the back "Monitor's as good as it's gonna get, LEAVE IT ALONE"

And the only people who will ever find the third set of adjustment knobs, located on the VIDIOT! board and altering the R/G/B/Sync signals before they even reach the monitor, are the people who go "Hmm, if I were a pinball company trying to make a videogame, just how badly would I bollocks it all up..."