Quote from J G on January 30, 2021, 7:05 am

Everyone who owns an Atari color vector arcade game has had to repair their Wells-Gardner 19K6100 deflection board, and replace its “bottlecap” chassis transistors, at some point – often more than once. Everyone from desperate collectors to Atari Games themselves has tried different changes, hacks, and add-ons to the 19K6100 deflection PCB, hoping we can somehow stop it from burning up every few months.

About two years ago, we had an idea: what if the problem isn’t the deflection board itself? What if the problem is that the “bottlecaps” are simply underpowered for driving a vector monitor yoke (which is a nasty inductive load), and the monitor chassis is an inadequate heatsink for them? What if the deflection boards fail because the chassis transistors fail, and take the deflection board with it?

Our Transistor Upgrade kit not only replaces the bottlecaps with higher-spec, heavier-duty power transistors – it clamps them to big, heavy aluminum heatsinks with a fan blowing through them. You can run your Tempest, Star Wars, or any other vector game all day, and the heatsink will barely even get warm. Vector games in Flynn’s Retrocade have run six days a week for a year and a half, with zero deflection board failures, since installing the Alan-1 Transistor Upgrade Kit. (These games used to average 2-3 months between deflection failures.)

I’ll say that again for the people in the back: Vector games in Flynn’s Retrocade have run six days a week for a year and a half, with zero deflection board failures, since installing the Alan-1 Transistor Upgrade Kit.

The Transistor Upgrade Kit requires no soldering and no permanent modifications to your monitor. It includes all the necessary cables and connectors, and you can install it in a few minutes. This is the best upgrade you can make to your Wells-Gardner 19K6100.

Our first production run sold out in a week. We’ve built more, and (after a months-long saga that could be its own article) they've finally arrived! You can order a new Alan-1 Transistor Upgrade Kit here, and it will ship immediately.

tl;dr Stop repairing your Wells-Gardner deflection boards, and install our Transistor Upgrade Kit!

Sincerely,

The Alan-1 Team

(Postscript, for the hardcore collectors and engineers: Wells-Gardner figured this out long ago. The 19K6400, built to replace the 6100, doubles up on the bottlecap transistors, and mounts them to aluminum heatsinks instead of the chassis. The few collectors who own one of these rarities have found it very reliable...and our design is even better, since it's actively cooled and uses higher-spec transistors.)