COMPOSITE MOD NTSC CONSOLE ON PAL TV

[RUNNER]

Hi all,

 

I'm posting this cause I'm desperate about this issue and I hope someone can help. I've read a lot about this here and there but I can't still solve my problem.

 

I've got an NTSC mod heavy sixer (composite exit) and a PAL tv (LG LCD).

 

I bought this console about two months ago from one of the well known ebay US sellers because prices for Atari stuff are much cheaper in US than here in Europe and also because I wanted an "NTSC-real thing". I had read previously that modifying the console thru a composite (RCA) exit would get rid of the NTSC/PAL issue, so, I went ahead and bought it already modified.

 

My surprise was that when I hooked it on the tv for the first time it seemed to work ok, though the image was a little blurred-de synchronized... I thought it had something to do with the tv composite in or the tv set itself, but I tried it on 3 more tv sets with the same result. Everything works 75% fine although the image is not 100 % clear and it's got strange effects (see attached pics). This is not the typical NTSC/PAL problem when you can't see the games at all or they're just shown black and white or in different colours, which leads me to think that the composite mod sorts out the issue but just at about 70-75% (colours are the right ones, but I get strange effects like shades, sort of scanlines somewhere and blurring).

 

What can I do? Last week I ordered an NTSC/PAL converter on ebay (25€) but it does absolutely nothing. It just simply says there's no signal.Perhaps the NTSC on the Atari is too old to get recognized by it.

 

Now, questions...

 

Would a composite-VGA cable (my tv's got an VGA port) get rid of the NTSC issue? Perhaps there's no NTSC/PAL on VGA... I don't know...

 

composite/HDMI?

 

any other ideas??

 

Thanx!!!

[RUNNER]

anybody? no ideas?

[strudders]

Not really sure I understand what your issue is from the pics.

 

I live in the UK and collect mainly NTSC. I've got a 4-switch woody that I modded and it's fine. When I say fine, it has some 'blurring' as you'd expect (I use a CRT though so that may be artifacts from that).

 

Maybe you could take some better full-screen images to show what the issue is ? Maybe you're expecting too much from the image clarity ?

[+SpiceWare]

I've got an NTSC mod heavy sixer (composite exit) and a PAL tv (LG LCD).

 

 

Do you have an older CRT TV you can try it on? Digit TVs are hit or miss with older consoles like the Atari as the signals they generate are not to broadcast specifications. On the rare instances my HDTV displays a picture from my 2600, the image is in B&W. My 7800 always shows a picture, but likewise in B&W. My HDTV also dislikes my Sega Nomad (portable Genesis/Mega Drive).

Edited July 29, 2014 by SpiceWare

[RUNNER]

Not really sure I understand what your issue is from the pics.

 

I live in the UK and collect mainly NTSC. I've got a 4-switch woody that I modded and it's fine. When I say fine, it has some 'blurring' as you'd expect (I use a CRT though so that may be artifacts from that).

 

Maybe you could take some better full-screen images to show what the issue is ? Maybe you're expecting too much from the image clarity ?

OK. I also had a 4 switch until 4 months ago or so. I used to connect that (same TV set) thru regular coaxial-antenna (I live in Spain). The image on that console was pretty good (not taking into account the usual crispy image from coaxial) but very sharp though and colours looked perfect.

 

This console shows the typical effects from a NTSC/PAL issue. Double shades and trembling images (like the paddle on "Super breakout". Won't stand still, moves a bit to the sides by itself, without touching the controllers).

 

Besides, some pixels (not all) show some kind of scanlines, what makes me think that the NTSC is trying to refresh a higher number of colour lines than PAL.

 

As a conclusion, it looks to me that the composite has got rid of 70% of the problem but not all...

 

I'll hang up a few more pics in a while.

[RUNNER]

 

 

Do you have an older CRT TV you can try it on? Digit TVs are hit or miss with older consoles like the Atari as the signals they generate are not to broadcast specifications. On the rare instances my HDTV displays a picture from my 2600, the image is in B&W. My 7800 always shows a picture, but likewise in B&W. My HDTV also dislikes my Sega Nomad (portable Genesis/Mega Drive).

Yes, fortunately I still have an old CRT Sony and I hooked it on that a few days ago thru composite. The image looks perfect there, which makes me think that the console is OK. I was a little concerned about the console itself but that doesn't seem to be the problem...

[RUNNER]

Not really sure I understand what your issue is from the pics.

 

I live in the UK and collect mainly NTSC. I've got a 4-switch woody that I modded and it's fine. When I say fine, it has some 'blurring' as you'd expect (I use a CRT though so that may be artifacts from that).

 

Maybe you could take some better full-screen images to show what the issue is ? Maybe you're expecting too much from the image clarity ?

Here are some more pics. Look at the sides of the chips in "Othello". There're shades (some kind of ghost effect) or they're doubled. Also the left side on "Super Breakout" looks blurred. On "Video Pinball", apart from the dissapointing double sides the main colour (pink) is not even right. It should be blue!

What do you think about these weird scanlines (not even though) on "Asteroids"? LCDs have no scanlines!! :-)

Not to mention of course all my carts are NTSC and they've been tested hundreds of times before on different consoles I had.

[Mef]

Here's the thing - Most of what you've described is not related to NTSC/PAL at all (not sure about the video pinball, but maybe you've been using NTSC cart on a PAL machine and got used to different palette? Most games work ok between systems, with just the palettes differing). Your TV is "new" enough to be multisystem, even tho it's running on 50Hz power supply. That's because the power supply no longer dictates the refresh rate as it did with many CRTs. So PAL/NTSC discord is usually out of question.

 

There's a couple things that I had to learn the hard way, naively believing that the picture quality was always fine with the old consoles I got (VCS, NES) and it's the fault with new TVs. Well, apparently, the TVs and consoles are usually both ok, there's just those details we didn't know/notice as kids, caring mostly about action and looking at much smaller CRT screens.

 

Let me share:

 

The "scanlines" on some objects are the effect of original game flickering the sprite in question.

It's just that modern TVs get confused by that flicker and think the image was interlaced, displaying empty frame every other scanline for objects which rapidly blink. I get the same with Jungle Hunt's crocodiles and other stuff. Instead of blinking as intended, they just become horizontally "striped".

 

The overall blurriness, ghosting and color bleed is simply how the original shittyness of Composite gets upscaled. You notice it more partly because you're looking at the screen 4 times the size of an old tube one, and partly because of the built-in "enchancements" which serve you bullshit like increased contrast, interpolated synthetic picture frames drawn inbetween the 50/60 Hz refresh rate, to make your TV "100 Hz" or "200 Hz" or whatever it says, and such.

 

Fuzzy edges of vertical lines, grains along the edges, washed out colors around the edges of objects and loss of small detail are all part of the main Composite flaw called Dot Crawl, again, upscaled as if you used a poor "blur" filter in a graphical program.

 

People convert to Composite, because it's far more resistant to interferences than RF, but the quality doesn't really improve if you had a good RF cable. No converters, like Composite-to-HDMI are going to help, because you simply can't accurately retrieve all the picture "data" once it's been "compressed" with high loss ratio (this is a newbie-friendly description, not the real thing, but it should give you the right feel. Try Googling for Composite artifacting and dot crawl to learn more).

The only upgrade you can get from here, is modding for S-Video output (provided your TV can accept it via S-Video connector or can be fed S-Video via SCART - some can, especially when they have more than 1 SCART), which will remedy all the dot crawl, most of the fine detail loss and "skewed" picture. Slight color bleed and some ghosting will stay tho, as those would require RGB/Component signal, which the VCS can't produce. The amount of blurriness is reliant on the upscaling engine of your TV, you might try to switch some of the enchancments off, by looking for a "game mode" in your TVs settings. For the "scanlines" issue, as far as I know - there's nothing you can do about it, apart from buying an expensive a proffesional monitor or standalone upscaler, which can fully understand 240p picture format.

 

Hope that helps, any questions - let me know.

Edited July 29, 2014 by Mef

[RUNNER]

Here's the thing - It's not related to NTSC/PAL at all.

 

Your TV is "new" enough to be multisystem, even tho it's running on 50Hz power supply. That's because the power supply no longer dictates the refresh rate as it did with many CRTs. So PAL/NTSC thing is completely out of question.

 

There's a couple things that I had to learn the hard way, naively believing that the picture quality was always fine with the old consoles I got (VCS, NES) and it's the fault with new TVs. Well, apparently, the TVs and consoles are usually both ok, there's just those things we didn't notice as kids, caring mostl about action and looking at much smaller CRT screens. Let me share:

 

The "scanlines" on some objects are the effect of original game flickering the sprite in question.

It's just that modern TVs get confused by that flicker and think the image was interlaced, displaying empty frame every other scanline for objects which rapidly blink. I get the same with Jungle Hunt's crocodiles and other stuff.

 

The overall blurriness, ghosting and color bleed is simply how the original shittyness of Composite gets upscaled. You notice it more partly because you're looking at the screen 4 times the size of an old tube one, and partly because of the built-in "enchancements" which serve you bullshit like increased contrast, interpolated synthetic picture frames drawn inbetween the 50/60 Hz refresh rate, to make your TV "100 Hz" or "200 Hz" or whatever it says, and such.

 

Fuzzy edges of vertical lines, grains along the edges, washed out colors around the edges of objects and loss of small detail are all part of the main Composite flaw called Dot Crawl, again, upscaled as if you used a poor "blur" filter in a graphical program.

Thanx for the reply. OK, makes sense, but then... it is really much better and in fact you get a much better picture thru normal coaxial? I had my previous 2600 console hooked onto this same TV set and the image was kind of "normal" like in the old times (without the scanlines of course) but it was clear, sharp and colours were fine.

 

I got it modded to get some improvements...and why are some colours wrong? I'm not saying you're not right, in fact and looking at your reply you seem to have some knowledge about electronics. I have no idea myself. I've always been a collector but never had "serious" electronics issues before and didn't have to bother that much about that...Had a CRT until about a couple of years ago, but as I said I had no problems with my old 4 switch before...

 

Any other opinions? Do your games look like mine on an LCD set?

 

thanx all

[+SpiceWare]

What do you think about these weird scanlines (not even though) on "Asteroids"? LCDs have no scanlines!! :-)

 

The weird scanlines are caused by your TV treating the Atari's signal as though it were 480i (interlaced) when in fact it's 240p. Games that use flicker (such as Asteroids) will show the lines in the middle of objects. I showed (reply 13) what my sister's HDTV does to the fireballs in Stay Frosty in another conversation that's similar to this one.

 

As said before, the Atari (and other classic systems) generate non-standard signals. In the days of analog equipment that didn't matter. Digital TVs often have problems. Some TVs have a "game mode". If yours has it, turning it on may help. If it doesn't you're just SOL and will have to live with the image as is, or better yet use an older CRT display.

 

For this reason I use an old C= 1084S monitor for my classic systems. My Atari looks like this on it (click on image to see it full size and eliminate the artifacts from scaling):

 

You can see other screenshots in reply 15 of another topic.

Edited July 29, 2014 by SpiceWare

[RUNNER]

Not really sure I understand what your issue is from the pics.

 

I live in the UK and collect mainly NTSC. I've got a 4-switch woody that I modded and it's fine. When I say fine, it has some 'blurring' as you'd expect (I use a CRT though so that may be artifacts from that).

 

Maybe you could take some better full-screen images to show what the issue is ? Maybe you're expecting too much from the image clarity ?

Here are some pics. Look

 

Here's the thing - Most of what you've described is not related to NTSC/PAL at all (not sure about the video pinball, but maybe you've been using NTSC cart on a PAL machine and got used to different palette? Most games work ok between systems, with just the palettes differing). Your TV is "new" enough to be multisystem, even tho it's running on 50Hz power supply. That's because the power supply no longer dictates the refresh rate as it did with many CRTs. So PAL/NTSC discord is usually out of question.

 

There's a couple things that I had to learn the hard way, naively believing that the picture quality was always fine with the old consoles I got (VCS, NES) and it's the fault with new TVs. Well, apparently, the TVs and consoles are usually both ok, there's just those details we didn't know/notice as kids, caring mostly about action and looking at much smaller CRT screens.

 

Let me share:

 

The "scanlines" on some objects are the effect of original game flickering the sprite in question.

It's just that modern TVs get confused by that flicker and think the image was interlaced, displaying empty frame every other scanline for objects which rapidly blink. I get the same with Jungle Hunt's crocodiles and other stuff. Instead of blinking as intended, they just become horizontally "striped".

 

The overall blurriness, ghosting and color bleed is simply how the original shittyness of Composite gets upscaled. You notice it more partly because you're looking at the screen 4 times the size of an old tube one, and partly because of the built-in "enchancements" which serve you bullshit like increased contrast, interpolated synthetic picture frames drawn inbetween the 50/60 Hz refresh rate, to make your TV "100 Hz" or "200 Hz" or whatever it says, and such.

 

Fuzzy edges of vertical lines, grains along the edges, washed out colors around the edges of objects and loss of small detail are all part of the main Composite flaw called Dot Crawl, again, upscaled as if you used a poor "blur" filter in a graphical program.

 

People convert to Composite, because it's far more resistant to interferences than RF, but the quality doesn't really improve if you had a good RF cable. No converters, like Composite-to-HDMI are going to help, because you simply can't accurately retrieve all the picture "data" once it's been "compressed" with high loss ratio (this is a newbie-friendly description, not the real thing, but it should give you the right feel. Try Googling for Composite artifacting and dot crawl to learn more).

The only upgrade you can get from here, is modding for S-Video output (provided your TV can accept it via S-Video connector or can be fed S-Video via SCART - some can, especially when they have more than 1 SCART), which will remedy all the dot crawl, most of the fine detail loss and "skewed" picture. Slight color bleed and some ghosting will stay tho, as those would require RGB/Component signal, which the VCS can't produce. The amount of blurriness is reliant on the upscaling engine of your TV, you might try to switch some of the enchancments off, by looking for a "game mode" in your TVs settings. For the "scanlines" issue, as far as I know - there's nothing you can do about it, apart from buying an expensive a proffesional monitor or standalone upscaler, which can fully understand 240p picture format.

 

Hope that helps, any questions - let me know.

BTW I think it was not clear in my reply...this is a 6 switch heavy sixer. I sold my previous 4 switch coaxial...

[RUNNER]

 

The weird scanlines are caused by your TV treating the Atari's signal as though it were 480i (interlaced) when in fact it's 240p. Games that use flicker (such as Asteroids) will show the lines in the middle of objects. I showed (reply 13) what my sister's HDTV does to the fireballs in Stay Frosty in another conversation that's similar to this one.

 

As said before, the Atari (and other classic systems) generate non-standard signals. In the days of analog equipment that didn't matter. Digital TVs often have problems. Some TVs have a "game mode". If yours has it, turning it on may help. If it doesn't you're just SOL and will have to live with the image as is, or better yet use an older CRT display.

 

For this reason I use an old C= 1084S monitor for my classic systems. My Atari looks like this on it (click on image to see it full size and eliminate the artifacts from scaling):

 

You can see other screenshots in reply 15 of another topic.

thanx. Wow looks awesome. Perfect image to me!!!

[RUNNER]

Not really sure I understand what your issue is from the pics.

 

I live in the UK and collect mainly NTSC. I've got a 4-switch woody that I modded and it's fine. When I say fine, it has some 'blurring' as you'd expect (I use a CRT though so that may be artifacts from that).

 

Maybe you could take some better full-screen images to show what the issue is ? Maybe you're expecting too much from the image clarity ?

Here are some pics. Look

 

Here's the thing - Most of what you've described is not related to NTSC/PAL at all (not sure about the video pinball, but maybe you've been using NTSC cart on a PAL machine and got used to different palette? Most games work ok between systems, with just the palettes differing). Your TV is "new" enough to be multisystem, even tho it's running on 50Hz power supply. That's because the power supply no longer dictates the refresh rate as it did with many CRTs. So PAL/NTSC discord is usually out of question.

 

There's a couple things that I had to learn the hard way, naively believing that the picture quality was always fine with the old consoles I got (VCS, NES) and it's the fault with new TVs. Well, apparently, the TVs and consoles are usually both ok, there's just those details we didn't know/notice as kids, caring mostly about action and looking at much smaller CRT screens.

 

Let me share:

 

The "scanlines" on some objects are the effect of original game flickering the sprite in question.

It's just that modern TVs get confused by that flicker and think the image was interlaced, displaying empty frame every other scanline for objects which rapidly blink. I get the same with Jungle Hunt's crocodiles and other stuff. Instead of blinking as intended, they just become horizontally "striped".

 

The overall blurriness, ghosting and color bleed is simply how the original shittyness of Composite gets upscaled. You notice it more partly because you're looking at the screen 4 times the size of an old tube one, and partly because of the built-in "enchancements" which serve you bullshit like increased contrast, interpolated synthetic picture frames drawn inbetween the 50/60 Hz refresh rate, to make your TV "100 Hz" or "200 Hz" or whatever it says, and such.

 

Fuzzy edges of vertical lines, grains along the edges, washed out colors around the edges of objects and loss of small detail are all part of the main Composite flaw called Dot Crawl, again, upscaled as if you used a poor "blur" filter in a graphical program.

 

People convert to Composite, because it's far more resistant to interferences than RF, but the quality doesn't really improve if you had a good RF cable. No converters, like Composite-to-HDMI are going to help, because you simply can't accurately retrieve all the picture "data" once it's been "compressed" with high loss ratio (this is a newbie-friendly description, not the real thing, but it should give you the right feel. Try Googling for Composite artifacting and dot crawl to learn more).

The only upgrade you can get from here, is modding for S-Video output (provided your TV can accept it via S-Video connector or can be fed S-Video via SCART - some can, especially when they have more than 1 SCART), which will remedy all the dot crawl, most of the fine detail loss and "skewed" picture. Slight color bleed and some ghosting will stay tho, as those would require RGB/Component signal, which the VCS can't produce. The amount of blurriness is reliant on the upscaling engine of your TV, you might try to switch some of the enchancments off, by looking for a "game mode" in your TVs settings. For the "scanlines" issue, as far as I know - there's nothing you can do about it, apart from buying an expensive a proffesional monitor or standalone upscaler, which can fully understand 240p picture format.

 

Hope that helps, any questions - let me know.

thanx again for you answer and taking the time. It really explains things I had no idea about. It's always a pleasure to talk to people with the same interests and who know what they're dealing with.

 

Any more comments from anyone will be appreciated!

[Mef]

Just to give you a little comfort - my games usually look almost exactly the same.

This is especially bad with small areas of diagonal singled-out pixels of highly saturated colors like the details on Space Invaders or the figures from Skydiver.

All jagged and even slanted, with various pixels getting different shades of the main color as the TV tries to blur them.

 

You'd notice that this is gone when switching to B&W mode (slight ghosting, etc will remain), because only the Luma part of the signal is processed and there is no messy/lossy mixing of Luma (kinda "pixel position and brightness" component of the image) with Chroma (color information), which makes Composite so bad.

 

This is why S-video is the best way to go. Even better, on the afformentioned Commodore 1702 or 1084 monitors. Disregarding all the other pluses they have, they are very-very tolerant when it comes to old computers and consoles' signals, which are rarely perfectly up to specs (let's just say that Commodore's, or Atari 8bit machines' signal predates the S-video standard used in TVs later on, so it might differ slightly) and have a multitude of inputs for different systems.

Edited July 29, 2014 by Mef

[RUNNER]

Just to give you a little comfort - my games usually look almost exactly the same.

This is especially bad with small areas of diagonal singled-out pixels of highly saturated colors like the details on Space Invaders or the figures from Skydiver.

All jagged and even slanted, with various pixels getting different shades of the main color as the TV tries to blur them.

 

You'd notice that this is gone when switching to B&W mode (slight ghosting, etc will remain), because only the Luma part of the signal is processed and there is no messy/lossy mixing of Luma (kinda "pixel position and brightness" component of the image) with Chroma (color information), which makes Composite so bad.

 

This is why S-video is the best way to go. Even better, on the afformentioned Commodore 1702 or 1084 monitors. Disregarding all the other pluses they have, they are very-very tolerant when it comes to old computers and consoles' signals, which are rarely perfectly up to specs (let's just say that Commodore's, or Atari 8bit machines' signal predates the S-video standard used in TVs later on, so it might differ slightly) and have a multitude of inputs for different systems.

ha ha, yes, you're right. when I switch to b&w most of the odd effects disappear. And I'd definitely consider to try s-video, though I don't think my TV's got it. I can't remember right now...I think it's just got VGA I'll check...

[strudders]

Someone else may be able to comment with more knowledge (god knows the others on this thread know more that me ) - but it may be worth adjusting the variable resistor R211. You can locate this using the Field Service Manual which is freely available on the net.

 

It certainly cleaned my image up as far as 'ghosting' goes but you have to be careful that you mark a reference point of the original position just in case.

 

Maybe best to see if others agree first though !

[RUNNER]

Someone else may be able to comment with more knowledge (god knows the others on this thread know more that me ) - but it may be worth adjusting the variable resistor R211. You can locate this using the Field Service Manual which is freely available on the net.

 

It certainly cleaned my image up as far as 'ghosting' goes but you have to be careful that you mark a reference point of the original position just in case.

 

Maybe best to see if others agree first though !

OK. Thanx! I didn't know about this. I'll try to spot the service manual. Let's see what others say though.

[freewheel]

Thanx for the reply. OK, makes sense, but then... it is really much better and in fact you get a much better picture thru normal coaxial? I had my previous 2600 console hooked onto this same TV set and the image was kind of "normal" like in the old times (without the scanlines of course) but it was clear, sharp and colours were fine.

 

I got it modded to get some improvements...and why are some colours wrong?

 

As Mef states, composite video can be... messy. Google up some comparisons between composite and S-video. On some systems, and some consoles, the difference can be astounding. My own setup - and a lot of people's - hardly shows a difference, so composite is just fine for me. It may not be "good enough" for what you're using.

 

To answer your broader question - RF/coaxial signals can be VERY good from older consoles. The 6-switchers, especially the heavies, have damned fine RF output. I have seen many composite mods that actually degrade the picture, overall. Sure, there's less noise, but when you already have a clean RF signal the "improvement" is slight, while the "degradation" is moreso.

 

My bigger question is what exact composite mod is installed in your unit. They all have their pros and cons, and some are worse for certain effects than others. Personally I prefer a mod that has several variable resistors in it, so I can tune the picture for my CRT, specifically for colour. And I've found that no two 2600 units take the exact same resistance values, so I suspect the pre-built mods might not always be the best answer. I won't pretend to understand enough about video signals to know exactly why, but tweaking each of the luminance signals independently has been a godsend when it comes to getting the colours "just right". I guess it has to do with colour saturation of various elements although I don't quite understand what each of the three does. And you can already play with the chroma with the built in POT.

 

[RUNNER]

YEEES! I managed to get rid of 70% of the problem and now a couple of things are much clearer.

 

Thanx to all for your answers and specially to strudders , cause you gave me the clue of what to do. As I said I'm not very much into testing electronics and the farthest I had got in the past was to disassembling my 4 switch and taking a look at the board, no further research.

 

As I couldn't get what strudders told me about the R211 off my mind I got up early and thought it'd be worth to give it a try so I took all the pieces apart and turned the knob...here are the results (take a look at the pics). Most of ghosting dissapeared and I recovered the original colours (look at video pinball, now it's blue!).

 

As for the rest, now I know it's got nothing to do with NTSC/PAL issues and it's much clearer to me that certain effects are caused by LCD and also composite mod not always improves image over RF (picture on my 4 switch was sharper but also noisier) so it could be a matter of sharpness over noise

 

As for the mod , I'm also enclosing a picture. I have no idea of what I've had done to my 2600... is it a good one, bad?

 

 

[RUNNER]

 

As Mef states, composite video can be... messy. Google up some comparisons between composite and S-video. On some systems, and some consoles, the difference can be astounding. My own setup - and a lot of people's - hardly shows a difference, so composite is just fine for me. It may not be "good enough" for what you're using.

 

To answer your broader question - RF/coaxial signals can be VERY good from older consoles. The 6-switchers, especially the heavies, have damned fine RF output. I have seen many composite mods that actually degrade the picture, overall. Sure, there's less noise, but when you already have a clean RF signal the "improvement" is slight, while the "degradation" is moreso.

 

My bigger question is what exact composite mod is installed in your unit. They all have their pros and cons, and some are worse for certain effects than others. Personally I prefer a mod that has several variable resistors in it, so I can tune the picture for my CRT, specifically for colour. And I've found that no two 2600 units take the exact same resistance values, so I suspect the pre-built mods might not always be the best answer. I won't pretend to understand enough about video signals to know exactly why, but tweaking each of the luminance signals independently has been a godsend when it comes to getting the colours "just right". I guess it has to do with colour saturation of various elements although I don't quite understand what each of the three does. And you can already play with the chroma with the built in POT.

 

thanx! vintagegaming mod? no idea...

[strudders]

That's cool !

 

Pleased you managed to clean your picture up a bit !

[freewheel]

Your mod is probably fine. I believe that's one of the earlier transistor mods although the pic is a bit blurry.

 

Really, all the various mods people have come out with over the years each have their own pros and cons. And like I said, it all depends on the condition of your console, and what kind of TV you're hooking up to. It sounds like the colour pot adjustment helped a lot, which is often the case. The colours drift on 2600s something fierce. Must be caps failing over time or something.

[Mef]

Ha! Good tip with the variable resistor.

 

I completely forgot about that. I think it's a similar case as with the Commodore 64s, where the Chroma signal is very strong and many people add extra 75-150 Ohm resistor onto the Chroma line when hooking it up to a new LCD TV. Otherwise they either get crazy colors with a lot of bleeding, or black & white picture (or alternating between color and B&W, depending on what's being drawn).

 

Glad you've tuned your VCS!

[RUNNER]

Ha! Good tip with the variable resistor.

 

I completely forgot about that. I think it's a similar case as with the Commodore 64s, where the Chroma signal is very strong and many people add extra 75-150 Ohm resistor onto the Chroma line when hooking it up to a new LCD TV. Otherwise they either get crazy colors with a lot of bleeding, or black & white picture (or alternating between color and B&W, depending on what's being drawn).

 

Glad you've tuned your VCS!

 

 

thanx!

[RUNNER]

OK. This is sorted out. Thanx to everyone who helped me and gave me their advice.

I'm going to receive tomorrow or probably Friday an SLG 3000 scanline generator and I'll also hook it up to this console to give it a try. We'll see what happens. I'm sure there's been a topic here somewhere about this but for anyone interested in knowing how it works on my 6 switch and LCD I'll open a new topic as soon as I get it.