Atari HDMI Mod?

[hizzy]

There's a guy on facebook who says he'll be selling HDMI 2600's & 7800's. Here's his post:

 

We are currently preparing a series of Atari 2600 and 7800 consoles with our new world wide unique hdmi mod.
We receipt the pcb boards a few days ago and start to assemble the first consoles. Starting with a series of atari 2600 junior black consoles. Next are black 7800 consoles.
The 2600 hdmi edition also contains a switchless pause mod supporting joystick pause without modification of controller. All hdmi mods will be delivered with our famous simple stereo mod boosting audio without game modifications.
The atari 5200 hdmi mod is on its way as well. We currently deal with some improvements due to vertical banding of the gtia.
Price will be 60 eur above av modded consoles. On the back is only a hdmi output cable.
Look at the picture how nice the output is.
7800 and 2600 have both similar output.

 

His name is Ralp Puchner. Has anyone else seen this? Is there an HDMI mod for the atari? I haven't seen one.

 

Thanks

[+groundtrooper]

Ya I have been following his posts since I stumbled across them. From what I can tell he is the FIRST. It is unfortunate that he is in the EU. It makes it very hard for us on the North American continent to get one. Exchange rate and shipping $$$.

I asked him if he would be offering a mod kit to buy and his answer was no. You either had to buy a completed unit from him or ship your unit to him because of some EU laws or something. Seemed weird, but whatever.

 

I would love to have a an HDMI 7800. I am working with a modder I found on FB who modded another 7800 of mine to S-Vid & AV. He does great work and is working on an HDMI for the Intellivision. He thought if he could get the Intellivision working he would give my 7800 a try.

 

It's a slow long term project in his free time, and he has a very busy mod business so I don't know how long or how quick this will progress. But I am hopeful that it will happen at some point.

[ApolloBoy]

You either had to buy a completed unit from him or ship your unit to him because of some EU laws or something. Seemed weird, but whatever.

Holy crap, that's that Retromod guy who got banned here a few years back.

[alex_79]

I'm not interested at all in HDMI mod for classic consoles. I have a few CRT TVs that I keep for the sole purpose of classing gaming and the only way I would play them on digital TV is through emulation with CRT effect enabled and usb adapter to use the original controllers.
With digital TV you always have some amount of lag, lightguns don't work and without some sort of filter (even a simple "scanline" effect would help) the picture looks just terrible IMHO.

That said, I see how some are interested in such a mod and I suggest to get more info before spending big money for it:
Unless the mod uses a similar approach as Tim Worthington's RGB mod (that is, the board is placed between the CPU and the TIA so to generate a digital signal bypassing the TIA video generation completely), it would only consist in an upscaler mounted inside the console, which uses the standard definition video signal from the TIA as input.

In that case, it would be better to just mod the console for the best standard definition analog video output (with the RGBmod or a good s-video one) and then send the signal to a quality upscaler designed specifically for retrogaming (like the mini framemeister), which will do a better job than a cheap one installed in the console.

While more expensive, the external upscaler can be used for many consoles and can be upgraded easily when something more performant comes out. (a scaler for UHD resolution, for example...)

[hizzy]

Just searched Retromod. Wow.

[AtariBrian]

That guy was a wack job. I can only imagine what he is gonna do to those consoles.