2600A (Crossbow please read)

[Mister VCS]

A few weeks ago I got my first woody 4switch 2600A made in Hong Kong.

Crossbow told me that the picture quality on the woody 2600A should be

better than on an all black 2600A.

When I played with the system on my 1995 Sony TV set I got the same

ill effects as with my all black system (fuzz and static on many games, but

not at all).

What is wrong with the 2600A? Back in the 80ies Atari must had some

trouble with his costumers with this cheap-made systems.

The picture on the 6switch Hong Kong 2600P is perfect, with all of my

games, and the 2600jr is even better than the 2600AP models.

[Ze_ro]

Are you sure the problem isn't with your RF switch? I know for some games (not all of them though), I'll get a really grainy picture (River Raid and Pole Position come to mind). Once, when River Raid was particularly bad, I fiddled with the RF switch, making sure all the connections were really tight, and eventually it got much better... although I really should get a new RF switch, since the one I'm using introduces more interference than it really should...

 

--Zero

[Mister VCS]

Z_ero: I don´t use a switchbox.

The german Atari consoles didn´t

included a switchbox. We just plug

the antenna-cable in the antenna-in

of the tv set.

[jahfish]

and when the tv (or vcr in between) supports ntsc, we can play all games in full color ;-D

 

shouldn't it be the same vice-versa for you us guys?

 

come on, upgrade your tv-sets with a multistandard vcr ..... i hate those traders going ... "no, no, i only collect ntsc carts"

[Ze_ro]

Well, the only NTSC Atari's that can do without an RF switchbox are the ones that have been manually modified to use a composite input... Older TV's only had one input on the back of them, so everything went through that (Nowadays, there's multiple A/V ports, but we're talking 80's TV's with UHF dials on them). Without the modification, we're constant slaves to the RF switchbox, and it's generally the limiting factor in picture quality unfortunately

 

Unfortunately, there's little to no way of determining if a TV/VCR will be multistandard (They don't exactly advertise that kinda thing on the box from what I've seen). I accidentally purchased a PAL version of Dragonfire, and I plan to keep it to test wether TV's will work with a PAL signal...

 

--Zero

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Actually it could be this fact as well. Your 2600A you stated was made in Hong Kong. I am almost 100% sure that my 2600A 4 switch woody I got in 82 was made in Sunnyvale. And it is a little known fact that variances in the units exist in quality of the units construction and quality of the picture and sound depending on country of manufacture. I am not saying that all the 2600s made over seas suffer from the problem you described, but I will state that I have seen these problems in those units from overseas more often.

 

I also know that my 7800 had a pretty nasty looking picture to it compared to both the 2600s I had and even to my Colecovision and Intellivision units. I finally traced it to several things acting in concert causing the various snow and distortion I was getting on the screen. First the rf connector on the 7800 was fairly corroded. A little fine grit sandpaper to remove the rust and some alcohol to clean up and that helped a bunch. Then the other problem was that I have about 9 gaming systems all connected up on a bookshelf. Well there was some small noise being introduced into the 7800 rf cable from the other cables and power supplies that were in the area.

 

I don't know the specifics of yours other than where it was made. With that I had to either agree that the RF switchbox is flakey or the 2600 could be at fault or it could be other cables or power adapters in the area. Also you can try and plug the 2600 into a seperate wall outlet or better yet one on a different immediate circuit to eliminate any noise coming from the power which could also cause this.

 

Lots of stuff to check...

 

 

 

[ 12-26-2001: Message edited by: -^Cro§Bow^- ]