Mef

Hi Thomas, which one are we talking about? I'm considering a Harmony (don't care much for Encore = homungous Atari Basic homebrews) and want to know what I'llbe missing.

You have a Commodore 1084S and go for A/V instead of S-Video (separate Luma & Chroma)... that's such a waste, why!?

I'd cut out a bit of the motherboard where the buttons are and solder a small microswitch horizontally (securing with some hot-glue or similar substance). This way the buttons would press on the switches properly - as in, on the same axis as the button movement, remediating the idiocy of the original design. Honestly tho, if you like the form factor, you might want to try The Bug. The flimsy construction of the plastic tabs that hit the directional dome-contacts is very prone to bending (mushy, worse responce) and eventual breakage.

If you've replaced the chip, and it still acts the same way, it means that there's smaller chance that the erroneous signal can be caused by an internal failure of any of the electrical components. Meaning you might just as well have a regular mechanical short. Joystick pins connected by some small scrap of metal, which got there there with the dust. A broken out piece of wire laying around the board or connector somwhere. I'd definately check for bridged pins on 4050's socket, too! Whether you're really confident with the soldering iron, or not - you might have accidentally let the solder connect to somewhere not intended. Continuity meter might be in order, to check for troublesome bridging. That's off the top of my head, and I'm no real expert. But I do hope it is as simple, and my suggestions and guesses will help you solve the problem.

Ok tune, but the new avatar rocks. Friggin' love Videodrome. Timeless and visionary, just substitute cable TV for the Internet.

Enjoy the glitches.

Don't bother, just sell empty cartridge shells, maybe you'll make it in time before another C&D. It's a no-brainer that you'll just doing this to open wallets of a certain group of peole ("I must have all Atari collectibles in the Most Collectory Collector's Editions available"), but the abhorrent beginner's-batari grade "games" are so useless on their own, you might just as well skip this part and quit pretending there's more to it, lol...

It you're simply looking for a vertical shoot'em up, then there's a plenty of those for the platforms. Just search for Atari SHMUP and you're good. If you want to find a game that looks like doodled, then tough luck - the resolution of both VCS and Atari 8 bit computers is too low to simulate the fine detail, so it's not really possible to make the sprites look like scribbled. You might find games like this for 16 bit stuff, but you'd be better off just checking out modern mobile and PC/consoles indie games. The doodle look is quite popular there.

There is no opening tune in the PAL version. And there's no Star Wars tune when you get temporary invincibility either. We got screwed with this conversion, which is nothing new, as most of them are sloppy in some way (game speed, line count, etc.). Probably they simply couldn't get the timing right within "reasonable" (cheap and rushed) effort.

Gold plated is plain bullshit. The connectors on the console and TV are not gold plated, so what's the to be gained? The interference comes from the cable itself, multiplied by its length. Plugs introduce negligible loses, if any. Just get a thicker cable with proper shielding. From my experience, even the cheapest antenna cable (with foil shielding and solid copper core) does a lt better than good RCA cable. Sure it's less flexible and much thicker, but the quality of the picture improves dramatically.

Isn't drawing lines one of the original DPC additional capabilities?

Thanks for taking time to put together your patronizing remark, but no thanks. I have a absolutely no interest in commenting Longhorn's input for the Atari fans' society. This is exactly why I've said that he should be criticized for spreading a botched mod instructions and not for anything else. The harm has all the more impact as his site is well known and frequently cited.

Ah, I see you've got it sorted out already. All I can add is that this Longhorn guy should be hung by his balls and removed from Google search results for how he got around doing this mod. Telling people to drill holes in the shielding when there are 2 already available, and to castrate the system by removing connections from the motherboard, for no real reason, great job there, "engineer"! In practice, I haven't experienced any interference from RF circuitry at all, and there's plenty of more elegant solutions. Instructing to pull the chip out with a screwdriver, bend 30 years old legs, then solder directly to them is just pure idiocy. Especially when those needing the instructions would most likely be amateurs (lest they'd figure things out on their own) and he's just creating ways for them to mess up their consoles.

I'd say you shouldn't worry about the colors, but about obviously messed up/glitched sprites and background gfx... Did you tinker with it some more, besides the adjustment pot? Did it look like that (disregarding the palette) when you first tried the system/games? You can try one of those titles via emulation and will instantly see the difference in actuall shapes of the objects. On your pics they look like you were frying the console...

xucaen, can you describe how exactly these fail? I'm asking, since yugobrandon's case is giving me weird ideas. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but looking at that weird scenario described above, it seems that the video signal is too weak and the DVD manages to pick it up still. Now I'd speculate that since all other carts work fine on the same setup (sans-DVD player), then perhaps these particular cartridges are using up more juice (because the games are more CPU-intensive, or simply use ancient power-hungry ROM ICs) and it's the failing PSU that causes that, and not actually the console? Did you try a different power supply? EDIT: Oh well, nevermind - just saw your new post. If it's not a dying TIA, there's another thing I'd try - checking the voltage regulator for overheating. One of my Juniors had a problem with it and it was only affecting one game: Jungle Hunt (I didn't have that many to try out, tho). After a couple minutes, the console would reset for a split second every now and then. When I've opened it up, it turned out that the voltage regulator was soldered incorrectly and wasn't connecting with the metal pad underneath, so it didn't have any heatsink. I resoldered it into proper position and applied some thermal paste, it worked perfectly ever since. Maybe in your case, the thermal paste has dried out completely, and the regulator suffers, making the rest of the console fail if particular conditions are met? Maybe it's the dried-up caps that people get so obsessed about? I'd try those first, before you start ordering more expensive replacement parts or looking for a new VCS altogether.

So it's like Video Olympics minus all the features and gameplay modes? Why!?

Atari joystick is of really poor built quality and not ergonomic at all. Get a Wico/TAC 2/Competition Pro/Quickshot Megastar or something along these lines. They're still mostly of the "central stick and button(s) on the base" variety, but way more pleasant to handle and near-indestructible.

I was using 40" LED for Atari 2600 and C64 via RF (antenna)* and via AV cables for NES (and Pegasus famiclone). Bastards from Samsung didn't implement S-Video... NES didn't bother me, as AV is the only way to hook it up, excluding expensive mods, but with Atari and C64, I really wanted to improve that. I managed to get a Commodore 1084S monitor (around 13") last year, so C64 was sorted out instantly. With Atari I've modded it to S-video in the last days of the previous year and I am using all of my machines on a Commodore monitor now. Can't imagine I could ever get back to LCD/LED or a screen bigger than some 23". Whether it's the lack of delay or more about smaller screen making it easier to follow objects on the screen with one's eyes, I've noticed a significant improvement in my scores. I'm an average gamer at best and on that goddamn huge panel my best in Seaquest was something about 45k. I love that game and was obsessed about beating 50k (badge score), but just couldn't. Everything was zipping by real fast and it was a real struggle to watch the "motion-blurred" action. On 1084 I'm easily getting over 100k on the first run, so I think that speaks for itself! Plus, nothing really beats CRT when it comes to low-res images. It's not that aparent on VCS, but many C64 games and a lot of demos use dithering heavily, to produce nice smooth transitions on a tube, looking almost as if the palette was bigger. Same for Amiga and pretty much everything untill PS2. On LCD, it's just sharp square pixels everywhere, looking like zoom x8 in MS Paint, eww. For anyone not convinced, here's a very good material presenting the difference in picture between tubes and LCDs (skip to around 5:30): *With a well shielded RF cable there were no interference patterns whatsoever and the "comb/checkerboard" effect on vertical lines was much less noticable than on AV cables.

Good to hear that. Btw, Star Raider is just a default forum status, not a nickname. That'd be Mef.

P.S. Couldn't edit the previous post anymore... I'm using a later 1084S model (and darkened the pics a bit as they were taken with a phone camera and horrible light, making them grey and flat), so that might add to the differences as well. The main idea was to prove that it's just a matter of the colors' combinations and S-video will always give those artifacts, to some extent. It's just the way it is, nothing really wrong with your setup. I've also noticed that these effects are much less noticable on my C64, propably thanks to much higher horizontal resolution (faster color clock?) and limited palette.

Hi There, Not to worry, there will always be some slight shadowing with S-Video. It's all down to combination of colors. Some transitions will give you almost RGB-like quality look, like those details here.: Some will produce a strong shadow/light banding: Note how white and pink doesn't give eny banding here, but the brown-on-blue does: Some programmers use certain color combinations to purposedly trigger this artifact, to cheaply simulate "3d shadow" of maze walls and the like. As for this particular game, here's how it looks on my setup: I dunno how much are your picture's colors true to what is showing on the monitor, but it looks as if you've got much more saturation. First off, I'd remove the 75 ohm resistors from the cables, these aren't needed at all for Commodore monitors, as the signals on Commodore and Atari 8-bit stuff weren't up to spec with 75 ohm impendance anyway. Then I'd use the trimpots on the mod board to bring the color levels down a bit, it's the swings in Chroma that produce this shadowing*, so with weaker signal I guess that should be less noticable. Can't really say much more without looking at the schematics of this particular mod you're using and comparing it to mine, but it looks like you've got an awfull lot of capacitors in there, which migh introduce needless delays in the signal, making the artifacting more harsh. Might just as well be that PAL is less susceptible to this behaviour (because of its nature), so I wouldn't worry about comparing your picture to mine. *Try running some games with Color/Black&White switch in B&W position, or simply detach the Chroma cable - you'll see no banding/shadows. It's also a good way to check the monitor's convergence - there shouldn't be a tiniest hint of color showing in B&W picture.

Why assuming its the caps? Just in case - try a different TV, and/or different unit on that TV. Best way to solve this would be using a video mod that taps directly into TIA and drives the signals completely by itself. Just in case there's some interference introduced into the signals before they enter the video circuitry/mod board.

I'm impressed, there isn't many pixelists who care and can compensate for this in their design. Very fluid animation, and greatly defined frames. Not even one messy "transition angle", each sub-picture is perfectly translated into the medium of small rectangles. Very well done!

Maybe because when you get the opportunity of getting $500+ for something you'd be playing say 2 times per year for 30 minutes to amuse yourself, you don't really need that shitty odd-shaped silly coloured typewriter'd label cartridge with a game not wort a spit on it. Rings a bell?

It's a consumer's point of view, not Atari geek. Not to mention that these technical specs are freely available today, but were internal Atari docs at the time, pretty much only for a narrow group of engineers and coders. And for that particular "only judge the outcome" view, it's pretty honest and has its own value. If you could choose which system/port to play, would you still try to justify the overall weak impression of VCS version with technicalities?