spaceian

Thanks omf! Didn't even think about the transistor replacement, which will probably be a good idea since now I'm barely getting any signal at all!

Hey there Atari Age! Apologies for my very first post being a question but times are dire on my workbench. A friend handed me his childhood Pong console (C-100) that he had dug out of a closet and lamented that the video was weird on his TV. After lecturing him on the intricacies of "classic" video devices on new display hardware, I saw the issue he was actually having. The colors and signal attenuation were all wonky and the screen would often appear split into four quadrants. Even worse, there was no sound to be had from the speaker. In my head I immediately changed my opinion to RF output issues. Possibly a simple fix with some adjustments or in-line amplification. After trying both go these methods, the problem persists and in fact has gotten even worse with the display showing barely any output whatsoever. Since the problem is getting worse, I'm making the assumption that the electrolytic caps are probably done for and might need a replacement. My question to all of you is: anyone seen this or similar issue? What steps did you take to remedy? This is definitely the oldest console I've worked on and in principle the electronics are just plain ol' electronics (with really rough solder jobs sometimes... I just spent almost an hour trying to remove the main power conditioning cap) but there's probably a lot of quirks and intricacies that I don't know about. I'm much more familiar with the Nintendo/Sega 8-bit era and beyond. Any thoughts? Anecdotes? Well wishes? Glad to be here with you all. Cheers, Ian

Late to the reply party on this one... Yeah the N64 video output is notoriously weak. I would highly recommend building an amplifier for the video signal. RetroRGB has a pretty good RGB mod and amplifier plan: http://retrorgb.com/n64rgbmod.html I hit similar issues on my Samsung LCD as well before getting my console all properly modded up