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Sears Breakaway AV mod or Atari C-380...


sanman

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I've not got one of these so everything I add is speculation.

 

It's a case of reverse engineering (unless you have a schematic), and it would pain me if I said anything that could cause damage to the console, so please treat this as an academic excercise.

 

You'll have to follow the signal back from the RF back to the chip, noting the junctions where the signals branch going back to the pins on the main IC.

 

I say the above as at that point in time the consoles all had a main IC where there were multiple pins outputting various components of the image, which would be affected by various resistances for the luminance levels before being combined and fed into the RF modulator.

 

You'll look at the IC, see marking on the board for voltages, see the lines feeding the IC.  You'll also see the lines going back from the buttons/switches and the controllers.  These pins you will eliminate quite easily.  For the others you will want to follow them to the RF.  You will be looking for where they combine just prior to the RF modulator, as that will be the area you will want to tap the video signal.

 

As a tip of caution so as not to cause damage to the system and also so you could retain the RF output, when you tap the signal use a diode so there is nothing feeding back into the console.  Use a good diode with a higher rating than the voltage and amperage of the console.

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I did a rudimentary mod on my Sears breakaway about a year ago. There should be a large metal box just to the right of the speaker hole in the PCB. This is the RF modulator. The output side connects to a composite jack going outside the case, and the input side connects to a trace on the PCB. That trace is your unmodulated video signal. I did a quick-n-dirty mod by  directly soldering a RCA cable to that trace. Output looked terrible on an analog TV, but wonderful on a digital one (I'm guessing the digital TV could better deal with an unamplified/impedance-matched signal.) Still need to figure out how to do a proper mod sometime.

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