Old school meets new school
My 800xl has a new companion, a Magnavox 15mf400t/37 monitor. Unfortunately, the Magnavox doesn’t like the Atari that much. It has to be turned off and turned back on to get the correct picture up. It works fine with my PS2 though… If you have any ideas why this is, please let me know!
I recently picked up
an old Commdoore cm-141 monitor, because C= were
the prefered monitors back in the day for the
8bits (I had to make do as a kid with sharp color
tv and vcr to make a pseudo monitor) anwyay the
c= monitor makes my 65XE setup look retro, but
the flat screen sure does look cool it even sort
of matches the 800xl industrial colors. One
thing tho, when you play games that use “artifacting” it will look like ass on your LCD.
Many games used this technique (to varying degrees) one I can think of off hand is Tower Topler (AKA Nebulus) I believe Zybex as well, but dont rem. Do you have a SIO2PC cable?
Oh about your problem, if you are turning the
monitor off and on again to get it to work, it
prob has trouble intitially synching to the
xl’s signal, I know Ive heard of this before but
dont rem the details, sorry.
Comment by Kevin242 — December 29, 2005 @ 10:05 pm
That 800XL was hooked up to a Commodore 1701 before the flatscreen, and to tell the truth, the picture on the 1701 is better than the LCD monitor. Probably because the LCD isnot running at its native resolution. I’m trying to consolidate space, that Magnavox also has VGA input for my windows machine.
The weird thing with the monitor is that my PS2 works fine, but my 800XL, 130XE, and Atari Flashback 2 all exhibit some sync issues.
I have SIO2PC and WinAPE. My old Ape machine was a crappy 8086 running DOS Ape. I’m wanting to consolidate my machines and use WinApe instead of the DOS machine and just have one monitor.
Comment by Gozar — December 29, 2005 @ 10:15 pm
Like I said I know Ive heard of this problem before (with
the LCD screens and old school consoles) I dont rem, but if
I had to guess, I would think it has something to do with
the precise timing these systems used to have in regard to
the screen refresh… I tried using my Flash back 2 on a
widescreen LCD because I thought having softball sized
asteroids might be pretty cool, but I noticed there was
something really wierd going on no flickering when it was
supposed to flicker and what appeared to be skipping frames. Remember
we are talking about a system that had a switch for Black
and White TV’s– It’s like inserting a Model T engine
into a 2005 Mustang!
I would love to have a little flat screen I could plug
everything into, and I am trying to either buy (cheaply)
or make a rack so I can put all the consoles/old school computers
in one unit too… but my main problem is the artifacting.
If many games are going to look all wrong or like crap, I may
as well just build a cheap pc with a SVIDEO out and a
Atari joystick adapter, with a few emulators because it
will provide the same experience.
That is another problem (if you havent already) you will
run into (esp on the Atari 8bit which used that technique
alot to get more then one color for games in it’s “hi-res”
mode (gr.8))
Comment by Kevin242 — December 29, 2005 @ 10:52 pm