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Showing content with the highest reputation on 08/20/2023 in Blog Comments

  1. I find your post to be bizarre, because it's completely at odds with how things work at my house (I'm not saying there's anything wrong with your post; I have no doubt it's accurate relative to what happens at your house). At my house the RF cable doesn't matter. I never see even a single speck of "snow," not even in a picture taken of the screen, not even with the stock RF cable (which I connect directly to the TV's tuner with an RCA-to-F adapter). That applies to all six of my Atari 2600s (four 6-switch models and two 4-switch woodgrain models) and to my Atari 7800. Also, the RF cable's proximity to the AC adapter's cord makes no difference whatsoever; they can be all tangled together or separated as far as possible and I get the exact same picture either way. Using the stock RF cable or using far superior RG6 given to me by a cable TV installer (which he had leftover after installing cable at my house many years ago) results in the exact same picture too. I do get some RF interference but it's never in the form of white specks ("snow"), but rather, it's in the form of faint/shadowy diagonal lines on the screen, which are in constant motion, and they continually vary in degree of visibility. They also vary depending on the colors being displayed. They are most prominent with certain shades of green, and they pretty much disappear with certain other colors. If you watch the attract mode in Space Invaders for example, you can see them instantly come and go at the color change points. Here's a picture of the diagonal interference lines on my "heavy sixer" (it should be opened at its original resolution [800x600] to eliminate the moire effect caused by the forum software resizing it to embed into this post): My 6-switch models are the worst in that respect (but they have the best colors by far); the 4-switch models have less of that type of interference, and my 7800 has none at all. Here's what that same screen looks like on my 7800: The cleanest RF output I've ever seen is from my frontloader NES; it's nearly as clean as its direct composite video output, and that's using it's stock automatic RF switchbox, which has a very skinny coaxial cable, even skinnier than the stock Atari ones. I would love to know how to eliminate those diagonal lines on my 6-switch models, especially my heavy one (because I use that one the most), but I have no idea how. Like I said, the type of coaxial cable and its proximity to the power supply's cord have no effect on it whatsoever. It must be possible though, because my 7800 has a very clean picture by RF standards, almost as clean as my NES's RF picture.
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