Let's take a look at: DINA 2-in-One, AKA Telegames Personal Arcade

[Retro Rogue]

Mine came, along with the Bit Corporation power supply. It's a 127v 60hz power supply, I'm assuming that should still work within the US? A reference I looked up stated it should if it's in the 90-140V and 47-63Hz range.

 

For anyone that wants to know, the power ratings are:

+5V 900mA

+12V 300mA

-5V 100mA

 

Will test it out as soon as I get one of my r/f to coax adapters out of storage.

[Rev. Rob]

If it still doesn't work, pull the card up ever so slightly and slowly untill it works. Usually its about 1/32" - 1/16".

 

Wow, I can't believe that worked! Was it like that on a SG-1000/SC-3000 too?

[bacteria]

Actually, this has convinced me to buy one!

 

It is easy enough to put a couple of heatsinks onto the chips, make a hole to incorporate a small fan, and some exit air holes in the case if you want to keep the console intact; or make into a portable like I intend to do, in which case it really isn't an issue anyway, especially as you can use/make other controllers!

 

I have a PAL Coleco, but the RF doesn't work and I can't get it working on composite, etc; so basically a lame duck. The Dina has S-video out, so good enough for what I want!!

[+save2600]

I bought one of these from Telegames NIB back in the late 80's for about $40-$50. Personally, I couldn't stand the cheap feel of the system and its controllers. Ended up selling or trading it soon after I bought it. Befuddling how "rare" and valuable some of this stuff is now. Yet another system I should have kept. <sigh>

[bacteria]

Thing is, if the controllers are crap, that doesn't matter if you are going to use different controllers or make your own; the cheap crap look of the system doesn't matter too if you give it a paintjob, or rip the guts out and use in your own system (as I am doing). All that matters is compatibility, and the Dina 2 in 1 seems excellent in this regard (if you don't want the Atari 2600 or steering wheel compatibility); has S-video output and also a smaller board.

 

When mine comes from France I will let you know my view on the system too, and internal pics, etc.

[Rev. Rob]

It has S-Video Out?

[bacteria]

Yes.

 

http://www.videogameconsolelibrary.com/pg80-dina.htm

 

Must be the port on the left:

 

Edited December 27, 2009 by bacteria

[Rev. Rob]

No.

 

 

That port on the left is for the power supply. The DINA has RF Out only.

[Bill Loguidice]

Exactly. Mine, like all the others, only has RF out, and its not even standard RF out.

[Herbarius]

We as Europeans can only laugh about your whining about that "channel 13" thing... This whole "fixed channel scale" thing you have seems to be US-/NTSC-only.

 

Here we don't have that "luxury", we would have to tune in to the correct channel on the TV manually - and then "save" it as a channel number (very old TVs, e.g. black/white ones, don't even have that "save" feature, so you'll have to tune into your favourite TV shows manually each time).

 

I don't know if you in the US can manually tune in to the channel, in case you really want to - or in case the console you got or some obscure TV channel did not stick to one of those predefined numbers - don't know if such things ever happened.

 

I once had a black/white-TV that had that "channel wheel" which looks like what you had on American TV sets, but none of the channels did recieve any program, you'd have to set it to "U" (maybe for "user"?) and use the manual tuning below.

 

 

Well, I am not really complaining about it either. Yes we have to tune, but it isn't really that much a deal (newer TVs/VCRs - meaning from the mid-90s on - of course offer "auto-search" features) and as I already said offers a broader range of compatibility, old TVs don't easily become obsolete if the number of TV channels explodes, like they did in the 90s... (again I'm not familiar enough with your situation to tell if something like that ever happened in the US, or if the scale was large enough and fixed, and everybody really sticked to it - which is hard to imagine, but maybe...)

 

 

Also we have some other advantages... You seem to desperately need those TV/game-switchboxes or at least some kind of adapter to connect your old consoles, because for some reason the plugs don't just fit... Well, we have the same kind of standard RF cable for everything... for plugging your TV to the wall mount that connects to the "cable" (or your house antenna) to plugging your game systems / home computers (that still used RF) in... Switchboxes like that do exist and also came shipped with some consoles, but they're simply for convenience, not having to plug out your normal cable and plug in your console each time you want to play.

 

 

Of course now everything is changing, You already don't plug in your games via RF anymore since, yeah the SNES I think (as far as I recall it still offered both options), and also with the advent of digital TV. RF may not be around for very long anymore... But we'll see, I think most people are still reluctant to pay the extra fees to get digital TV...

Edited December 29, 2009 by Herbarius

[Rev. Rob]

We as Europeans can only laugh about your whining about that "channel 13" thing... This whole "fixed channel scale" thing you have seems to be US-/NTSC-only.

 

Here we don't have that "luxury", we would have to tune in to the correct channel on the TV manually - and then "save" it as a channel number (very old TVs, e.g. black/white ones, don't even have that "save" feature, so you'll have to tune into your favourite TV shows manually each time).

 

So, like a radio? Crazy. By the way, the "U" stands for UHF.

 

Also we have some other advantages... You seem to desperately need those TV/game-switchboxes or at least some kind of adapter to connect your old consoles, because for some reason the plugs don't just fit... Well, we have the same kind of standard RF cable for everything... for plugging your TV to the wall mount that connects to the "cable" (or your house antenna) to plugging your game systems / home computers (that still used RF) in...

 

We have that too. However, really old TV's didn't have the coaxial input that you're describing. TVs from the 70s and early 80s aren't "cable ready" as is the standard today. To connect the antenna, you had to screw down two prongs from the antenna. Some very old game consoles, like Magnavox Odyssey, Fairchild Channel F, and RCA Srudio II used this set up because that's what was available in the 1970s.

 

 

You need to get a converter to screw down the inputs so that it plugs into a standard coaxial input. The converters are very cheap, less that a dollar.

 

 

Some more modern game consoles came with converters for coaxial to antenna inputs. The Sega Genesis comes to mind.

 

 

The reason why the Channel 13 issue is annoying is twofold:

 

1. 
    
   
2. All other game consoles are set to work with channel 3 or 4, so changing the TV to 13 is annoying.
   
3. Depending on the regions, either channel 3 or 4 is reserved as a "blank" channel. If you had a station on channel 13 it could interfere with the game's picture.
   

Edited December 29, 2009 by Rev. Rob

[Bruce Tomlin]

Here we don't have that "luxury", we would have to tune in to the correct channel on the TV manually - and then "save" it as a channel number (very old TVs, e.g. black/white ones, don't even have that "save" feature, so you'll have to tune into your favourite TV shows manually each time).

For a short time, there were US televisions with what you were describing. I recall that they lasted a bit longer in VCRs than in television sets.

 

But two things happened:

 

1) The rise of cable television in the late '70s and early '80s meant that not only was a 12-button or 16-button tuner insufficient, but channels were adjacent, so there was no need to skip over large ranges of unused channels.

 

2) The varactor/varicap solid state variable capacitor made manual tuning unnecessary. It became possible to control a single tuner with a microprocessor, which also made infrared remote controls easy to implement.

[Bruce Tomlin]

Depending on the regions, either channel 3 or 4 is reserved as a "blank" channel. If you had a station on channel 13 it could interfere with the game's picture.

More specifically, the FCC would not assign adjacent analog channels in the same or nearby areas. (note that 6-7 and 13-14 are NOT adjacent because of band changes) This guaranteed that either 3 or 4 would be unused. If your RF modulator is fixed at channel 13 without an option for channel 12, you were screwed if you live in an area with a channel 13.

 

The new ATSC digital signal is designed to allow adjacent channel numbers in the same market, but it won't interfere with the analog signal from an NTSC RF modulator.

[Herbarius]

TVs from the 70s and early 80s aren't "cable ready" as is the standard today.

Even that old B/W TV I spoke of had the normal coaxial plug - being optional as it also had and included antenna (that telescope-style antennas you know from radios). So regardless if you have cable TV or still use "air waves", you had the same coaxial RF plug.

 

More specifically, the FCC would not assign adjacent analog channels in the same or nearby areas. (note that 6-7 and 13-14 are NOT adjacent because of band changes) This guaranteed that either 3 or 4 would be unused. If your RF modulator is fixed at channel 13 without an option for channel 12, you were screwed if you live in an area with a channel 13.

Yes, that's the thing I wondered about... Obviously in the USA everyone really sticks to the channel scale, and as you say it's even made sure there are no adjancent channels... That's not really what I expected of the "land of the free" - please don't take this the wrong way, but all in all it seems that certain kind of regulations that exist in many countries won't exist in the USA "out of principle"... [The prime example would be (compulsory) resident registration/personal ID cards... although I have heard it's discussed to be implemented...]

But from what you say I get that the FCC does indeed assign the channels, not only regulate and certify devices - as I thought before.

What about the assignment of number to station? Are those constant (assuming the station doesn't cease to exist) or do they change sometimes? Here every few years they'll shuffle them all around for some reason and you've to reprogram your TV - the cable provider will send out letters a few weeks in advance... (including some blabla to explain why they changed it, but it sounds rather like made-up reasons if you ask me...)

 

The rise of cable television in the late '70s and early '80s meant that not only was a 12-button or 16-button tuner insufficient, but channels were adjacent, so there was no need to skip over large ranges of unused channels.

I don't really know what you mean with 12-button or 16-button tuner... But you are right, here we have large "chunks" of unused frequencies you could as well skip over when searching for channels.

 

If your RF modulator is fixed at channel 13 without an option for channel 12, you were screwed if you live in an area with a channel 13.

This of course is rather a problem with the nature of RF in itself - surely one of the reasons why the FCC has so strict regulations about it. It's obviously damn hard to shield anything against it. You'd think a real "switch box" should completely lock out you normal TV programme, but in reality I never seen one that really does that. I also wonder how such a device really would look, maybe a big and heavy lead "brick" or something like that. Even that might not suffice, as equipment like the console or the TV itself seem to unitentionally act as "antennas" catching enough RF "out of the air" to provide noticable interference... E.g. If I disconnect my TV cable and start tuning I will find some TV stations. And while neither picture nor sound are of watchable quality, it's sometimes good enough to understand words that are spoken... Note I'm not talking about the old-style B/W tv with the included antenna, but about a newer TV which does not include such "feature".

Edited December 29, 2009 by Herbarius

[Rev. Rob]

TVs from the 70s and early 80s aren't "cable ready" as is the standard today.

Even that old B/W TV I spoke of had the normal coaxial plug - being optional as it also had and included antenna (that telescope-style antennas you know from radios). So regardless if you have cable TV or still use "air waves", you had the same coaxial RF plug.

 

No, you didn't. I just told you that wasn't true, and I showed you a picture. Why are you arguing?

Edited December 30, 2009 by Rev. Rob

[Herbarius]

TVs from the 70s and early 80s aren't "cable ready" as is the standard today.

Even that old B/W TV I spoke of had the normal coaxial plug - being optional as it also had and included antenna (that telescope-style antennas you know from radios). So regardless if you have cable TV or still use "air waves", you had the same coaxial RF plug.

 

No, you didn't. I just told you that wasn't true, and I showed you a picture. Why are you arguing?

Sorry, I didn't mean to argue. I meant, HERE in Europe, you had the same coaxial RF plug.

[bacteria]

the composite video/analog audio mod is stupidly easy to do, which provides a very nice picture for both ColecoVision and SG-1000 games.

How is it done please? I can't find details or pinout on the net anywhere! Anyone know the pin location for composite output on the Dina 2 in 1?

Edited December 31, 2009 by bacteria

[Rev. Rob]

TVs from the 70s and early 80s aren't "cable ready" as is the standard today.

Even that old B/W TV I spoke of had the normal coaxial plug - being optional as it also had and included antenna (that telescope-style antennas you know from radios). So regardless if you have cable TV or still use "air waves", you had the same coaxial RF plug.

 

No, you didn't. I just told you that wasn't true, and I showed you a picture. Why are you arguing?

Sorry, I didn't mean to argue. I meant, HERE in Europe, you had the same coaxial RF plug.

 

Well, you guys are obviously cooler than us is every way.

[Bruce Tomlin]

Even that old B/W TV I spoke of had the normal coaxial plug - being optional as it also had and included antenna (that telescope-style antennas you know from radios). So regardless if you have cable TV or still use "air waves", you had the same coaxial RF plug.

Europe uses a completely different RF plug from the US. The US uses the screw-on F connector, which is much more reliable... except that cheap connectors have a loose screw part, which makes the ground less good. I have only personally seen the Euro RF connector on an O^2 unit. (and on a PAL TV that I found in a thrift store years ago... which I promptly replaced with an F connector because it was easy to change) And if you're considering a whine about having to screw them all the time, there is a slide-on variant of the F connector.

 

What about the assignment of number to station? Are those constant (assuming the station doesn't cease to exist) or do they change sometimes? Here every few years they'll shuffle them all around for some reason and you've to reprogram your TV - the cable provider will send out letters a few weeks in advance... (including some blabla to explain why they changed it, but it sounds rather like made-up reasons if you ask me...)

The non-adjacent channels were to avoid interference. (How the hell did you drift that into ID cards?) When you have a few thousand TV transmitters, and two long borders with other transmitters not under your control, you need channel allocation rules to avoid interference.

 

NTSC had enough bleed-over around the edges of the 6 MHz channel that it would cause signal quality problems over the air. (There's other adjacency rules that I didn't mention because they are more obscure.) Cable TV didn't have atmospheric effects and reflections off of buildings and distant stations 200 miles away to deal with, so they could use every channel. And the FCC doesn't control the cable TV signal since it's not being broadcast over the air. Not that cable was trouble-free... if you put an OTA station on the same channel, people living near the transmitter or with a weak cable signal would get interference between the two nearly identical signals. A few years ago a channel 5 (the lower frequencies show this problem the easiest) in San Antonio insisted that the cable company move them off of 6 and on to 5. At least now it doesn't matter.

 

And the towers keep the same channel as long as they are licensed. Sometimes a station will change networks, but the transmitter stays the same. And it's exactly because of this that the FCC needs to assign channels for new stations so that they don't interfere with each other. Commercial transmitters are custom-built to a single frequency, and they can't be simply re-tuned to another channel.

 

In the UK, there are only a few networks, mostly BBC channels, that are rebroadcast all over the country on multiple transmitters, so if all you did was pre-tune your channels, you wouldn't know what channel freuqency you were getting, just that it was BBC3. Presumably they had similar allocation rules, but you just wouldn't know it. Really big cities like Los Angeles and Dallas/Forth can have over 20 or so network and independent channels broadcasting around the area.

 

I do have a problem with something about the digital transition. The signal can claim to be a different channel than it is being broadcast on. This made sense when a station had two transmitters during the transition. But most stations did not go back to their original frequency. I can understand allowing them to keep using the original number for "branding" purposes, but apparently they are actually forbidden from changing to their new number if they want to, which I think is stupid. There's even one station in Waco that was 25 analog, stayed on their 26 digital, IDs as 25, but one of the sub-channels has a "bug" in the picture that says 26.

 

I don't really know what you mean with 12-button or 16-button tuner... But you are right, here we have large "chunks" of unused frequencies you could as well skip over when searching for channels.

That PAL TV I found at a thrift store was a 16-button tuner. Just a bunch of fixed buttons, and you manually tuned each one of them to a channel. Then you could just label the buttons BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, etc. if you wanted. Also, by being a "slider" tuner, it would be sellable in more PAL countries that used different specific channel frequencies.

 

This of course is rather a problem with the nature of RF in itself - surely one of the reasons why the FCC has so strict regulations about it. It's obviously damn hard to shield anything against it. You'd think a real "switch box" should completely lock out you normal TV programme, but in reality I never seen one that really does that.

What? The problem is that if there is a local station on the same channel, the very wires you use to connect to the set, and even inside the TV set, can be a sufficient antenna to pick up a weak signal from that station. If the local channel is strong enough, your game's picture will be bad and you can't do anything about it.

[bacteria]

Got my unit today, yay!

 

From what I read (there is little info on the "Dina 2 in 1" on the net):

 

1) System runs off 5v via the 7805 (rather than the 12v, 5v and -5v like the ColecoVision normal console) - I know in the first post it mentioned 12v at 300mA; however if it goes to a 7805 then it only needs 5v as the 7805 outputs 5v

 

2) Composite mod is just to:

 

 

Are both of these details correct?

 

Also, the power supply plug has many pins on it, anyone one what the pinout is - I can't find this info anywhere!

Edited January 5, 2010 by bacteria