S-Video No Color With Ultima III / IV

[Frankie]

I was surprised when I loaded Ultima III today and it was all in B&W. It's been a while since I played but I was positive it was in color. So I plugged the regular coax-video in to the tv on channel 3 (I had bee using the monitor cable out to s-video) There it was, plenty of color. Why would the S-video not show color for this game? It shows color for all the others. I'm using a regular Atari 800. I have an 800xl that I hooked up the missing chroma for, it did the same thing. Color for other games, not for Ultima III.

 

Anyone seen this before?

 

Frank

[BrianC]

Does it have lines in s-video? If so, it uses a trick to get more colors that doesn't work in s-video. Lode Runner, David's Midnight Magic, and a few others use this trick too.

[Frankie]

Does it have lines in s-video? If so, it uses a trick to get more colors that doesn't work in s-video. Lode Runner, David's Midnight Magic, and a few others use this trick too.

 

 

Artifacting! That's it. Argg! I guess you can't have everything.

[potatohead]

You can try running the composite signal into both pins of the S-video port. Recently I did this by accident, and found it sharper than just using the composite port, and the color ends up working, though you might have to adjust the intensity of it some to get the screen looking good.

 

I've got a cable made now that has just one RCA on the end, and a S-video connector on the other. Both grounds on the S-video to the outer shield, and both signal wires to the inner pin of the RCA.