My Black and White Odyssey 2

[Uglydog]

Hello I'm new to the AtariAge forums and hope I’m in the right place.

 

last week I picked up a Magnavox Odyssey 2 with all the cable and a few games. i hooked it up to the TV in the living room. tested all the games and everything seemed to work fine. so I boxed it back up and moved it down to my 8bit dungeon. few days later i decided to hook it back up and play some KC munchkins… but it was in black and white so i tried resetting it, other games, different TV.. still black and white. so i searched the interweb and found nothing on losing color but i did fine and pretty simple AV mod so i did that. The AV mod works perfectly, except it is still in black and white… am i missing something? is there a color BW switch like on the 2600 somewhere.? or is it just plane old broke.

[Dripfree]

Are you sure it's a color tv you hooked it up too? Just kidding I'm not gona be much help to ya but I can say something probably is broke. It will probably be a pretty easy fix, but finding the source of the problem may be harder then the solution. I had a similar problem with my 2600 and used a very silly non scientific way to discover the source of the problem. I took it apart, hooked it up, and turned it on. I then just started poking at stuff with my bare hands. Yea pretty smart hey? I found a wire that when I played with it the color came back. So I resoldered the connection and presto the color came back. You probably wont be so lucky but no guts no glory. Just don't electrocute yourself or fry you O2 all together. Or just wait till someone who knows what he's talking about responds to you I'm a moron.

[CatPix]

European Videopac produe RGB that is converted into composite. It may not be the case with the O² (The US intellivision produce YUV that converts to composite, whereas the Euro Intelli produce RGB converted to PAL/SECAM). but you can check out around such a chip.

It may be a dry solder or a dead chip.

[Uglydog]

Thanks for the response guys. think you'er both right I'm going to have to get a magnifier out an start poking around at the solder maybe a bad capacitor?.. I'll start with the power off first lol.. idk I'm pretty new to this stuff so wish me luck.

[CatPix]

Probably a bad cap indeed, or a cut resistor (much rarer, but because it's uncommon it's easily missed). But I would go for a bad cap or a dry solder as you did got color.

 

And, reading again your first post, there isn't any B&W switch on the O². In fact, I think that the VCS is the only console that got such a switch.