Atari Pong Model C-100, extremely weak video output

[spaceian]

Hey there Atari Age!

 

Apologies for my very first post being a question but times are dire on my workbench.

 

A friend handed me his childhood Pong console (C-100) that he had dug out of a closet and lamented that the video was weird on his TV. After lecturing him on the intricacies of "classic" video devices on new display hardware, I saw the issue he was actually having. The colors and signal attenuation were all wonky and the screen would often appear split into four quadrants. Even worse, there was no sound to be had from the speaker. In my head I immediately changed my opinion to RF output issues. Possibly a simple fix with some adjustments or in-line amplification.

 

After trying both go these methods, the problem persists and in fact has gotten even worse with the display showing barely any output whatsoever. Since the problem is getting worse, I'm making the assumption that the electrolytic caps are probably done for and might need a replacement.

 

My question to all of you is: anyone seen this or similar issue? What steps did you take to remedy? This is definitely the oldest console I've worked on and in principle the electronics are just plain ol' electronics (with really rough solder jobs sometimes... I just spent almost an hour trying to remove the main power conditioning cap) but there's probably a lot of quirks and intricacies that I don't know about. I'm much more familiar with the Nintendo/Sega 8-bit era and beyond.

 

Any thoughts? Anecdotes? Well wishes?

 

Glad to be here with you all.

 

Cheers,

Ian

[omf]

caps sound like a good place to start, you may also try removing the rf modulator and replacing it with a 2n3904 transistor which will increase power on the composite video signal line that the rf modulator used to convert to rf this will increase video quality quite a bit

[spaceian]

Thanks omf! Didn't even think about the transistor replacement, which will probably be a good idea since now I'm barely getting any signal at all!