Modding a pong console for better picture

[Johny_lovin_it]

I just sent my Magnavox Odyssey 4000 to be modded for composite. I have 2 and the first one I had, I had it modded for RF to get rid of that one that needed a specific switch box and there was no way I could use that for any of my TVs. So it was a success but after seeing all the mod projects done to consoles, I had to see if it can go higher from RF. Naturally, I thought of RGB but being realistic, let's start small and go composite first. While its being worked on by Long Island Retro Gaming, I wanted to know if it can be done to other pong consoles. I just saw this video on youtube that modding composite to your pong system is possible. But are all pong systems different? Do they all need that RCA mod board for that or can it be done on any board with just the right wiring? I have Nintendo's first pong system the TV Game 6 and TV Game 15. Can composite be installed on those too?

 

[CatPix]

There are mostly 3 kinds of Pong systems :

The older, rarer kind uses discrete components to generate a picture (that would be machines built before 1976) Pongs that use the GI AY-3-8500 chip, and the TI TMS1965NLA.

All of those systems natively generate composite video that is turned into a RF signal, making composite the natural choice for modded video output.

Colour was added either by a variant of the chip, or by adding a second chip that simply coloured the shades of grey of the chip with a palette of 8 colours.

https://console5.com/techwiki/images/7/74/AY-3-8915.pdf

The colour chip still output composite.

In the case of a Pong system using such a chip, you could do a more complex mod replacing the colouring chip with a circuit doing the same task but outputting RGB (I'm not aware of such a mod, but a Frenchman did a similar mod for the SECAM Atari 2600 because it's precisely what the Atari 2600 SECAM does : using the composite video of a PAL Atari 2600 chip and turning it into RGB which is then mixed into SECAM composite).

 

Consoles using the TI TMS1965NLA are harder to mod; unlike the GI chips, the TI ones output raw video signals (not unlike the Atari 2600 TIA) and mixing them into composite is done externally, requiring extra modding; in many cases, a GI-powered Pong can be modded by tapping the video signal at the right place, or may require only a simple transistor to amplify the signal are required levels for a TV.

 

Bottomline : all Pong systems can be modded for composite, more or less easily. Modding for RGB may be impossible as some Pong chips produce game and colour together (so at best you could build an internal composite to RGB converter).