Video banding on s-video upgrade

[XL Freak]

back at the end of 2013 i purchased a magic knight s-video upgrade off ebay, and had it installed in my brand new-old-stock 130xe. the difference in video was night and day. then i put it in storage for almost another decade. got it out earlier this year and the video is banding something awful

a trusted friend who services 8-bits in another country says it looks like composite is connected where chroma should be. i have no idea where to start looking to solve this issue. the upgrade inside the unit? the custom video cable? the video cable plugs into the monitor port on the back of the 130xe, and the other end is an s-video plug and a single channel rca audio plug. I can't find anyone locally or even in the u.s. to look at this, and the cost to the u.k. and back is just too much.

 

anyone know where i should start looking? i am not above buying parts and building another cable. i just need part #'s and pinouts.

 

thanks for any help...

[Mark2008]

I have read so many jailbar/vertical banding issues over the years, it can be a lot of things.  But a thought occurred to me, did you take it out of storage after 10 years and plug it into the same tv, or a different tv?

 

One possible thing to suspect is that your machine hasn't changed, the tv is even the culprit at times.

 

As for me, I had jailbars, that were greatly reduced with a different cable.

[_The Doctor__]

cable, power supply, filter caps. or bad video upgrade, but their are some pretty crappy displays out there these days

 

Edited December 28, 2022 by _The Doctor__

[woj]

Or something bodged close to the video upgrade that was disturbed during the installation and now surfaced. I'd start by checking the soldering work on the upgrade and around.

[flashjazzcat]

Since the cable is not 'known good', this would be the first place to look. Composite and luma or chroma may simply be switched.

 

[+-^CrossBow^-]

15 hours ago, XL Freak said:

back at the end of 2013 i purchased a magic knight s-video upgrade off ebay, and had it installed in my brand new-old-stock 130xe. the difference in video was night and day. then i put it in storage for almost another decade. got it out earlier this year and the video is banding something awful

a trusted friend who services 8-bits in another country says it looks like composite is connected where chroma should be. i have no idea where to start looking to solve this issue. the upgrade inside the unit? the custom video cable? the video cable plugs into the monitor port on the back of the 130xe, and the other end is an s-video plug and a single channel rca audio plug. I can't find anyone locally or even in the u.s. to look at this, and the cost to the u.k. and back is just too much.

 

anyone know where i should start looking? i am not above buying parts and building another cable. i just need part #'s and pinouts.

 

thanks for any help...

Are you located in Stilwell as your profile states? I'm located in Tulsa and while I might not know exactly what is going on, I've a few different displays that can be checked against this along with one of the Herc s-video cables to try and rule some things out. I actually installed the UAV into my 130xe due to the crap native s-video output from the console. I still had them afterwards but removing the Rf modulator finally got rid of most of them. But what you are showing looks much worse than even my stock video output was ever doing.

 

[XL Freak]

thanks everyone for the help! here's a quick rundown of what i've done, which i should have included in the original post.

 

when i got it out of storage, i no longer had the same 32" samsung tv i was using. i couldn't find a new s-video tv or monitor, so i got an inexpensive fhd hdmi monitor with an s-video to hdmi converter. it had banding, or bars as some call it, exactly like the picture in the original post. so i had a 130xe, s-video cable, converter, hdmi cable and new tv that could all possibly be bad. i found an s-video tv at a pawn shop and it had the exact same banding on the s-video input as the other monitor did using the converter. then i started this thread. just tested the s-video monitor on a 2 screen laptop with another known good monitor (the fhd monitor mentioned earlier in this post - it works great) on the hdmi port just to test the video, and evidentially the hdmi input is broken.

 

13 hours ago, flashjazzcat said:

Since the cable is not 'known good', this would be the first place to look. Composite and luma or chroma may simply be switched.

so tomorrow i will test the cable. thanks @flashjazzcat for the pinouts. i'm going to ohm out the cable from both ends testing for continuity, shorts and opens. may i assume with the cable disconnected at both ends, none of the non-ground signal pins will short to ground on either end? ie. i'm wondering if maybe some condensation got in that homemade cable and is shorting something out. i have a straight s-video to s-video cable but that won't do me any good without an s-video device to plug it into.

 

On 12/27/2022 at 9:16 PM, Mark2008 said:

As for me, I had jailbars, that were greatly reduced with a different cable.

thanks. i may just build a new cable for it now that i have the pinouts.

 

9 hours ago, -^CrossBow^- said:

Are you located in Stilwell as your profile states? I'm located in Tulsa and while I might not know exactly what is going on, I've a few different displays that can be checked against this along with one of the Herc s-video cables to try and rule some things out.

yes, and thank you! that'd be great to actually have some other devices and cables to test with!

 

On 12/27/2022 at 9:16 PM, Mark2008 said:

I have read so many jailbar/vertical banding issues over the years, it can be a lot of things.  But a thought occurred to me, did you take it out of storage after 10 years and plug it into the same tv, or a different tv?

different tv. the original monitor that had bars thru the converter works great as an extended second display on hdmi, so probably not that monitor. might be the second one, but doubt it since it has the same look as the first one that ended up not being bad. i bet its the cable. or a cold solder joint inside the 'puter. thx tho!

[XL Freak]

the xe end of the cable had male pins and the tv end had tiny s-video male pins. i soon discovered i needed 4 hands to do this and i only had 2 lol. i did manage to get the 'bulge' where the 3 cables tied together (the 3rd being the rca audio plug) unwrapped and no matter how i wiggled any and all of the wires in that cable, i was unable to get the display to flinch even for a second. so i took the top case off and wiggled all the magic knight wires inside, and was unable to get it to flinch either. i'm wondering now if it's been infected with the 4050 chip bug lol. i reached out to a very prominent member of the atari community and they said they don't touch xe's anymore, one reason being xe's just aren't built very well, and keep having problems, especially where the motherboards are concerned.

 

might ask one of my nieces to help with the cable testing. she could hold one terminal on one end of the cable for me to check the rest. hmmm...

 

i'm also thinking about boxing up this 130xe forever, and replacing it with one of the few remaining 800xl's that best elec still have in stock. while my (still waiting to be delivered) sf551 drive from this video won't match (yep that's mine) perhaps i could have an xl styled case 3d printed for it. anyway, i've always loved the xl styling. perhaps that's the way to go...