Tennis on Swedish TV 1983

[carlsson]

"Hylands hörna" was a talk show that ran on Swedish public service television 1962-1983, heavily inspired by US talk shows.

 

In one of the last episodes, they played video game tennis. Based on the graphics, it looks like Atari RealSports Tennis, and the controllers as pointed out elsewhere look like Atari 5200 but the machine on the table definitely doesn't look like a 5200, not even an Atari 800 to be honest. Also, bear in mind this is PAL territory and the 5200 never was released here anyway.

 

What are we seeing? My best guess is that they indeed had imported a 5200 hidden underneath the table, using a very rare TV that could display NTSC graphics and of course genlock the display. Then they had a completely different item on the table - looks like a VIC-20 or Spectravideo SVI-328 - in order to fool the viewers and to give Atari minimum credit as it definitely was not sponsored.

 

 

[edweird13]

If you zoom the video you can see the 5200 with cart on the desk next to the VIC20.

[carlsson]

Hm, yes. I did react to there was something black with what looks like a rod sticking up, but never considered that would be the console. I doubt the Swedish Atari agent of the day, which would've been Algavision/Algatronic/Vasatronic (lots of name shifting around then, and possibly the market divided between consoles and computers), was involved. Rather someone in the production had been over to the States and got himself a 5200. Perhaps feeding the NTSC signal into a video mixer wasn't any harder than feeding a PAL signal, just that for home users we rarely could watch even NTSC composite video, at least not in color.

 

Now I want to try to find the entire program to know what they did with the VIC as well.

[CatPix]

I remember reading the workshop manual for the 5200 because despite the console being never released, it mention PAL machines, oddly (I guess the manual was intented to be international).

And, I guess owing to the fact it was an Atari 400 in a fancy shell, the difference between an US and PAL Atari 5200 would have been mostly a PAL GTIA and a PAL video output.

I can see a crafty engineer getting a 5200 and switching the NTSC GTIA for a PAL one and tinkering with the RF box to have video and sound where they should be. (PAL TV usually don't have fixed channel selection, but the spacing for picture and sound is different between the M broadcast standard and the B/D/G/K/I standards used in Europe (and L is even more different).

It wouldn't be very hard, even less if an importer you mentionned was involved.

I heard that Atari UK also worked on a PAL 5200 prototype, so they might have also sourced that machine from here.

Either way, that is a very uncommon thing to see.