new 2600 owner

[muell67]

well I have a 2600 I found at a yard sale with no power cord or rf adapter

I have found a power cord but I need to find a way to hook it to the tv. I eventually would like to get the s video adapter but I dont want to spend the money until I find out if my 2600 works. I tried to take the male end of the rf cord on the atari and using a connector hook it to the male end of a rf adapter from a nes. This did not work I believe the screen flickered the game screen but its to fuzzy to tell. I tried this with two nes rf adapters with the same result. Is this a dumb way to try and hook it up or should that have worked. Is there a cheap way to hook the atari up without buying a original atari rf adapter, like I said it would just be to make sure the unit works then Im going to buy a s video adapter.

[Max-T]

The 2600 uses an RF output, like your NES, as you thought. In most cases, you should be able to hook the Atari up to the RF box, and it should show a correct picture (assuming that your RF box works [check it with the NES]).

 

However, I've owned an old Atari whose output signal strength wasn't high enough to trip the 'auto-switch' feature of my NES's RF box. So it's possible that, if your NES RF box is an 'auto-switching' type, as opposed to an RF box that has a manual switch (like the ones that came with the old Ataris), that your Atari's signal may be too weak to trip the switch.

 

You can try a manually-switched RF box. Also, Radio Shack sells an adapter that has a female RCA jack (phono plug) on one end and a male coax on the other. This lets you skip the RF box enitrely, and simply turns your Atari's male RCA plug into a coax end that you can screw directly on to your TV's cable jack. All you need to do then is make sure your TV is tuned to the proper channel, and you can enjoy your Atari without having to worry about a switchbox. Of course, then your cable TV is unplugged, but they make other switches and splitters for that.

 

Good luck, and welcome to AtariAge!

[Ze_ro]

I eventually would like to get the s video adapter but I dont want to spend the money until I find out if my 2600 works.

I assume you're talking about this S-Video card? Frankly, I don't think it's worth the $60. You could probably mod your system for composite output for MUCH cheaper, and have only a marginally lower quality signal. It's a little bit of work, so if you're don't know how to use a soldering iron, you might want to try to convince a friend to do it for you. This page looks like it has a lot of helpful information.

 

I tried this with two nes rf adapters with the same result. Is this a dumb way to try and hook it up or should that have worked.

No, that's normal... all the automatic RF switches work by monitoring the power of the input signal. The Atari 2600 (and many other pre-crash systems) don't put out a strong enough signal to trigger the switch, so you get rather odd results. You have to use a manual RF switchbox instead (I found this out the hard way, and spent a good 3 years thinking I had a broken ColecoVision). You can still get manual RF switches at Radio Shack... they're the silver metal boxes with a big black switch on them.

 

Alternatively, you could use a coax-to-RCA adaptor. AtariAge even sells them. If you do this though, you don't have any easy way to switch between the game and normal TV.

 

--Zero

[muell67]

That is the s video i was talking about. I did think it was a little expensive. I would preffer making something myself, is there a website with a how to on the s video. I cant use composite because my tv doesnt have the conections for it just standard av & s video. Also this may be a dumb question but where does the sound come from with this. do you do audio cables also.