I've been Coleco'd

[rubber_jonnie]

And just hope it will solve some issues too.

8-)

Me too, and I think that it should be easy to do a composite mod with just a few components as described here: Colecovison composite out

The modulator is where the mod happens and it's on a separate board and just needs a few components, so I could mostly reassemble the CV and still have access to do the mod.

[HigashiJun]

@rubber_jonnie

The composite mod is really easy.

Worth giving it a try.

[rubber_jonnie]

@rubber_jonnie

The composite mod is really easy.

Worth giving it a try.

I will :)

[rubber_jonnie]

How annoying.

It seems the composite mod I was looking at is only for NSTC. First is my PAL modulator, second is an NTSC one:

IMG20241003144150.jpg

Col_NTSC.jpg

The instructions specifically state to connect to the pins of an IC that is present in the NTSC device, but it isn't present in the PAL device. Best I start looking for a PAL solution....

[rubber_jonnie]

Aha!!

This should do it:

Screenshot 2024-10-04 at 09.12.04.png

Quite simple, will try and figure it our later.

[rubber_jonnie]

I'm glad I lifted the modulator up the other day to look into the comp mod, because although the mod wasn't suitable, I did find quite a bit of rust underneath similar to the RF shield.


So, that's had a proper cleanup now and matches the RF shield and modulator top cover too. No more rust here :)

IMG20241004090921.jpg

What I'll probably do is use the modulator output for the composite out, a bit like on the Speccy and put the amplifier board next to it as ther'es lots of room.

I've figured out where all the components are on the mainboard, so hopefully I can get on with that over the weekend, by which time I'm hoping my PSU will have arrived.

[rubber_jonnie]

Well, this just arrived:

IMG20241005132346.jpg

So just waiting on the PSU and working on the composite mod.

The amplifier board is built and I'm in the process of wiring it in.

Once composite is sorted I'll hook up the sound and should be good to reassemble it

[HigashiJun]

Ah, those unforgettable controllers...

Was future for me back in the 80's.

:lol:

[rubber_jonnie]

Ah, those unforgettable controllers...

Was future for me back in the 80's.

:lol:

Even better, it's in excellent condition and works fully :)

Also, I've completed the composite mod:

IMG20241005141244.jpg

And it works great :)

IMG20241005140112.jpg

Next up I need to sort the audio. It seems I should be able to pick it up anywhere along the way and up to the modulator board, so I'll look at that next. There may still be a RAM issue as I see a bit of corruption, but I'll get the mods finished first and then I'll look at that again. It is just graphical corruption, it still runs, so nearly there.

[rubber_jonnie]

And the audio is done now too :)

IMG20241005154618.jpg

This was really very easy to pick off as I just used the audio input on the modulator board and fed that to the socket and took GND from my composite amplifier board.

The only thing I had to do a little different in all of this was that my machine wasn't fitted with R156. There was a spot for it, but it was never fitted, so I just connected GND to R139 and all is good.

Very happy with the results, and there is definitely a RAM issue in that I'm fairly confident that there are more 4116's on the verge of death. The graphics corruption goes away when the RAM is warm, or if I warm it up with my hot air gun, so I'm ready to swap them out when I need to.