Old Skool Blog

The past week or two I have been fighting what seems to be a losing battle. My TV (32″ LCD) just doesn’t want to work with either of my ZX80s. It does work fine with my Commodores, the Aquarius, most of my ZX81s and various game machines - just the ZX80s seem to give it grief. When I try to tune in the channel, “auto-tune” skips right past the channel without even a blip, and “manual tune” will sometimes show a very fuzzy picture but won’t let me stop close enough to fine tune it.
The few, tantalising glimpses I get when using manual tune are enough to convince me that a) the ZX80s work (at least intermittently); and b) theoretically it should be possible to tune a correct channel in.

I have tried bypassing the modulator and just taking a composite signal straight from the circuit board, but even that isn’t getting much success. I can sometimes get a brief flash of the ZX80 screen up, but it just doesn’t seem stable enough.
My next step will be to dig out my old TV from the back room, which has a manual tuning mode which is much easier to control than the modern tuning mechanism on my LCD TV.

Of course my ultimate solution is going to be to use a TV tuner card which would allow me to take screen grabs (and even create movies) of the old skool machines in action. Unfortunately I don’t currently have a spare slot in my Windows PC and USB tuners for Macs are just ridiculously over-priced, so it may take a while before I can use this option…

Sigh! It never used to be so hard to tune in a channel on your TV. Whatever happened to the rotary tuning dials?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 11:26 pm and is filed under OldSkoolComputing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.