There are two issues here:
the video output from your challenger could be improperly formed for the
modulator you are using. I don't recall for sure if you are in 50hz
PAL land, SECAM, or NTSC land, but there may be some expectations by
some modulators as to the timing of the composite video signal you
distribute to the circuit. I'm guessing if you are in the US since you
mention channel 3 tht you have it set up okay.
The other issue is what would you see on a monitor which is capable of
displaying via a composite signal.
What you have displayed looks like your processor is not running to
clear and paint any reasonable contents into the video memory, and you
are getting out well formed composite video of garbage from your video ram.
I'd try to dig out an old style video monitor and check that.
The second thing that might be happening if the video monitor is
working, is that you might be killing your processor when you connect
your lashup of Challenger -> modulator -> display. When that happens it
might be bad grounds or worse killing off the Challenger.
When you use a 300 ohm feed adapter, I think that floats the two outputs
connected to the broadcast receiver input which receives and displays
channel 3. When you use a 75 ohm adapter, you have ground and center
conductor, which will common the grounds thru from your display possibly
to your computer.
Hope this stimulates some idea as to what might be fouled up.
Jim
On 5/17/2012 1:31 PM, Jonathan Katz wrote:
Vintage Computer Buds,
I dug out some cables and hooked up my Challenger 1P to my TV. Instead
of hooking the video directly to the TV like I did before, I hooked it
through a Magnavox Modulator that rebroadcasted the video signal on
channel three. This worked for some reason. Well, kind of. The URL is
to a photo of what displayed on the TV. It wasn't too easy to read,
but it is clearly some kind of ASCII character dump. No clue what's
going on. Do I need to invest in a proper old-style modulator like
they used on the Atari 2600 that will "split" the A/V signal from a
single RCA cable and then put it on channel 3? Per the website, [
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=813 ] that
looks to be the case...
Here's the output I do have. What the heck is my machine doing?
http://imgur.com/UWcZ8