4-port Atari 5200 with no power cord or game/RF switch. Looking for video mod service

4-port Atari 5200 w/no adapter or game/RF switch. Looking for video/power mod service

This thing is notorious for the strange way it connects to your TV and power source through the game switch. Guess what I am missing? The game switch and power plug. Ugh.

There is only ONE two-conductor shielded RF cable going to the console that is a heavy gauge and thick enough to carry power on the same line. I have seen DIY guides for making your own box that can power it and split off the video my winding a choke in a project enclosure.

Even so, I can't stand that the video cable is permanently attached to the console. What idiot thought that up?! If it develops a short, you're screwed. What's more, the console seems to be designed to store or wrap the excess cable around the bottom, but any attempt to actually get the super-thick cable to stay there involves dangerously kinking a thick non-replaceable POWERED cable! Even ignoring the obvious implications for long-term reliability, it seems like a pointless fire hazard. There are guides online for making a proper power connector on the console. There are also guides for an S-Video mod. The S-Video conversion looks as complicated as many RGB mods, which is too much for me. Does anyone here do these kinds of things? How much?




For those who don't know what a game switch is or what is different from an RF switch:
In the days when TVs were meant for actual television, they had no other input than the antenna connection (RF). They typically only had one set of antenna connections because that was the only thing you could do with them before VCRs and games got popular in the late '70s (before I was born) and '80s. Even through the mid '90s, cheaper televisions often had no other input in part due to game consoles accommodating the limitation and VCRs now having other inputs with built-in RF modulators.

VCRs had their own tuners and were typically designed to be the only thing connected to your TV. The "TV/VCR" function would bypass the VCR and feed the antenna signal straight to your TV, but the antenna was disconnected from it otherwise and you could do all your TV watching with the VCR's tuner and remote. Your game console doesn't have all that fancy tuning stuff but it too needs to get between your antenna and your TV to interrupt the antenna's signal and substitute its own so that there is no interference, especially if you have cable TV where both VHF channel 3 and 4 are in use. Early consoles did this with a "game switch," which was just a box with a switch that connected either the antenna or the game RF.

Broadcast signals are sometimes powerful enough to interfere even without a direct connection. In most markets there are no broadcast stations using channels 3 and 4 but broadcasters on 2 and 5 can still interfere without an antenna, which is why those two are selectable in any US console with RF output (select the one with less interference).

More modern game consoles with built-in RF output would output a little power over the same RF wire to power an RF switch that automatically disables the antenna when the game is on. This is very similar to the way the Atari 5200 would split the RF video signal and enough power to run the console from a single stupidly built-in cable. The 5200 switch was powered from the power brick directly, so it didn't take anything fancy. The clicking relay in the power brick does kinda tell you how much more power is going through that cable than there should be! Anyway, this was never standardized, which is why proprietary RF modulators were the norm when consoles stopped including built-in modulation (SNES model 2, N64, multi-out only PSX, etc) and generic modulators for DVD players and such all used a wall plug.

 

I can do both services for you, PM me and we'll work something out.