In the quest for subjects for blog posts I think this is somewhat “low hanging fruit”.
I finally got round to retrieving my old Commodore VIC20 from my parents house. It was a present from my parents on my 14th birthday in July 1982 and changed my life. Still boxed and in pretty good condition, I was pretty confident about it still being in working order – despite having not been powered up for around 30 years.
After fitting a new plug I connected the power supply and switched it on – the red power LED fired up and no burning-smell/excess-heat was produced! On to try to get a picture from a television…
To display a picture on a TV usually involved plugging in the VIC20 to the aerial socket of the TV via the included RF modulator. The picture and sound produced by this horrible thing was pretty atrocious most of the time; the VIC20 does output video and audio directly, but most TVs back in the early 80s didn’t have direct inputs. Things are different now, of course, so it was off to the workshop to make up an AV cable.
To make an AV cable for a VIC20 you’ll need:
- a 5 pin DIN plug with the pins arranged in a 180 degree pattern
- a composite video cable
- an audio cable
- soldering iron + basic tools
First, make up the video cable so that you have the phono plug on one end and stripped back inner core and shield on the other. Do the same for the audio cable.
Solder the outer shields of both the video and audio cables to the GND pin, the video to the Video pin, and the audio to the Audio pin (Duh!):
Re-assemble the plug housing (you did remember to thread the DIN plug boot onto the cables before soldering right?!) and give it a try.
Right, now where is that copy of Amok
