while our parents were visiting recently we got out the atari 2600 and played a couple games with our dad (it was his atari when he was a kid and he thoroughly beat us at all of them despite not having played in probably over thirty years), and it has me kinda wanting to try streaming some atari games but: how the *fuck* do you video capture the output when it's RF only? this was well before any TV had any input other than twin-lead RF for an antenna
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and a pretty fun space-invaders-like
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also we discovered that our dad's atari is apparently a really rare model, one of the "heavy sixers" (the physically heavier of two models that had six switches on the front; this is the first model that was made) with a label that says "made in taiwan" (they were only made in taiwan for a few months, and not in large volume as they were switching over to the light sixer design that was made in hong kong) to the point that there are people on collectors' forums saying they don't exist
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actually, thinking about that 2600, i'm curious: what games on it should we keep an eye out for if we visit a used game store or something? Just curious if there are any that are particularly good (not concerned with collectibility)
We were surprised by how good Phoenix and Defender were
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@Felthry how is it being hooked up to your monitor?
-- freya raccooncat 
@xenon it's not, it's hooked up to the TV through a balun that converts the 300 Ω balanced twin-lead to 75 Ω unbalanced coaxial
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@Felthry If you can turn that RF video out into a coax connection or a set of RCA connections, there's plenty of antenna/RCA to HDMI converters out there.
@LexYeen we have a capture card that can do composite, component, s-video, and HDMI, so the problem is getting the RF to one of those
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@Felthry Hmmmm. You'll need an RF modulator that outputs something your card can interpret, then.
@LexYeen A demodulator, rather, but yeah.
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@Felthry Good news is, composite and component are standards that haven't changed much if at all in the entire time I've been alive.
@Felthry Oh, that's fantastic! Absolutely love a weird bit like that.
@Felthry I hear pitfall is very impressive for the specs at least, dunno if it's any good though
@Felthry i really liked night driver and activision's admittedly rather basic tennis game for whatever reason. no idea how much they go for these days but we got our copies (which we long ago gave to a friend) from goodwill for like a dollar a decade or so back
@patchwork really? we thought night driver was just the game where you're driving on an empty road at night
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@Felthry i mean, that's about it, though i do remember quite a lot of dodging, as well. it's very simple, but it's fun to play with some music on in the background
@Felthry not likely for serendipitous finds, and you'd need a flash cart or repros, but there's also a ton of great homebrew for the system. can't remember any in particular rn, but atariage used to have a bunch :3:3:3:3
@patchwork i bet we could *make* a repro if we really wanted. couldn't do the case without sacrificing another game but we could do the PCB, pretty sure it's just one ROM chip we could program an EEPROM for
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@Felthry might be able to get aftermarket cases/housings somewhere on the interwebs if ye didn't want to sacrifice an original game :3
@Felthry Pitfall, Enduro Racer, Yar's Revenge (there was never an earlier game, that's just the name), Haunted House, Missile Command...
There is a retro Atari collection on Steam that has many 2600 rooms, that would make for ideal streaming, if it's just the game play you're looking to show.
@JulieSqveakaroo We have Yars' Revenge!
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@Felthry there's gotta be rf-composite converters. Or just use a VCR
@noiob Someone else from Germany suggested a VCR, and we discovered that European VCRs typically output composite--North American ones never did, they always output RF over coaxial, the same thing we're trying to get something to convert to what our capture card can take as input
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@noiob over here, VCRs had composite *input*, and TVs typically didn't until approximately the 90s, so you would use the VCR as a composite-to-RF converter, and it couldn't be used the other way around
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@Felthry weird, it makes much less sense that way around
@noiob I don't know what the market was like in Europe but over here a majority or at least significant minority of households wouldn't have upgraded their TV since maybe changing from a black and white one to a color one. a lot of people still *had* black and white tvs in the 70s when the first VCRs were being made, even
a lot of tvs sold even into the 90s didn't have composite input, just RF, and everyone had a VCR with composite input by then so they didn't need to
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@noiob remember also that SCART was never a thing over here. the only connector most TVs had was an F connector for 75 Ω coaxial RF input (or on really old ones, four screw terminals for twin-lead VHF/UHF)
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we have one we'd never played before called Phoenix that, it turns out, is actually *ridiculously* impressive for a 2600's hardware
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