7800 S-Video Out Magic Knight Kit

CrossBow · March 6, 2019

I'm surprised there isn't a thread about this already as this isn't new. But sometime back in 2017 a UK member at Atari Age came up with his own take on the old Soundby s-video mod that was tailored for the PAL regions and found that is produced really good results on NTSC 7800s he had tested as well. So he began offering his kits. Fast forward to Nov. 2018 and he has an updated version of his kits that tweaked things a bit more and now his s-video solution is nearly equal to that of the UAV's s-video output. As a result of this, I've been installed a few of his boards in some recent commissions for lesser cost since his boards cost less than the UAVs and at the time were more available.

Few things to note about this Av board:

- It doesn't have any ground attachements on the board itself and it is expected you will just attach your AV out connections to any ground along the main board.
- It is S-video out ONLY. There is no composite filtering built into this board so keep that in mind
- Similar to the UAV, no components have to be removed from the console. So it makes it easy to reverse the modification if needed
- It includes audio filtering that the UAV does not currently include. However, while there are attachements for Left and Right audio, they are in fact tied together on the board internally in a dual mono fasion. So only one of the attachments points is needed. The audio doesn't have to be used if you have other audio modifications you would rather use..Stereo...etc.
- It features a 10k trimmer for dialing in and adjusting the Luma brightness for your particular needs
- It has the same initial installation that the UAV uses in that you attach wiring from the different Luma, colorbursts, etc to the Magic Knight from the same points on the 7800 main board.
- The kit is available both populated with AV panel mount connectors and hookup wire and as bare PCBs as needed. Other options are likely available as well if you ask Magic Knight about it.

So yeah, it is good s-video out solution for the 7800 I'd recommend if the UAV availability and recent cost increases aren't your thing. Again it doesn't have composite filtering on it and while it is possible to use an s-video to composite adapter to get composte. It had pretty bad color bleeding using one of these adapters. Magic Knight is looking into the possibility of offering a slightly more complicated board in the future that could have both composite and s-video selected with a toggle switch or hardwired for one of the other if desired.

Here is a sample video of the Magic Knight s-video board in action on several games both 2600 and 7800, along with examples of both the Harmony and Uno flash carts so you can see how the menus are displayed through this board. The checkerboarding and audio distortion are not actually present and are artifacts from my camera pointed at the LCD while recording. The Audio distortion is because I had the audio plugged directly into the Mic input on the camera and that is a powered mic input and not designed for line level audio. So all audio comes in hot because of this. Still it gives an excellent idea visually of the clarity this kit can provide.