Troubleshooting A Flashing Screen

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Don't Panic. Please wash hands.

    Hello,


    It took a bit, but I finally got a VIC-II in the mail to put my mk2 build together however I'm hitting a bit of an issue and could use some guidance.


    It seems like the machine is booting up and I can connect to the machine remotely, but I'm not getting any sort of display on my monitor. Updated the firmware remotely to see if that would do anything, but it didn't.


    I'm connected to a little 7" TFT LCD with an s-video to composite rca cable. The screen is set to PAL and functions fine otherwise though I live in an NTSC region. When I turn the commodore on, the screen just flashes. I'm planning to borrow a second screen soon from a friend to see if I get the same result, but in the meantime any tips on what to troubleshoot from here?


    Here's my chipset info below for reference.


    VIC-II: 6569 (56 53 AF55 PAL)

    SID 1 : 8580 (DE 00)

    SID 2 : Unknown (11 00)

    CPU : PHI2 OK (0458)

    MCU : 20180227

    You should really try with a regular PAL monitor (CRT if you can) first - chances are the display just cant make sense of the weird non standard signal that a C64 produces.

    Hey Tobias 👋!


    That’s kind of what I was thinking myself, but I don’t think I’ll be able to test it on a true PAL CRT anytime soon. Asked a friend who sells CRTs if he had any I could try it out on but his current stock is all NTSC only. He occasionally stumbles upon the Sony PVMs with both options but they’re getting harder to come across here.


    I guess with that are there any decent converter options I could try out with an LCD? Or any suggestions on getting output from the video port rather than s-video?

    If you really need composite, then using the regular A/V port is probably the better idea.... However it may or may not be the cause of the problem you are seeing :)


    You should be able to find a cable at many retro stores/webpages ... or build it yourself :)

    Thanks Tobias! I’ll see if I can find a couple other cables to try out, I just went for composite since I use this cable with a SNES and had it lying around.


    This monitor has VGA and HDMI inputs so maybe an s-video to VGA or HDMI cable will work instead. I appreciate the help!

    Pretty much all converters that I have tried in the past years are a complete FAIL in terms of colours, colour transitions and sharpness. Nothing even gets half the resolution that a 1702 monitor gave us.


    The Samsung SyncMaster 214T is by far the best flat screen with S-Video in, which is near-OK to use with a C64.


    That said, I have difficulties understanding what the "flashing screen" actually means. It may just point to a defective VIC chip, so you might want to insert an NTSC VIC and see if you get the same flashing, or if it just works. The nice thing about the C64RMK2 is that it auto-detects and makes all required settings in the startup phase, so it's really only changing the chip. This will give us a valuable data point for a diagnosis.

  • The last reply was more than 365 days ago, this thread is most likely obsolete. It is recommended to create a new thread instead.

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