How Can I Play My Sooooper TV Boy?

(by tinkering with the display)

Glasgow Gaming Market was on today (3.11.24) and I bought things!

I usually go to these events, snoop around and end up going home empty handed (sad face emoji) - I prefer to write out emojis these days, deal with it kids.

But, today I was determined to buy some stuff. I like stuff and I recommend everyone buys themselves or loved ones stuff now and again. It’s good for the non existent soul.

I wanted to buy a suitable Famicom cartridge to perform a rom swap for a certain game. I also wanted at least one NES cart, as I don’t seem to have ANY games for that console at all. I think I gave my only cart to my brother when I last saw him. He’s a big fan of the NES and I bought him his first console, the wonderful NES when he was about 8. If you’re wondering - yes, I did open it up before his birthday and play it to death before I gave it to him. I soon bought myself one afterwards, though.

What I actually bought -

• Super Chinese 2 Famicom cart (TLROM, to make a New Zealand Story) (tick emoji)

• Crackout NES cartridge (awesome mad artwork on the label) (tick emoji)

• Super Mario Bros / Tetris / Boring football pish multi NES cartridge (tick emoji)

• Janky bootleg Gameboy cartridge (£2, how could I not have bought it? It stinks of jankiness)

• Janky Megadrive bootleg cartridge. I am a fan of these naughty multi carts.

• Systema Super TV Boy. It was cheap as chips and the vendor said “It’s super, so surely worth £10?” I couldn’t argue with his logic. SOLD.

Fail

I rushed home as fast as my little car could drive me and ran to my gaming room with all the glee of a kid with a new toy to try out my wares. Multi Gameboy cartridge is a 32 or so in 1 and has the usual 6 games on it repeated with different names. Just what I expected, all is fine. The other games I haven’t tried yet, as the next on my list in my heady fit of glee was the ‘Super’ TV Boy.

I carefully pulled it from it’s reasonably conditioned box and checked it over. You can actually run this thing from batteries, but they were dead as disco*

I have a multi voltage, dual polarity mains adapter I used (careful to use the correct voltage AND polarity, otherwise things will go POP! in a disappointing way.

I also plugged in a yellow AV composite lead into my new machine and the other end into a nice 28” CRT TV and got nothing on power up. The little LED on the Super TV Boy was lit, but nowt on screen?

It then dawned on me when I looked at the writing near the video plug that this thing was RF - actually, marked up as ‘ANT / Cable’ (puke emoji)

I hate RF output. It really is dead nowadays and quite rightly so. It’s without doubt the worst way of displaying a videogame, or indeed anything on a TV.

Fix that RF (rip it out and replace with something better)

Hmmm. I wonder if someone has instructions on how to convert this to a much more friendly composite output. This consists of video and audio. Usually a yellow RCA jack for video and a red or white (or both) RCA jacks for audio.

No. Couldn’t find any guides. I don’t think the Super TV Boy was that popular. In fact, probably a cheapo throwaway toy BITD.

Surely it can’t be that difficult to convert? LET’S PULL IT APART AND FIND OUT!

Is that all inside it? Jeepers, that’s *cheap* It is basically an Atari 2600 and a bunch of games on a chip under epoxy underneath that large metal can. The bit we need to have a look at is under the smaller metal box, the filthy RF box. (ick emoji)

To my surprise and delight, the manufacturer had left me a clue as to where the audio and video were going into the box of nasty delights, in the form of some letters - A, V and VCC. A for Audio, V for Video and VCC is a voltage supply for the RF circuitry, which we won’t be needing.

The pic is a bit blurry, but the pins attached from the motherboard pcb to the RF box pcb are at the bottom of the image. I snipped ‘em off and desoldered the entire box.

Here is my faithful dingbot off to the trash bin with it.

Isn’t he adorable? Helpful, too. Everyone should have a Dingbot.

I then made up 2x RCA cables.

• Yellow jack - Middle pin to ‘V’ solder point on the PCB & outer casing to a GND point

• Red jack - Middle pin to ‘A’ solder point on the PCB & outer casing to a GND point

It really was that simple! I tested all this first before even warming up the soldering iron, by using a pair of crocodile clips from the end of an RCA jack the points mentioned above and I got a colour image first time! Same with the audio, but with the sultry sounds of an Atari TIA chip. Sounds so pure, they can melt your brain.

Here are the soldered parts -

I then tucked it all back up in its case and designed and made a 3d printed cable clamp in about 8 minutes. Wallop!

I can now play ‘Pacmania’ and ‘The Dentist.’ along with the other 125 games on board in style. Names have been changed to protect the innocent (and probably copyright infringement)

Oh yeah, baby. Just loooook at it, laaavly, guv’nor.

Disclaimer

* relax, disco isn’t dead, it’s just lying dormant and looking good (sunglasses emoji)