They were available with a variety of connectors.
Some of those switchboxes had a short flat wire with spade lugs as
output for connecting to the TV, and for input had screw terminal antenna
input, and RCA for the RF input from the RF modulator.
the Wikipedia article for the Sup'R'Mod II has a picture of one such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sup%27R%27Mod
That could easily be mistaken for antenna VS composite switching.
But, there were also some stand-alone RF modulators that were like what
you are describing. That would presumably have a wall-wart or similar
power supply?
OB_irrelevant_anecdote: I had a Plantronics CGA double board that
supported 640x400 video, and maybe some other text modes. It had a DE9
and 4 pin Berg, but no RCA jack! The Sup'R'Mod had 4 pin Berg and RCA
jack inputs, plus RCA RF output. Not having an extra DE9 monitor handy,
and not having time to conveniently make a cable for the Plantronics
board, I "temporarily" connected the 4 pin Berg of a Sup'R'Mod to the
Plantronics board, and connected a composite monitor to the RCA "input" of
the Sup'R'Mod, but nothing to the Sup'R'Mod output to use the Sup'R'Mod as
a cable adapter. "temporarily" was less than 10 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sup%27R%27Mod
Q: is "Berg" the right/best name for that 4 pin connector?
male was 4 pins in a row with one missing;
female was an appropriate molex connector
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
On Thu, 31 Aug 2023, Mike Katz wrote:
You are correct for some but I do recall some with a composite output in that
little switch box as well. Maybe I'm misremembering from 50 years ago.
On 8/31/2023 6:02 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
On Thu, 31 Aug 2023, Mike Katz wrote:
The roots of this standard go all the way back to the 1930's and became a
standard in 1940. By passing the tuner meant bypassing all of the
filters and demodulation that needed to happen. Many video games of the
70's and early 80's came with 300 Ohm antenna leads and an RCA plug with a
switch for modulated or unmodulated signals.
That little switchbox was so that the RF input of the TV could be switched
between the [normal] antenna, and the RF modulator of the Computer/vide
game. With almost all of them, the output was to the TV, and the inputs
were antenna VS computer/video game
Without that switch, if they were just hooked in parallel, then the output
of the computer/video game could leak/boadcast out of the antenna.
