Ending Sunday, November 12 about 11:25 PM EST (8:25 PM PST)
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ATARI C240 VIDEO MUSIC GRAPHICS COMPONENT
This auction includes the Atari C240 Video Music graphics unit with power
supply, and a copy of the promotional material / operation manual, and
schematics of the circuit board. The Atari C240 Video Music unit is in
excellent shape.
The Atari C240 Video Music graphics converter takes audio input from a
stereo or other audio device and converts it into wild video patterns that
are displayed on a TV. The patterns change with the volume and beat of the
music. There a a multitude of controls to change gain, color, contour,
shape, horizontal and vertical display characteristics.
It was 1975 and Bob Brown (originator of home Pong) was looking for
another
consumer (home) product to design. Mega stereo systems (multi-component
setups that were usually designed with a mixture of futuristic metal and
rec
room woodgrain) were all the rage. Bob decided to make another component
that would take advantage of Atari's video display technology and act as a
bridge between the television set and the stereo system. The result was
the
Atari Video Music, which Atari released on it's own in 1976.
By selecting any 4 predefined shape modes and further adjusting the
horizontal and vertical displays as well as the color and contour knobs,
you
are able to create psychedelic displays on your television. Legend has it
that while on a tour of the home Pong manufacturing facilities, the Sears
people were shown the Video Music prototype. One of the people from Sears
asked what they were smoking when they designed it, and one of the
technicians stepped out from the back room and produced a lit joint.
Today, the AVM is extremely scarce, and consider yourself one of the
select
few owners should you get lucky enough to find one. It also doesn't help
that the Video Music looks like an amplifier, and most folks will pass it
up
not knowing it's a product made by Atari. Fans of the Jaguar CD's Virtual
Light Machine who check out the VLM's distant relative will get a major
trip
for sure! Don't expect anything better than archaic 2600-type stuff,
however. This is 1976 we're talking about. Any receiver or amplifier can
be
attached to the Video Music via RCA style jacks. From there, you simply
connect the Video Music to the television to produce the desired effects
on
your TV. As with most high voltage products from this area, to guard
against
static electricity and other problems make sure it's completely grounded
before plugging in the jacks.
Back in the heady days of Nolan Bushnell-managed Atari, when the home
versions of games like Pong and Stunt Cycle were making decent money, and
the sky seemed to be the limit, and the 2600 was nothing more than a
promising idea on the horizon, anything could've been the next big thing.
And not even necessarily anything that was a video game. Despite all of
the
legendary stories of executive meetings in hot tubs, on-the-job marijuana
use, and blue-jeans-as-businesswear, it may just be that nothing provides
as
much concrete evidence of the heady, psychedelic early days of Atari as
one
of their most obscure products: Atari Video Music.
Simply put, Atari Video Music was a precursor to the "CD visualizations"
that are now commonplace in home video game consoles and computer audio
player programs. In 2000, it caused some consternation that Sony's
Playstation 2 lacked the colorful CD player visualization modes of the
original Playstation - it was a standard feature and people expected it to
be there. In 1976, however, it was hard to explain what Atari Video Music
did, let alone why a product would be released that would create its
effects
(or, for that matter, why anybody would buy one). Video Music created
blindingly colorful (and I don't use that description lightly),
psychedelic
light displays that would pulsate and change depending on the intensity of
the music.
Of course, this being the 70s, Video Music was strictly analog, and to
create even the limited effects that it produces, it was quite a bulky
piece
of woodgrain wizardry. (In the Phosphor Dot Fossils game museum, our Atari
Video Music unit sits directly underneath the massive Atari 5200, and the
5200's footprint is only slightly larger.) A series of buttons along the
lower front panel of Video Music, ranging in warm colors from brown to
tan,
governs the unit's basic functions (including the power switch, and
whether
or not the manual controls have any influence over the display). Above
those, several knobs give the user manual control over intensity and
various
display parameters - allowing for solid or "donut" shaped displays, the
degree of sensitivity to changes in the audio, and how many patterns would
appear on the screen at a given time.
It's hard to really explain just how bright Video Music's displays are. As
this piece of hardware comes from the era when game makers were only just
learning that high-constrast displays could do permanent damage to TV
screens if left on for a significant amount of time, its displays are
incredibly high-constrast and incredibly colorful - maybe it's a testament
to a far trippier era, but it's hard to watch it directly at length. (The
most pleasing effect, in fact, comes from turning Video Music on, getting
the music going...and then looking at the reflection of the colors on the
opposite wall.)
The designer of Video Music, Atari engineer Bob Brown, moved on to help
design the company's next big project, a programmable video game system,
and
his brainchild remained unique in the company's history - really, for that
matter, in the history of consumer electronics altogether. Video Music
remains, to this day, a hard-to-find relic of Atari's pre-Warner Bros.
heyday in the 1970s.
If you want to get an idea of what kind of patterns the Atari Video Music
component produces, check out this site!
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This Atari C240 Video Music component is in excellent condition, and is
fully functional. Includes schematics for the circuit boards.
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