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FA: Atari Video Music C240 Audio / Video Component
Ending Sunday, November 12 about 11:25 PM EST (8:25 PM PST)
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...7912&rd=1&rd=1 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! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This Atari C240 Video Music component is in excellent condition, and is fully functional. Includes schematics for the circuit boards. |
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