8BitDomain ColecoVision A/V Mod Experience

I recently bought a new 37" LCD TV and found that my main CV's composite mod (done by doubledown around 3 years ago) was causing the top quarter of the screen to badly flicker on certain games (only does it on some TVs and some games and not others!!!!). I have had an 8BitDomain ColecoVision A/V & BIOS mod board waiting to be installed for over 3 months and became incentivised to get the mod installed in my spare CV to see how it performed and to see if the screen flickering occurred, i.e. was my new TV faulty!!

Installation was pretty straight forward except desoldering the existing BIOS chip was a real bugger. I'm a novice at soldering but after persevering, a good overnight sleep, and lots of desoldering wick I managed to do it. Finished the installation and tested with the following results (check out the attached file for screenshots):

Composite Video

Colours appear to be correct. Unfortunately there is a lot of blue and green colour bleed around white text and a lot of blurring around the edges of objects. These screenshots do not clearly show how some of the smaller, more detailed, onscreen objects are so blurred in appearance so as to make them unrecognisable. Note that the blurring is somewhat less on my 26" LCD TV. Interestingly the flickering experienced with my other CV does NOT occur with this mod.

S-Video

I cannot get s-video to display anything unless I also plug the composite cable into the TV as well as the s-video cable (into different inputs). The s-video screens are marred by coloured streaking to the right hand side of all graphics. Colours are generally wrong and white text looks multi-coloured due to colour bleed.

Component Video

I was (and still am) very excited by this one. The attached screenshots show major streaking of colour from left to right - the colours are also dominated by blues and reds. What excites me about this one is the sheer crispness of the graphics and text - I have never seen such sharpness and definition from a real CV before (although I know doubledown has with his most recent mods

). In particular the white text on the scores is perfect. I'll be over the moon if I could get this working properly. In fairness to 8BitDomain he stated up front that the component video part of the mod had only been tested on one of his TVs and he could not guarantee if it would work on others.

I contacted 8BitDomain with my results and Mike got back to me pretty quickly. After a few emails of clarification Mike advised me that his mods were designed for CRT TVs and that the mods "tend to overdrive the color on some newer digital sets". He said that he would look into the possibility of modifying my board.

In summary, my main disapointments are the blurring on the composite mod and the severe colour streaking on the s-video mod. In it's current form it is unuseable on my LCD TVs. 8BitDomain was quite responsive to my support request although no solution is yet forthcoming. I also find it disappointing that the 8BitDomain website does not clearly state that results may be poor on newer TVs.

Has anyone else experienced poor video quality on newer TVs with these mods?