Aug 08 2007
Creative TV repair
I frequent the local Salvation Army thrift store and today I picked up an old little 1990 model Magnavox AC/DC TV. When I tested it at the store on the little built in antenna it displayed well. No problems that I could see. One neat thing about this small TV is it has a swivel base, in addition to it being AC/DC and having mono A/V inputs on such an old TV.
When I got it home and hooked it up to my NES via A/V inputs, I was horrified to find the upper left corner and top of the screen was showing the blue sky of SMB with a purple tint. I tried the degauss button on the back of th TV but it didn’t really ever fix it. Upon trying a large dual deck VCR which i placed on top of the TV, the metal bottom of the VCR suddenly corrected the screen!
I looked around and grabbed an old untested SCA SCSI hard drive and set it on the top of the TV and voila, it fixed the color problem! Any sort of large, thick metal object will do though a hard drive seems to work very well. Just have to duct tape it on and it should make a great little TV!