You might be asking yourself, less stripes? No, not the colorful stripes on your breadbin badge. We’re talking about the stripes on the video image. The same stripes that we’ve all become accustomed to over the many years of playing Commodore 64 games, watching demos and carrying on with modems and BBS’s. These stripes, which are actually interference, come in a variety of flavors: horizontal, vertical, and checkerboard patterns. The intensity of the stripes also varies from machine to machine. Some say with that these stripes become even more apparent when using a C64 with a modern LCD monitor.
Whether you love them or hate them, there is a solution for easing or even completely eliminating the stripes all together. The user e5frog on lemon64.com came up with a design for a carrier PCB that would sit between the VIC-II and the motherboard. It’s purpose was to invert certain signals back into itself, each with an adjustable degree. These signals AEC, PHI0 and chroma are all thought to contribute to the stripes on the final output image of the C64. It’s a fascinating discussion that I urge you to read.
I have never seen these stripes or other artifices on my or any of the C64 sold by the shop I worked for.
But on the other-hand I first got my job at the store making the triple cable video cords to hook the C-64 to the Commodore monitor that always could use the three inputs to drive video and sound. We also used video cables to make the video signal lines while some of our competitors used video cables.
Did the cables make the difference or was this only seen on people who hooked to TVs using the RF interface.