VIC-II chip noise

The VIC-II chip's luma output is quite noisy. I did some sampling to see how bad it was. I programmed the C64 to display a blank gray screen, apart from two small bars to indicate the left and right edge of the display. I hooked up the luma output to the S-Video input of my capture card, set saturation to zero, increased the contrast, took a lot (about 1000) of samples, then averaged them to obain a relatively 'smooth' picture.

Board: 250446, 6569R5, original RF modulator.

Contrast-enhanced version of the above.

Michiel Boland

Aug 2020