Modding the Philips Videopac G7000 – Part Two

Well I haven’t posted anything new for a while because I’m working on another project right now. But I did find something relating to the Philips Videopac G7000 in my photo archive that I’ve been meaning to share for over a year now!

I mentioned in my other post: Modding the Philips Videopac G7000 – Part One that I may have had another console winging its way to me. Well I did! I’ve just checked and it cost me the princely sum of £5.03!

For some reason, I never took a picture of it when it arrived. Clearly I’d planned to use the ebay images – which, over a year later, have now gone of course. So you’ll have to make do with the few pictures I have – sorry!

So what was wrong with it?

Glad you asked. The console was being sold for spares and repairs – and we all know by now how much I like a challenge. Having fixed one already, I thought I’d give it a whirl anyway. This one had the joysticks wired internally. And when I say “had”, I mean they weren’t there now. Someone had cut them off, and the aerial lead. Just chopped them off at the edge of the console. Barbarians!

Reading between the lines, I think what happened here was that the seller didn’t have a power supply for it, so they cut off the joysticks to sell off separately. They probably didn’t realise you could actually disconnect them inside.

The first thing I did was to wire up a new power supply – see my other post for details on that one. Then I borrowed the modulator from the working one to see if it was alive.

Ha! It lives!

Love it. Absolutely nothing wrong with it, if you ignore the bits where it’s been unnecessarily butchered:

I thought you said you were going to modify this one?

All right. Keep your shirt on. I technically have haven’t I? New power supply? How quickly we forget.

Anyway, I could attempt to wire a new aerial lead to the existing modulator that had been butchered, or… I could attempt an AV Mod. Let’s do that…

AV Mod time

I found this website, https://circuit-board.de/forum/index.php/Thread/1726-Philips-G7000-AV-Mod/ with detailed instructions on how to do it.

There’s really no need for me to re-invent the wheel here, so to summarise, these are the circuit diagrams I used:

How hard can it be, eh? Well, here’s my lousy soldering work:

It’s not a difficult machine to mod to be honest. You can just unplug the modulator and use the connector and its wires on your circuit. Again, see the original blog post at circuit-board.de for more details. The other connections go to the phono cables:

Did it work?

To my surprise, and even though I had built the circuit myself, you can see from the image below that it was a success!

After adding a switch too, the back of my newly modded Philips Videopac G7000 looks like this:

And finally…

Remember I mentioned earlier that the joysticks had been chopped off at the edge of the case? Luckily for me I managed to buy 2 joysticks that connect internally, and even a spare keyboard, for a mere £13! So there you have it. Another fully working, AV Modded, Philips Videopac G7000 – for less than £20!