Black and white video coming out of tv games.

[kylechu]

My pac-man tv games thing is only outputting black and white video. I tried replacing the cable, but that didn't work. I tried a different tv, that didn't work either. Why is this happening? This happens on my dvd recorder too.


edit: Oddly, when I plugged it into a third tv, it worked fine, but it still doesn't work on the other two. Why is this? I know the other two tvs work fine, I tried them with a different tv games thing.

[bicostp]

Is there anything else plugged into the TV? Sometimes our main TV only shows black and white on composite if there's something hooked up to Component or S-Video (unless you use the front inputs).

[MegatronUK]

You most often see black and white output when using devices with mis-matched colour spaces when and the display device doesn't support both PAL/NTSC (ie a PAL device on an NTSC tv or a NTSC device on a PAL tv).

[tom61]

I've had one TV Game --a Simon Says/Battleship-- that came out black-and-white on my 1980's TV, but works fine on TVs made more recently. Best guess was miss-matched impedance between the two, as both were NTSC. Other TV games, including Pac-Man, worked fine.

It could be a weird fluke like the Simon Says I encountered, though, with the DVD recorder causing trouble, I'm leaning towards what MegatronUK said, a device not designed for your region. You might want to check the settings of the recorder, as it could be just set to the wrong video format.