Pioneer 810H & Atari 2600 & tuner-less monitor

[ddubois]

I dusted off my old Atari 2600 tonight, and thought I would be able to plug it into the coax/RF input of the Tivo, and have the Tivo tune to channel 3 on behalf of my TV (my TV is an HDTV monitor, and has no internal tuner) then send the signal out over the S-Video out port to the TV.

But I don't see anyway in the Tivo user interface to make an on-the-fly selection of whether Tivo treats the input S-video or the coax/RF-in as the primary input.

The installation manual shows something about using both a Satellite Box and an RF program source, but nothing about using both a cable box and a RF program source. And the guided setup only has "Satellite and XXX" as installation options.

Now that I have an HD cable box, I've actually been using it directly more and more, and Tivo less and less (despite the crappy OS on the Scientific Atlanta). So I might be amenable to just giving up on the cable box and only using the Tivo just as a tuner for the Atari! But I'm not sure how to accomplish that even.

[jkovach]

The easiest way to do this would be to select "Record from a Video Camera or VCR" on the Find Programs menu. This way you don't need to undo your existing video source connection, and along the way the prompts will ask you how the 2nd video source is connected to your Tivo.

A word of warning, however. No matter how you do it, playing video games through your Tivo is nearly impossible due to the several second delay that the recording / playback of Live TV introduces into the system.

[TydalForce]

Ahh the Atari 2600! I still have mine, and a crateload of cartridges... good stuff

There is in existance, a gizmo called an "RF Modulator", whose purpose in life is to take video output and then broadcast it on channel 3/4 or whatever. I wonder if there's an "opposite" of that, that you could use to shove into the Input directly on the TV?

Lacking that, go find yourself a cheap VCR...