N64 Brightness Fix

Plug a Nintendo64 into a modern TV and you might find things have got a lot brighter than the good old days of CRT TVs.

My (PAL) N64 produces the images on the left below on my 1080p LCD TV, plugged into scart using a composite video cable. A simple fix gets it back to the proper images on the right.

It involves connecting a resistor between the yellow composite video wire and ground. I did this inside the N64 connector itself.

Popping open the shell you can see the left and right audio wires (red & white) and the yellow composite video wire. Each of these has a ground connection - the audio grounds go to a single pin on the bottom row of connectors, the video ground is on the top row.

The consensus seems to be to use a 75 ohm resistor, but I didn't have one of those so I used 68 ohms, which worked fine. Just solder the resistor between the composite video and ground pins, put the connector back together and you're done.