Sunday 22 April 2012

The Loewe C9003 does 256 lines

Over the past weekend I found the time to revive a Loewe C9003 chassis that I had stored in a cardboard box. It needed a new power switch and I managed to salvage an identical replacement from a non-working Grundig CUC 2030 chassis that I found on Good Friday. The new power switch did the trick and chassis came to life!

This is the oldest Loewe chassis I've tried. The main menu system looks very different although the Service Menu is very similar to the E3000. The picture quality is very good. Quite a "classic" image. Less modern looking than the E3000 and none of the silly image artefacts that appeared on the later chassis types.

The best news is that the C9003 will happily display 256 lines (hello R-Type and Mortal Kombat!) The E3000 fails in this regard. So, the C9003 is now the Loewe chassis to look out for...

Loewe C9003 showing 256 vertical lines

2 comments:

  1. Why do you need 256 scanlines at 58 Hz? R-Type runs at 55 Hz and that should be achievable with any standard TV without any need for an arcade monitor. Also, Mortal Combat I think runs as low as 53 Hz!

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  2. The screenshot is simply of Arcade_OSD displaying the default mode it creates, not the refresh rate GroovyMAME actually uses to run R-Type.

    Although, theoretically, most TVs should be fine with these modes, the Loewes usually don't handle them well. The Loewe C9003 chassis is the only one I've tried that doesn't have issues with these games.

    Also, the point of using a Loewe over a Grundig or something is the amazing image quality they produce.

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