We went from the twin lead coming from the antenna on the roof, to the coaxial stapled along the outside wall, coming in through a hole in the wall near the TV and connecting to a box, which connected to the antenna in. Then the VCR comes in and the TV got a coaxial in. Then we had the RCA component in on the TV, along with RGB. That’s where CRT input ends.
There’s the TOSLINK, but I think that was only for audio hardware.
Then HDMI, and probably other ones I’m forgetting.
I was there for all of it. Including the rabbit ears antenna on “portable” CRT TVs. And, the Sony Watchman.
I’m 38, and I still remember black and white TV.
We had a couple in our house for a while. We were gifted an Atari 2600 and that was designated a lowly b/w video source. So I never played any of those games in color. Sometimes it was difficult to figure certain things out
Were you there for this?
Just give me my degauss button back. That sound, on-demand at a single button press. We didn’t know how good we had it.
And then it couldn’t perform for a few minutes — for another good degauss you had to wait a bit for another good one, like an orgasm
chonggg…tk
“Just match the colors!”
“There’s no yellow… It’s just red and white.”
“That’s impossible. Move out of the way!”
“…”
“My God.”
“What do we do now? I’m scared.”
“This is a CD player, not a DVD player. You’ve been scammed”
Not really. The cords are all the same inside, the colors are just for convenient matching of the ends.
If both ports are the same color, and wire has the same color on both ends, you’re fine. You can send yellow through a red cable. I’ve definitely had a few times where all I had were a couple of loose cable pairs and it works fine.
What about when component rolled around. Totally fucked with my young mind, red blue green instead of red white yellow. And my old man had the nice cables too, which made it really feel like I was fucking some shit up.
I remember hooking those up incorrectly and we watched a huge section of “A Beautiful Mind” in black and white… We were convinced it was a stylistic choice like a really long flashback or something for quite a while before somebody was like “Wait a minute…” 😂
Isn’t the video lead of a composite video cable meant to be nominally 75 ohm, but in practice rarely was?
Video and mono sound if all you can find is a stereo RCA cable.
Oh no, I’m getting old
Or the coax passthrough connection so you could play Nintendo on channel 3
I had to use Channel 4. VCR was on 3.
Fun fact, my GameCube and my NES used the same RF adapter.
RF Modulator
I remember when you had to use a screwdriver.
I remember when we upgraded to cable and I had to get a box for the TV in my room that only had the VHF/UHF input.
Looked like this:
I remember the black boxes, modded to descramble the movie and PPV channels.
That laminate wood on electronics really defined an era didn’t it?
All the best stuff was wood paneled!
lol General Instrument.
Were they trying to knockoff of General Electric and Texas Instruments?
Mmm, yes.
I remember that box. Pretty sure it still exists at my parents’ house. Our connection wasn’t the greatest and I remember flipping the dongle switch a few times to get the Atari to work on the tv.
Addendum: I just remembered that this Atari box was hooked up to another box that had the dongle switch on it that I had to flip and that in turn was also hooked up to the VCR, which was hooked up to the TV, which we had to switch to channel 3 to use.
Ah yes, the fun days of hooking up the dvd player to our CRT, but it was too heavy to move, so we had to trial and error all the cords without seeing the colours on the back until it worked
To be fair thats probably easier than blindly plugging in hdmi, its like usb but so much worse
I present to you: blindly plugging a SCART in the back of our monolith of a TV… Harder than aligning an HDMI and it would shock me from time to time for some reason, while feeling around to find the socket
fortunately everything is built way lighter and cheaper and it is no longer like moving a brick chimney
USB-C has a DP-alt mode, so it can feed DisplayPort signals through that connector.
DisplayPort can speak HDMI too, so cheap passive adaptors and straight through cables are possible from DisplayPort connectors.
So a USB-C port can fling HDMI signals and theoretically a tv can have usb-c ports for everything except maybe power which would exceed spec.
I don’t know if I hate this idea or not.
Wouldn’t the audio get lost with passive ones?
except maybe power which would exceed spec
According to wikipedia you can use a USB up to 240w, a TV will def not use that much power
Thought, it would probably have 2 different USBs, one for display and one for power which i am hating, i already see from 1km the people mistaking the ports and messing shit up
Make it like a laptop. Which port is for power? Whichever one you plug into the wall. And I’m still unsure I can power a 60 inch 4K tv with usb-c PD
a TV will def not use that much power
Holy hell, I never thought of that.
Our TV defines 33W “typical” and 53W max.
If it had USB-C I could run it from a power bank.
Funny thing with that is that my TV is on a wall mount that pivots so it should theoretically be easier to plug in the HDMI, but the mount part that screws into the TV is also in the way of where the ports are so plugging anything in involves shoving my hand into a narrow gap anyway lol
Though to plug the other end of it into my PC I just have to crawl under my desk :3
God help you if you put the video cable into an audio channel. Trying to connect this shit with a dying flashlight was hell.
My father watches snookers and I remember how happy he was when the quality was good enough to distinguish the colors
Could you mix the cables and get cool surreal colour switched versions of your shows?
Yeah component cables (the RGB ones) could be mixed up and man did it make for some psychedelic pictures.
Sounds cool.
It was. It really, really was. 🥲
Maybe, if you were rich enough to have the green and blue plugs and not just yellow, white and red. Normal composite only had one plug for video, component had three plus the two for audio.
When my dad got a lot of legal work in the early 2000s, we got 2 widescreen CRTs at the peak of their quality. I just got rid of the second, they both developed color issues. But those were the best displays I’d seen besides the large CRT monitors we had.
Oh I wasn’t aware, there were different kinds of component cables. Didn’t think about sound.
Yeah red white was always left right audio. Yellow was video, then we got rgb which was yellow gonewild
You could a little with the later component cables where there were separate ones for the different colors, but the “original” composite cables (yellow, red, and white) only had one video cable and the other two were left and right sound. You could get odd patterns in the static with the sound plugged into the video port, but that was about it. Before that was the single coaxial cable that carried video and sound together, so there wasn’t easily available messing with that without damaging the cable or doing magnetic or RF shenanigans against an unshielded cable.
That said, if you get into messing with some of the old hardware in different ways, you can get some real wild effects from those old analog media standards/hardware/cables.
There’s small communities online doing stuff with it. Search for analog glitch art, analog data moshing, and circuit bending (although that last one is more abusing where digital circuits and hardware are susceptible to analog style weirdness due to basic physics of how electric signals work “analogly” between components).
I looked it up a little, pretty cool what people do, thanks for pointing me towards that. Found a cool website explaining the different disciplines: https://glitchology.com/
I remember seeing a video a long time back where someone powered an NES from batteries and showed how it shut off, not instantly, but gradually. It was straight from a creepy pasta. I found the video again: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zTqcb8hl8YI&t=10m18s
Nightmares back to speakers wires that were just never long enough.
What’s up with the image? It’s like those weird YouTube kids videos that show cooking images with a voiceover at 200% speed taking about someone getting cancer
I think it’s just some random art. OP usually uses something like that behind their words.
Personally, I dig this one.
PAL is your pal
SCART wasn’t just for PAL. In fact, as a French standard it was used with SECAM from day 1.
