When my brother’s old 1980s 5″ black and white TV was recently discovered during a “I wonder what’s under here?” exercise and amazingly seemed to still be working my first thought was, of course, “Nice!! 3rd monitor for my PC”.
I knew that wouldn’t be exactly simple as the TV only appeared to have a 3.5mm “EXT. ANT” socket.
…I can’t do anything but applaud this.
I think I am getting old.
I had a small monitor, and threw it away, and just used one of these instead:
https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-7-Touchscreen-Display/dp/B0153R2A9I/
With a proper case, and a 18650 battery it makes a very nice portable emulation station.
I should still congratulate the author for effort, though.
Nah, the challenge is making a working solution, using what’s available, while minimizing the cost of purchased parts.
Of course, the definition of “working solution” is left up to the hobbyist.
Old parts tend to be:
– bulkier
– half broken
– lower spec’ed
– and more importantly less power efficient
Just keeping an older fridge, tv, computer, whatever running will cost more in electricity than replacing it (in a proper time frame).
Nice work… but that VCR-in-the-middle is a pest. I actually can’t believe the ‘Source’ button on the front doesn’t switch through all sources, instead of just between the DVD and VCR.
Meanwhile, no need to modulate and demodulate RF when you can add a composite port! 🙂
https://modelrail.otenko.com/c64amiga/commodore-64-using-an-ancient-bw-tv