I am this old.
Wow, stereo TV, fancy.
The red one is for dangling.
Older
It’s wild that we absolutely needed 2 cables for Audio but that one ought to do for Video.
It makes perfect sense since it is analog, each of them provides signal to a separate device. You had one screen and two speakers.
I don’t know, I kinda like that it’s 1 cable per device. Definitely easier to troubleshoot audio if a cable is disconnected, versus trying to figure out why my TV isn’t passing HDMI 5.1 through the fiber audio output to a wireless transmitter to all the speakers! But maybe I’m old school too…
Well the good news with Fiber is you can literally see if it’s passing data. Can’t see electrons.
No, but sometimes you can taste them.
Please do not try to taste the electrons.
No left and right video
You joke but the next evolution up was literally Red Green Blue for the 3 colors to make up an image
That (RCA component) was fucking stupid.
Why 3 connectors when no consumer ever mixes color channels? (mixing between sources requires external sync, which is only on pro gear and an extra cable anyway)
Why did they not decide between YPbPr and RGB before writing the standard?Should have just adopted SCART (European connector for bidirectional A/V, RGBA and kind of CEC), dammit
I continue to be shocked to discover things that seemed very recent to me are now a decade or two old. I probably shouldn’t be, but here I am.
Does this answer your question?
Also I don’t think composite is that old tbf.
Ooh, I get to trot out my console humblebragging picture again.
A pain in the arse to drive from modern video sources is what it is! Bought a CRT recently with a thought to using it as a cool secondary monitor but HDMI to composite adaptors are all crap!
What I ended up doing was using HDMI to VGA, then VGA to composite. This let me set a proper 4:3 resolution and the picture improved a lot. What I should have done is not bother with composite at all and gone VGA to RGB to SCART as this would improve the colour a lot, but couldn’t find the adaptors for that. Not sure how widespread SCART was, might have only been a European thing but when I was a kid most TVs could either take a composite RCA input or SCART, and SCART could carry composite or RGB.
Definitely given me the bug for old TVs though, I’m going to have to write an ActivityPub to Teletext software adaptor so I can have Lemmy on a ‘90s TV or something. HackTV looks like a lot of fun as well.
Created in 1954–1956 in wiki is correct
“created” and “in mainstream use” are two different things… composite video has been around for a very long time, but composite video on consumer electronics really only started to get popular maybe starting in the late-80’s. I worked at a Radio Shack in the early 00’s and was still explaining to people how to use it because their old VCR only had coax and they used it on channel 3 or 4. The fact that “just match the colours” was so confusing to these people was … well… yeah.
I have the same answer 😅
Is that old? I still have devices using tulp. Modern day mixers and CDJ’s still use tulp connections, as do proper amps.
I’m this old:
That’s old? Try this
Ah yeas, forgot about that one. I’m that old that I’m starting to forget things.
Yours needed a dongle to connect to the serial port?!
And what the hell is that thing between the left and right buttons?
“not THAT kind of PS2…”
I’m literally watching a baseball game with the right picture in the back of my second monitor, and it’s plugged into an adapter for the left picture in my PC.
I’m 39.
I’m 39
Same. Time for a monitor and gpu upgrade mate.
Oh I know. Single income family on a farm makes money for that sort of stuff a little tight.
Yeah? Those were on the ps2
I must be too young, I grew up on this:
SCART was ahead of its time. You could control connected devices with it like HDMI CEC. You could wake up devices through it. You could daisy chain devices together with it. A TV could sent its TV signal down to a SCART connected device from its tuner! No equivalent for this exists today, unless there’s TV that do HDMI OUT! By the end, it could do 1080p!
Also, the TV didn’t just send the currently-tuned channel ‘down’ the chain, it also allowed connected devices to inject their own, synced, video back into the TV, so you could be watching a show on BBC1, say, and the VCR could overlay a box in the top-right corner letting you know it had started a scheduled recording off Channel 4. Or, if you used a device like a Selectavision, if you tuned into a scrambled channel the Selectavision would notice, decode it, and send the descrambled version back up to the TV, all without the user realising it. Those clever Frenchies.
Yes, SCART’s features are fucking clever but it got unwieldy thick because by the spec, each cable had to be separately shielded. Even the widescreen control signal that’s mostly DC. Why not use differential pairs to reduce thickness and cost, modulate the audio and control signals together for fewer wires, and add a 5V rail to accomodate little demodulating converters (if you want separate audio devices) and eventually power PVR/tuner dongles? Most people use TV speakers anyway, that’s the whole point of a single connector of an A/V standard. Not to mention how easily it fell out, almost every other connector holds better, and the ports are hard to feel on the back of the TV. If it’s a giant 32" one nearly flush against a wall, good luck lining it up whenever you yank a controller cord and the vibration makes it fall off! And while a small STB can hang off RCA jacks, SCART sometimes disconnects by the weight of the cable itself. Or it gets angled so the video passthrough stops working and you only find later your VCR recorded just audio.
I think it’s because of these problems, the biggest one emerged: SCART never became a worldwide standard. Nowadays, TVs are made for a world market, so even North America finally enjoys PAL-compatible sets (while most Europe-market ones and many VCRs were 3-standard since 1990), but unfortunately SCART is basically gone, not to mention very few capture cards were made with real RGB input because RCA component is stupid (why 3 connectors when no consumer ever mixes color channels? (mixing requires external sync, which is only on pro equipment and an extra cable anyway) why not decide between YPbPr and RGB before writing the standard?)
clever Frenchies
Don’t say that. SCART is awesome despite its flaws but the same people also cursed half of Europe with fucking SECAM. Imagine needing a 64µs, 5MHz-bandwidth delay line just to decode color at all (unlike NTSC/PAL’s QAM, SECAM’s FM allows just a single chroma channel per line, alternatingly carrying U and V axes), and a frequency-modulation+pre-emphasis system in every console/camera/DVD player to encode it, plus no color killer option (disabling the colorburst) for sharp B/W like on the Apple II!
In PAL, information between subsequent lines was used too but only to correct recovered carrier phase between colorbursts, which was optional (cheaper sets kept NTSC-style hue controls) and could be handled by a locked oscillator rather than a whole-ass delay line (before shift registers (digital sequential-access-memory), every color set had fucking piezo transducers and physical waves travelling through precisely cut quartz, WTF?!).
Was it able to shock me with one end connected or is it just a false memory.
I think some old double insulated devices have power supply issues that meant that the ground/plug-shell would be energized at half mains voltage. You wouldn’t notice since the rest of the TV was wood/plastic, not metal, but if you touched the metal on the back you would get shocked.
It probably had a good reason to shock you! /s.
By design, SCART carries low voltage, not enough to shock someone. The device it was connected to could have been faulty or badly grounded and leaked higher voltage into the connector though. So its plausible.
I combined those 3 plugs into this with a small plug.
I am this many years old.Jeez. You old! Damn, me too. Nowadays such a device would be 79,99 ans surely sold separately. Without cables of course.
As far as I remember that thing came with the 2600, no?
My brother/sister thank you, that takes me back. Had the og Nintendo going through that
I am this old as well but there’s a reason I always have a screwdriver handy
Oh ye with a weak thumbnail!
I have that exact model with my 2600!
crumbles into dust
I modified my 2600 to have composite output instead. It also slightly improves the video quality
What channel would you use? I always used channel three and swore channel four gave a worse signal.
In my area channel 4 had a TV station on it and channel 3 didn’t, so channel 3 was the available default for these things.
That explains the slight interference I was getting. There must have been a signal just in range to scramble things but not close enough to see or hear. Our stations were on 12, 6 and 10 and you could get PBS on 32 on UHF.
I feel simultaneously seen and called out.
Beat me to it. Life got really good when I could upgrade from the small kitchen B/W set to a color one.
Came here to post this.
Before my time but I did run across these as a kid. Even played a few games, too.
This was the only thing station included up till and including the fucking Jaguar.
Came here to say the same
still have some in a bag in my scrap catcher drawer
I am this old.
I totally saw a boob!
Are you sure? It might have been an elbow.
I think you are watching some illegal channels
I can hear this picture
Dude, I had that but didn’t need it most of the time because on saturday after midnight on the French channels you would always get softcore porn like Emanuelle or something similar. I guess growing up in Quebec had its perks after all. Lol
I’m this old - old TV, new for the time console
Channel 3
I had RF adapters for my NES…
I had to get a new TV since my old one had the two screw posts that the Atari hooked up to.
I’m also this old.
Definitely had this as well.
I’m “turn to channel 3” old…
Yeah but I had a knock off brans
I’m gen z but just set up tvheadend after unsubscribing from any remaining streaming services. Learning there is free tv over the air was a shock to me
The real age here is the “turn” part of the comment.
Wait current tvs don’t have a channel knob?
You could feel the static charge shift when changing channels
Yeah which explains my hair in those days
Sometimes I used channel 4 if the signal wasn’t working. Coaxials were shitty.
Which is worse? Coaxials or Co workers?
TVs had channels?
I’m old enough to remember Saturday morning cartoons, but seriously, it feels like TVs don’t really have channels anymore, and instead just have thousands of shitty streaming apps.
We forget how much TV was boring AF.
It’s been about 20 years since I watched cable/broadcast TV in my home. But yeah way back tvs didn’t have inputs for other devices, instead you had a box which you put in between the antenna or cable signal and your device which basically over wrote channel 3(why channel 3? I have no idea) with whatever your device was out putting. So if you wanted to play Nintendo you would change to channel 3 and see Mario or metroid.
It’s been a while since I’ve had to do a game system setup on an old TV, (like damn near 20 years) but I think you used channel 3 because it was a channel reserved for local communications, so there would never be “TV” on that channel. Your VCR connected to the TV with a coax cable, and if you wanted to have “TV” plugged in at the same time, you either needed a TV with multiple coax inputs (I think it was common to have 2, one for VCR, and one for satellite/aerial antenna) or a coax splitter. Early on, those RCA plugs weren’t built into a lot of TVs, so you needed the VCR to inject that signal onto coax for the TV. Lots (if not most/all) VCRs would let you switch the channel used in the settings, I think mainly to cover other regions where channel 3 was not standardized.
A local news station use(d? they are all digital now) channel 3, with both ota and cable. I remember using both 3 and (front) rca ‘input’ for my games.
I remember the coax cable but did not know about channel 3 being local communication. I thought it was just convention.
Thanks for teaching me.
It’s not the case. We had WISC-TV, the CBS affiliate, on channel 3 in our area. I seem to recall that one could switch between channel 2 and channel 3 on the Atari RF modulators, and later, VCRs could switch between channel 3 and channel 4. I think they used 2 and 3 because those were the first two channels, and the FCC wouldn’t allow two adjacent channels in the same area, so one of the two would always be unused for everybody. (Oddly, there was no TV channel 1.)
I had a nes and that switched between 3 to 4. My next console was n64 which had the 3 wires you see in the original post
I could be wrong, but I think that was what the convention was in the US at least.
Similar to how there is nothing “stopping” a web server from having a 192.168.x.x address, but we have a standard that blocks off those addresses to be used inside of your own network.
They still do if you use an antenna.
But I just got comfortable!
Just be happy you don’t have to move the rabbit ears around till I get a good image
Anymore.
Unless you were in Cleveland…then it was Channel 4.
Really? Interesting. We’re there other places or other channels like that? Like if you were in England or India did they do channel 3, channel 4, or something totally different?
Canada was either channel 3 or 4 depending on the device. Probably all American made then.
Was there a station that broadcast on channel 3? I remember TVs growing up often (always?) having support for both channels 3 and 4 as auxiliary inputs. Also, what happened to channels 1 and 2?
Channel 2 is KDKA CBS in Pittsburgh.
Ah, ok. I’m misremembering. It’s only channel one that didn’t exist. Just looked it up and apparently the FCC reallocated it in 1948 because it was causing interference with another use.
If I’m remembering right, channel 3 was all local ads when I was a kid. I think the only times I ever watched it were when I shut off whatever was using channel 3 and left the tv on.
Sadly, yes
