Gadgetory

if you were obsessed with video games as a kid there is no pure form of time travel than playing those games again but even if you've got the games and got the console in some dusty old box how do you get that all connected to today's modern TVs well I'm gonna show you how all right now if you're working with the console from the early 80s like an Atari 2600 you're likely dealing with an RF video output the simple fix for this is to buy an adapter this is an RF to coaxial adapter lets you plug right in to the antenna or cable input on the back of your TV make sure your TV is tuned to channel three so you want to take the cable is running out from the back of the Atari plug-in that adapter that adapts it for a coaxial input now back here you're gonna see that antenna input or cable input just want to screw this on well screwed on now alright the great news here is that you can resurrect your extremely vintage 80s video games the bad news is that the RF video output coming out of this thing is about as bad as you're gonna get the other bad news is that by making use of the antenna input or the cable input on the back your TV you're excluding the ability to use your actual cable that's how you're hooked up you can invest a few extra bucks though and getting an AV switcher box that way you can switch the cable when you want it and switch to your retro console when the mood strikes you alright moving down the line a little later 80s here you've got the Nintendo the original NES you're gonna have a better option here than you had with the Atari you still got that RF video output on the back if you need to make use of it but they do you one better and they give you composite video output along with a mono audio output so you can use this with a standard RCA video cable you're gonna plug yellow into yellow red into red and then you're gonna do the same thing on the back of your TV using the a/v input switch short video inputs and then go AV 1 boom skater died the Nintendo lives check this out this is one thing you're going to notice with a lot of these old games on the new TV it looks great this guy doesn't for this the video game looks great and it's filling up the whole screen and that's not what we want the original systems here we're all standard definition so this TV is kind of tricking us and stretching the picture it's think it thinks that's what we want but really let's fiddle with the TV settings to get the picture size down to a 4-3 standard definition aspect ratio might not fill the whole screen but this is true school this is how you want to do it all right now after you've gotten your fill the 80s it is time to move on to the 90s my representative here is the Nintendo 64 once you get to this era a lot of manufacturers started using a swappable cable when it came to the video output so you can kind of match the video output for whatever kind of TV you've got what kind of inputs on the back in this case the cable that came with the Nintendo 64 was a composite video cable but if you look on the aftermarket you can get up to an s-video quality which is gonna give you slightly better resolution than you get with composite with the composite video cable though you can pretty much use the same system that we use for the Nintendo except the added advantage is that you've got stereo audio out instead of the mono audio from the Nintendo yellow and that yellow and green connection right here and then now we've got stereo audio so go red red white to white boom all right now even if you don't have any of these original consoles but you still the games and you want something to play them on there's something you should know about this thing is the super retro trio by a company called retro bit seventy dollars gives you a system lets you play Genesis Super Nintendo and original nes games all in one box you get two controllers you get video connections for composite and svideo this thing would have made me a ton of friends in the 80s and now you can have it it's pretty great alright so there you go that's how to get your vintage video games up and running with your modern TV now I needed my boom box in my top gun soundtrack and I'm back in the 80s there you go Pat me get some ghost ah