HOW TO rebuild a vintage television using modern technology

hey everybody my name's aaron welcome back to the channel on today's video i'm going to show you how to take this gutted 1976 sony trinitron tv and rebuild it with new [Music] can rebuild technology we have the technology [Music] so welcome everyone to the retro hack shack now you may remember a little bit ago i tried to repair this sony trinitron uh tv from 1976 and after weeks of effort and hundreds of dollars of parts i wasn't able to restore it and the likely culprit was a bad flyback transformer which aren't interchangeable between different tv models so what i wanted to do i saved the uh the shell of the tv i took out the the tube and some of the boards that are inside took those out and took those to e-waste because i couldn't use those anymore however i just love the look and feel of this sony trinitron tv it's just like a set that i had growing up and so what i thought might be interesting to try is to see if we could restore it bring it back from the dead if you will by using something like a flat screen lcd and maybe a few other tips and tricks and hacks to get some of the knobs and dials working so that you could relive the experience of this tv set but you would be doing it with modern technology so keep the look and feel but modernize everything inside that's what i want to do today now as you know the name of the channel is the retro hack shack and the hack when i built the channel i put it in there on purpose because some of the things that i like to do are hacking on old technology and adding something to it that brings it into the modern day or transforms it in some way and i've done this several times on the channel so if way back in the early days i took a black modem and turned it into something that looked and sounded like knight rider then i took a doorbell and actually recreated the doorbell from ferris bueller's day off including the sounds when you push the button ferris actually comes on and speaks to you the same way he did in that recorded track thank you for stopping by i appreciate your concern and of course who can forget the rgb to hdmi device that i sell on my website which actually takes the video output from many old computers and converts it to hdmi full quality crystal clear hdmi video that you can plug into any hdmi device and relive those days without actually having to have either an rf connection to a tv or the original monitor because those can be really hard to come by these days so it's in that same vein that i tackle this project today so before i start i want to talk about the plan and what i have in mind and then we'll see how far i get so like i said cr2 crt tube is gone but i kept all the other electronics here because i'm hoping i can find a way to reuse these um you know that maybe the tuners but definitely like the power on switch here right that turns it on the volume knob maybe the hue or maybe some of these buttons to control some of the features that at least keep that illusion going of having this thing work even though the insides are basically going to be completely gutted what i did was i took some very detailed measurements of the inside of this bezel and i bought a kit you can buy these from china fair they're fairly cheap and they come with various components so inside we have a remote which will be really handy because you know just just like in the old days in the 70s you know i was the one i was the youngest so i was the one that had to get up and change the channels on the tv because we didn't have a remote on our tv back then there we go so this is the input board and you can see all of the various inputs that we have there's actually hdmi vga there's component and there's even a rf input that you can do as well i think this is for like a security camera but we'll test that out and see how it works but i thought this was going to be great because now i can put any input i want essentially into this old 1970s tv and bring it to life in a way that you would never have been able to do back in the 70s so this is actually the control module so you can see here the the various like you know volume up volume down um menu buttons and so forth that you would use on a regular lcd monitor basically um to be able to change the brightness and the contrast and all that plus there's an infrared uh component here for the remote as well now i could just take these controls and pop them through the back of the tv or even through the front of the tv and get access to these buttons but i think what i want to do this is how i basically want to interface the buttons on the tv to the the controls here so that maybe i can make it so that when you turn one of those knobs it controls the volume up and volume down for example on this board so that's one of the things i'm going to be working on there's also a high voltage board in here and this high voltage board is is pretty dangerous they do give you a caution here to be careful but yeah you do need to be pretty careful with the high voltage board that drives the lcd screen and last but not least we have the lcd screen itself now again i took really the copious measurements here and i know it's not going to be exact so i'm going to have some extra room some extra width on the sides and i'm hoping to be able to play with the controls a bit and then bring the picture in to to so that it actually comes into right about here because the rest of this will be hidden behind the bezel so here's what's left of the tv i'll probably most of this will all go away and i'm just going to try to keep these knobs and then interface them with something else to make things work this panel is 1024 by 768 resolution so this is a 4x3 resolution panel as well which is of course important but you just can't find something that matches exactly it's a little loose but not much and the um it actually fits in really nice behind these standoffs here so i could even tilt this up right now even though it's not screwed in and we could take our first look at what this looks like and actually i have to say it doesn't look too bad there's a glossy protective cover on this there is of course the gap here in the bezel i think i can maybe do something about that with a little 3d printed part or something but honestly it doesn't look bad just sitting in this display so if you've never seen these uh these displays these individual displays like this they're pretty easy to hook up i've got my high voltage board here and then that connects back to this controller board which which feeds the power into the high voltage board and then for the signaling to go from you know whatever you're bringing in to the panel itself there's usually a cable like this the only real question is where do you put this long connector here and you really kind of have to hunt on the board to find it in my case it's right up here at the top and that's just a press fit connection so that's it all the components are hooked up there's a few extra sockets here this one actually says speaker and this one says dc in so i'm assuming there are different ways you could hook up speakers obviously and there's a there's an alternate way to to power this up if you didn't want to use the barrel jack which is nice um okay let's go ahead and try the remote i'll hit the power button green light comes on and hdmi does it give us a signal hey and look at that it's actually working okay here's the menu pretty fancy for uh for this type of of thing and this is nice too we can change the color temperature from cool to warm which warm is probably going to be better for this vintage uh tv to match a little bit better yeah really fully functional um controls here this is great it even has a little equalizer you can turn up the treble or bass if you want to through this thing you can lock this with a password and then there are some other simple setup stuff for the on-screen display and logos and things like that but yeah this is looking really really nice i think this is going to work out perfectly okay now i want to figure out how to tackle the problem of interfacing the controls with the dials on the front of the tv this is the signal processing board i guess for lack of a better term and this is where this would take the tv signals in and then you could use this that's why it's connected to these things up here you could use it to test you know tune for uh different colors and hues and all that kind of stuff that came with this sony trinitron tv and it has this really nice bar here or metal piece that attaches to the pots as you can see right here they just screw in like that and then they're soldered into the board so i want to reuse this metal part here to make it easier for me to mod this and perhaps you know put some different uh parts in here but basically use this as kind of like the stabilization because obviously everything's laid out already um in you know where it needs to go so if i can reuse this metal piece that'll save me a lot of time so what i want to do now is just disconnect this the rest of this board from the this metal bracket here and to do that i'm going to have to desolder all of these pots [Music] okay i think i've got all these off here i should just be able to lift this up and pull it out just like that and here's what's left it's just this bracket with all these uh pots nicely attached and hopefully i'll be able to change those out if i need to with something like a rotary encoder so since i just mentioned rotary encoders let's talk for a minute about how i plan to use these 20th century dials and knobs to control the 21st century lcd display i want to find a way to register turning the knobs as a button push on the control panel this way i can control all the functions of the lcd display from the front of the tv and just make the illusion of a working 70s tv that much more complete one way to do this is to replace the old potentiometers with rotary encoders rotary encoders have been around forever in fact i first became aware of them back in the day when i would repair old-school ball mice they are essentially a wheel with holes punched all around the edges light sensors are set up in line with the holes when the wheel spins the sensors register when the light shines through the hole as a high signal or a one when the light is blocked it registers as a low signal or a zero with a sensor on either side of the wheel you can determine if the wheel is being rotated in one direction or in the other and you can count how many times the light has been seen this made this technology perfect for early ball mice that were used with the early pcs so based on this i can use a rotary encoder and a microcontroller like this esp32 to send a signal to the control panel every time i turn the rotary encoder either left or right perhaps turning it right can trigger the volume up button and turning it left can trigger the volume down button all i needed to do was write a little arduino code to control everything and get the timing just right if successful this should create the illusion of the dials actually working in a similar way as they did originally so if you like hacking on projects like this then you're going to like the sponsor of this episode pcb way pcbway offers inexpensive pcb manufacturing and a whole lot more need assembly services no problem they can do front side backside through-hole components you name it they also offer 3d printing cnc milling and more so check out pcb way for your next project and i thank them for their support of the retro retrohack shack okay i've hacked together some power here so that the 12 volts actually goes through this old 45 year old switch here that controls the power and the volume so let's hook this up and see if the display will come on when we pull that switch got the power connected let's see what happens oh i see something happening hdmi i can turn the tv off done so first switch of integrating the old technology with the new technology as a [Music] success okay so now i want to test out the audio and just make sure that's working but one thing to keep in mind here is that this is most likely a d-class amplifier you can go google and see what that means if you're not familiar with it but basically you can tell because if you look at the the way these connections are labeled on the speaker one says right positive and right negative and then you have a left positive and left negative and if you connect the negative side to a ground connection for example you'll see that they are not connected because they are not ground referenced all that to say is that if you tried to just twist these wires together and hook them up to a single speaker you'll most likely blow the amplifier on this board so word of warning if you only have one speaker just use the left side of the speaker because that's typically the mono side in most cases you're going to lose the right channel in a stereo scenario stereo scenario but yeah just connect one side in this case if you try to tie these together and connect both you're going to blow the amplifier if you have a stereo set though you're in luck you can now take one side to one speaker and one side to the other speaker okay so i've got everything connected and i'm ready to try this out let me give you a quick rundown of what's going on here here's the rotary encoders over here luckily these rotary encoders are the same size as the original potentiometers that were on here and so these uh the same knobs i can use the same knobs and they'll fit on this and they should you shouldn't notice any difference whatsoever but here's the rotary encoders they're installed that's running over here to the microcontroller which has the software running on it that i built and when you move one of these knobs or click on one of these buttons that sends a signal down to the microcontroller which then sends another signal out of these digital pins here which are connected to the original control mechanism everything still works on here all the buttons are connected but what i did was i put some transistors here which connects this particular switch together the signal side and the ground side that sends a signal back to the control board which then does the appropriate function whether it's moving volume up and down switching the channel opening the menu whatever so if this works the way i hope it will the functionality will be slightly different than it would have been on the original set because i wasn't able to actually connect to the channel changer for example to change the channel but in all reality if i use the rf input on this it's almost always going to be set to channel three so i'm not too worried about that however the channel function also drives some of the menu functionality to move the menu around and adjust things there so i still needed to be able to access the channel somehow so i've got the channel on one button and i've got the volume on the other button and i've got uh the push button functionality here is menu on one and input on the other well so far this is looking good um i can see this is the video of my restoration of an ibm 5151 monitor the original ibm pc monitor that was sold back in 1981 with the original ibm pc that kicked off the whole pc revolution so let's go ahead and play it and see what happens okay so the speak the sound is not coming out of the uh the tv speaker but i think that's because the my sound connection just i just need to tell my laptop to send sound out of the hdmi port okay let's try it now which is the version there was also a 5153 that was the cga version so this was the monochrome then they came out with the cga version and then they came out with the that sounds so much better actually coming out of the original tv speaker than it does out of these crappy speakers that are in my laptop so that's a really good sign also the screen looks great now let's test the controls and see if i can do things like bring up the menu so this should be the menu here yep and there's the menu i can make that go away i can change the input with this other button look at that it's working when i twist this rotary controller it's doing the channel up and channel down um to move this around and then if i move this rotary encoder it's changing the the volume down here now it's going in the opposite direction i think so this uh this when i move this this way it should be normally this would be turning the volume up and the other way would be turning it down but that's no big deal i can just change or swap the wires on the volume up and volume down over here and that'll fix that problem so so far this is looking really really good all the controls are working so far so i guess it's time to move on to the next step if you remember the new display i have is perfectly flat and the crt tube is rounded and you can see the bezel is rounded here it's flat on the sides but rounded here which means there's going to be a little bit of a gap on the bottom and a little bit of a gap on top which may be distracting from bringing this tv set back to life so the other problem with this is that the this what you're seeing here is all one piece so i was originally hoping that i could pop just the bezel part out because it looks like it's a separate piece a separate component and then i could 3d print something to go to fill in that gap and then spray paint it to match the original kind of brownish gray blackish color of the bezel but i can't because this is all connected it's all one piece so in order to paint it i would have to mask it off paint um you know hopefully it would it would match i just don't want to go through all that trouble so i'm going to try something a little different which is this eva foam so this is a foam that a lot of costume designers use and cosplay folks use to design their costumes and the reason they use it is because it's cuttable number one it's light number two it's sandable number three and it's paintable number four so you know and you can glue it as well you can glue pieces together so that makes it very very versatile and what i thought i would do is go ahead and try to cut a length of this and then scribe this line onto the length once once i get it to the width of the opening here i'll scribe that line on and cut it off and although it's not a perfect match this isn't exactly pure black either it's kind of a it's kind of a i don't know a dark gray almost and it's actually not that far off of the original color it does reflect light a little bit differently and this has some brownish tones in it i think as well as some gray so i think though if i use this i think that'll be good enough to do what i want to accomplish what i want which is to fill in that gap there so it's not so noticeable so that's what i'm going to do next okay well here's the piece that i cut out and you can see just how thin and small it is i mean it's probably less than three quarters of an inch here maybe just over a half an inch and it's quite long so yeah that's the piece that i'm going to be fitting in there i'm glad i did this with foam because there will be some little imperfections in the curve here but because it's foam when i put it in here and get it glued down you know it'll give a little bit as i glue it down and i should be able to make that a nice tight fit so i ended up just using some regular super glue here to tack down uh the corners and the middle part so i could test this out and see what it looked like before i actually committed to gluing this all the way in and once that glue had dried i put in the display and look at that it looks pretty good in fact the color matching really doesn't matter that much i don't think it looks like it's part of the original set to my eyes i think that's a win okay so now i have to figure out a way to keep the screen from falling out if the tv is tilted back so the screen is in there pretty good and it's kind of tight against the edges so i don't and it's it's not moving around a whole lot so it's not like it's gonna flop around inside the case but like i said tilt the tv up the right angle this will just come out and flop out backwards so i guess i'm in a foam mood because what i decided to do was take a little bit more spare foam that i have laying around and i cut it up into these kind of t-shaped pieces so i can use this to actually screw into the mounts this is where the ears from the crt that was held into place were right here where the screw screws are these screw holes and luckily i saved the spare parts from the tv when i took it apart because i thought i might need these screws for something just pop them through this foam screw them in here and that's really all i should need to hold this down i just need a little bit of gentle pressure this is a very light screen it's not heavy at all so a little bit of gentle pressure will hold this screen in place and keep it from flapping out should somebody knock the television or press against it or something like that and the foam is pretty tight but as you can see it's not putting a lot of pressure on the display itself which you know too much pressure could cause some distortion in the uh in the picture on the display if there was too much pressure on it so i think now it's time for a poke test yeah if i really wanted to i could poke on that display and get it to move a little bit but it's it's it's almost very it's very springy it's not coming out and if i turn it this way yeah a little springy but not really going [Music] anywhere so the next thing i wanted to tackle is how to light up the channel indicators for vhf and uhf on this set these would have lit up as soon as you turn the power on and whenever you change the channel here they would illuminate what channel you were actually connected to so you knew where you were at in the tv frequencies the original tv had incandescent bulbs that were lit up most likely with ac voltage and of course there's nothing to connect these two anymore nor would i want to i think this situation can be easily resolved with some leds if i can figure out how to hold them in place so i took the tuners out and i just love the way the these numbers look on the dials i mean how cool is that the orange plastic with the the black foreground there to make sure that only the number lights up i don't know i just found it really really cool so here's an example of what those incandescent bulbs look like that used to light up the dials they had a reflector in the case which you know made them shine forward through the the numbers and then here's an example of the holder in one of these and i think i can repurpose this and put an led inside and make that shine through the numbers really well okay so i've got my leds installed and i hooked up the tuner assembly just with a single screw for now and brought out the wires and we can just use a simple coin cell battery to test this so make sure you don't get the polarity reversed coin sells the the big flat side on the top here it's usually marked with a plus i'll put my positive wire there and i'll put my negative wire on the back there we go look at that very bright very readable i was a little worried they would be too dim but yeah this is gonna be just fine look at that [Music] okay i'm getting really close now to uh finishing up this project and i'm getting pretty excited so i hope i don't go too fast and ruin things but here's another look at the board um with all of the inputs on the back there and i was looking around for a place to put this and it looks like conveniently there are some mounting holes there's one here and there's one over here on this side if i look inside the back of the case here i can see that there's actually a little plastic support here i could actually use this and screw through that hole to mount this right on the back here and then i'll just have to find some way to mount this other one on the other side over here because i think i'm going to need that but anyway it's a super convenient place for them to put a little piece of plastic and this is going to fit in there super super well if i drill the holes in the right locations in order to support the other side of the input board i just pulled out an old project case that i had 3d printed for something i always like to keep these around for just this reason and i was able to cut a corner of it off which will act as a support and i'll just epoxy this in to permanently attach it to the back of the case and with that in place we can turn it around and see how badly i butchered this thing well actually it doesn't look too bad really i mean the some of the whole cutouts are a little too big but this will work just fine for plugging in all the inputs to the back of the tv [Music] okay well it's time to start reassembly and i've already run into my first problem although i did anticipate this and that is that this bracket here which holds so nicely all of the pots in the new rotary encoders that i installed used to screw into the chassis that was holding the crt in place and the uh pcbs down here and it also had that pcb here that was installed here and anyway there were screws and everything that held this into place but now those are gone and if you were to push on the on the knobs on the front it could cause this to come off there's nothing holding it in place anymore i think i'm going to try to tack it on with a little bit of super glue first okay well that didn't work it only held for a few seconds and then it snapped off so i'm going to try some e6000 glue instead this stuff works really good to bond metal to plastic and it is removable but also very strong once it dries for 24 hours so i'm going to try this and kind of stepping it up in terms of you know strength and unfortunately uh the ability to take the thing apart again so once i get to epoxy it's gonna be really hard to take apart so i hope this e6000 works six hours later okay well the glue has been drying here for about six hours and it does feel pretty firm already i can lift up the whole the whole front screen here of the tv without any problems and it looks like it's equally firm on the back so even though it's really i do want to test this out so i'm just going to put the power button on and hold it from the back while i push this in just to be sure because that's where the bulk of the pressure comes from okay so that's all the way in now and the test will be can i turn the tv on and off a few times without seeing any noticeable movement in the bracket so here we go that's the easy part oh yeah way better i use it in a lot of my projects and it's always when i'm in a situation like this where i need something that bonds really well but i can always take a knife and cut around that glue and take it off later it does get a little bit hard it'll it's not not going to be easy to get off but you can take it off and salvage your components without breaking them and just after i recorded that segment about that glue and how it's good that it can come off i realize that these knobs uh do not go on from the front after you put the bracket on they have to go in first emotional damage unlike these other knobs back here which are pushed on from the front after the the brackets in place so that means i need to take this off so that i can put these on these posts first and then put it in and then put the other dials on so yeah i didn't realize that when i was making the comments about having to take this off but that's what i'm gonna have to do i'll take it off you know put these in let it sit overnight come back and hopefully test this thing out so once the glue was sufficiently dry i went ahead and started putting all the connections together and then gave everything a really good clean with some windex and a little bit of elbow grease and as you can see the dials are now sparkling i mean they're not perfect but they are definitely mirrored again so i can see my reflection and i was really surprised how much grime was just on the surface of these little color tuning knobs they really came out looking brand new when i was done [Music] okay so i thought i'd try this out with a few different inputs starting with uh this one but first let's just go ahead and turn it on and make sure it's working so pull the power button out and you can see the channels hopefully how nice they look actually with the led in there i did not think they were going to look that good but they look really good and you can also see as this comes up how some of the menu items are cropped and i'm okay with that like i said we're losing about a half an inch off either side just due to the size differences and that's as close as i could get it but i think as you'll see as we play through especially with the older sources like pitfall it was assumed back in the day that there was this bevel bezel bevel bezel was going to overlap the tube somewhat to cover up the edges of the crt where the signal was coming in because they can be quite bright sometimes it was assumed that there was going to be some overlap so when they you know made games and things like that they designed them with some you know buffer around and so i think what you'll see is that it actually works really really well even though we're missing a little bit of space on every dimension here okay so let me make sure that the input is set to let's make sure the controls are working first so we can do that by making sure that the input is set to um analog tv and it is atv and you can see the controls are working i can go up and select a different media source if i want so i have full access to all the controls all the things that i might need to change if i do need to change anything without having to either make that back panel of buttons accessible or having to resort to using the remote i do have the infrared hanging out the back so i can use the remote if i want to it actually reflects off of things in the room so if i wanted to here let's just bring up the menu again as you can see even though the even though the the infrared is in the back here it still picks up the uh the infrared signal as long as i'm not pressing right at the tv if i hold it off to the side here that works as well am i not plugged in it's always a possibility oh there we go okay so we've got a scratchy a scratchy power button here let's see if it'll there we go okay and even the feedback loop there was always a little sound i don't know if you can hear that but there was when i played these games on a tv just like this i swear back in the day there was always a bit of a of a ground loop or something some feedback coming through the the speaker and that's still true today so um yeah let's just see if this will work here yeah oh there we go there we go this uh joystick this is one of the original joysticks and it is a little bit scratchy i've cleaned it up a little bit but it's still a little scratchy but as you can see the picture fits in fine it's a little bit off on this side but the picture does seem to fit into the uh on the display just fine pitfall was always one of my favorite games ouch you can hear how loud that speaker is hopefully i don't know how many countless hours i've spent on this thing oh here's the tough part let's see if i can do this the first try after uh after not playing this for a while let's see here we go ready gotta time it just right wait for him to close look at that so this looks really good the viewing angle on this isn't the greatest i will say so you know if i stand off to the side i can still see it but to get the colors sharp it's actually the the vertical viewing angle which is off i have to kind of to get the colors really sharp i kind of have to look at it straight on so something to keep in mind with these probably cheap panels that you're getting online is the viewing angle might be off and i think appropriately i'm testing this with a heavy sixer for those efficient audios out there you'll know what that is yeah this is the this is the original original uh atari later named 2600 but when it first came out it was called the video computer system so very period appropriate for this particular tv and you can see there the way the tuner works is it actually cuts off the signal when it doesn't see anything anymore so you don't get that static which is a really nice bonus actually of how this particular chip works on this system okay now i want to test the composite input so i've pulled out a composite computer to test with this is the apple 2c not period like the atari was before necessarily but apple 2 certainly the original apple ii would have been period for this particular tv set it's just that this is smaller and easier to use and has composite output if you're wondering why there's no cover on this then you should probably watch my video where um i was showing how to do some mods and things and ended up destroying and burning the uh the case the top cover of this and starting a fire in my study so yeah if you want to watch watch me start a fire and learn a little bit about the apple ii in the process you can click that link above there but anyway i know this machine works and it works well the drive works well so i'm using this to see if we can get a composite signal so let's go ahead and turn it on there we go apple 2c of course it's not going to do anything because i have the disc out but there you go apple 2c is up and running and looking great and it fits nicely in the in the display that we have here so let's go ahead and this should be oregon trail i had to make a new disk because i lost my old one and funnily enough you know in the old days you didn't put your floppy disks on top of a tv or a monitor because the magnets inside could erase the the data or corrupt the data on the disk and so as i'm sitting here you know getting this ready i was keeping my disks far away from the monitor and totally uh taken by the illusion of this set thinking that it was a tv set a real tv set when i mean i guess it is but it's got all new electronics in so there's no powerful magnets it wouldn't happen anymore but i got totally taken by the illusion of the tv sitting here so even as i've been working on this for the past couple of weeks i still get taken in by the illusion which to me is just awesome ah so here we go oregon trail copyright 1985 again a little bit late but it does show the color coming in on the composite there we go going back to 1848 it looks great again you know the only thing missing here is really the scan lines to let you know that this isn't a real tube tv in my opinion anyway okay guys now i want to test out hdmi and not just hdmi i'm going to be testing out the hdmi rgb to hdmi adapter that i sell and use all the time by the way but i sell this on my website retrohalkshack.com it's a great device to take either analog or digital signals out of your old computers and convert those to you know high quality hdmi lots of custom configurations you can do with this thing um and of course the project is really being maintained by the wonderful enb shout out to ian who is uh kind of maintaining this project and uh who i've been working with to to bring these things to the marketplace so yeah you can find these on my website uh but it's a great way to test hdmi and relive some of my childhood at the same time because as i mentioned this set is very similar to the one that i had growing up and this um first rev of the trs 80 color computer from radioshack is the first computer first personal computer that i ever laid hands on and ever used so this setup right here with the color computer in this monitor from 1976 is almost identical to what i had growing up and it is extremely nostalgic for me to see both of these things together at the same time so anyway we're going to be putting hdmi out through the rgb to hdmi board like i mentioned it'll take the signal from the color computer convert it to hdmi and send it hopefully to the screen and let's see how it looks let's go ahead and power it on see what happens okay now this is normal it's the raspberry pi boot up screen okay now i've got a special cartridge here it's the the sdc cartridge that a lot of people use i use it all the time with color computer normally when you boot up the color computer you would see a screen like this but with the little flashing cursor but because i have this in here we can now explore the uh we now explore all the games and stuff that are on this particular image in this thing and i want to pull up a game that definitely shows the color i'm i'm gonna pull up zaxxon now zaxxon is the is actually the game that i use when i'm testing uh i test all the all of these uh um rgb to hdmi boards i test it with zaxon because i know what it looks like i know what the colors are supposed to look like and it just is a great test for me to make sure everything's working before i ship these things out and by the way thank you if you've bought one of these so many of you have bought um i've shipped these things around the world at this point so uh just thanks everybody if you've if you bought one from me i hope they're working out for you i've got a lot of feedback a lot of people tell me how much they like them and use them so anyway just a quick thank you to to anybody out there that's bought one of these boards from me okay so let's go ahead and fire up zaxxon see what it looks like here we go the official zaxon and you can see this is actually by sega in 1983 and you can see here was programmed by stephen bork so let's go ahead and hit one player and see if this thing works oh yep there we go looking good now this is a little bit easier in my opinion than the as i die this is a little bit easier than the arcade version i think and also because i played it you know so much as a kid that the muscle memory is coming back for me at this point um but uh yeah this is a good game the colors look great the set looks great um so wow this is just really really nostalgic for me right now guys this is incredible um i can't even focus so anyway yeah this is looking great colors look great um yeah just brings back so many memories okay one last thing i want to test there is a also a usb port on the back of this but it's detected that looks like that i have some movies on this usb thumb drive oops there we go and sure enough i do so we can kind of scroll down here and see here's uh computer chronicles these are all just mp4 files i haven't tested every file format here you can see it pulls up a preview there of the show and it's got all the information up there for you know controls and things like that and if i hit display that should go away there we go video games have come on hard times these days with close out sales discount prices just about everywhere but what about computer games well as computers have gotten better computer games have gotten better too with vastly improved graphics much more sophisticated text handling and much greater speed we'll take a look at some of the newest and hottest computer games next on the computer chronicles [Music] so let's see i should be able to pause this yep you can pause you can fast forward um all that stuff and play whatever video you want and again it just looks perfect on this set even though computer kernels started in the 80s i think early 80s and this sets from the 70s but you know if i was watching this i would still be watching it on this set because tvs were expensive i think we had this rtv around for a good 10 or 15 years so we definitely would have been watching computer chronicles on this set on a set just like this one okay well here we are back in the 70s set this is exactly where this particular tv set belongs and it just fits in perfectly it looks perfectly and uh you know what i love is even i got fooled by it when i first started using it the way the channel numbers light up on the dial and the way everything works the ability to control it from the front panel and it just looks great i really feel like this is kind of the bionic tv set now if you will because really i mean it has a lot of features it didn't ever had before so for example it has a remote now for one it has every input imaginable on the back so that i can play any source while i'm sitting here talking about a game system or an upcoming episode and i think it's going to make a wonderful addition to the set and also i just look forward to plugging things into this um as i need to for just using it as a regular monitor i think it'll be great now for those crt purists out there that say oh i would never do that you should always use original crts well in this case i'm really glad that i saved this thing because you've got to remember the flyback transformer on this set originally was shot and the only way to get another flyback is to find another model um just like this one or maybe you know a model that had the same flyback which they'll probably only be a few tvs that have that flyback and if the flyback is working it probably means the rest of the set is working or easily repairable so yeah i'm not going to rip apart a perfectly good tv to get the flyback out to fix this one on top of that the crt i had before there's no telling whether it was any good or not it was obviously a high hour set so i feel pretty good about the fact that i was able to remove those components and then actually bring this back to life without sacrificing the the the chassis itself um and so yeah i feel really good about my decision and there are other crts out there there's nothing like a good crt for sure but in this case i'm really glad i saved this the way i did now the other thing to keep in mind too are there are some challenges if you're looking to do this yourself first and foremost is the screen size you're really going to have to pay really close attention to the screen size and try to match that up as much as you can while still keeping it a little bit bigger than the opening that you have i can link this one down below if you want to see an example but don't take that meaning that this will fit any tv it obviously won't so make sure you measure the opening that you have and try to find a panel that matches that as much as possible that's number one number two the panels that you will find like this are actually going to have a challenge in that they're meant to go in monitors they're meant to go in very thin uh casing and not in a tv set like this where you want to mount the controls all the way in the back they're meant to go in monitors that mount the control very close to the screen and so i had to do quite a bit of extension to the wires that are in there and so that creates a bit of a challenge and in terms of opening and closing this i want to make sure that there's enough enough wires so that i can get in there and do that and still close the setup and i'm even waiting for an extension to come in now so that i can actually uh improve on this design and extend the wires that i need all the way to the back so something else to keep in mind for sure and the last thing i would say is take your time make sure you like for the glues for example make sure you're using the right glue i was really uh if i had used resin on this uh this back plate that's holding the controls in place instead of that flexible e6000 glue i would have been out of luck when it came time when i forgot that these dials had to go in first i would have been in really bad shape and perhaps had to break the plastic off to get it off so use a glue that will work and and just go slow take your time progress through like this is the least harmful way to do it and then maybe this other thing uh could be a little bit harder and then you know kind of work your way through the progression like that uh as you're working on this and take your time so that it comes out great and you don't end up like i almost did with an unrecoverable error so i really hope you liked that episode be sure to give this a like and subscribe if you haven't already or become a patron you'll see my patrons in the credits and their names will be coming down and i thank everybody for their support of the show so with that until next time we'll see you later [Music] patrons receive ad-free and early access to content after the episode commentary and of course your name in the credits [Music] if you liked that episode here's a few more you might enjoy and i thank you for your support

2022-07-24 18:59

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