Funny Picture Thread [17]

spapakons said:

A few graphics cards back in the day had TV out (usually an RCA composite output) to connect to the TV. Now you can buy an HDMI to AV adapter both PAL and NTSC output for a few Euros (dollars). Too bad you don't need it since all modern TVs accept an HDMI input. I wish we could have current technology back in the day, or future technology today. Anyone has a time machine?

It is called a gen-lock. Usually the Yellow / Composite out. Gen locks ( like the Amiga ) where used in video-editing and some
could interact with the hardware it was plugged into. So Imagine an Amiga used for animation sending video out that is being
overlapped ( green-screen/ blue-screened ) by another device/computer overlapping video, 3d, animation, or anything else.
Same with the Later Macintosh's ( those little abominations that turned into gems during the early 1990's ) , being used in
desktop publishing ( graphic design ). Take video and overlap it just the same while having your magazine graphics ( vectors logos, words ). Of course I am talking about a 10" - 15" display meant to print most magazine sizes. Which is still a thing.

There are also these little boxes ( I forget what they are called but I have one ) from Japan made specifically for the frequency of various arcade cabinets. Using this I was able to run a second display ( of course via 640X480 because that is what all Analog displays are limited to ) from my computer at the time. It is like going back in time when I had a commodore monitor ( used in electronics ) or a Trinitron ( like the one in my closet. ). You could buy variants cheap nowadays but I ordered mine through a pass-through pay Japanese auction website ( Because Yahoo auctions died in the west ).

I did buy a VGA to AV converter in the 90's to be able to connect my old PC to the TV. The default output was NTSC 525 lines 60Hz and you could switch to PAL 625 lines 50Hz from a little DOS utility, no hardware switch. So I couldn't use it in Windows Vista and later, unless I wanted NTSC 640x480 60Hz output. Pretty useless here in Greece we have PAL. Thankfully a newer nVidia graphics card I bought later had built-in TV output. Also I remember our humble Pentium CPU could not play MPEG 2 video and we had a hardware MPEG 2 decoder card! Fortunately this came with TV output to watch the DVD movie on TV.

Borg 386 said:

With too much luck the pin wouldn't have hurt any cable, it would have been between two cables. Too bad nobody is that lucky, except Gladstone Gander...