The classic console corner's CRT changeover

In the corner of the rear Floodgap lab sits a pile of classic game consoles. It used to look like this:

The centrepiece is the 20" Panasonic cathode ray tube TV-VCR on the cart (and a DVD player balanced on top), because with the exception of the Sega Dreamcast all the consoles here only came with NTSC RF output and date from the pre-flat panel TV era. That includes multiple Atari consoles (including the inevitable VCS, here a Darth Vader 2600), several Pong machines — including two Commodore units — with various chipsets, an Intellivision (as the rebadged Tandyvision One, my first) and a Bally Astrocade with lots of upgrades. It seems wrong to use them with a flat panel, and CRTs lag less. Plus, games with a light gun (here the Dreamcast and one of the Pong consoles) often rely on the CRT's rapidly scanning beam to know where they're pointed.

So what do you do when the CRT TV goes bad?

You track down another one, and then labouriously redo all the connections so you can still play the games. Yes, this article is basically just a big bubbling ball of nostalgia. My consoles — let me show you them.

I should note that this isn't all the old school gaming fun in the house. In the commons next to the pinball machines are an Xbox 360 Slim and a PlayStation 2, and in the home theatre connected to the 3D projector is a PlayStation 3 since it has some stereoscopic titles. These might appear in future articles. But most of the rest are here.

I bought this Panasonic Omnivision PV-M2035 from a friend at church in 1999 for $100 [about $200 in 2026 dollars]. He had no use for it, and the top of the plastic shell had been heat-warped by sitting in his car too long, but it worked, still had the remote, and was a suitably cheap TV for my unsuitably cheap studio apartment. I used it for local news and Friends with a set of rabbit ears, VHS movies, and speakers for playing music by connecting a CD player to the single rear input. When I moved to a less cheap 1-bedroom, it came along, and its flat top was flat enough to become a shelf for a DVD player. I got the Dreamcast from Fry's in 2001 after Sega discontinued it and managed to share the composite input between them. That apartment was my crashpad for about a decade before moving to the current orbiting HQ, whereupon I bought a passive-3D flat panel TV and moved the Omnivision to its current location in the back of the house. It shared the RF input between the Inty, and later the Atari 2600, and later still the Astrocade and various Pongs. At any one time there were at least four consoles always connected to it via switches and switchboxes, and I wired up an accessory port for more.

Last year the screen started doing ... this. It was likewise very jumpy with the Tandyvision through the RF input, lots of roll, and with the Dreamcast on the composite input was very dark and eventually faded to black. Oddly a tape played through the VCR was stable, but it had really bad colour. Although I managed to track down a service manual with the schematics, this TV hails from that awkward transitional era where formerly discrete components were increasingly being consolidated into ASICs, and gingerly probing the board while keeping my fool fingers away from the tube didn't yield an obvious single point of failure like a blown cap. Plus, as a combo TV-VCR, there were lots of paths to the display output and all of those paths were bad in different ways with no clear pattern.

I left the console corner to gather dust (it's good at that) and tried finding another similar Panasonic TV-VCR so I could either swap the main board or simply put it in service. After months of scanning eBay auctions I found this fully working Panasonic PV-M2046 which is nearly the same except for a 4-head VCR (the PV-M2035 has a two-head) and front inputs, and its service manual suggested it had similar or identical components. The seller padded the face of the CRT well, but UPS still managed to find a way to dropkick it off the lift gate or something, because the plastic was broken and on these TVs that's pretty much the load-bearing part. When it arrived at the mailbox and I unpacked it, I could see the lower half had sandwiched right through the VCR slot, with visible PCB fragments and broken buttons; aside from the tube itself (ironically), the thing was a total loss. The seller nevertheless made good on the refund, to their credit, and I got to schlep it to the recycler.

Overall, however, it had occurred to me that there were very few TVs sufficiently contemporary with the M2035 out there, which might be a hint about their general longevity. So, if I was going to be forced to buy a different Panasonic, then it might as well be a more recent one, and it should be one of the "triple play" units (i.e., TV, VCR, DVD) so that I could at least get rid of the external DVD player.

And that was this, a Panasonic PV-DF2036M. All that bubble wrap enabled it to arrive safely, though it was a bit of a squish getting it into the Civic hatchback. I got out a VHS tape and a DVD and ensured they played, and they do.

This unit was produced in June 2006, substantially later than the older TV, so if I can't fix that one I should get plenty of wear from this one.

Because this TV was produced during the lead-up to the end of analogue television broadcasting in the United States, it carries this warning on the front that it "will require a converter box after February 17, 2009" consistent with the Digital Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005. The reason for the warning is because it only has an analogue NTSC TV tuner, predating the FCC March 1, 2017 requirement to have a digital ATSC tuner, though an old NTSC one is exactly what we want for our purposes. The DTV Delay Act of February 4, 2009 later pushed the end of full-power analogue TV broadcasting to June 12, 2009 to buy time for people stuck on waiting lists for digital converter box coupons. I got a couple of these myself and used one for a free tuner with the old Panasonic, though I don't know where the tuner or the other unredeemed coupon card ended up. After that date, only low-power broadcasters and translators remained until the last such stations were shut down in Alaska by January 10, 2022.

It also has a rear input like the old TV, along with digital and analogue audio out from the DVD player so you can connect a soundbar or surround system.

Also upgraded is a separate set of front inputs, and a headphone port as an output, "in stereo where available" as American TV shows of a certain vintage used to brag. (A great example of this is on the Mission: Impossible '88 and '89 DVD sets, where the "in stereo" animation was even burned into the video stream.)

Now that we have our triple-play TV, let's look at all that dusty stuff wired into the old TV set before we dismantle it. The Dreamcast and DVD player share the single rear input with a Y-cable each in its video and audio jacks. I'll show you this in a second, but the video Y-cable has one end connected to the Dreamcast and the other end to the box on the left, a Sima Video CopyMaster used to defeat old-school Macrovision Analog Protection System signals when enabled on a DVD. Macrovision inserts abnormal pulses in the vertical blank that interfere with most VCRs' automatic gain circuitry, causing wild changes in brightness and preventing a clean VHS recording. This includes copying VHS tapes encoded the same way, and DVD recorders that detect these pulses will likewise refuse to operate. Since this TV routes the rear inputs through the VCR so they can be recorded, it becomes susceptible even when not recording and thus impossible to watch many DVDs, for which the Sima CopyMaster was the cheapest solution: it simply blots out that portion of the vertical blank along with the pulses, which also has the side effect of sometimes stripping closed captioning (in the vertical blank as well), though DVDs with proper subtitles are of course unaffected. Later Sima devices could regenerate portions of the vertical blank for better quality, and Macrovision actually sued them over their products in 2005, but later settled.

The mixer on the right was purchased literal decades ago at Radio Shack (more specifically a "Video Enhancer Stereo Audio Mixer") that I think we used for a Halloween display exactly once and then forgot about. Here it was used first as a cutoff switch, and second as a way to match the audio volume from the DVD player with the audio volume from the Dreamcast, which was also directly connected to the second rear Y-cable. This TV is mono, so the stereo channels from the audio mixer and the DC get merged using their own Y-connectors (also Radio Shack) before going into the Y-cable to the single line audio input. The video function isn't used here at all; it was just a audio mixer on the shelf I wasn't otherwise using. The DVD player is under the mixer and the CopyMaster, a cheapie Sony special that will only eject discs if it's in the mood or summarily threatened with violence.

The Dreamcast is in front of the TV. You already met this system when we adjusted the laser pickup and refurbished its rechargeable battery.

Likewise, you met the Tandyvision One (otherwise identical to the Mattel Intellivision Master Component, and manufactured by them as an OEM) when we installed a composite video modification and a front power-cutoff reset. I later upgraded it with an original Mattel Intellivoice speech synthesizer (Tandy never rebadged these) and a CuttleCart.

But you haven't met the Bally on the bottom, officially introduced in 1978 as a game console and simple home computer, sold under various names such as the Bally Professional Arcade seen on early units, later the Bally Computer System badging here, and now collectively referred to under its final incarnation as the Astrocade. These machines were based around a 1.789MHz Z80 (half NTSC colourburst) combined with the same graphics hardware Dave Nutting Associates used for Midway's arcade games Gorf and Wizard of Wor, among others. Unfortunately, much of its theoretical graphics power went unrealized because it only has half the video memory of the arcade units (i.e., 4K) — and that's all the memory it has, so it has to interleave bits in the video memory to store BASIC programs, meaning only game ROMs can take full advantage. Still, that was enough to be solid competition for the likes of the Atari VCS and Fairchild Channel F, and it holds its own well against the slightly later Intellivision.

Even amongst contemporaries from that pioneering era, the Astrocade is a delightfully odd duck. Instead of a conventional keyboard, the computer functions are accessed through a small keypad which by default is laid out like a calculator, but with an overlay can also be used to enter letters and BASIC keywords. Because the game cartridge form factor was still a relatively fluid concept, Bally settled on a cassette-like carrier called a "Videocade" that was inserted and ejected (boing!) like compact cassette tapes. The rear of the machine was used to store the Videocade cartridges and covered by a clear smoked plastic shell, but since I have a multicart installed I use the back to store two of the Astrocade's unique controllers, a surprisingly functional mashup of joystick and paddle with a trigger button on the grip.

The Astrocade also has quite a lot of expansion capability. For hobbyists Bally sold a 300 baud cassette interface to load and save BASIC programs, later incorporated into the Astrocade BASIC cartridge (which I have, not shown here). Additionally, besides the four controller ports, there are knockouts for a light pen connector (never offered) and an expansion slot to which my Astrocade has this Lil' White RAM box connected. This upgrade draws power from the light pen connector port and provides up to 32K of additional RAM, though a modified BASIC like ViperSoft BASIC is needed to access expanded memory above $7FFF.

The Astrocade is a solid system and fun to play, so we'll take a spin a bit later, but one big drawback it does have is a doozy: the cooling vents are on the underside. These machines are very prone to overheating and can be easily damaged by it, which is why I use two foam struts to keep it off the carpet.

The yellow label is for Astrovision, a separate enterprise that had been attempting to develop their own console. The (then) Bally Professional Arcade was selling poorly, though part of this was due to a tardy launch and Bally's weak retail presence, and Bally decided to sell off the consumer products division in 1979. Astrovision, unable to get their unit to market quickly, bought it in 1981 along with a limited license to the Bally name and reintroduced it at Winter CES 1982. Astrovision units are otherwise the same except for the badging and are the most common Astrocades today, though the company became another victim of the 1983 video game crash and went bankrupt shortly afterwards. Simultaneously, an Astrocade derivative merged with Bally's unfinished ZGRASS-100 expansion chassis was reworked into the Datamax UV-1 graphics generator, sold in small numbers until around 1982.

These systems all connect to a TV using a phono cord carring RF. Most of them allow selecting channel 3 or 4 and I set them all to channel 4 on purpose except for the VCS, which only offers 2 or 3. Since I only have one RF input, the Inty, 2600 and Bally all feed into a 4-input phono jack switchbox behind the Intellivoice, with the fourth input defined as the "accessory port" for external devices I'm testing.

I decided this was also a good time to free and reroute all the wall warts and power strips, and do a little spot vacuuming with the Roomba.

First off was the DVD player, the mixer and the CopyMaster, and all their associated wallwarts and cables.

Now that we can slide the TV forward a bit without sending everything atop it flying, here are the old TV's rear connectors. The two phono Y-cables for the Dreamcast and DVD player are attached to the video and mono audio inputs, and the RF switchbox shared by the others is attached to the coax antenna input.

The output from the phono switchbox behind the Inty attaches to the RF game-antenna switchbox here. When I still used rabbit ears as a TV antenna, they attached to this box also as the antenna input, though that's been long since disconnected. You can also see the Y-adapters merging the two stereo audio channels to mono.

Disconnected and removed from the cart, leaving only the Radio Shack RF switchbox and the Dreamcast outputs.

The old and the new for size comparison.

Unfortunately, despite the same tube size and overall similar dimensions, the new triple-play TV's side speakers are only just wide enough to fit; I can't rotate the TV like the old one, so the Dreamcast that used to sit next to it will have to be relocated. I unplugged it and moved it to the shelf with the Tandyvision for a moment to get everything installed.

We can dispense with the Y-adapter since this TV has stereo audio jacks, so all three of the Dreamcast's phono jacks can connect directly to its rear line inputs, and the RF switchbox goes on the antenna connector as usual.

The Dreamcast's unexpected relocation also required me to find a better spot for the input switcher. Because the TV generates RF of its own and power cords also generate interference, I kept the box away from the old TV for higher signal quality, but for this one I decided to see how well it would work on top of the set since I could just Velcro it there.

The first attempt with the Tandyvision's RF output, which should be clear as a bell from its newer internal module, was very noisy. I followed all the rear inputs, made sure their lines did not cross, and made sure the power cord wasn't crossing them either.

This did improve it ...

... but not quite enough with some screens.

Eventually I reversed everything and angled the Tandyvision to give the Dreamcast a new location, but also to make space behind the other side for the input switcher to go back on the lower shelf. After all, I don't have a regular need to get at the Intellivoice or CuttleCart, and the serial port I cooked up for the CuttleCart not too long ago exits with its own DE-9 below which is still accessible.

Now that the signal path avoids the TV's own interference, the quality on RF is much better. I really must make a note to pick up one of those Keyboard Components; I hear they'll be out in spring.

The next system to check on the switcher is the Astrocade, so let's fire it up too. The multicart's DIP switches are set to Bally Pinball, my personal favourite. This unit has the later 1978 ROMs and displays options on a menu screen not unlike the slightly later Texas Instruments 99/4, with the first set coming from the cartridge and the other four built-in: Gunfight, a simple two-player shooter where the knob controls aim; Checkmate, a ripoff of Gremlin's Blockade; and a simple calculator and screen paint toy ("Scribbling"). The display is a bit noisier than the Inty/Tandyvision, probably because of the difference in shielding, but still quite good.

What I like most about Bally Pinball is the two-handed play: your flippers (and the ball launch) are controlled with each controller trigger. It almost makes you wonder where the Wii got some of its ideas from ...

Now for the Atari 2600, which had gotten buried under the other ones in its official Atari Game Center, so I cleared those away for the moment (we'll come back to them).

This machine, a Darth Vader unit, was a gift decades ago from someone who was just getting rid of it but I didn't have space to hook it up until I moved here. It came with joysticks and paddles and a few games, all in the Game Center, covered by its own smoked plastic lid. The Atari Game Center was an Atari-branded version of the Videostak Video Game Center, which allegedly could accomodate a VCS, Intellivision or ColecoVision. The front decal is somewhat worn and the woodgrain veneer doesn't match the Vader VCS nearly as well, but it's still a fun-looking setup.

The console sits on top and under it is the storage, where the cartridges are and where I also keep the paddles. About half the cartridges here came with it; the rest I got from a backwaters Salvation Army thrift store when they still sold those sorts of things. A few cartridges like BASIC Programming are kept separately.

The 2600 is probably my most neglected console, at least in terms of upgrades and mods. I keep procrastinating on installing a composite modification or some way of loading programs, and it's the only one of my constantly connected backroom systems that doesn't have some sort of mass storage or multicart.

Here we are playing Reactor (with a joystick; I only have a somewhat iffy Wico track ball). I'm not quite happy with the display output as there is more ghosting and background static than I would like, but I couldn't make it a great deal better by moving cables around. I have a 2600 Jr. in storage that is said to have better video, when they work, and various rando hot takes on the Internets suggest that this may vary on the specific unit or even on the game. I did have to agree that Kaboom! looked a lot better than Reactor did.

It's playable, at least, though also an indication I need to get this machine on the TLC queue in the near future. Or, alternatively, I recently landed an Intellivision System Changer which has Atari 2600 hardware in an expansion box for the Intellivision II (useable on the original Inty with modification). It might be fun to explore the reputed irregularities between what is believed to be a VTI clone TIA in the System Changer and the slightly earlier Coleco Expansion Module 1 (and the related Coleco Gemini), and see how they differ in practice.

Now for the Pong machines. These attach to the "accessory port" on the input switcher. The current Pong menagerie are mostly MOS 7600-based, MOS' own Pong-on-a-chip: two from Commodore themselves but PAL only using the MOS 7601 (the TV Game 2000K and TV Game 3000H), plus two MOS 7600 (NTSC) systems, a Coleco Telstar Gemini, not to be confused with the Coleco Gemini or Coleco Telstar, and an Allied Leisure Name of the Game II, possibly the earliest use of the chip in NTSC regions. We'll play the Name of the Game II and Telstar Gemini below.

These will be consoles for another day, but I also have a boxed Atari Video Pinball, an "honorary" Pong machine though it plays several other games, and a boxed Atari Ultra Pong Doubles, which we had before we got the Tandyvision, but I don't ever recall it working fully and it later failed to power up and got thrown away, so this is a replacement. My least favourite of the Pongs here (I really only picked it up because it was cheap) is a 1977 Magnavox Odyssey 3000. The 3000 is basically an upmarket Odyssey 2000 with proper handheld controllers, but otherwise the same me-too AY-3-8500 Pong-on-a-chip generating the same black-and-white display.

The Allied Leisure Name of the Game II is a two-player Pong based on the MOS 7600-001. This chip notionally contains three field games (a tennis game, a "goal" game usually billed as either soccer or hockey, and a racquetball game) and a skeet shooter, but the racquetball game can be put into a single player mode by setting it to "four" players and the NotG2's switch triggers this mode in place of the skeet shooter. It was noisy on the other TV and it's noisy here, possibly because it has its own internal RF switchbox, but it plays fine.

Next the Coleco Telstar Gemini, an MOS 7600-004 system. This has two "pinball" variants (with flippers and moveable Pong paddles, so it's still a Pong of sorts) and two shooting gallery variants involving shooting a deformed bear sprite. The light gun connector is the same as the Coleco Telstar, so I borrowed the gun from that.

And the gun senses the sprite fine, even considering the aging photodetector inside; I was able to shoot the bear across the screen mostly consistently, which is probably the best you can expect from a console this cheap and a light gun this old. There is no lag and the hits register instantly. That's what you have a console CRT for.

Finally, the Dreamcast.

Well, okay, it was an excuse to play Crazy Taxi and sing along with The Offspring. But the output looks crisp through the rear jacks, the sound is proper stereo, and we now have front inputs I can use for something else without rigging a whole bunch of Y-adapters again. Plus, if the Telstar Gemini's gun works, it's all but guaranteed the Dreamcast's does.

The last step was to vacuum the floor and reorganize the Pong stack so that the 2600 doesn't get buried again. Because I prefer the 7600 Pongs and the PAL ones won't work with this TV, the Ultra Pong Doubles and the Odyssey 3K will go on the floor with the two Commodore TV Game units. On the other hand, I am likely to play some Video Pinball, and in its box that's easy to move, so that can go on top of the 2600 and the NotG and Telstar Gemini can sit next to it.

The old TV is out in the garage and as I have time I'll extract its circuit boards and go over them more thoroughly, since I had a lot of good times with that television and it would be nice to fix. If I do, I'll write it up here, since it's an actual old VCR. Meanwhile, I have some possible projects in mind for the Tandyvision and Astrocade, and maybe some mods to go in the VCS, and you can read about those in future articles too.

In the end, with the new TV all set up, the 1980s can live again in my rear office. Or, as my wife likes to point out, they never actually died there either.