You've seen some wild things done with a Raspberry Pi, but when an enthusiast runs a YouTube channel called "The Post Apocalyptic Inventor" and has access to vintage tech, the limits melt away. In one of his latest videos, he goes over every existing video option for connecting a Raspberry Pi to different displays. Everything goes smoothly until he crosses the composite-output frontier and enters the territory of a German television as old as I am…
Now, why does this matter? Beyond experimenting, learning, and reusing hardware that the market insists should be in a landfill, hooking a Raspberry Pi up to old TVs is a big deal for anyone building arcade cabinets. Putting an LED or LCD screen inside a small cabinet isn't hard (there are free designs online), but we all know classic games look "better" on a CRT.
So if you can get your hands on a 14–21 inch color TV and work around it, you might get a more "faithful" experience. The Raspberry Pi has two main video output routes: HDMI and a composite connector that, depending on the model, carries only video (via a yellow RCA) or combined audio/video through a 3.5 mm jack with four contacts.
The video posted by "The Post Apocalyptic Inventor" on YouTube starts out simple: an HDMI monitor, a Raspberry Pi attached with a plain cable, and that's it. Then he moves on to VGA on other monitors, which is easy enough to handle with an HDMI-to-VGA converter. Things really get spicy when he uses a TV with a SCART video input—many of our European readers will remember those. Again, the Pi connects via an adapter that turns SCART into RCA "and" has an input/output switch, plus a 3.5 mm cable (four contacts; the wiring diagram is online if you'd rather build one) to RCA.
His final stop in this Fallout-flavored video escapade is a German WEGA television built in 1980. It's a sturdy, handsome design, and it's a genuine miracle to see it running perfectly. That TV's only video input is its RF antenna connection. Raspberry Pis technically don't include an RF modulator, so your options are to buy one (15–20 euros for a generic one) or salvage one from an old device like a VCR. The salvage route requires fiddling with the modulator (it wasn't designed to be hooked up to a Pi), but the video offers a third option: a PLL-controlled modulator that's ideal for UHF televisions (otherwise, on VHF you'd need channels 2, 3, or 4).
Finally, you obviously have to tweak the operating system. A line in Raspbian's config.txt switches from NTSC to PAL, and other parameters correct the "overscan" so the whole picture shows up. I once did something similar with a PlayStation 1 and a black-and-white TV. Playing Resident Evil on that screen was worth every second. If you have a Raspberry Pi, give it a shot!
