This site may earn chapter commissions from the links on this folio. Terms of employ.

The 1970s were a deeply disruptive fourth dimension. Formica countertops were everywhere, shag rug was popular, nighttime forest paneling (combined with shag carpeting) conspired to make the interior of every dwelling a place where visible low-cal went to die, and about every consumer product came in either vague pastels or eye-searing colors that could drive a cat to frenzy.

Evaluated by the decorating standards of the day, the JVC Videosphere is a brilliant slice of hardware. It's a Tv built into a space helmet, modeled on the astronaut uniforms shown in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Designed equally a portable TV, the Videosphere came with its own portable carrying chain (shown below) and could be wired up with a 12V cable plugged into a cigarette lighter. Some early versions came with a rechargeable battery pack besides. Now a hardware modder in the United kingdom has demonstrated how one of these TVs can exist wired up for modern gaming — and that's impressive, for several reasons.

Videosphere-Inline

As this Wikipedia image shows, the Videosphere only had a simple aqueduct knob. In the UK models, at least, there are no native RF inputs. These inputs are the basic edifice block of how nosotros hooked up VCRs or game consoles to our televisions in the 1980s. In the aforementioned way that HDMI ports deliver that capability today, a small-scale RF adapter labeled "GAME" on one finish and "Tv set" on the other was the mechanism by which we rocked out on Combat or Adventure. But what exercise you do if you tin can't use the RF cable inputs?

You hack the aerial RF input, that's what. The one thing every Television did have, dorsum and then, was a connexion to a TV antenna. The procedure for connecting PC hardware if y'all want to connect to a Switch, you just need an HDMI to Component video connector, followed by a component to RC converter, provided by mode of a VCR, before a spliced RF cable is fastened to =the aerial itself.

As for the content, it looks surprisingly proficient. That'due south going to be helped, to an extent, by the fact that the screen is modest. I can't find exact details on the screen size of the JVC Videosphere, just the few records I did find suggest a 38 square inch display. Using 4:3 brandish characteristics, this suggests a roughly 9-inch diagonal. This besides tracks with the display existence explicitly intended as a portable Television that you could actually run in a car or off a battery pack.

Every bit the author says: For a 43 twelvemonth-sometime TV, this doesn't look one-half bad.