Can I make old games consoles work with my TV?

AThere are several reasons why new tellies and old consoles don’t get on particularly well. Primarily, this is because new TVs, generally built to ever-tightening budgets and with absolutely no love or respect for the past, have done away with much of the circuitry required for backwards compatibility with ancient tech.

There’s now no such thing, for example, as analogue TV in the UK, so why would any manufacturer bother to include an analogue tuner? Ditching analogue tech obviously means that everything can be stuffed onto fewer and fewer chips: this is exactly what the world is coming to, people.

There are various cheeky workarounds if you’re dealing with a console that only has an RF output. See, for example, if you can get your hands on an old VCR player with an output that your TV supports. Find your console using its analogue tuner and you will at least be able to get it on screen. Alternatively, your TV may still have a composite input, which is nice if your console supports it, but the chances are that you’ll need a new cable. Whichever way you play it, Guru would wager good money that you’ll ultimately be saddened by the results: a blurry, poorly-scaled, awfully coloured mess of pixels.

You could go to the trouble of having your console converted for RGB or even component output – there are enthusiasts out there who can do it for a fee and usually a long wait time – but this is unlikely to solve the problem completely. You could end up with slightly less fuzz and better colouration, but that’s about it.

The favoured (though not exactly cheap) solution of the retro gaming crowd is the Framemeister, a bit of Japanese-import tech (£yikes) that does the technical shizz-whizz required to turn any old analogue input into a beautiful digital one suitable for your TV. Sharper pixels, better colours, spot-on scaling; the Framemeister can even add scanlines to its output for an authentic but definitely-notauthentic CRT experience.