Oh. I didn't notice you there. If I had, this tragedy could have been avoided. But now you have to watch a video. [ominous music]
[CSB narrator speaking] The CSB noted that on the day of the accident- If you grew up with an NES, you might remember that there were two different ways to connect it to your television. One was through the jacks on the side, the white and yellow ones. And the other was through the jack on the back, labeled "RF out". You might have wondered why there were two different outputs on there, what the difference between them actually was, and, if you actually used both of them, why one was so much worse than the other. The image quality on the RF output was usually pretty terrible, so if you had a choice in the matter, you'd generally use the yellow-- [insistent meowing] That is a record. He has never interfered that quickly before. Gibbs! [Gibbs meowing] [extremely inquisitive meow] Wow! Did you hear that? We just have to wait 'til this is over. [meow] There he is. [meowing] [happy cat noises] The image quality of the RF jack on the back was usually a lot worse than the yellow jack on the side, so if you had the choice, you'd always use the yellow jack. So, what was the difference between these and why was one so much worse than the other? To start with, "composite"is the term that's generally used for quote-unquote "the yellow jack", but a more general term would be "baseband video". And that word is very important to understanding what's going on here. Now, I'm going to be talking about analog TV here, which is completely different than digital TV in a lot of ways. Some of the stuff I'm talking about might apply to digital TV but I don't really know. My solution to this is to pretend that DTV doesn't exist, because it's extremely boring. In my previous video about those weird phones, I sort of summarized some concepts about what a signal is. When you send information electronically, it's sent as a single voltage on a wire that changes over time. At any moment, it's at only one voltage and that voltage can change faster or slower to form a simple waveform, or a series of combined waveforms, or something much more complicated and arbitrary, like this, a television signal. It's a lot more complicated than a telephone signal, but it's still just a single voltage that changes over time to encode information. That voltage has to carry a lot of information, such as the brightness of each part of the picture, color information, synchronization pulses for every frame of video, and a continuous audio signal. They're all packed in there and that means it has to change voltage up to six million times per second to get all that information across. So, we say the bandwidth of the signal is 6 MHz. You can plug this rapidly changing voltage straight into a television set, but that's not what TV signals were intended for. They were meant to go through the air, and when we send a signal through the air, we call it radio. We use that as a shorthand for the most basic audio-only type of broadcast, but TV signals are the same thing. Just like normal radio, there's always multiple stations you can tune in to, so you can't just send that plain TV signal right out into the atmosphere, or you'd only be able to send just that one. If you want to send multiple signals at the same frequency but you only have one wire to send them over, you've got a problem. If I connect this NES video jack to my TV, and then I connect another one from, say, a camera, they get mixed up and we get gibberish on the screen. Even though TV signals go through the air, the same problem happens, because the air is pretty much like a wire to a radio. The solution is to change the frequency that each video signal uses, so they don't interfere with each other. That problem was solved in my last video by the concept of modulation, and it serves the same purpose here. Let's take channel 3 for instance. In the U.S., this TV channel begins at about 60 MHz. The video signal is scooted a little bit up from there at about 61 and a quarter MHz, so, imagine you have a sine wave that's oscillating 61 and a quarter million times a second. That's called a "carrier". Let's put the original 6 MHz video signal here, and we'll call that the "baseband". Add these two together, so that wherever the baseband goes up, you make the carrier get louder, and wherever it goes down, you make it quieter. The result is still the same simple sine wave, just getting more or less intense in sync with the baseband. The result is called a modulated signal, and this process is called modulation. Specifically, amplitude modulation. Amplitude being how loud the signal is, how high its voltage goes. Now, transmit that into the air. When a TV set receives all the many signals in the air through its antenna, it can pick out just the one that's oscillating at 61 and a quarter MHz. Now imagine the TV can step back from that high frequency signal, sort of "cross its eyes", and instead of seeing the whole thing at once, it all blurs together until it only sees the amplitude changes. That process is called "demodulation" and it produces our original 6 MHz baseband signal. You can think of that baseband as the "language" of television, and your television set as two separate devices: a radio receiver that picks different frequency signals out of the air and pulls baseband signals out of them, and the TV itself which only understands the baseband. Like if your TV and the gear at the television studio were chatting over walkie talkies. When television was invented, nobody had VCRs or camcorders or Nintendos. The only thing that people ever watched on a television was broadcasts. Of course, when these devices did start getting popular, televisions started getting inputs for them, but that wasn't univeral. It took awhile for it to catch on. This television set, for instance, is from 1986, and if I turn it around, you can see that there's nowhere on it where you can put in a direct video signal. Now this is a portable model. It was meant to be used in an RV, camper, car, something like that. It may even have run off batteries at one point. But this one here from 1993 was meant to be used in exactly the same situations. It takes 12 volts so you can run it on a car. But even this one has a direct video input on the side. So by 1993, these had become far more ubiquitous. But since the NES came out in 1985, that didn't do them any good. Despite not having a video input, though, what televisions did universally have was an antenna connection. On low-end televisions, or portable ones, like these, you did have a built-in antenna, but on higher-end televisions like the ones that most Americans had in their houses at that point, it was pretty common to have no built-in antenna at all. Instead, you'd have a pair of screws on the back of your TV like these,
[popping sound] and you would take the leads from your antenna and screw them down on those posts. You could use a rooftop antenna, or you could use just a pair of cheap bunny ears like this. Eventually, the screw lugs on antenna inputs got replaced by the F connector, which is one of these, that you're probably more familiar with. This is an adapter to go between the two. In fact, even these portable models, despite having their own built-in antennas, have a connection on the back where you can connect your own antenna. It's this jack right here. I don't know why it's a headphone jack instead of a normal F connector or screw lug but both these TVs have it, so apparently this was a standard for portable TVs at some point. At any rate, you could rely on pretty much every television except the absolute bottom of the barrel models having an antenna input, so it was the only thing that Nintendo knew they would be able to use to get the signal from the NES into your television. Since the antenna input is only meant to receive broadcast signals, the NES can't just put baseband video in there. It has to put the image inside of a television channel in order to get into your TV, and that's where the RF modulator comes in. If I open this NES up, you can see a metal box in the corner. That's the RF modulator, and it takes the video signal from the NES graphics chip and modulates it as we saw earlier, onto channel 3 or 4, so you could plug it straight into your television's antenna input. So that explains why the NES had the RF outputs, to support televisions like this that only have an antenna input. But if all TVs have an antenna input, then why bother having the other output at all? And the answer for that is basically that the RF output often looked like crap. Here's the signal from the NES going straight into the baseband input on the TV, and now here's it going from the RF modulator into the antenna jack. Even from here, you can tell there's a significant drop in quality from one to the other. This is over a decent cable in a decent environment without a lot of interference, going into a TV much newer than the NES was when it came out. I used to use my NES on a TV that was a lot more contemporary, and I remember it having a lot of problems with noise, and color, and blur. I used to think this was because the RF signal was just inferior, like it was trying to do something that was harder than what the composite signal was doing, but I've since learned that shouldn't really be the case. The RF signal should be high enough bandwidth to carry the entire composite signal without any degradation. So one theory I have is that my TV was just crappy. It was from about 1988, it had been used heavily before I got it, so maybe it was just having a tough time tuning into any signal. I don't remember anything ever looking perfect on that TV, so that could be part of the problem. But I've looked it up and a lot of other people have stated that the NES's RF output looked terrible, and, you know, across awhole range of experiences. So it seemed like this was a pretty common problem. Now, when I first wrote the script for this video, I was going to say that the other part of the problem is that the NES's RF modulator is just cheap and poorly built. But then when I went to demo that, I was kind of surprised by the results. This here is a professional RF modulator. I'm not quite sure where it came from. It came in a rack with about 10 others, and that means it didn't come from a television station. It could have come from a cable network, but more likely it came from a hotel. They use banks of these to turn cable and satellite channels into normal television channels so that the cheap TVs they could put in every room can tune into them without having to have a cable box in every single hotel room. Now this modulator is obviously a lot larger than the one in the NES. I mean, it's almost the size of half the unit in the first place. And if you guessed it costs a lot more, you'd be right. But this does do the same thing as the module in the NES that I showed you. So, here, I can demonstrate this for you. I'll take the composite video from the NES and put it into the input of this modulator, as well as the audio. And I'll take the antenna input for the TV and put it into the output of the modulator. And then I'll get the gigantic, screaming power supply that this thing requires and hook it up. And now the deafening fan will drown out my voice for the rest of the video. [fan noise] Yes, there we go. Now we'll just switch this to TV input and tune to about channel 40. And there's Mario! [Super Mario Bros. theme song plays] Now, if we zoom in here, you'll see that the quality of the image looks pretty much exactly like it did with the NES's RF modulator. Now, I'm gonna need to ask you to take my word for the following: The two RF signals look pretty different here, but in real life they were indistinguishable. It seems like the camera did some kind of image processing nonsense, or maybe I adjusted the TV settings in between shots and forgot about it. You can still see some specific places where the RF signals are definitely inferior, like the numbers on the status bar, which are much more well-defined on the composite signal, and Mario's face, which is a blurry mess in both RF images. Even if the pro modulator is a little bit better when you get right up close and look at the pixels though, it's still definitely worse than composite if you compare them side by side. And, both these signals would probably have looked much worse on a fully analog 1985 TV. Those are very hard to get ahold of these days, or I would have used one. You'll just have to believe me on this. I mean, maybe on a better television we'd be able to see a difference, but we saw a pretty stark difference when I switched from the composite to the RF before, so, I think if there was going to be a big change, we'd be able to see it here. So this looks just about like the NES did. The narrative I was prepared to give you here was that the NES RF modulator probably put out bad video because it was just cheap. You know, it probably cost Nintendo a dollar or two, considering the entire machine was only a couple hundred bucks when it was new. This, on the other hand, would have cost two or three hundred dollars and has almost as many parts in it as the entire NES does. So it would make sense that this would be higher quality, but it's actually not. The NES's RF modulator, despite being extremely inexpensive, seems to do about as good a job as you could possibly do at making an RF signal. If I open up the pro modulator, you can see it has hundreds of components, multiple adjustments, lots of integrated circuits, and intricate shielding. I can't show you the inside of my NES modulator because they're sealed, but here's one that my friend Richard found buried in his backyard and kindly opened up for me. They don't look much better new, and you can clearly tell it was a much cheaper device, yet the performance, when new, was nearly indistinguishable from pro-grade devices. That's really impressive! So you might be wondering, if this is putting out a television signal, then isn't it broadcasting it? I mean, if it's producing it, shouldn't you be able to pick it up on your television without needing to plug it straight in? Well, if we want to split hairs, it is. Any device that produces radio frequency signals is sending a little bit of it out into the ether, but, because of FCC regulations in the U.S., Nintendo had to ensure that this device didn't give off enough of a signal that something could pick it up. That's what all the shielding around the RF modulator was about. If we pick up the NES and look at the bottom, there's a sticker that says that this device complies with FCC rule part 15, and part 1 of that is that this device may not cause harmful interference. What that means is that this device, because of the nature of its operation, is going to produce a radio signal, but it has to be so low that no one's going to notice it. It's not going to interfere with any real television broadcasts, for instance. The signal is so low power that it can't make the jump through the air to your TV. You've got to plug a cable in here so that the wire can provide a much easier path for it to get there. This wire is shielded, so as the signal's going through it, it's not being radiated off of it. Now the other thing is that radio signals don't transmit very well unless they have a properly tuned antenna attached. Well, what if we did attach an antenna? Would that do it? Still no, because the signal is so low power that it just gets lost in the background noise of the world. Now, if you put it into a television transmitter, to boost it up to an actual television broadcast level, then it would do the job, but you can't buy a television transmitter. They don't sell them. There was never in history any reason for consumers to buy one, so the only television transmitters that you can buy are 10,000 watts and up, and they have to have a whole building built around them. You probably can't do that just to play Mario wirelessly. So even though the NES generates a television signal inside of it, there's just no way to transmit it to your TV. Legally. Or with any decent quality. But if you don't care about those things... I was telling the truth when I said that you can't buy a television transmitter. They just don't make them. I've never found one, not even a cheap Chinese knock-off on Alibaba But, let's talk about what a transmitter is. We already have our television signal. We just need it to be bigger. Bigger. Bigger. [music] What makes TV signals bigger that we can buy? This here is an antenna distribution amplifier. The idea is that if you have one antenna on top of your house, but four or five televisions, there might not be enough power in the signal coming from the antenna to feed all of them. So you connect your antenna here, and you connect your televisions to these jacks, and it boosts the signal up enough that the TVs can all receive signals off the same antenna. So this is making a TV signal bigger, except that you put the antenna in here, and the larger signal goes out to all your TVs. But what if we turned that around? Disclaimer! Don't do this! You could go to jail! I've done research and I believe that what I'm about to do here is barely legal. The FCC part 15 rules allow for low power transmitters, such as little FM transmitters you get to listen to music in your car if you don't have an AUX jack. These are very tough rules to follow, and you don't want to get in trouble with the law, so enjoy the video, but don't try this at home. This is an amplifier, so it requires power to operate. And instead of attaching the antenna here, we're going to attach the input from the NES RF modulator. And instead of attaching this to our television, we're going to attach this little stubby antenna that I found. Oh no. I've made a mess of things. Now we'll tune to channel 3. And there's Mario! It doesn't look very good. The signal is so low power it's having a hard time jumping the gap here. It can't even get color. If I touch it, it works, and if I play with this long enough I'll get into a position where it actually does OK. Wait.
Oh.
Oh! Ah, there we are. Much better. So there it is.
[Super Mario Bros. theme song playing] It's not very good, but Mario, wirelessly, is possible. Oh, that's much better. Fantastic! Obviously the quality is pretty bad, and the range is atrocious. I can't really get more than a foot or two before it's pretty much unplayable. But, I am playing Mario wirelessly using only stuff that might have been available in an average 1993 American household, and I think that's pretty cool. Obviously not every American household in 1993 had an antenna distribution amplifier, but they were available at Ratio Shack for like 30, 40 bucks, and there were plenty of dads that probably bought one. In fact, they may have sold higher gain amplifiers and better antennas. It's possible this worked quite well. It stands to reason to me that some kid probably figured out that they could do this. If they did have a higher power amplifier, I wonder if they were accidentally broadcasting Super Mario Bros. to their neighbors. I wonder how long it took before anybody figured out what was going on. I hope that happened. I hope some kid was running a pirate video game television station out of their house for months in 1995 and nobody figured it out. We had such a beautiful, messy world for awhile before everything got all digital and reliable and boring. Now, there was an even better demo that I wanted to finish this with, which really answered some questions, but I'm not going to be able to, and I'll explain why. So this is a consumer distribution amplifier, but there were professional ones as well. This is a professional distribution amplifier. It weighs about 10 pounds. [hollow clattering] It just doesn't -- it doesn't sound as heavy as it is. This has a much higher amplification ratio than this little baby one that's intended for consumers. That's because nobody was supposed to own this. This was supposed to get used inside, like, a cable television station. But I thought, well, it's the same sort of thing, I'll bring it home and I'll try it. So I did. Now, the reason I'm not demoing it for you right now is because it is so much more powerful than I realized, that it would be illegal for me to plug this in for even a moment. It would be a very bad idea. To give you an idea, here's a picture I took when I first tested this. This is Super Mario Bros. being transmitted a foot or two with no antenna attached to the amplifier at all. The signal from this thing is so hot that just the copper inside the jack is enough to transmit the signal to the television. When I took my multimeter and tried to measure the voltage coming out here, as soon as I touched the center conductor, the image popped into perfect clarity on the television. It looked like it was coming in through the composite jack. I could hardly believe it was being transmitted. I had to check my cables. And then as soon as I realized what was going on, I unplugged it. This thing is so high power that even just a little piece of wire that I had shoved into the jack was enough antenna for this thing to do a better job than the NES can do plugged straight into the television. And a better job than this thing can do plugged straight into the television. So in running this at higher power than intended, I accidentally discovered that the NES RF output is as good as the composite output. But there's something preventing that quality from making it to the television. Maybe there's something about sending RF signals over a cable that's more complicated than transmitting them through the air. Maybe these need to be impedence matched, a thing I never understood but people always seem to talk about with RF. At this point, I don't know. A lot of this stuff is over my head. So if anybody watching this has any theories, I'd love to hear them. But now you know. Every NES contains a little television station that was trying to scream your video games out into the ether very, very quietly. Maybe a few stray electrons made it out through your window and into space, and some alien civilization built their entire culture around your incessant attempts to complete The Adventure of Link. Probably not, though. FCC regulations, naturally, prevented Nintendo from sending your video games to the stars. Again, we could have had such an interesting world. If you do want to experiment with transmitting television images, you might look into ham radio and slow-scan TV. It's not really the same thing. It's not real time, and it's not really analog. However, it is about the most interesting thing you can possibly do, aesthetically, to an image. The rest of this is just a neat technological footnote. I hope you enjoyed it and thanks for watching!
That was a lot more than a footnote. Thank you for putting it together. You are very charismatic and I watched the whole video without getting bored (even though you don’t put out a lot of emotion). I love the slow build up and hope you make more videos for the future. NES and SMS are my childhood and I want to put this together for my setup. Thank you for sharing!
Love this!!! Learned so much!!
He almost lost me when his dog or whatever wandered into the room. That quirky, "outtakes" style of video has to be done sparingly or it gets annoying. The rest of it was pretty interesting, though. I'd love to see a deeper dive into why the RF signal over the wire looks worse than actually transmitting it (via a homemade pirate TV transmitter).
Great video, thanks for sharing. Reminds me of technology connections but this one guy definitely is much better at explaining stuff in a simple manner
Thx! Ima give this a watch. I'm assuming this dude is doing a technology connections kinda thing.
Thanks for sharing, it's a really interesting video and while I am a fan of technology connections these kind of subjects are more relevant to my interests in general.
For those of us who don't want to watch a 19 minute video (I'm at work and prefer articles anyway) what's this all about?