Yeah, I remember even during the XP days needing to use some sort of tool or hack to make it output at 320x240.
But the “TV Boxes” will downscale from 800x600 to NTSC. Text won’t be readable, but you get the image at least.
Ultimately the whole exercise was a little pointless
No, it was very pointless, a presentation of the affliction known as too-much-time-on-your-hands.
My dad used one of those to write his thesis. It spent then summer at the summer camp at which we all volunteered, and would get trucked over to the family cottage on our weekends off. Thing was bomb-proof. Can’t beat playing Skate, or Die while looking out at the lake…
Personally, I prefer vintage stuff that was ahead of its time.
high resolution displays in 1975.
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I feel like this is like the 4th article on boingboing where surprise is expressed at the idea of using cables and converters to downgrade digital video to analog.
You can buy hdmi to rca adapters pretty cheap these days, and, if you need to, additional adapters to convert rca to RF.
It’s pretty easy to do.
That said, I think it’s fun to play with this stuff. A low resolution CRT is probably bad for a monitor but this setup would be great if you wanted to play old TV shows via YouTube or maybe Atari games on an emulator from the computer onto the CRT.
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If that box has an rca or RF input on it, it would be possible! Neat!
I often think of a scene in a jetsons Cartoon where Elroy was watching TV on his watch. And how we are finally living in that future. Minus the flying cars and sky houses and robot maids of course. (Although we do have robot vacuums I guess)
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Sadly it does not appear to have an composite input – but I’d imagine one could be hacked in. (Or if you want to get really fancy, and probably break some FCC regulations you could build some sort of transmitter and tune into it using the tuner on the device.)
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I did that too, it’s how I got through the overnight shift at the gas station I worked at.
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I’ll bet that there is a test point on the circuit board, past the tuner, where composite video could be injected. (I’d open up my PXL 2000 TV, which appears very similar, and look, but I’ve yet to remove two tamper-resistant screws.)
Eliminating the RF modulator/tuner step would make a big improvement for digital video. (And maybe there’s just enough room to slide in a Pi ZeroW with a Johnny Mnemonic-worth of USB stick…)
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I’ve seen a teardown of the wrist part before but never the tuner box, but I’d imagine it’s mostly through hole stuff too which would make modifying it pretty simple. I’ve long been obsessed with this little piece of 1980s frivolity, but they are rare and expensive so I don’t see myself ever owning one.
Oops, I thought you meant the OP 5" TV. Lord knows what’s in that Seiko. (And I doubt there’s room for a PiZW!)
I used to run my Atari 800XL through a Thorn B&W portable like this as a kid in the '80s. Made games reliant on colour a bit hard. Couldn’t play Master Of The Lamps until I scored a colour model.
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We actually have a ginormous nearly 30 in. Toshiba color CRT that I have yet to connect to my Commdore 128.
I imagine it will actually be pretty great.
(How we came by the CRT involves a death in the family, and cleaning several storage lockers. We may try to sell it, but I find the immensity charming. I’ve never owned such a beast in my past life before, so the temptation to station it with a GameCube, an N64, and the aforementioned C128 is powerful.)
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There are some problems when doing this. Older BW TV sets could have an hot chassis directly connecte to a wire of the mains. Whitout a schematic diagram with a transformer in it separating the high voltage area, it could be dangerous, annenna signal it’s not a problem because there is an RF transformer used to match the impedance.
On some TV set the video signal is inverted compared to the normal composite video and could also have a bias, so some circuitry has to be added. A simple crystal-controlled rf tv modulator could be made with a couple of transistors.
The biggest problem is to get a composite signal from a modern PC.
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Yes, the usual caveats and warnings about poking around in a TV, even when unplugged. The 5" set in question is powered by 12VDC from a wall wart, which should be isolated from the mains, but that’s a dangerous assumption without testing first.
Easily solved with a Pi ZeroW. 
