/vr/ - Retro Games

>>3332994
Your cousin was probably using composite rather than RF. Whenever I plugged into a VCR it was always through composite, because even as a kid I noticed that the signal was a lot more reliable. Those RF switch boxes that came with the NES and Genesis had a nasty habit of breaking, and before they stopped working completely they had very poor quality video.

Composite still isn't the greatest, but even when going from composite to RF through a VCR I noticed that the signal was generally much better than when I just went straight from RF to RF. I think that as a rule of thumb, most VCRs had higher quality RF modulators than the ones that they would stick inside of game consoles. And as said before, the RF switches Nintendo and Sega made were cheaply made and unreliable. They probably used relay switches to detect when the game console was turned on so they could automatically switch the circuit away from the TV antenna, and the problem with relay switches is that they wear out.

Of course, the best possible picture quality you can get from a TV that only has RF is to use a standalone RF modulator, since they are designed to strip out any signal interference and give the cleanest possible picture. They were made to bypass the copy protection on DVD players, which on a VCR would cause the image to get scrambled. My family had to buy one when I saved up and bought us our first DVD player, because the only way to make it work before that was to use an old broken 80s VCR which caused the image to fade from light to dark in regular intervals.

The broken VCR was at least better than the scrambling that a modern VCR caused, but it was only a stopgap until Radio Shack got the RF modulator we special ordered in (this was back around 2000 or 2001, and no-one had them in stock yet).

Honestly though, if you have a CRT TV that only has RF, you should just throw it out and get one that at least has composite. The thrift stores will only charge you like $5 for one.