RCA to Coax adapter for old consoles on modern tv?

YellowJersey · November 5

So modern TVs don't come with RCA ports (at least none of mine have) and I have a bunch of old pre-hdmi consoles I've tried an RCA to HDMI adapter and found the image and audio to be atrocious. My TV has a coax port, though. Would an RCA to coax adapter be a viable way to play my old consoles on my new TV?

B16CXHatch · November 5

That would likely get you even worse results. For the absolute best quality, what you will need to do is get whatever cables provide the best video quality for your systems (S-Video, Component, SCART, etc.) and use a good scaler such as an OSSC or RetroTink. The problem with that is it can be expensive and a bit involved to get working right.

The much easier and likely cheaper option (depending on quantity) is to buy direct attach HDMI adapters. They plug into system's A/V out and have an HDMI port on the other end. LevelHike makes several for systems like SNES, N64, GameCube, PS1, PS2, PSP, XBOX, Genesis, and Dreamcast. They're pretty basic in that they don't do any scaling or anything. They just take whatever best analog output the system supports and converts it to a digital 720p signal over HDMI so that most modern TVs and monitors can display it without issues. It doesn't look the best, but it looks WAY better than anything using composite (the yellow RCA cable) or RF (analog Coax).

thrasher_565 · November 6

23 hours ago, YellowJersey said:

So modern TVs don't come with RCA ports (at least none of mine have) and I have a bunch of old pre-hdmi consoles I've tried an RCA to HDMI adapter and found the image and audio to be atrocious. My TV has a coax port, though. Would an RCA to coax adapter be a viable way to play my old consoles on my new TV?

if you want an analog to hdmi you need and ossc, retrotink, there is a cheaper one people say work but might not look all that good. you can buy a few adapters per console but cost way more... all the cheap stuff is crap and dose not work.

also if you want it to look good you need a good quality cable that cost like $50+ each console. or a moded console with hdmi /rgb

6 hours ago, B16CXHatch said:

That would likely get you even worse results. For the absolute best quality, what you will need to do is get whatever cables provide the best video quality for your systems (S-Video, Component, SCART, etc.) and use a good It doesn't look the best, but it looks WAY better than anything using composite (the yellow RCA cable) or RF (analog Coax).

you can get moded cables for thows console that look so good that composite looks like svideo.

Edited November 6 by thrasher_565