At the time, it was pretty far outside my comfort zone and I had a looming deadline (dad's birthday). Writing the software to work "as I intended" turned out to be much harder than I'd expected, so I ended up hacking things and making single 8-hour long video for each channel (with some persistence, so on next boot it'd continue from where it was)
On the positive side, Dad loved it, and keeping the tuner (the channel dial) with some high resistance made the TV feel as if it was truly an original TV.
Unexpectedly, everybody loved the ads that I added! I think my family mostly felt nostalgic about them
The Sony, in particular, would make an amazing terminal screen.
Trouble is, it is becoming harder and harder to find repair manuals for these.
If anyone knows of a community where these kinds of repairs are executed successfully, I'd love to hear about them. I've keep these things on my shelf for decades now, and I remain committed to their restoration. I'm pretty sure the tubes are still viable .. but maybe the capacitors aren't.
I also see Polish forums when looking for TV stuff but I don't have a specific suggestion for that corner of the web.
Chatgpt (especially deep research) is pretty good about digging up stuff like this
There is something so magical about those early products.
A young person about 10 years old came over "What's that thing hanging off the back of your TV?"
I got some nice parts out of that TV, and cracking the vacuum seal on the CRT was just so satisfying.
PaulHoule•3h ago