When I was young I loved my Sega Game Gear. It ate through batteries like nobodies business, but it had Sonic on it. It was amazing.
But one thing that I always wanted was the TVTuner adaptor. This allowed you to plug in a special tuner cartridge into your Game Gear and watch live broadcast TV on the go. It was the coolest thing ever. Suffice it to say, my parents never got it for me and that's probably for the better. But I never forgot about it.
When I was going through a ROM programming phase, I purchased a Game Gear on eBay and wrote some ROMs for it. Sometime later I remembered the TVTuner accessory and picked one up as well.
The problem, is that Analog TV broadcast was shut down on June 12, 2009. The TVTuner adaptor no longer had any signals it could pick up.
So instead, I decided to make my own TV station. I saw some other YouTubers doing broadcast television in their homes, usually from a VCR or DVD player. I decided to take the concept & package it in a neat travel case. I found a bunch of retro commercials and TV episodes, chopped them up and exported them.
I wrote a quick python TV-station script that picks random episodes, random commercials and generates a playlist on start up.
I put a raspberry PI in the box and when it boots it makes a random playlist of 90s television and starts broadcasting.
Below, you can see a video on the whole process!
