This Retro Tech Hack Obtained a PS5 Engaged on a Eighties TV — However Why?
A PlayStation 5 running on a four-decade-old boombox television sounds like a punchline. It’s not.
A viral video that has racked up more than 1.4 million views on X shows exactly that setup in action. The conversation it sparked reveals something worth paying attention to: the growing cultural fascination with bridging old and new tech.
The clip is short, a little chaotic and oddly satisfying. Here’s what happened.
The retro tech hack that made it all possible
The gamer in the video took a PlayStation 5 (released in 2020) and connected it to a 1980s boombox TV through a daisy chain of adapters.
The PS5’s HDMI cable was plugged into an HDMI to RCA converter. That RCA cable, with its red, white, and yellow connectors, was then plugged into an RCA to RF converter. The RF output went into a twin-lead transformer, which finally connected to the boombox TV.
That’s four signal conversions between a modern gaming console and a screen from the Reagan era.
When the gamer powered on the TV, static filled the screen — the kind of analog snow that anyone who grew up before flat screens would recognize instantly. Then the PlayStation 5 booted up. And it worked.
“A PlayStation 5 was plugged into a 1980s boombox TV and it actually worked,” the video’s caption read.
And while the HD image people expect from a PS5 got compressed into something dark, blurry, and barely legible, that wasn’t really the point.
The internet was quick to share its mixed opinions
Reactions split into two camps. A large chunk of viewers weren’t impressed at all, arguing the connection was technically unremarkable.
“Why would a video feed not work on a (checks notes) video display?” one X user quipped.
“A signal’s a signal’s a signal. As long as it can be converted, they work nearly universally,” another X user wrote.
Others simply asked: “Why?” Fair enough. The picture quality was terrible compared to what the PS5 can deliver on a modern display. You could barely see what was on screen.
But a smaller group of viewers saw something different in the experiment. One user framed it this way:
“That’s retro-tech magic. A modern PS5 running on a 1980s boombox TV shows electronics’ adaptability—HDMI converters and ingenuity bridging decades, turning past hardware into a functional, nostalgic gaming experience,” one user concluded.
That tension between “this is pointless” and “this is kind of brilliant” is where it gets interesting.
What those tri-colored cables actually are
The RCA cables at the center of this setup have a long history.
According to Radio Shack, RCA cables were named after the Radio Corporation of America and were used for transmitting audio and video signals.
The color coding is simple. The red and white connectors (sometimes black instead of white) handle the right and left audio channels. The yellow connector carries the video signal.
If you’ve ever hooked up a DVD player, a VCR, or an older game console, you’ve probably handled these cables. They were the standard connection method for consumer electronics for decades before HDMI took over.
Why this retro debate keeps going viral
Anete Lusina / Pexels.com
Videos like this one tap into a specific curiosity: can old hardware keep up? The answer, at least on a basic functional level, is yes.
The signal conversion chain in this video is crude, and the image quality takes a massive hit. But the fact that a modern console can talk to a TV from the 1980s through a series of inexpensive adapters says something about how analog signals work — and about the surprising durability of old display technology.
The skeptics are technically right.
A video signal is a video signal. If you can convert it to the right format, the receiving device doesn’t care whether that signal originated from a Blu-ray player or a PS5. The physics haven’t changed.
But the people calling it “retro-tech magic” aren’t wrong either. There’s a real appeal in watching someone hack together a connection between devices separated by 40 years of technological evolution, using nothing more than a few cheap converters and some patience.
The real takeaway from this viral moment isn’t about gaming performance. It’s about adaptability.
Decades-old hardware doesn’t become useless just because newer standards arrive. With the right converters and a willingness to experiment, signals can bridge generational gaps in technology. Even if the results look like something from another era.