This Retro Tech Hack Got A PS5 Working On A 1980s TV

If you ever spent part of your childhood crawling behind a wood-paneled television set, fumbling with a tangle of red, white, and yellow cables while someone yelled “Is it working yet?” from across the room — this retro tech hack is for you.

A nostalgic video making the rounds online shows a gamer doing something beautifully unnecessary: hooking up a PlayStation 5, the sleek modern console released in 2020, to a TV that belongs in a time capsule.

We’re talking a 1980s boombox TV — the kind with built-in speakers and a dial you had to physically turn.

The video has been seen more than 1.4 million times on X, and it’s sparked exactly the kind of generational debate you’d expect.

Some viewers were amazed. Others shrugged. And a whole lot of us just felt something we hadn’t felt in a while.

A Rube Goldberg machine of cables and converters

Here’s where things get fun — especially if you still remember what an RCA or RF connector looks like.

Getting a PlayStation 5 to talk to a TV that predates the internet by a solid decade required some creative problem-solving.

In the video, the gamer plugs the PlayStation’s HDMI cable into an HDMI to RCA converter. From there, the RCA cable — yes, the one with those iconic red, white, and yellow connectors — was then plugged into an RCA to RF converter. The RF output was then plugged into a twin-lead transformer, which connected to the boombox TV.

A PlayStation 5 was plugged into a 1980s boombox TV and it actually worked.

pic.twitter.com/4tEhyiAbJH
— Science girl (@sciencegirl) January 29, 2026

If you just read that chain of adapters and thought, “I understood every single one of those words,” congratulations — you’re probably old enough to have recorded songs off the radio onto a cassette tape, too.

Despite the boombox being four decades behind in technology, the connection worked — with a little help from all those converters bridging the gap.

TV Static: The sound of a thousand childhood evenings

Once everything was hooked up, the gamer turned the TV on. And what appeared first? TV static. That familiar, crackling wash of black-and-white snow — the kind of static only the older generation would recognize.

For anyone who grew up in the ’80s or early ’90s, that static is more than visual noise.

It was the preamble to every movie night. Every Saturday morning cartoon marathon. Every illicit late-night attempt to watch something you weren’t supposed to.

Your kids have never seen it. They’ve grown up in a world of instant-on screens, OLED displays, and streaming apps that load before they can finish saying “I’m bored.”

But once the gamer turned the PlayStation on, the static disappeared in lieu of a familiar screen. And just like that, voila — it worked.

“A PlayStation 5 was plugged into a 1980s boombox TV and it actually worked,” the video’s caption read.

The internet wasn’t impressed by the retro tech hack

retro tech vintage tv in desert on desk — Trương Hoàng Huy Ngân from Pixabay

The video gave viewers a hit of nostalgia, but many of them were unimpressed with the concept — at least from a technical standpoint.

“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.

Fair points, both. Others were left asking a simple question: “Why?” After all, the HD image people are used to these days was compressed to something so dark and blurry you could barely see it.

But that wasn’t the point — and some X users were able to see that.

“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 last response might be the most satisfying take of all. This was never about image quality. It was about the sheer joy of making two completely different eras of technology shake hands.

For the kids who have never seen an RCA cable

If your children or teens have ever stared blankly when you mentioned “hooking up the cable box” or asked why old TVs were so thick, this video is a golden teaching moment — or at least a fun conversation starter at dinner.

For those who don’t remember or didn’t grow up during that time, RCA cables were named after the Radio Corporation of America and were used for transmitting audio and video signals, per Radio Shack.

The red and white (sometimes black) connectors are for the right and left audio channels. The yellow connector is used for video signals.

Those three little plugs were once the universal language of home entertainment — the gateway to VCRs, early gaming consoles, and DVD players.

Why this video hits different for today’s generation

There’s something about watching a PS5 — a machine your kids might be playing “Fortnite” on right now — running through the same type of connectors you once used to hook up a Nintendo or a VHS player.

It’s a tangible, visual bridge between your childhood and theirs.

Your kids live in a world of wireless controllers, cloud saves, and 4K resolution. You lived in a world where you had to blow into a cartridge and pray. And yet, with a simple converter, you can essentially play any new-age video game console on any old-school TV if you want a taste of what your parents grew up playing.

The image quality is terrible. The experience is impractical. But absolutely none of that matters.

Because sometimes, the best thing about technology isn’t how far it’s come — it’s remembering where it started.

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And if this video gives you an excuse to sit down with your kid, pull up that clip, and say, “Let me tell you about the TV I grew up with,” then it’s done its job better than any 4K display ever could.