We’ve seen plenty of game console projects here, many of them that seek to produce a miniature game console. But this one from [RayTriangle] may break a new barrier entirely — it fits an entire TV game console that plays DOOM, including the battery, into a TV antenna plug.
There’s a type of antenna plug with screw terminals, originally intended for matching 300 ohm balanced feeder to 75 ohm co-ax. It provides a tiny project box if you look at it that way, and it’s in here that the console sits. It’s an ESP32-S3 that talks to a controller via Bluetooth, and he’s gone into some detail on how the RF for the TV is made. Some clever tricks such as a look-up table for the phase shifted chroma waveforms for each color allow the creation of a good quality composite signal through a resistor-ladder DAC, and this is modulated in a surprisingly old-fashioned way onto a carrier provided by the ESP’s clock generator.
The result as can be seen in the video below is a bit noisy, but we think that might be fixable with a little filter magic. It’s designed for PAL TVs with a VHF tuner, but we’re guessing some ingenuity could be brought into play to make it happen for UHF or NTSC. The hardware meanwhile is put on two boards either side of the battery, with a flexible PCB joining the two.
It’s true that gaming though an analogue RF input to a TV is probably less common in 2026, but we applaud the ingenuity in getting this into such a small space. For some reason it reminds us of the world’s smallest MIDI synthesizer.
get it to run on ATSC and go full HD and digital on that puppy
That’s going to take a lot more computing power to do the MPEG compression.
maybe with an ESP-P4?
Not necessarily. It would take a lot more computing power to do decent MPEG compression. Didn’t some cheap Chinese equipment get H.264 support a decade ago by not trying too much and doing a simple MJPEG-like compression with nothing but keyframes? Probably the same could be done with MPEG.
The keyframe-only trick should work on mpeg (2) as well – creating an “i-frame only” mpeg file was a good way to get a fast preview from video editing software back in the day (at the expense of quality/file size, of course).
Sadly, I doubt that would be enough.
The ESP32-P4 has hardware acceleration for h.264 encoding, and the latest versions of ATSC support h.264, so as [Nath] mentions above, maybe that would be a possibility for anyone crazy enough to attempt it.
Just thinking out loud, but assuming that MPEG 2 keyframes are similar to JPEG (are they?), maybe we could get 480×270 effective resolution in 1080p by scaling it up 4x, precalculating all possible 8×8 block combinations and pasting them into the stream. Or maybe there’s a nice way to optimize DCT if we know there are 4 quadrants with identical values? Similar to what is done right now with precalculated pixel colors.
There should be an option to hide articles that mention Doom
No D00M and no 555… soon no ROPi emulating other things … wouldn’t be much left.
God point
555 is fine. The NE555, LM741 and LM386 are the holy trinity of ICs, so to say.
Doom < Commander Keen
🩶
THANK YOU JENNY, for writing explicitly ESP32-S3, and not just ESP32 (which doesn’t mean anything nowadays, thanks to the brilliant master-minds in Espressif’s marketing dept).
blame stm32 for that….
I miss the times when Tetris and Chess were ported to about any system.
That is quite remarkable work.