Why did older video game consoles need to be on channel 3 to operate correctly?
In: Technology
Old tvs didn’t have “input” settings they just had channels so in order to display on a tv they had to choose a channel to send the signal on. 3 was universally accepted because it wasn’t commonly used by a standard tv station.
Most, if memory serves, had the option to also switch to channel 4 as a secondary option.
Because old televisions only watch television broadcast, they had no inputs of any kind apart form the antenna
So if you wanted to display something else, you needed to work around that, so they made the console broadcast on channel 3 or 4 so you could turn your tv there and play
The way that cable TV got into your house in the old days was with a radio signal. The signal was passed along a coaxial cable, which you plugged into the back of your TV. They could encode multiple channels (as many as 500 at once) onto the cable by using different frequencies. You’d change the channel on your TV to tune into the different frequencies, kind of like tuning your radio to listen to different radio stations.
Old video games came with an RF (radio frequency) connector out of the box. You’d put that connector in line with your cable TV, so the cable went into the back of the RF connector, and then the RF went into the back of your TV. When it was off, you could watch channels like normal, because the RF connector was just acting like a dumb wire. When the console was on, it would send a radio frequency signal to your TV.
Since your TV needed to be tuned to the specific frequency of the channel you wanted to watch, you needed to know what frequency your console was on. Channel 3 made sense – some old TVs only went up to channel 30, so you didn’t want to pick a high channel. But everyone had channel 3. The Nintendo RF adapters had a switch on them, you could set them to channel 3 or channel 4. Sometimes for whatever reason you’d get a snowy picture on Channel 3, but it would be much more clear on Channel 4. So Nintendo gave you the option.
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