I replaced the main board of this TV with brand new parts made in 2023!

I think the language support hints at what the purpose of these boards is: repairing TVs in parts of the world where the cost of living is very low and incomes are very low. All those videos of people building something new or welding an engine block back together, they aren't just clickbait they are really doing this on a regular basis. Repair culture is at the heart of many low cost countries.

It amazes me that ALL the tremendous R&D effort in television broadcasting on analog CRTs, dating back to the 1920s, finally came down to a board that you bought for $50 bucks which has a built-in game. An amazing 100 years!

This brings back memories. I learned TV repair in school. a friend and I plowed through the books several weeks before the rest of the class and the teacher assigned us a broken TV. We eliminated point after point until the only thing left was the fly back transformer, and it wasn't putting out any power. Found a burned out power transistor, swapped it and burned out the replacement. Found the real problem and fixed that, swapped in a second replacement transistor and it should be working, but without assembling everything we didn't know for sure. Here we didn't know how to proceed. We didn't have any instrument capable of measuring voltages in the tens of thousands range so how could we test what we got there? I asked the teacher and he told me to peel back the isolation from the terminal on the transformer. Then with the power on take a screwdriver rated for 100KV and poke at the bare terminal. I asked what I was looking for and he just said I'd know when I saw it. Well the "it" was a two centimeter electrical arc jumping between the terminal and the screwdriver. Scared the shit out of me and left a deep burn mark on the screwdriver. My teacher laughed his ass off. Never liked working on the high voltage parts of TV's after that. Turns out he had that TV for several years and we were the first to get a picture out of it again. The thing is he could have diagnosed and repaired it in thirty minutes while we worked on it for days. That's what experience will do for you. And I never dug into a TV again after that!

The unsung hero for retro gaming right here. Helping keeping crt’s alive for another however many years 😊

As a viewer from Hong Kong, I am surprised there are still some companies made crt TV in China. The result is pretty impressive. ❤

You may call it janky, but i think it's a great swap and now you have a very capable CRT screen with RF! Get well soon, Adrian! All the best.

I remember about 7 or 8 years ago, working on a Mitsubishi 60" rear projection CRT TV from the late '90s. It had RGB convergence issues that I later discovered were the result of cracked solder. I was surprised to find out that, not only did it use convergence amplifiers from the '70s, they were still in production and I got a complete set for less than $20, shipped in under a week!

Years ago I found my late father working on an old wooden TV set in his shed, at the time he worked for Radio Rentals in the UK and had brought home a very old set which had been rented out to an old lady for decades, but was now beyond repair. The old lady didn't want a new plastic TV set in her living room so my father had removed the guts from a modern Furguson TV set and had modified the old wooden cabinet to take the new guts. He had just finished it when I walked in and the results were very impressive, even with a close inspection I couldn't see any of the woodwork done to match the tube to the old wooden frame and the varnished wooden panel he installed where the old controls were almost matched the rest of the set, so you had to stand in front of the set to spot the wrong wood grain and the new varnish! Those were different times, when pride in a job trumped shareholder dividends.

Hey Adrian, With your degaussing coil issue: Just replace the thermistor with the one from the original board and you should be fine!

The thing that kind of boggles my mind is not only does the flyback have the 2023 date sticker on it, but the PCB has a 2021 date silkscreened on it-- meaning that the PCB design was revised that recently! Wild that there's enough demand for CRT TVs and components to be actively developing products in the 2020s.

Was in the Philippines recently, and rented a karaoke machine... The crt had the buttons glued to the front the same as your set now does. They had either replaced the board like you did, or swapped the board from another tv... I love the effort and skill they show in repair there.

I've spent exactly 22 seconds on your channel and the way you said "human malware" has earned you my respect sir. Keep up the great work!

That looks like a possible solution to dead CRT based arcade machines. Some of the CRT driver boards for those are full of unobtanium parts (particularly the flyback transformers). This might be a good replacement for the original board.

Chungwa are/were actually a big name in CRT technology, I had some dealings with them in the late 2000's. Around 1996 they had built a giant plant in Eurocentral, Scotland to build CRTs (do you see where this is going??) - took a bunch of Scottish Government money to do it, hired security, got the local population excited for the new jobs, local colleges offering courses to train up production and technical staff, etc etc They only ever employed no more than a third of the 3000 staff predicted, and produced not even 20% of what the plant was capable of. The plant lay empty for a few years, eventually it was partially demolished and another company built a business park with a hotel on the site. The government even sued to get some of that start up capital back and allegedly got 8Million from a 20Million pounds investment returned. Such a shame, but CRTs by 2000 were really on the way out.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane with contemporary updates. I have not toured the inside of a TV for almost 50 years! Yes I am a "tube jockey" I worked in TV shops from 13 years old through college. What a joy to see an TV rather that a flat screen monitor. It is wonderful to be looking into an image on a vacuum tube! You made my day!

I like that someone found a small niche market to produce those generic boards so older TVs can be fixed instead of thrown away. However, my thoughts go to those many CRT TVs kept together with hot glue and gaffa tape because the new board just didn't fit 100% :D Great video and how you feel better soon!

I am floored seeing this. I had no idea they built tv sets with sokoban (usually called "box man" on these sets,) built into them. I can see how it's done, just using a special character set. Considering the tv comes with so many languages it makes sense that they'd have so much space left on this motherboard for a full game.

PAL-BG, I and DK are some of the different PAL flavours. BG used in Germany, Netherlands, Belgium and is your default. (B is VHF, 7MHz channel width, G is UHF with 8 MHz spacing). PAL-I is used in the UK (UHF only, and sound subcarrier 6 instead of 5.5 MHz) and DK is for another channel numbering used in Eastern Europe that wanted to stay compatible to Russian Secam. Computers and VCR’s are usually modulating on UHF channel 36 or 37 in Europe. PAL for Argentina is PAL-N and for Brasil PAL-M.

I miss the ingenuity and 'beauty' of CRT TVs, my last one was around 2008, a benemoth HDTV from Sony. I'm glad to see there's still an industry dedicated to maintaining them.

I’d bet there’s a decent market for retro gamers.