Plugging things in and out

This morning I was mainly 'writing' (adding photos and amazon links to) an article for my photography tips website, and writing another Korean Folk Village blog post for my photo website.

All afternoon and the first part of the evening I was helping Mauser get his room set up so that he can have lots of video games consoles plugged into his TV. He wanted the SNES as one of the consoles, so me and L went into the garage to get it. Unfortunately, we didn't know what box it was in, and it turned out to be in the last box left we had to look in. So finding the SNES took quite a long time.

Then there was a problem with how to plug all the consoles into the TV. In the garage I had a '10 in 1' S-video / RCA lead that has a Nintendo, X-box, PS, and DC connectors on one end, and an S-video and RCA connectors on the other. It's named 10 in 1 rather than 4 in 1 because the nintendo connector can be used for various Nintendo consoles, and the PS connector works on the PS1 and PS2.

So I connected up the Dreamcast, PS2, and SNES all on this one lead. But when we tried using the consoles, the Dreamcast had no sound, and the SNES had no sound and the picture continually jerked up and down with no way to correct it.

After disconnecting the PS2 and SNES from the lead, I found that the Dreamcast did work on the lead with sound. I plugged the lead back into the PS2 again, and now the Dreamcast had no sound again. So it seems that the 10 in 1 lead is pretty pointless if you can only have one console plugged into it at a time. In the end, I just left it connected to the Dreamcast since it was easier than unplugging it completely and then finding and plugging in a Dreamcast specific S-Video cable.

There was also a problem with the N64 connected with an RF cable, in that it wasn't tuned in properly, and was all staticy. So I switched the N64 to scart, and then the SNES could use the RF connector switch that the N64 was previously connected to.

So we ended up with:
Blu-ray player and X-Box 360 connected via HDMI
N64 connected via RCA to a SCART adapter, which was plugged into another SCART adapter which also had the Gamecube connected via RCA
Playstation 2 was connected by RCA to SCART adapter
SNES, Megadrive, NES, and the Aerial were connected via a series of RF switch boxes (each box has two RF cable inputs and one output with a switch to switch between the two inputs)
Dreamcast connected via S-Video and RCA L/R audio.

The only problem we have now is that the SNES and Megadrive control pads have really short leads, and extension leads are quite expensive. Also, it would be quite nice to have the Saturn plugged in as well.

In the evening I made some Eccles cakes and went to see K.K. as well.