Most folks buy their TV's at places like Sears or Best Buy, and there's a lot to be said for plunking your credit card down and driving home with a functional television set. But that's not my style. I've been using a Commodore 64 color monitor hooked up to a VCR since the late 80's and it's worked great. On the other hand, VCR's are going the way of the dodo and a 13" television with weak mono sound isn't much fun so I should probably upgrade.

Given my fondness for doing things the hard way I've decided to hack together a computer-powered television set using parts that I've mostly already got lying around the house.

Bill of materials:

• HP A2094A monitor - a 20" RGB monitor from an old HP X terminal. Picture tube is a Sony Trinitron.
• Generic Intel 815-based motherboard with a 900MHz PIII.
• AverTV tuner card. The only component I've had to buy so far, $20 at Compusa.
• Sound card (not sure which one yet)

As a proof of concept I think I'll try to get my office computer to work with the TV card. The only problem is that my office computer is a diskless workstation so I've been using pre-built kernels from the LTSP project at http://www.ltsp.org/, and their kernels don't have all of the drivers that I need.

-- TobyCabot - 30 May 2003