The World’s Smallest TV Console Plays DOOM

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 …. The World’s Smallest TV Console Plays DOOM.

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. 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.