The World’s Smallest TV Console Plays DOOM

What happened

The World’s Smallest TV Console Plays DOOM, according to Hackaday. 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 (Tencilica and RISC-V based Espressif SoC) 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 provided by the ESP’s clock generator. The hardware meanwhile is put on two boards either side of the battery, with a flexible PCB joining the two.