Already knew the answer to that. TV went all digital years ago.

Somehow watching tv on a game gear was way cooler than watching tv on a smartphone nowadays

Not in the US, tv is broadcasted digitally. If this was tested before 2009, it would probably work

Sega *needs* to make a digital version of the TV Tuner!

This short was more video game related work than Kotaku has done in years

FUN FACT - Believe it or not? There are SOME UHF channels within the United States, where it will work. CAVEAT: They are PIRATE TV STATIONS. There are two nearby where I live. I always wondered WHY anyone would make PIRATE UHF stations, but it's basically like public access TV in the 80s/90s. Fun times.

Fortunately most states have no radio broadcast TV. HOWEVER fun fact, in the Philipines due to the island hopping nature of that region they pretty much ONLY use radio broadcast TV since wires are a non option and satelite coverage is expensive.

Technically, the tuner is working 😅

Would've been the perfect Rick Roll

I was going to be shocked if it worked but then halfway through your first try I remembered that they made people buy digital antennas for their TVs a little over a decade ago.

I wanted this so bad when I was a kid.

Theres a video in port on the tuner you can use, seen people run a DVD player off it.

I think this was pretty obvious to anyone familiar with OTA broadcast tv. In 2009 the transition to DTV pretty much forced all high power stations to switch from analog signal to digital signal. There are a very very few low power analog stations still broadcasting but its rare and unlikely that you will pick any channels up. Oddly enough they still make those small TVs that had built in radio and OTA tuners, sadly they are kinda useless too other than the radio.

A friend of mine back when we were kids experimented with the game gear tv. If you get a classic console such as a genesis, snes, or n64 with a RF adapter for channels, set the Game gear tv to VHF and put the RF cable on top of the antenna and set it to channel 4 you can get a semi clear picture playing snes or n64 of your gamegear.

It does if you connect a dtv box or a vcr to the external antenna port with an adapter

Wow I love this. Even though it doesn’t work, it’s still an interesting piece of history

No surprise there. Recently, I got rid of an old handheld TV that I had owned since 1999 that hasn’t worked since, maybe 2013.

The tuner works, but there's nothing to find. Interesting relic

There’s a video somewhere on KZfaq of a guy recording his Game Gear TV with a handheld camera the moment the old broadcast TV signal was shut off. It’s cool, he channel surfs for a few minutes just to document what actually watching the SGGTV was like, then says goodbye to a piece of hardware that will forever be defunct.

Given they switched analogue off nearly 15 years ago I had a feeling it was going to be a no tbh.

they shut down the very last channel a couple years ago but its been many many years since you could actually watch tv on non digital ears, im waiting for a digital mod for this

Hmm, it’s almost like the channels aren’t there anymore🤔

You can use the AV input and use it as a monitor for your.. NES!

If you make an analog tv transmitter which is really easy to do with off the shelf parts you can buy 2nd hand (An RF modulator or VCR with options for rf out channel 3/4, a basic bunny ear antenna, and an antenna amplifier (Range depends on the type of amplifier and how cheap/expensive it is)).

It's a digital world now... my friend.

I wanted one of these as a kid. My neighbor had a game gear, i thought it was so cool. The display is as crappy as i remember it back then though 😂 tough to get a good angle.

I wonder if you could modify one for digital tv signals?

Analog Switch Off 😂😂

With the switch to Digital broadcasting a few years back, no this won't work anymore. That said, if you take one of those "new tuner for an old TV" boxes and figure out how to get the tuner to reach the gamegear's antenna, and channel 3-4 tuned, you'd be able to use the Digital tuner with the game gear. Horribly impractical, but functional. I've modified an old ghettoblaster radio with a 5" B&W TV to use a digital tuner for the TV part, and made a Li-ion battery pack to replace the 12!!! D-cell batteries this unit used from the factory. I take it camping with me, lasts a good 4-5 hours before I need to charge the battery or switch to radio only.

Had a portable tv as a kid,was veey cool.

I was a proud honor of one of those when it came out. Would have liked to have had a TG express but even back then it was pricey

Depending on where you live where I'm at and what you get as an antenna as well as the tuner there are about over 130 channels. There was a lady here who had one of those tvs with the old fashion green volume bar which wouldn't pick up anything over the air and one where the TV only had options like catv and TV. There's a dude who showed that you could broadcast to a device like this via a uhf converter, a cable Amp and an Attenna

A kid I knew had one of those, we stayed up late once and watched Beavis and Butthead on it.

In my part of Arizona, I can still get broadcasts from the Spanish TV network

Analog tv signals were phased out so unfortunately it’s just a working static brick, but if you go to a lesser country with analog signals it would work.

I wanted this so bad as a kid in the early 90's. Was dreaming how id be the cool kid watching TV at school. As an adult I realized it would have been crappy daytime TV, not Nickelodeon 😂

Take the cable wire for a vcr or a atari or something. Take the center pin wire from the cable against the antenna and dial in whatever channel its set for... 2 3 4 itll work

Good old days. Where is time going

You could wire a digital converter box to the antennas leads. It would work then, but it would be a mess to deal with.

I don't know why this is so sad to me. It's like we lost contact with an era of people from a different world, and all is silent now... 😢

Hollywood got greedy, made us all go digital, so that way it would force us to pay for cable! But 15 years later no one really watches cable anymore!😂

Please, God, give me those 50 seconds back 🙏🏻

You need a hd to analog converter box. I used it to make a analog handheld tv work a few years ago.

Dude that is so cool. I'm so jealous.

End of an era

would have been amazing to have as a child

i've had mine since the early 90s

great game gear

Still works; but since we went digital as per mandates, (which made some companies money and the rest of us pay for regular channels...don't get me started on the value of analog vs digital), you won't pick anything up. Never knew such a device existed, so 👍 for that.

My mum used to say if you have nothing good to say then don't say anything at all" Today if you have nothing good to say just start a youtube channel.

Just came here after seeing this device on Isekai Ojisan, I'm really impressed with how accurate that anime is with it's references lol

From my understanding there is two ways to get this thing to work in this day and age I don't think it has an auxiliary port but if it does that's one way also there was some devices that were Wireless that would tune in to the TV on an analog say no I think if I remember I saw somebody with a VCR once kind of similar to how you have those devices in your car for music with the radio stations in the Bluetooth. So yeah with the right equipment it's possible to kind of use it

It might work better if you use it in or near the border of Canada because they still have analog channels for news channels

Its a shame megamix didnt use saturn hi res mode

There is a way to hook it up to a decoder and it still works.

Wait a minute have you tried moving the antenna thingy

Make a battery powered digital converter for it, and it’ll work again. 😂

Depends on the country you’re in. But the united states stopped using analog tv back in 2009. The Deficit Reduction Act was signed President Bush in 2006.

You already know to gotta wrap thr antenna in foil amd put it in a wierd position for it to work.

There's no reason I should still want one..

works in El Paso TX, get MExcan TV channels from Juarez Mexico!

Btw if you have an exteral input you can still watch tv and and other videos devices

Madhouse children without dream sega out there

You gotta touch an RF cable to the antenna XD

Everything is digital now. There’s nothing to pick up on these analog tuners.

Just as i expected from such an old technology, but i think it had their time. It feels odd that you can watch TV on a portable videogame system.

Its not the fault of the Game Gear, the TV signal has massively changed and requires a much different decoding process, the poor console never had a chance.

Yes, it does work in 2023! across Europe and Asian countries, it works out of the box without a mod. In the US you have to mod it with a digital tuner. My friend did this for fun with an extra Sega TV device he had

It could be possible to use the Game Gear and it’s tuner as an external display for analog fpv drones. Considering that analog fpv drones have pretty short video transmission capabilities, you would have to be pretty close to it.

Aren't those all analog? When they switched everything to digital, companies bought up all the analog channels that were left. There was a nefarious reason for that, but I don't remember the reason now, it's been like 15 or 16 years since that whole thing happened. God I could only imagine how many batteries that thing would've taken back in the day...I couldn't play more than 3-4 hours back in the day because of the "luxury" of the backlight and the color screen. Although to be fair you couldn't play Gameboy worth a shit in any darkness.

in the U.S., Full power Analog TV broadcasting has been switched off in june 12, 2009, Class A Analog TV Broadcasting in September 2015, and Low Power Analog TV Broadcasting in July 2021 (the last, Alaska in January 2022). and in brazil, my country, from 2023, Analog TV Broadcasting will cease. from Pouso Alegre, Minas Gerais, Brazil.

I wouldn't say no...i would say it's inconclusive because it claimed to receive TV broadcasts during the 1990s which means it only receives analog TV signals, not digital TV signals.

Born in Febuary 17 2009, i was watching Octonauts while the Analog is being shut off.

If you were really hell bent on watching something you could always play NES in RF mode and display it on the game gear.

Funny thing is sega give us first ever TV the on go how we can not play game gear games on the actual TV like we did with GAMEBOY games

The only analog channel I got after the switch to digital was QVC. But that was a long time ago, shortly after the switch, so I don’t know if they still do that.

You could probably hook up a DTV converter box to it and get it to work. Will probably look very grainy and ultra lo-res though, since the signals it will pick up are now digital and the low res GG screen was never meant for high res images.

You can with something like the satellite dish or smart tv but that’s good if you don’t have a TV at all if you want to use even a be very good quality of roku but have it from hdmi to av adapter.

Over the air channels went digital like 15 years ago? The old antenna's won't pick up anything anymore.

I remember when we went digital that’s when TV started to suck even more

Well technically it does, but there are no TV channels that it can receive.

Try it in the Dominican Republic it works

Make sega comeback with tv too epp to previous to psp

I bet in some countries you can make it work

Digital tuners killed analog tuners 😢

Careful Todd Gloria is going to sieze that to pay for more bike lanes!

Obviously know it's not going to work cuz your TV won't work with an antenna no more that single was disconnected years ago

Nope! It's still cool to see past history for memories.

Had a Game Gear years ago. I thought about getting the TV tuber, but didnt!

I think everyone already knew that answer since free TV has been all digital for years now. But maybe you could figure out how to connect one of the digital TV boxes to it 😂

Every station literally changed its signal format when they went to HD. This was definitely a waste of time

Goodness I wish I had that on mine wtf I didn’t even know about that

That’s thang is so cool

Not unless you have a dtv converter box,antenna and 3.5mm to av cable.

To be fair, it didn't really work 30 years ago either.

Only a smoothbrain would try this in 2024

Didn't know that existed

analogue tv stopped airing years ago

Tv went digital years ago

thought you were going to plug in something into the av port