Super Nintendo to mono TV

If you play your games on an old CRT TV (because LCD doesn't look right with old consoles), how do you do it if the TV has only mono sound? For an NES, that's no problem, but how do you connect a Super Nintendo to such a TV (assuming of course you use that white/red/yellow composite cable and not antenna or SCART)? I mean, just plugging in one of the two sound cables cannot be the solution, right?

Plug one of the two channels and set the game options to "mono".

Yeah, o.k., but that's not a global option, is it? Does every game has a sound menu? Also, I doubt this would be recreatable if, for example, I plugged in a supergun to play an arcade board that has stereo sound.

Well, back when I had a mono CRT TV, I just plugged it through the RF antenna, so the sound mixing was already done in the console. Sorry for forgetting that when I wrote my 1st post.

I also had an RF antenna adapter for PS1 and PS2, that probably mixed the sound channels before modulating the signal, but I remember that in PS2's case most games looked horrible way too dark to be playable in some cases. It was fine with PS1 though.

I always just used a Y adapter on the red and white plugs as a ghetto mixer.

You mean that thing where you have to find your NES image in the channel search of the TV? The one that gives you a crappier image? Nah. I still have to insist on the composite/cinch/red-white-yellow plug.
Besides, neither my DVD player, nor my supergun would have an antenna output.


Alright, can you link me to such an adapter please? Because whenever I'm looking for something like that, I find all kinds of stuff, but not what I need. If you could link me to a concrete product, that would be nice.

Yes. Old TVs have only this as input, nothing else.

What do you mean with "old"? My CRT TV from 20 years ago already had composite output.

I don't know where you live because you haven't filled in the Location field in your profile, but this product should work. You should be able to find something similar at Walmart, Best Buy, RadioShack, or your country's counterpart.

And a lot of TVs from around 25 years ago didn't have composite output. People had to buy an external RF modulator to use them with a mini Super NES, a Nintendo 64, or a DVD player.

I live in Germany, but I use an actual American TV and an American NES and the supergun is from the USA as well.

The linked product is called "RCA Plug to 2 RCA Jack Splitter Adaptor". So, I guess it's for plugging a mono device into a stereo TV (like an NES into a new TV so that you can still hear the sound from both sides) and not for mixing together a stereo signal into a single mono signal.

Linked product is what you want. It just connects the three jacks together; no directionality.

What ends up happening with a Y-adapter-as-mixer, as I understand it, is that the source's left and right channel output drivers end up fighting over the level of the signal put on the wire, and resistance inherent in the system causes the signal's level to meet in the middle.

What do you mean? Just searching for "linked product" in Google doesn't produce any useful results.


And this really works properly?

"linked product" is the product tepples linked to, it's not the name of a product. blargg meant that these things just connect the 3 ends internally, so it doesn't matter whether you are splitting or joining, they can be used for both.


For audio it appears to work just fine (does it damage anything? I'm not sure...), but don't try to mix video that way!

By "old" I means about the same age as the NES, that is closer than 25-30 years old.

The " y adapter" is even mentioned in the gamecube manual for this specific purpose.

Sorry for being terse; phone keyboard discourages editing.

Regarding the audio output drivers, unless they run on a split power supply (+/-), they'll need AC (capacitor) coupling on the output to remove the DC bias. Those would then form a divider at signal frequencies (AC).

Here, just to the left of the data bus on the right center (all the vertical lines).



The outputs of the transistor buffers come up from the bottom on either side for each channel, then run through series resistors and series capacitors. Further, they're not push-pull output stages anyway, so there could be no fighting even if there weren't series resistors and capacitors, just one's pull-down resistor ganging up with the other's.

blargg, it's the first time in a while that I go through an entire post without understanding a single word of it! Seriously, it could just as well be written in Polish and I would have gotten just as much information from it.

Could you explain to us hardware illiterates the relevance of what you wrote (i.e. "using the Y plug will make your SNES catch fire!") and what action should be taken to solve this issue without any negative side effects?

I am way late to the party, but I'd like to post the following pages from Nintendo specifically about connecting one of their consoles to a TV with only mono audio in: (SNES, GCN)

When I was young and had a TV with only mono in, I decided it was acceptable to just use one of left or right and lose any sound that was panned hard the other way.

So did the people who did sound effects for the Super Mario World animated series, apparently.

tokumaru, I offered that research simply for the hardware-inclined to verify that it will cause no damage. I definitely didn't put the effort to make it accessible to anyone.

Essentially each audio output has a resistor and capacitor in series with it. These alone are plenty to avoid any significant tug-of-war when you connect the outputs and play a game that uses phase-inverted channels, like Secret of Mana 2 or King Arthur's World.

Thanks blargg. I wish I knew more about hardware, but that's so much harder to learn on my own than software! Not to mention that there are certain analog factors involved that are hard to predict or measure objectively, unlike software, which is 100% precise and predictable 0s and 1s! =)

I've played with electronics since I was 7 or so but didn't start understanding it to the mild degree that I do now until a few years ago when I began reading the first several chapters of The Art of Electronics over and over over the months until the really basic things started to sink in. Before that it was just seat-of-the-pants hacking and combining of digital things which let you somewhat get away without grasping much beyond logic levels (I didn't even know about logic level interfacing and always struggled mixing TTL and CMOS, not even realizing that they didn't always mix well).