Vintage TV emulator whisks us back to a time when everything we watched looked like garbage

By Kevin Cortez | November 1, 2019 | 4:32pm

Aux Features TV

Vintage TV emulator whisks us back to a time when everything we watched looked like garbage

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This is an HD era, for better or worse. This is the era of motion smoothing and endless 4K restorations of older movies. It’s easy, then, to forget that we once watched TV through a film of flickering grain, the likes of which now serves as a nostalgia trigger for consumers of a certain age. If that’s the sort of thing you’re looking for, meet MyDecadeTV, an emulator from developer Joey Cato.

The project’s landing page—itself an opportunity to explain to Zoomers what sites hosted by Geocities used to look like—is separated into three decades: the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. Simply choose from My ‘70s TV, My ‘80s TV, or My ‘90s TV, and you’ll be whisked to a vintage television portal filled with hours worth of era-appropriate content, all of which unfolds with the fuzziness we’re all objectively better off without. You can even toggle between what kinds of content you’d like to see, from soap operas, game shows, talk shows, sports, cartoons, and more.

Flipping through the faux-television’s channels gave us a live performance from the Cardigans, an old news segment about an influx of Batman merchandise, and a violent compilation of punk rocker GG Allin kicking people’s asses. All of them looked like shit, but, hey, that’s the point.

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