The television

The television is the most important object in the room, because nothing else means anything until something is showing on it. It behaves like a television: it has a power button, a volume control, inputs you switch between, and it shows a blank screen when nothing is reaching it.

The set. Controls along the front, inputs across the back.

The buttons on the set

All of these are on the set itself, and all of them are also on the TV remote if you would rather not walk over.

Button	Does
Power	Turns the set on and off. A powered-off set shows nothing even if a console is running
Volume − / Volume +	Volume for whatever input is currently showing
Mute	Silence without changing the volume
Source	Cycles the inputs — Composite 1 through 4, the antenna, and VGA
Channel − / Channel +	Tunes up and down when the set is on the antenna input
Audio mode	Switches between stereo and mono output
Aspect	Switches the picture between 16:9 and 4:3
CRT	Turns the CRT effect on and off — scanlines, curvature and phosphor glow
3D	For stereoscopic sources: both eyes, left eye only, or right eye only

The 3D button

Systems that produce a stereoscopic picture — the 3DS, the Virtual Boy — can be shown in 3D, or forced to a single eye if that is more comfortable. The cap shows an eye leaning toward whichever side it is showing, so you can tell at a glance.

The inputs

• Composite 1–4 — four full phono rows, so four machines can stay wired up at once.
• Antenna (RF IN) — for an RF switch, or for a real tuner.
• VGA — on sets that have it, for a computer’s DE-15 output.

Which one you see is whatever Source last landed on. A machine on an input you are not watching keeps running.

Wiring is covered in full on plugging things in.

Live TV with an HDHomeRun

If you own a SiliconDust HDHomeRun tuner with an antenna attached, RetroXR can watch actual broadcast television on it. Set the source to the antenna input and the channel buttons tune through your real local channels.

How it finds the box

Discovery is layered, cheapest and most reliable first:

1. An explicit host, if you have named one in channels.json.
2. The last address that worked, cached between sessions.
3. A UDP broadcast on port 65001 — SiliconDust’s own discovery protocol.
4. http://hdhomerun.local/discover.json over mDNS.

mDNS is last on purpose: it is the flakiest of the four. It has returned a link-local IPv6 address ahead of IPv4 and hung a resolver outright, and Android may not resolve .local at all. Every other route yields a plain IPv4 address, which always works.

Every URL the tuner hands back is rewritten onto the address that actually answered, for the same reason — the headset should never have to resolve a .local name while you are trying to watch something.

Note

The tuner and the headset have to be on the same network. A guest network or a VPN on either end will stop discovery finding anything.

Snow

Tune the antenna input to a channel with nothing on it and you get snow. That is not a failure state — it is the set telling you it works and nothing is reaching it on that channel. The same picture appears if an RF switch is connected but its console is off.