I’m 35 years old and I think I’ve only ever lived without a VHS player for maybe 3 years? Even if I don’t use it regularly now, I still watch old videos on mine and still have a small collection (mine and inherited tapes from my mum).
But they don’t last forever and most people have at least DVD players if not Blu-ray players or just stream stuff on their devices. So what do you do with a VHS player gathering dust? You turn it into a gaming PC like Tech By Matt. His approach was to replace the internals with the standard PC components but rather than leaving the front panel nonfunctional, he attached the power button to the PSU and repurposes the playback buttons as volume controls.
Of course this is rather cumbersome and I wouldn’t recommend going out and turning any VHS player you find into a PC but if you have one that no longer works, it’s better than e-waste.
Filed under: how to retro tech video