-Over the years, you may have accumulated a lot of video game consoles and, unfortunately, your TV does not have enough inputs to hook them all up.
There is a solution to this problem.
My name is Steven Beecham, Producer for CNET TV and I'm gonna show you how to set up a video game patch bay.
To get started, you're gonna need 3 things.
You're gonna need an RCS patch bay, 3 patch cables
and an RCA cable with the video and 2 audio connections.
Now, finding an RCA patch bay is probably the hardest part.
There are tons of them on eBay and other sites like Google Shopping and guitarcenter.com.
You might also be able to find them in local music stores and electronic shops.
And they range in price from about $20 to $50, depending on the model.
Now, once you have your patch bay in hand, it's time to now start connecting your consoles.
Choose an RCA input on the back of your television and connect the 3 inputs to the back of your patch
bay.
On my patch bay, to make it easy, I like to do it in the bottom right hand side.
So, the first thing you wanna plug in is the video.
Plug in the video there, audio white, and then, audio red.
And then, those correspond to these 3 patches on the front, making for a simple patch.
Plug in the RCA outputs from your console into the back of the patch bay in an order that works best for you.
I connected mine in chronological order across the top of my patch bay from left to right, starting with the NES,
then the Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64 and so on.
Now, I'm obviously a Nintendo collector, you could see here.
But this patch bay does work with older consoles like the OG Sony PlayStation and the Sony Dream cast here because they have the old school RCA outputs.
So, now that you've connected all your consoles to your patch bay, now, you wanna label them with a pencil or a sharpie so you know what sources you're patching into.
Cube.
R. So, now, you're finally ready to start
patching your consoles into your television.
So, let's start with the Super Nintendo first.
So, I'm gonna take 1 patch cable.
Plug it into the video output of the Super Nintendo and plug it into the television video input.
I'm gonna do the same with the audio connections, audio left into the audio left for the television, audio right of the patch bay into audio right of the television.
And you turn on your television, then change the input on your television
from HDMI or whatever it's set to, to AV1 or the RCA input.
And wahla, there's your Super Nintendo.
So, now, it's very easy to change consoles at any time.
Say, you wanna go from Super Nintendo to Nintendo 64, you just literally take the patch out, plug it into the next one in the line.
And now, I'm playing James Bond.
So, that's it.
All your video game consoles have 1 place easily accessible
via your brand new video game patch bay.
My name's Steven Beecham for CNET How-To.
And I'm gonna play some Mario.
Oh, yeah.
