On 08/01/2013 09:27, tony sayer wrote:
OK - TV's have always been specialist - but most other machinery was pretty
simple.


I dont think TVs were THAT specialist when they were full o' valves


Now this is a good point. A TV of say 1960 or even earlier had pretty
straightforward circuitry so much so that I managed to convert a 1960's
era 405 line set to 625 lines and it worked very well.

Course these days a few chipset's and well, what can you do with
those?...


Reprogram them, put a different OS on, change the jumpers, quite a lot
if you want on most modern sets.
However its not really worth it as you can probably buy something that
does what you want for peanuts.