Since I’ve entered college, I’ve noticed one bad thing: you don’t really have much room in that tiny dorm room of yours for a TV. Sure, you could make room for one, but that’s pretty inconvenient space-wise.

A nice alternative is to get a TV tuner. For those with desktops, it’s pretty easy since they’ll most like get a PCI or PCI-e one. For those of us with laptops, we’re most likely stuck with using a USB one.

Unfortunately for us, these USB tuners don’t offer fast enough connections to play console games on most of the time. There’s usually a lag on the order of 1-2 seconds. Quite inconvenient for most games. Fortunately for us, Adaptec has come out with the GameBridge.

The Adaptec Gamebridge is a pretty small USB device. It allows you to hook up a game console via component and S-video connections. Gameplay using the GameBridge seems mostly flawless. The video is pretty crisp and I’m sure it would even better if I weren’t using S-video (ugh.) I have noticed a bit of sound distortion at times. I’m not really certain if it’s the adapter itself, though. Actually, I’m almost certain it has to do with my CPU.

The hardest thing about this product is installing it, believe it or not. It seems that some of the packages don’t come with the driver CDs (like mine.) Even worse, Adaptec doesn’t host the drivers on their website. I had to Google (yes Google, I totally used your name as a verb, deal with it) in order to find the .iso image of the driver CD. It would be nice if Adaptec dedicated the 50 or so MB of space on their servers for this. Also, it’s kinda annoying that you have to go through the install process twice, once so Windows can recognize the device and other so that it can actually install the driver for it.

After the drivers are installed, the software is pretty easy to use. The interface is pretty easy and the things you need to do in order to see a console game are pretty obvious, so obvious that I need not even talk about them. I thing I did notice was that the device had pretty awful compression. That low quality video that you see at the bottom came in about 90 MB. Recorded at the best quality, it came in at about 100 more MB for 6 minutes.

All in all, the Gamebridge is a pretty nice device. The cheaper versions will give you something to play console games on your computer whilst the pricier versions also give you the ability to use it as a TV tuner. I found the cheapest version well suited for my gaming needs.

I decided to include this video of me really sucking at Dragon Quest.