I wasn’t aware that there were any games that could make meaningful use of 16 cores, let alone games that might want more. Was there a major advancement in game programming when I wasn’t looking? Or is the headline as far off base as I think?

“If one root server directs traffic lookups to one intermediate server and another root server sends lookups to a different intermediate server, important parts of the Internet as we know it could collapse”

this doesn’t pass the sniff test. Records sometimes being out of date for some users is par for the course for DNS. Domain owners already need to account for that. Also, the "intermediate server"s in question would be things like the .com and .org operators’ servers. I would hope the likes of Verisign and the Public Interest Registry can handle a delay in sunsetting a DNS server to accommodate something like this.

Likely Solved

Of the options people have presented, a video card is by far the most likely for us to have owned at the era those options are from. The two-way arrow symbol on the connectors does give a little bit of doubt, but it seems pretty clear at this point that if I still owned the matching product, I wouldn’t use it, and that’s enough info for my needs

Both din connectors have a two-way symbol

It is definitely 7 pins, not 9. The pin layout matches this image on the wikipedia page for mini din: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:S-Video_7-pin_quasi-DIN_connector.JPG#/media/File:S-Video_7-pin_quasi-DIN_connector.JPG

I tested the pin connections and it does match the “compatible with an S-video… plug” in the image’s caption, but I don’t know if the keying allows for that. The key on the 7-pin is both wider and thinner than on the 4-pin.

The fact that this is a long cable instead of a short adapter does give me the impression that both the 4-pin mini din and the rca connector are supposed to be used simultaneously.

I don’t believe we ever owned a capture card, but it’s at least plausible to me that an old video card may have used it.

Testing with the multimeter, the outer pins of the 7-pin connector are 1-to-1 with the pins in the same places of the 4-pin connector. I read the wikipedia article on mini din connectors more carefully, and there is an indication that this scheme was sometimes used to have a socket which could accept either an S-video cable or the proprietary one. However, the keys don’t look compatible. The key on the 7-pin is both wider and thinner than on the 4-pin.

the center pin of the row of 3 connects to the pin of the rca connector, and the ring of all 3 connectors are connected together. The center two pins of the row of 4 are not connected.

That is indeed a Nintendo RF converter in the background, but I don’t believe we ever owned a Sega console. Granted, I didn’t know we had a SNES until it was found a few years ago in a shed that was being torn down