It's only been 3+ years in the making.
A long time ago in ah... this galaxy, I decided to make a VGA cable for my modded XBOX with Frosty's VGA patched bios. I had read back then that some monitors support "sync on green" which meant a dumb cable where all I would have to do is wire this to that and it would work. Well, it did, just not on any monitors that I owned at the time and as a matter of fact I still don't own one that does. The cable worked fine on my brother in law's monitor but that did me no good.
Fast forward to this week. To be honest I don't know what made me think of it but it was on my mind so I decided to fix it for use with monitors that don't support "SOG." So I ordered a 5 pack of LM1881 "sync separator chips" on ebay. Figuring they'd have the capacitors and resistors I need at Radio Shack I waited for them to arrive. Needless to say, RS didn't have everything I needed. They did have the capacitors but not the resistors (even in the $10 multi-pack) so I got some of those on ebay.
The resistors arrived today so I've spent it getting this thing up and running. First it was just a mess of wires and junk to make sure it would work as expected. Then I went out and got a project box and breadboard (also from radshak) and did it right. It's the first time I've ever put together a circuit and even though it's a simple one and all the "ee" was done for me I'm still pretty proud of myself.
XBOX cable: already had
VGA connector: scrounged of old video card
Sync Separator: 1.49 (five pack costing 7.44 shipped)
Capacitors: 1.89
Breadboard: 1.10 (two pack costing 2.19)
Enclosure: 2.69
Resistor: 0.035 (100 pack 3.58)
Audio Jack: 3.19 (I bought this 3+ years ago, listed is the current price.)
Total: $10.39 (not including whatever it would cost for a XBOX video cable or a VGA connector)
Granted if you add in the cost of the excess parts like the other 4 LM1881 chips or 99 resistors the total comes to $20.98 but I have a pretty good start on making 4 more cables if I want to in the future.
I'm planing on putting this in a XBOX powered bartop at some point in time by the way. Don't hold your breath though. If the time it took to finish this is any indication it will be another few years before that gets done. Anyway, here's the pictures.