Flour, your VGA-SCART cable need not be anywhere near as complicated as the ones on those threads. No disrespect to those good people, it is just that all you need is a simple pass-through cable. No resistors, transistors or PCBs necessary. You can even do it without soldering. Will look much neater too.
Sorry but one of my long-winded, but detailed and useful posts follows.
Your local hobby electronics store should have SCART heads, but you can get them online too. Wherever you go, try to get the ones with "blade" or "spade" type connectors. "Spade" is the type pictured below, in the finished cable I opened up. A SCART with buckets connectors is in the pic with the golden female crimps (sounds exciting doesn't it? Just you wait...!)
If you have preferred spade connectors then you can use 2.8mm female crimps on the ends of your signal wires. Break off the outer part with a pair of pliers as pictured (and file down any sharp bits that result), otherwise they won't fit in. Once done with crimping, pop a bit of heat-shrink insulation around it (as it gets cramped in there), and use a pair of pliers to slide them onto your SCART header's spade connectors. If it doesn't fit snugly, just adjust the crimp end a bit with your pliers. This makes things a whole lot easier and more secure than soldering thin wires into bucket connectors. In the pics, you'll see that I've bent them back about 35-45 degrees so that they fit inside the case.
I like to put a small blob of solder inside the female crimp to secure the wire connection better, but this is entirely optional.
You can also use spade connectors with the bucket types - still works, just doesn't fit on as neatly (see pic). Just use heat-shrink to insulate properly, maybe you could use a smaller size female crimp, if available.
Make sure that you put the SCART locking screw-cap thing onto your cable FIRST. Even though you can remove crimps, it is always a regrettable PITA if you forget. You might also use this opportunity to put on a ferrous bead to minimise interference (shown below with the dead-headed VGA cable).
For the VGA end, if you are tired of cutting up perfectly good VGA cables then consider getting one (or some) of these VGA headers with screw-terminals, just like you'll find on an IPAC/JPAC or similar device. The one pictured below is hooked up to a standard arcade monitor RGBs connector, but obviously you can connect it to SCART or whatever you want.
Note that you effectively have composite sync already if both H+V are negative (or same polarity, and note that ATI/AMD cards output -'ve on both H+V by default) and just twist the wires together. No need for sync conversion here. Probably wise to advise that you could pop a resistor onto this (470 - 1000 ohms seem popular) before hooking it up to the SCART if you are feeling extra paranoid (I don't think you even need it, I haven't done it for the cable shown, but be aware that the voltage level from VGA is a bit higher than standard for TVs, so do at own risk and I don't want you blaming me if your stuff melts). The SCART-YUV transcoder will automatically adjust, clean & process your sync to composite before feeding it into the circuit anyway. So all you'll need to do is twist H+V together and connect them to pin 20.
HOWEVER, if you choose to do composite sync out via crt_emudriver, then make sure that you don't connect the VGA vertical sync (pin 14) because it can cause interference on the signal. For my setups I prefer to NOT use composite out of the driver as it seems to make my picture less stable, even without pin 14 connected.
SUMMARY: No soldering if you really want, especially if you use the VGA screw-in headers pictured below, SCART headers with spades and female crimps, and some reasonably thick wire around 22-24 AWG or so. But even then I'd probably tin the wires at least, maybe pop that resistor on the sync if it concerns you. Whatever you choose, using the spade connectors with the female crimps makes it easier to change things around if you want.
There are 100+ ways to roll your own VGA-SCART cable, and almost as many guides out there. I've written some of them, been doing this a long time. I recommend that you make what you need and don't make it more complicated than it has to be for your purposes.
Further info: the VGA-SCART cable pictured below takes 5v from VGA pin 9, and there is a 100ohm 1/4W resistor (that you can't see) inside the heat-shrink on that wire connected to SCART pin 16 to give ~2v for RGB blanking. There is no AV-mode switching on this one. I've used it with many TVs, it works with any except one that insisted on AV switching as voltage well (ie voltage at pin 8, another story). Your cable will be even simpler because you won't need any blanking voltages to signal AV/RGB modes.
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
Send this topic
Print
Topic: CRT Emudriver on newer cards or other choices (Read 4190 times)
