Sidequest: VGA scan doubler

[troed]

Fantastic!

This is surely going to go into most STs regardless of other digital solutions. Us hobbyists who can desolder and socket an original Shifter will have work to do for others

/Troed

[Smonson]

Looks really nice. Will it fit in the shifter enclosure with the lid on or is that the goal? It looks like it will anyway.

Not the way I've got it mounted in my machine. I've replaced the shifter socket with IDC pin header sockets - I'm constantly unplugging and replugging mod boards into it. Then I'm using extra-long pin headers that are approximately 2cm long, so it sits above the larger passives that are in the shifter box.

The next one I make up, I'll use regular-length header pins and see if that fits. The main problem is one tall electrolytic that's close to the socket. I'll puzzle over what to do about that. I expect some people are going to want to plug this directly into the IC socket that the shifter is normally mounted in - I have my old H4 donor board with one of those on it so I can see how the height goes with that too.

[Smonson]

Fantastic!

This is surely going to go into most STs regardless of other digital solutions. Us hobbyists who can desolder and socket an original Shifter will have work to do for others

It'll be like the late 90s modchip scene all over again!

[Smonson]

Looks really nice. Will it fit in the shifter enclosure with the lid on or is that the goal? It looks like it will anyway.

Nah, I just had a close look and there really isn't much room... if you could sit a board right on top of the electrolytic capacitors, it's flush with the lid of the box. You could save a couple of mm if you could avoid the electrolytics (and then you hit the heads of a bunch of TO-92 transistors), but you actually need a fairly large amount of vertical space for the shifter IC and a socket. It might be better just to leave it open. I don't think closing it up improves anything picture-wise.

[DoG]

...The next one I make up, I'll use regular-length header pins and see if that fits. The main problem is one tall electrolytic that's close to the socket. I'll puzzle over what to do about that...

Yup, of course you have done some mods to easier test out stuff. Didn't think about the cap in there. You could make a large hole in your PCB design so the cap goes through your board. If you go with shorter pins that is and that is the end goal of course.

Remove lid is the easiest solution of course.

EDIT: I see what you mean by all the transistors. You don't save much space by clearing the cap.

[Smonson]

You could make a large hole in your PCB design so the cap goes through your board. If you go with shorter pins that is and that is the end goal of course.

Heh, I actually kinda did this once for the HDMI mod, after I got the boards back I realised it was going to hit the cap. So I used a round file to notch the board on each of the prototypes... it wasn't pretty, but it did the job!

[JezC]

It'd probably look even better on an old analogue VGA monitor, but I don't have one to test it.

I have quite a few old monitors to test with

Can't wait to get one to try out!

Great work that man.

[atari030]

That is truly a work of art.

[exxos]

@Smonson Does Closure run ?

[Smonson]

@Smonson Does Closure run ?

Hahaha, I knew somebody was gonna ask that eventually!