homemade Megadrive I A/V cable

[AntiPasta]

Hi there,

Because finding A/V cables for the Megadrive 1 has become all but impossible in the Netherlands I decided to do some modding myself. So I bought a female RCA connector, looked up the pinout on the web and got my soldering iron. I connected the 'tip' of the connector to the pin on the A/V connector marked as composite and soldered the edge to a piece of silverish plating on my Megadrive's PCB (later I tried different points for ground).

When that was done I hooked the thing up to a rca-to-scart converter and tried it on a TV. The display looked extremely odd, it was grayscale, several parts of the screen were scrolled vertically, some was garbled and the Megadrive crashed after some time (don't think that has anything to do with my soldering, though).

So I tried it on another TV, it displayed a rapidly rolling black-and-white image (only black & white, no grayscale this time). On my TV card it was even worse, I only got a display one line high and the rest was the blue color you get when there's no signal!

Now what did I do wrong?

 

[Scared0o0Rabbit]

is it a pal megadrive? is your tv pal? also, I'd double check to make sure you got the correct pin. It shouldn't make a difference but you might wanna try grabbing ground off the same place the connectors uses. Also, make sure you are using the pinout for the correct model megadrive, and maek srue your solder isn't bridging any points.

 

[googlefest1]

make sure you didnt reverse any thing ( incase you mixed up wile looking at the pin out and the connector from another angle ) like front of cable as aposed to rear -- i do that sometimes - pisses me off

 

[Arakon]

since you got a scart connector, just go right for a RGB cable.. the quality is by far superior over the AV quality.

 

[Scared0o0Rabbit]

assuming he has an rgb monitor.

 

[Arakon]

he's in netherlands, he got a scart tv. scart tvs in europe are 99.99% RGB.

 

[Scared0o0Rabbit]

fair enough, I forgot that fact lol.

 

[AntiPasta]

yeah I have a RGB SCART connector... nice idea guys I'll give it a try. The reason I went for composite is that 1. my TV card has only composite and S-video and 2. my nifty 4" TFT has only composite in