C64: S-video!
More C64 stuff tonight - almost immediately after work I decided to have another crack at seeing if Jaycar (our local electronics shop) had what I needed to make a video cable (up til now, I’ve been pushing wires attached to RCA leads into the relevant holes on the video port, not great for reliability!).
Surprise surprise, they did… almost. They had a male 4-pin S-video connector (PP0364, but they didn’t have an exact match for the video port: an 8-pin V shaped DIN (the exact DIN specification escapes me). They instead had the more common U or C shape, which is almost 360 degrees. So I wasn’t sure which would fit, so I bought a five pin one (PP0304, which looked like the pins might be too far apart, but would give me composite video at least if it fit) and an 8 pin one (PP0312), which I was certain would not fit but maybe I could make it work.
Sure enough, I was able to use a pair of multi-grips to force the top two pins out (which most definitely did not fit, as expected, but they’re 5VDC and “Not connected”, so who cares), and then I set about soldering wires to them. I did have to butcher the casings a little bit to get four wires out of the large DIN plug, and two cables (four wires) into the mini-S-video, but it came up pretty tidy.
The results are awesome, the S-video is almost VICE level clarity. There’s some jailbar banding that’s caused by the VIC-II being dodgy, there’s a plug-in (well not in my case, as soldered VIC-II) fix for it called LumaFix, but I genuinely don’t think I care that much, it looks fantastic and all the bleed over caused by composite is gone when plugged into the Retrotink 5x. I’m using the “Consumer-1” scanline overlay and it just looks perfect to me. I left an RCA for composite video in case I wanted to use my small CRT instead, but I honestly don’t think I would!
I still have to sort a flash cart, which I very nearly pulled the trigger on today but I have some other stuff I may want to spend my fun budget on instead, so I waited.
fwagglePublished:
Modified:
Filed under:
Location:
Horsham, VIC, AustraliaNavigation: Older Entry Newer Entry