Sunday 12 February 2012

uVC to SCART to JAMMA all in a days work.

Decided to pimp the PONY II with a bit of 15 KHz 240p processing and multiconsolise it at the same time. Its in the same vain as the OKBaby, but this time round I decided to give the uVC (universal video converter from HAPPS) a go and boy I am glad I did. Not only is it 8 times smaller than the emotia, but it can handle 24 KHz processing as well. Only drawback is that it is not at all output friendly, not only you need to solder it to a fingerboard before you can use it on the cabinet but by doing that you need to solder controls and sound as well to the same fingerboard or boards if you chain the boards with jamma adapter(s). So I decided to go with Viletims' solution again and rig the uVC to a scart connector. I asked Tim of Viletim whether his adapter will accept the uVC's signal and to be honest, he can not be sure, but I took a punt and it paid off. Currently the uVC can only run on the arcade screen, I attempt to run it on my sony PVM with no success. The viletim adapter has to be cranked up to 40% before I saw a picture.

So on with the pictures:
The uVC did not come with a header, so I built one. I thought about directly soldering the header to a fingerboard, but decided against that idea and instead made rca breakouts from the header for easy connection. The connections are Red, Green, Blue, H(C)-Sync and all grounded to GND on the connector. I did not bothered with V-Sync because the uVC has a jumper to set output to C-Sync.

Next I rewired a RCA to SCART to pass through the signals from the uVC. Make sure you check these RCA to Scart cables before you hook anything up to them because the wiring on them can be crazy sometimes. Always buy the ones with a screw bottom of the SCART plug and open it up to double check the wiring.

I powered the uVC with a makeshift pc and it litterally lit up like a christmas tree. I tried the output on my pvm but it seems like the signal maybe too weak or it was searching for composite video sync (the uVC is outputing just composite sync) so it was just a black sreen..things not looking good : (

Alright...so now I hooked up the scart cable to the primary reason for the uVC: to run 15/24 KHz on arcade monitor. I am going to use two dualshock1 pcbs for controls because various other console adapters have better compatibility with these type of pcbs. Viletims adapter lit up as expected when I powered up the cabinet. I slowly dialed the contrast and a picture appeared at about 40%.

 I christened the setup with Progear of cause! The picture was very very nice indeed.

Will upload a video of it in action soonish..

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