Building a shim to fix the "white flash" issue

[jlancaster86]

Hi, guys:

I’ve been meaning to do this for the last couple of months, but tonight I finally got around to building a shim for working around the problem with the RetroTink 2X losing picture during white screen flashes.

Using the resistors recommended by James-F in this thread and a cheap SCART coupler, I’ve come up with this:

Now, I know SCART isn’t an intuitive choice for YPbPr, but I thought it easier to work with than a bunch of RCA jacks, or modifying existing RCA cables.

It’s early days, but the picture dropouts seem to be gone. Explosions in Star Fox 64 and the Sega logo screen on Mega Drive games are no longer causing the picture to drop. But I haven’t been able to test the 10 kΩ resistors on the audio lines yet (I’ll have the right combination of SCART-RCA adaptors soon, though), and I haven’t bothered with fixing S-Video.

My RetroTink 2X arrived two months ago after several months of waiting, and I’m now finally able to use it. Here’s hoping some enterprising folk can put together less shoddy adaptors than this one to get other RetroTinks out there back in the game.

Cheers.

[nmalinoski]

As a prototype, this is neat.

SCART absolutely isn’t intuitive. I don’t think there are any simple, passive solutions for getting YPbPr in and out of SCART; you could use two of these to get YPbPr in and out, but the result is going to be a chunky mess (no idea if those adapters are going to affect the video signal), and the alternative is $70 to $90 in custom cabling.

I imagine a production version would consist of a 3x RCA (GBR coloring), SMT versions of those resistors, and, if they exist, 3x through-hole male RCA connectors, so the unit can just be mated to the RT2X. (Failing that, a short 3x RCA dongle, at which point you might as well add stereo RCA inputs and a longer audio dongle so people don’t have to stretch their cables.) Bonus if the PCB blocks the composite and S-Video inputs, since those shouldn’t be getting used while you’re using YPbPr anyway.

[jlancaster86]

I’m using RCA-to-SCART adaptors like those at the moment (hence the current lack of audio), but soon I’ll be using one of these cables at each end. The downside there is that I’ll effectively have 3 m of cable when I need only about 0.5 m, but there are bigger problems in the world.

Ideally, I think a cable that looks similar to an HD Retrovision cable (but shorter and with RCA/S-video at each end) would be the way to go. While a box with all the separate input and output jacks would also be in option, it’d probably end up being larger than the 2X itself, so that wouldn’t be ideal.

[nmalinoski]

While a box with all the separate input and output jacks would also be in option, it’d probably end up being larger than the 2X itself, so that wouldn’t be ideal.

I would think a simple, straightforward $10~$25 add-on would be more ideal than spending a pile of money on a significantly bulkier setup that goes from component to SCART and then back to component again.

[jlancaster86]

I would think a simple, straightforward $10~$25 add-on would be more ideal than spending a pile of money on a significantly bulkier setup that goes from component to SCART and then back to component again.

Yeah, of course. I’m not advocating for SCART—I’ve just used it myself to minimize the DIY work involved.

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