PC Engine RGB (Continued)
We have to mount it to the board though, and we can't use the normal tabs/legs of the mini din socket to do this. The following is much easier if you have a fibreglass pencil, you need to scrape away the green coating of the board around where the socket will be mounted, to expose the copper which we can solder onto.
It should only take a couple of minutes with a fibreglass pencil and it leaves a great service to work with. It's time to test fit the socket, you can see I've bet one of the tabs outwards, this is to go through mounting hole from the old RF Unit.
Once you are happy that the socket lines up with the outer casing, take a scalpel and mark around the rear of the socket. This may sound odd, but you'll see why in a moment (don't worry about the edge with the contact pins, you don't want to damage them!)...
Because we only have one tab to solder the socket with, it would be better to secure the socket elsewhere also. Add a bit of solder to the exposed copper next to the line you just scratched in the board. The scratch will stop the solder spreading, so it will finish adjacent with the socket. You can see where I added the solder, and test fitting the socket AGAIN to make sure it's fine. Test fit the casing to make sure it fits back on okay.
The socket fitted fine, it's flat on the motherboard. If you wanted you could super glue it to the motherboard before soldering it into place. Solder the tab that we bent to fit through the motherboard, and then add some solder to the rear of the socket and then join it to the solder that we put on the motherboard.
It's time to link up the Audio/Video signals to the socket now. This is the pinout that was supplied to me, I didn't see any point in changing it!
I started by soldering one wire at a time from the Ext Bus to the Socket (I did them in this order GND - Right - Left - Sync - Blue - Green - Red - 5v, I found it easier to solder the socket this way). Here's where I routed the wire, it's Kynar wire again - a modders friend!
Time to solder up a Scart Lead now. You could make the whole scart lead, or, you could do what I've been doing recently and pickup an RGB scart lead for another more common console and cut the console plug off of it - leaving you with the Scart plug and some cable coming from it. You'll have to open the Scart plug up and make a note of what colour wire is attached to which Scart pin. Remove any capacitors or resistors that might already be on the RGB pins (7, 11, 15), and make sure that there is a wire going pin 8, and that a 75 ohm resistor goes from pin 8 to pin 16 (some scart leads are wired up wrong)
