Building a high-quality test cable

For a while now I've been wanting to build a high-quality VGA to SCART test cable that only has video and no audio. The reason for no audio is that I have a collection of SCART to RCA cables that have 6 individually shielded wires. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

SCART to RCA

I figured that since there are 6 RCAs that was just the right number to build a video only cable: red, green, blue, H-sync, V-sync and 5v to enable. Having the RGB lines individually shielded should theoretically provide better quality. Who knows... hard to tell in practice. Either way, I at least wanted to build an extra cable so I could try and get dual displays going and, hopefully, test TVs side-by-side. I took the opportunity to practice some neat heat shrinking work and generally make things as tidy and accurate as possible. Here's a few work in progress shots:

Composite sync circuit

Wires trimmed, shields heat shrunk, pins soldered

SCART plug fully loaded

 Completed VGA wiring

And... it worked! Street Fighter III in action.

Since this was the first time I'd actually bothered to systematically measure the lengths of each wire and accurately cut the heat shrink to length, it took me a LONG time to get things this neat! I have to say, after spending the best part of 3 hours on this exercise, I was mighty relieved when I hooked the cable up and it worked perfectly straight away!

Solder time!

I have a dream... that by selling off some of my SCART TVs on eBay (each with a pre-made VGA to SCART cable), other arcade game lovers will have the opportunity to experience the same thrill that I've gotten from playing MAME on an authentic looking CRT screen.

So, with that dream in mind, I set about soldering up some VGA to SCART cables this week. I had some cheap SCART cables that I bought on eBay in 2011 lying around and also some components I bought from a local electronics store waiting, ready-to-go...

Man, what a time consuming exercise! The concept is simple enough but wrangling all those fine pins, cables and components proves tricky in practice. Nevertheless, I soldered on and managed to get 3 cables finished, complete with 3.5mm audio jacks.

Hopefully the next batch will be much faster now that I've worked out some techniques and gotten hold of some better tools (especially a decent vice with rubber grips! That thing makes soldering SO much easier).

SCART workbench

Next post I'll show off some of the finished articles...