I built a sync-stripper cable

Posted by admin on January 6th, 2013

‘A what?’ you might say. Well thanks to Pete at www.mmmonkey.co.uk I have built a sync stripper SCART cable. To be honest the last time I picked up a soldering iron was at college, I don’t have fond memories of it and building this cable didn’t help matters. I built it wrong at least twice but when I got it working I was ‘well chuffed’.

‘Why?’ you may ask. Some of my previous posts talk about buying an XRGB mini upscaler for connecting my retro consoles to my HD TV. All the consoles I’ve bought so far have worked perfectly but a PAL Sega Master System just wouldn’t work properly. Whenever I powered it on I would initially get a picture but it would be very unstable and then fail and just show a black screen. Shortly after the XRGB mini would show a ‘NO_INPUT’ message.

I wasn’t really sure what the problem was, I assumed it was a Sync issue but as all my other consoles worked fine I wasn’t certain. I’ve been looking at mmmonkey.co.uk for a while trying to pluck up the courage to do a ‘mod’ and happened to be reading the article about the Composite Sync Stripper. At the end Pete mentions some symptoms he saw when connecting his Saturn to an upscaler which matched the symptoms I was seeing exactly. So I decided to take the plunge and build a short cable in the same way.

Building the cable was not that easy for me, I got all the parts from the excellent www.bitsbox.co.uk but then the soldering up of the circuit board and the cable took much longer than I was hoping. Once I’d put it all together it wouldn’t work at all until I realised that I’d wired all the power connections up back to front. Once I sorted that out I plugged the console in and tried for a final time and it worked, at least I got a more stable picture and the image stayed on screen rather than disappearing.

So thanks to mmonkey.co.uk my Sega Master system and XRGB mini are now good friends and I now have no excuse when a soldering iron is required for a job.