Lets build an RGBtoHDMI adaptor for the Amiga 500

one question that comes up time and time again is how do i connect my classic amiga computer to a modern display well the best video signal you're gonna get out of this thing comes via its rgb video port that modern display though well it's going to be looking for hdmi so we need to convert between them to do it what most people do is use an rgb discard cable then skirt the hdmi converter simple enough but it is another external box of tricks that needs another power supply but we do now have an internal solution for the amiga 500 and that comes in the form of a little rgb the hdmi board that sits in line with the knees we then plug a raspberry pi zero into that that does all the conversion for us and we get our hdmi output now you can't buy these things pre-made for about 25 pounds or so but where's the fun in that one thing that i definitely need practice with here on the channel is surface mount soldering on a particular fine pitch surface mount soldering so instead of buying one assembled board ready to go i bought a kit so let's see if we can't put it together only problem is some of the parts in this kit are tiny so i think it's pretty safe to say that i didn't quite appreciate just how small 0.65 millimeters actually is um this is going to be tricky look at all the size of the pins on them now i know some of you are watching this would be like sure this is really easy stuff i do it every day well i don't do any of it but i am keen to learn because if we can put this together and if it works we can use this as a springboard to move on to bigger projects like say one of the terrible fire accelerators i could have a go at building a tf-536 030 accelerator for the omega 500 that would be pretty cool to have but i thought we'd start with something simple like this and yes i bought two of them just in case i make a mess um let's be honest here it's probably fairly likely so i think the first thing that i'll start with is the little passives the capacitors and resistors these things are absolutely tiny i'm going to have to find the tweezers on the try and help i even went to the trouble of buying brand new soldering iron tips so we need those i need to get the flux out because we're going to need plenty of that and i need the tweezers so i thought we'd give ourselves half a chance here and try and start with the bigger of these the resistors then that capacitor and then we'll try and do these incredibly tiny ones i'm going to use these tweezers here these are the sort that hold themselves closed you have to push the open so i'm hoping that will make it a little easier to hold the component in place at least i don't have to apply any pressure to the tweezers to keep a grip of it when you look at how ridiculously small that is how am i ever going to do this well at least the tweezers hold it and i don't need to apply any pressure to it so that's good that that's what i'm hoping for i'm hoping this is going to make it easier and this is r1 which is there so i need to hold that sort of there with my shaky hands while trying to solder it in place right where's the flux we have a brand new tip on the iron it's going to get a little bit of solder on that and then i suppose it's just a matter of doing it well that's sort of done let me see if i can tack the other side slightly and then we can try just to uh reposition it or maybe a bit better trying to reposition it at the minute plus it is sitting up off the board slightly oh dear this is not going to be simple is it you know what that doesn't look too bad to me let's get a bit more solder on the iron and see if we can get the other side of it there so it's not perfectly straight but you know it's on there let's see if we can do this capacitor beside it c4 all right so again it's stuck down but um sitting up in the air so let's see if we can push it down [Laughter] i'm not going to be building any accelerators anytime soon sure or not get off it right you sir are sticking to that pod honestly i don't know how i'm going to do those smaller ones these are literally the size of nothing only three of them not two let's just try and do one of these on camera and then i will try and do the other two somehow needs to go that way but then i need to try and get it down because it's up in the air again there's a bit of a blob on that but we'll try and tidy that up in a second and i'm sure people are cringing looking at this at the steel of this but see to be perfectly honest with you i'm actually really happy with that so far yes there's probably too much solder yes it's probably not the neatest and yes they're not exactly straight but they're on there i'll do those other two and then we'll have to tackle these three ics those other two capacitors went on really easy and i think that's just because without the camera in the way i was able to orientate myself directly over the top of them then with tweezers and the iron just easier to see what i was doing and hold everything but they're all on there now let's try and get one of these things on let's start here with the one the middle so pin one on these is denoted by a little circle a little dot in one corner of the chip and pin one has to line up with this corner up here sort of like that i don't know if i'll be able to hold these in the tweezers while trying to do this because the thickness of that capacitor there beside it or the closeness of that capacitor beside it and the thickness of the tweezers no it sort of works yeah i think i should be able to hold that so same again get our flux in there i haven't orientated myself very good here have it because i'm left-handed i prefer to hold the iron in the left hand just going to try and get one of the pins on and i'm not even that worried at the minute if we get a solder blob or anything i can try and tidy that up so i think that's tacked up in that top corner there let me see if i can tack the opposite corner let me just check to make sure the thing [Music] is sitting in the right spot i think it is yes that is one big nasty solder blob yeah okay so it is sitting in the right place just hi are we going to solder this in so i have watched umpteen videos on this and what most people seem to do is just take a bit of solder on the iron and drag i am making a right royal mess of this let me see if i'm trying so caught up with a bit of breed well i've tidied up the blob but i'm not convinced that those pins are connected let's see if i can do anything with this side i think to be honest with you here the problem is well although i don't really know what i'm doing that flux i have i don't really think is particularly good there's another bridge there for goodness sake right i'm gonna have to move the camera out of the way try and get on top of this and see if i can't sort it out so it's on there tested all the pins there's no shorts or anything like that everything seems to be connected making good connection um all i really did in the end to be honest was just tidy up the blobs with the wick and just run the iron along everything certainly doesn't look like there's a lot of solder on there but i suppose it wouldn't being such a small pitch in fact if we try and bring the magnification in i'm not sure how well that's going to look on the camera on apology for the glare from the lights a bit of lens flaring for you but you know doesn't look too bad i'm going to see if i can do these two okay that is all of the surface amount of stuff on very stressful to say the least i just went ahead and put on the little 3.3 volt voltage regulator as well that was like a cake walk putting that on compared to these things but having only done three of them in that order um i do think i've actually got a little bit better that one is kind of rough this one went on not too bad and then this one just seemed to go on really easy so that is all the surface mounted stuff done it's just through-hole stuff now and you've seen me do that sort of thing plenty of times before so i'm just going to go ahead and get all of this populated then we can test it in the amiga so i just wanted to show you quickly here for soldering on the strip of pins that connected to the dna socket i thought the easiest thing to do was to pull out the spur omega 500 motherboard stick those rows of pins into the knee socket and just set this adapter on top and solder it up at least that way we know everything will be lined up okay so that's our rgb hdmi board built i think it turned out not too bad in the end um we've got the pi zero with its mail gpio header installed as well i've stuck a two gig sd card in here which is absolutely loads the smallest sd card you can find would be plenty and that has the software on it that you can download from the github link in the description so that goes on there like that but we need an amiga to put it in the test and so i thought we'd bring out the omega 500 that we were working on a couple of weeks ago and see if we can't install our little board into this so this board goes in line with denise but just before we do that let's just power on quickly to double check that this 500 is still working don't see why it wouldn't be but just to be thorough that seems fine nothing else for it then let's get that chip out and get this in and i've bought myself a new toy a proper chip lifter you know what actually before we try it with the pie let's disconnect that put this in just hopefully this goes into this socket okay and let's put the chip back in and then we can try it again just on the normal rgb scart to make sure that that side of it is still working then we can go to the pi and check out the hdmi yep so that still looks fine nothing else for it but to try this um we're going to need an hdmi cable aren't we so this is mini hdmi at this side and this is just a cable straight out to normal hdmi and i just have that plugged in here just into discard the hdmi converter it also has an option on this box just for hdmi passthrough that's just handier then hooking around at the back of the pc right i need to change this thing over the hdmi so source will now be on hdmi let's go is this going to work you know what it looks like it's working let me reconnect the keyboard and then we'll try the amiga test kit disk that we wrote last time when working on this machine so power on again let's go for this disc just how sharp is that pitcher that is unbelievable crystal clear right so what i want to do is f6 for video and i want to go f1 that is absolutely razor sharp out of the pie because if we just actually switch over here to the rgb the hdmi now that is stretching the image on us just because of the way this thing is set but well that is quite sharp as well but to be honest with you i think the output from the pi is just a wee bit better also notice that it is outputting 1920 by 1080p so it is outputting a 16x9 image but it's only displaying the native amiga you know four by three image in the middle of that there is actually an option menu you can call up on the pi the change a few bits and pieces here i think you can probably stretch the image and you can introduce some scan lines and things like that but i'm not too worried about that today i'm still rather dumbfounded that we were able to get that working very impressive picture though very impressive but we can't quite leave this with a long hdmi cable hanging out of it we need to try and come up with something a bit more practical so one thing i've seen a few other people do is to take a cable from the pi run it sort of round here underneath where the floppy drive would be cut a hole and use an hdmi panel mount adapter at this point that gives you the socket that you can access from the other side but to be perfectly honest with you i don't really want to start cutting holes into our otherwise perfect omega 500 case so what i'm going to do instead is try and make use of one of the existing holes and the one that i have personally never used the monochrome composite output i think if we remove that uh socket just pull the motherboard out of the way then we can use that hole to feed the cable through you see i've picked up one of these things here so this is mini hdmi on this point and i have had to scratch off a bit of the rubber around this so that that fits through there that gives us our hdmi socket then on the outside but we just can't quite leave that hanging there like that sure we can't i've came up with this thing here on the 3d printer and the idea behind this is that that sits in there like that gets clumped to it sort of like that and that will set vertically like that i put a little tab on it here just to line up with one of the screw holes in the case so we when we screw the case back together that will hold the thing and maybe have to put a little bit of glue on that just to hold that together my little um legs and holes that i uh built under this are just a little bit too loose for it to hold together by itself but it also has this sort of shroud on it here which is a nice tight fit in through that hole and the idea being if we mount it vertically like that you can still easily access the rgb video port as well should you need to but i need to get that composite port out now you probably could just cut it out but i don't want to do that i'm going to remove the motherboard from this bottom rf shield and just desolder this properly so that is our monochrome jack removed there it is there i'm going to hang on to this though and to be honest with you i think what i'll do is try and find somewhere in the case here just to put it stick it down with a bit of double-sided sticky tip just to keep it with the machine it came out of probably put it up here somewhere around where the floppy drive is there's a lot of dead space here but we should now be able to get the hdmi cable in i wound up just taking the rest of the rubber off this end here that's really just so it fits through this hole a bit easier especially the hole and the shielding which i also had to make slightly bigger just to accommodate this as you can see that barely just fits through there so we're going to bring it down that side of the capacitor there and there should be enough length on this 15 centimeter cable let the loop grind neatly and plug in i can then take this thing here clamp our cable in it like that and this should slide in let me take a bit of encouragement just to get it through the shield there goes and that is going to become our hdmi output it's going to be spotted super glue on that just to hold that together but as you can see it doesn't file the rgb port so if you ever wanted to connect this machine up over scart again you could do so quite easily just a matter of putting the rest of it all back together and then we can give it another test i've had a bit of a snag putting it back together i can't put the top shield on for starters this thing here sits too high and those uh pins on it there from the gpio connector we'd be touching this which would be bad news but also that leg of that there that comes down on this section here would have to be cut away to allow the fit around this that's a bit annoying because i was hoping to um keep the rf shield in this case but oh well we'll just have to leave this off well everything is back together minus one rf shield i'm going to take hdmi this time direct from the amiga into the capture card one thing to point out by the way it's only video that it carries the audio isn't mixed into that hdmi so you do still need your rca audio separate here we go i really can't get over just how clean that video signal is but let's test it with a game and let's pick a game that well at the time anyway was known for its amazing graphics the shadow of the beast yeah the actual game itself isn't that good but the graphics in this on the music and this at the time were outstanding in fact the music in this game still is outstanding i don't really collect big box games all too often but when i seen this box come up this is absolutely mint and at the right price i uh to absolutely jump on it that cover art on that that's just fantastic right anyway [Music] absolutely crystal clear image and i'll keep saying it but i really can't get over just how good it looks well it's shadow of the beast it looks fantastic it sounds amazing but unfortunately the gameplay well it sort of sucks doesn't it so i just want to see if i can notice any lag in this because if there's one game you need fast reflexes for that is this one my reflexes suck just see well i mean that does look pretty much instantaneous as i push the button our character is punching so if there is any lag introduced by our rgb to hdmi converter it certainly very minimal see how you're supposed to get past that without taking damage this game is absolutely impossible well it does look very impressive with its multi layers of parallax scrolling [Music] so oh i'm gonna be dead especially this i mean how are you supposed to get past this and i'm dead as i said the game sucks it just looks really pretty and sounds amazing well there we are we have successfully completed the rgb to hdmi mode for this omega 500 i know i keep saying it but i really can't get over just how good that picture is coming out of this machine i think it is by far the best i've ever seen an omega look on a modern display so definitely worth doing if you own a 500 or even a 2000 there is a version of that board for the omega 2000 um i can only hope going forward that we will see other versions for the 600 1200 cd 32 and all the other machines as well i think it would be particularly good to have one of these for the cd32 since the wii console just fits naturally underneath the big tv in the living room it would be awesome to get a picture like this out of it i am going to have a go at building the other board that we have and i've actually since went and bought some better solder on better flux so i'm hoping it will go together even easier than this one did and i know i said i would try and use this as like a springboard to move on to like an accelerator i think instead though the next logical step would be like a 8 megabyte faster on board possibly for this machine so i think i'll order up the bits and pieces i need for that and maybe have a go of putting one of them together if that's something that you'd like to see on the channel please let me know in the comments below but for now that's pretty much everything so if you enjoyed this video i would appreciate a thumbs up as it does help with the youtube algorithm why not hit subscribe if you haven't done so already still plenty more yet to come here on crg and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: CRG

Views: 3,953

Rating: 4.9616613 out of 5

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Id: 5JaUkeGv4JE

Length: 33min 56sec (2036 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021