Testing out an RGB cable for region- Safe way?

[evil_ash_xero]

I got an e-mail from RCA about the SNES RGB cable she just sent me. I haven't gotten it yet, but she told me that she may have sent a SCART rather than a JP 21 pin.

Can I try this with a CSY 2100, and not worry about frying anything? I'm not sure what to do.

[Fudoh]

For a CSY2100 you *need* Euro Scart, not JP21. What did you plan on doing with the JP21 in the first place ?

If you just want to know wether you got a EU or JP21 cable, just have a look at the connected pins. It's easy to tell.....

[evil_ash_xero]

Well, I ordered a JP cable for my XRGB.

I didn't want to see if the cable was SCART or JP, by testing it on my XRGB. That's why I was asking if I could see if it worked, or didn't work, on a CSY.

I have to see what region the cable is, as she thinks she made a mistake. I just need to know a safe way to go about it. I know the XRGB blows up if you put the wrong cord in it.

[Fudoh]

If you don't feel safe about checking it yourself, just post a pic of the pinout once you get the cable and somebody here will tell you.

[evil_ash_xero]

If you don't feel safe about checking it yourself, just post a pic of the pinout once you get the cable and somebody here will tell you.

Ah, OK. Sounds good. I'll do that once it arrives.

[alamone]

As mentioned, just open up the scart jacket and look at the pins.

Quick and dirty way, SCART will have RGB lines wired in a row in the middle,
whereas JRGB will have the RGB lines clustered in a corner.
Usually the RGB lines will be colored red, green, blue and will have caps wired in-line.

[evil_ash_xero]

I just bit the bullet and tried it out.

It's a SCART.

[rugdoctor]

I just bit the bullet and tried it out.

It's a SCART.

Ballsy....

[evil_ash_xero]

That's how I roll.

[alamone]

I've actually plugged in SCART cables accidentally into my XRGBs (1, 2, 2+) with no ill effect,
I think it was beginning with the XRGB-3 that it started getting all super sensitive about it. YMMV of course...

[evil_ash_xero]

Yeah, I got the 3.

I didn't try it with that. I tried it with the CSY.

[Retro Access]

I've actually plugged in SCART cables accidentally into my XRGBs (1, 2, 2+) with no ill effect,
I think it was beginning with the XRGB-3 that it started getting all super sensitive about it. YMMV of course...

Yeah I get returns often from people who just got their xrgb mini and thought SCART cables work on them (I'm not sure how you arrive at buying a xrgb mini without doing much research but there it is.)

Anyway this won't happen again. Ash zero's purchase was smack in the middle of several people each side all buying SCART versions. The title was too close to the SCART cable title, so I changed it. I also invested in a label printer (not for myself, as I do keep the cables separate, this happened because I misread the purchase) so buyers know they got the right cable.

I caught this error because I ran out of stock of SCART versions earlier than expected, but this was not before I had mailed it out.

Is there some difference with the 3? I do not have the 3, I had a 2 and got a Mini now.

The mini has not got that ground wire connected in it that could potentially short everything if you plug in a SCART.

If the 3 is different I think I'm going to have to start packing warning letters in with my SCART cables.

[Ed Oscuro]

(I'm not sure how you arrive at buying a xrgb mini without doing much research but there it is.)

Easy, people on all the retrogaming websites go "well this here thing will make it purty and fast on your newfangled teevee" and don't give "the long version" (the long version is always frowned upon...even though it saves a lot of money and headaches in the long run. Funny how people would rather spend money than a little time reading...)

Labels are a good idea - I'm surprised people don't affix them already. Since I just got a cable with the EURO SCART pinout, and my previous cables are JP21, I ran a piece of heavy-duty green masking tape across and Sharpie'd in all the relevant details.

[evil_ash_xero]

If the 3 is different I think I'm going to have to start packing warning letters in with my SCART cables.

I believe so. On Fudoh's page(http://retrogaming.hazard-city.de/), it has a warning that if you put a SCART plug in it, it will fry the "Game" input.
There was a guy on here, just a couple of weeks ago who did that, and fried his input.

A warning label wouldn't be a bad idea! That's an expensive mistake, that a lot of people could easily make. I read through
Fudoh's page, so I was aware of that "quirk" with the XRGB 3.

Here's a quote from his page "When buying from sellers outside Japan make sure the RGB Scart socket on front is still working. It can easily be blown by using a Euro-Scart cabe without an adapter".

[Retro Access]

(I'm not sure how you arrive at buying a xrgb mini without doing much research but there it is.)

Easy, people on all the retrogaming websites go "well this here thing will make it purty and fast on your newfangled teevee" and don't give "the long version" (the long version is always frowned upon...even though it saves a lot of money and headaches in the long run. Funny how people would rather spend money than a little time reading...)

Labels are a good idea - I'm surprised people don't affix them already. Since I just got a cable with the EURO SCART pinout, and my previous cables are JP21, I ran a piece of heavy-duty green masking tape across and Sharpie'd in all the relevant details.

Few reasons why I wasn't labeling:

1. Time taken to do it on the PC. I didn't have a label printer. I have to cram a lot of jobs into a day. When there are a lot of orders I already get up at 5am.
2. I honestly thought there was no issue because like I say, people buy scarts, they tell me "blue screen and no signal!" Which means they have an xrgb. I get the return, I post out a replacement, and - no problem. I didn't know the 3 did this. Nobody's made the mistake yet who has a 3, I've never made the mistake either til now. The xrgb mini does not seem to have this problem.
3. I did do labels when people buy a mixture. Some people buy a mixture and say, it's ok they intended on the mixture.
4. Well, these labels are not cheap. Doing it fast and professionally is not cheap. I didn't want to pass more costs on. Already I have to charge more than competitors because I import everything, because I wire up more ground wires (people in the USA do more research, and want better cabling) oh and - actual cabling (that I do not import because weight makes courier costs prohibitive) is much more expensive in the USA. It's four times more expensive than buying wire intended for SCART in the UK. Because you can't get wire intended for SCART.

Anyway this was all stupid and ignorant of me, I've gone 6 years now without anyone blowing anything up and I guess that was lucky with the amount of people who buy the wrong cable.

I'll just absorb the cost of the labels. It's a possibility that the warning label on the scarts will not be noticed or read, because they don't read the listings, but I'll try not to let that bother me.

I don't know why Micomsoft (why did my ipad auto correct this to Microsoft) could happily go years with obviously building some sort of protection for this kind of thing, reverting this in the 3 then going back to being cautious with the Mini.

[Ed Oscuro]

I'm not criticizing you here - people should do their due diligence. I guess that the tendency to give people a short answer can give them the confidence of knowing the full story when they don't (and SCART / JP21 pinouts is one of these things, easily).

Personally I think people should do it themselves, once they find out about it. For me, it's no big deal, although a professionally done sticker would be nice, I can choose whatever text I want to put on there.

[Retro Access]

Nah, I didn't think you were criticizing me. I'm criticizing myself.

I didn't know the xrgb 3 was like this. Should have done my own due diligence there, but I guess it's not a common scaler for people to make this mistake with.

Like, this happens all the time, but it only seems to happen with Xgrb mini because it's what all the people new to the hobby buy, I guess.

Nope xrgb mini does not seem to suffer damage from wrong cables. I am not saying go plug them in (I do envisage damage could be eventually possible) but at least it's protected people from breaking their scaler because this scenario is so common.

The use of phrasing like "japanese SCART" on guides throws people for a loop. If I list as "euro SCART" I get people asking me if the cables only work on euro consoles. I get people asking if they need the japanese cable because their system is japanese, and I get people thinking they need japanese cables for NA consoles because the region is NTSC. All sorts of confusion abounds on this.

I wish Japan, when they decided to use the SCART style plug had just used the same pinout.

It's probably copyrighted or something so they should have just used dsub (let's face it, a more reliable connector.)

Given the potential danger though, I have started putting warning labels on things. Especially as I made this mistake. It would have been easier to ask ash to check the label than tell him to open the plug up.

I have been playing with that labeller today and wishing Ii got one sooner, much easier than walking to the PC, opening notepad, feeding label paper into the printer, printing, getting the scissors, cutting out, etc.

[Ed Oscuro]

The use of phrasing like "japanese SCART" on guides throws people for a loop. If I list as "euro SCART" I get people asking me if the cables only work on euro consoles. I get people asking if they need the japanese cable because their system is japanese, and I get people thinking they need japanese cables for NA consoles because the region is NTSC. All sorts of confusion abounds on this.

Yes, I had to think about this a bit when filling in the short space on my own tape...I wrote something like EURO SCART - NTSC SNES although if I had the space I would really write EURO SCART PINOUT - NTSC SNES (for some reason Retro Console Accessories wrote something like "SNES only" on their auction - signal & pinout is totally the same as the SFC though). And I annoyed daskrabs a while back asking about NTSC RGB (though it must be said that referring to NTSC RGB makes clear what signal you're working with, in the case that there could be an incompatibility down the line).

Probably the simplest way to put it would be something like this:

Connector type and pinout (must match source and display device, unless a pinout converter is used to change from one pinout to another) - JP-21 almost exclusively for use on Micomsoft upscalers, and rare Japanese displays that use it; otherwise Euro SCART throughout seems to work fine
Signal type (RGB, or something else?)
Region of console (matching 50/60Hz to your display type or output device)

[Retro Access]

Re. Listing "snes only" - that's protecting myself. I had two people say stuff worked on their snes but not their sfc.

There's a dozen or so revisions of snes so that's probably the reason, unfortunately I sell on ebay so I have to be careful.

I had that same issue with US Saturn and Japanese Saturn. They are the same! But there's more revisions of japanese Saturn. More than one people said it didn't work, I took it off the listing.

This way if people come back to me with "it doesn't work on my japanese system" I can say "it's not in the listing."

I have 5 different revs of SNESes here and two Saturns but I don't have any Japanese ones. I can't be 100% confident because if I can give a good example - there's at least one revision of snes that has really weak signal output on csync AND composite video and flashes up problems on a bunch of stuff. Somebody very kindly gave me that snes like way back and it's what prompted the need for sync seperator circuits in xrgb adapters.

More problems with nomenclature:

The official name of JP-21 - "21 pin RGB" throws up confusion because some cheapo SCART lead manufacturers in china like to write that on their SCART to SCART hookups.

"Japanese 21 pin rgb" does not fit in the listing field box along with all the other relevant stuff

"JP-21 XRGB" is my own invention.

So is "raw sync" - "composite sync" confuses people, "csync" results in "what is csync?" questions.

"Uses composite video for sync" results in "what, this is a composite video cable?"

Man I don't know what to do about it half the time but the main thing I steer clear of is affixing any "SCART" description to 21 pin rgb wiring.

SCART is officially the name of the *euro pin out*. Annoyingly it's also the name of the plug when you buy them from parts suppliers. I've been trying to get people to accept it as the name of the pin out to avoid massive mistakes - most sellers of SCART cables do not say "Euro SCART" because to Europeans SCART is just "SCART".

The LM1881 circuit also amplifys a csync input to the required range for video equipment. "Sync stripper" or "sync cleaner" confuses people, they don't know if they can feed it a sync signal. I get all sorts of questions then, leading to things like "this includes a sync stripper so if I feed it a composite based genesis SCART will it remove jailbars" - well, no.

"It boosts the signal, any signal" results in less questions.

Maybe I'm doing this wrong but as it stands I'm already spending 1-2 hours a day on questions since I moved to the USA. In the UK it was just - sell the SCART cable, guy plugs it into his tv, no problem.

I do wish I could be more transparent and people go out and do their research first so I can stop charging a premium on "answering questions time".

[BuckoA51]

Hi Retro Access long time no post

Maybe I should revise my section on my website to more clearly explain the differences between raw sync, Japanese RGB21 etc, that way you could link to me, I get more traffic you get less hassle

Then again, from what you say it seems there are a core of people out there that just don't want to do any research anyway and will just ask the same questions over and over.

Nice work on those PS1 luma sync cables btw, working great

[evil_ash_xero]

Yeah, I have some of those PSX cables coming my way. Looking forward to testing them out.

[Retro Access]

Hi Retro Access long time no post

Maybe I should revise my section on my website to more clearly explain the differences between raw sync, Japanese RGB21 etc, that way you could link to me, I get more traffic you get less hassle

Then again, from what you say it seems there are a core of people out there that just don't want to do any research anyway and will just ask the same questions over and over.

Nice work on those PS1 luma sync cables btw, working great

Oh no problem. I've decided to start posting on forums a bit more, normally I get burned out answering questions on ebay and have no time to post elsewhere. I thought I could maybe answer them here because they seem to be asking here, then link people to the response later. Somebody on ebay linked me back here the other day.

Yep I have no problem linking to your site, thank you for the support.