The Extron RGB 109xi VGA connector doesn't make any sense

[donluca]

Seriously.

I've wasted like 3 hours trying to figure out what's going on here.

I'm talking about the VGA cable the Extron RGB 109xi unit has which is used to connect your source.

Pin 13, which is Horizontal Sync, isn't connected, only Pin 12 which is Vertical Sync.

Pins which shouldn't be connected because unused are connected.

The RGB ground pins aren't connected.

There isn't a common ground pin. Or better. The common ground pin (which is 5) is connected to the connector but it isn't connected to the unit's ground!

What the hell's going on here?
Is Extron using custom pinouts?

For reference:



Pin 1 - Red - OK
Pin 2 - Green - OK
Pin 3 - Blue - OK
Pin 4 - Unused - OK
Pin 5 - Common Ground - Connected but not to Ground!!!
Pin 6 - Red Ground - Not connected!!!
Pin 7 - Green Ground - Not connected!!!
Pin 8 - Blue Ground - Not connected!!!
Pin 9 - Unused - Connected! (God only knows to what)
Pin 10 - Sync Ground - Connected but not to Ground!!!
Pin 11 - ID0/Ground - Connected! (but not to Ground)
Pin 12 - ID1/Unused - Connected! (God only knows to what)
Pin 13 - Horizontal Sync - Not connected!!!
Pin 14 - Vertical Sync - OK
Pin 15 - Unused - Connected!!!

Can anyone help me out? I'm absolutely clueless about what to do.
I want to remove the 15-pin connector and put 4 RCA/BNC connectors to use the adapter I made.

Thanks!

EDIT: so, trying to analyze the situation with a cool head.

Things possible: something in the VGA connector is wrong. Maybe a bad solder joint.
There are actually 2 cables which are not connected to anything, so one of these might be the H Sync. Tomorrow I'm gonna try both of them and see if I manage to get a picture.

If everything fails, I'm gonna make a small circuit and put the Sync on Green and call it a day.

[beatsgo]

More than likely just a bad cable. Try a different VGA cable and verify.

[donluca]

I can't, it's soldered inside. I can only hope the other end is ok.

[beatsgo]

Oh! Did not expect that.

Do what you need to do then. Hopefully there's nothing wrong with the 109xi itself.

[donluca]

Alright, two cables are not connected to the unit.

That's two less to try out

I've tried using the V Sync (white one) as H Sync (who knows) with a LM1881 and it's a no go.

I guess I'll have to try all of the cables which I'm not sure of.

Grey one is next. All of the VGA cables I've seen so far have white as V Sync and Grey as H Sync.

Maybe this is the case too.
Otherwise I'll just go with Sync on Green but I don't like the idea of SoG, I prefer having dedicated channels.

[BazookaBen]

Have you checked the solder joints for the cable inside of the unit?

[donluca]

Solder joints inside the unit appear to be ok. I might try to desolder and solder them again just to make sure as a very last attempt.

So far I've tried ALL the cables and no one worked.

Neither did putting the cleaned sync on green.

Wii with Component works and shows H and V frequency on the display (so the unit is ok, at least on the RGB lines), but no luck so far with Mega Drive, Saturn and Playstation 1/2 with RGB output.

I think my LM1881N might be busted, but the shop where I usually get my stuff doesn't have them in stock anymore, I might get another one off good ol' ebay.

I saw some people putting a 680Ω resistor between sync and the green signal cable, I might give it a shot as well to see if I can get at least Sync on Green working.

[donluca]

ugh, the LM1881 seems to be working properly.

I just measured the output and it reads 3V, so it's definitely working as intended.

The problem is clearly in the unit.

I've tried adding a 680Ω and a 100uF cap on the green line as per specified here:

http://www.raphnet.net/electronique/syn ... een_en.php

and nothing comes up.

I'll try one last time connecting all the wires, one by one, triple-checking my solder joints to make sure everything is good, I really want RGBs to work.

[BazookaBen]

So it reads sync from the Wii's component output? And you get picture? How about setting your PS2 to RGB mode and playing a 480p game (480p RGB on PS2 is sync on green)?

If both of those things work, then it seems like all the IC's in your extron are working properly, and the problem might be a broken trace on the H line.

[donluca]

HOLD!!!

The screen on the extron is finally showing something!

I might be getting closer to a solution.

I'll report back hopefully in half hour.

[donluca]

Ok, so... the I'm doing my tests with a Jap Mega Drive (it's the most conveniently positioned console I have atm since it's near where I'm working on the Extron) and connecting the white cable (which I'm 100% sure it's V-Sync) and the red cable (which turns out to be H-Sync!) to the LM1881 it worked for a couple of minutes.

The Extron's screen showed the correct 59,97Hz Vertical rate and 15,62KHz Horizontal.

But after a couple of minutes the Horizontal rate started to climb up, arriving at a whooping 150KHz Horizontal rate! Good thing I didn't turn on my BVM

Seems like the 109xi doesn't take H-Sync as C-Sync and it needs both H-Sync and V-Sync to work.

Now I think I've messed up something on the LM1881 so I'm going back to do all the solder joints and make sure everything is in order before doing anything else.

[Fudoh]

May I ask what you're trying to accomplish ? What do you want to the use the interface for ?

[donluca]

SUCCESS

The problem was that the point where I got the +5V inside the Extron was somewhat... uh, unstable.

Now I'm using a USB battery and it's working flawlessly!

I need to find where the hell is the voltage regulator inside the Extron to tap the +5V from it to feed the LM1881.

Also, the image processed by the Extron gives a sharper image, that's pretty awesome.

A pic of the mess done with the crappy camera of my phone.



EDIT: I'm using the Extron to convert 480i material from PS2, DC and Wii to 240p

[rugdoctor]

I have that exact same floor lamp tidy desk!

[BazookaBen]

Awesome. Let me know how the forced 240p looks from the 109xi. My 201rxi looks pretty good, but there is a little bit of interference between lines so the picture doesn't look as sharp as it should. A good place to look is above and below white text on a black background, you might see a faint white "shadow" where it's supposed to be total black.

Example taken on my PVM-20L2MD, which shows it really strongly: http://i1301.photobucket.com/albums/ag1 ... g~original

Side question: do you have a Dreamcast VGA Box modified for 15hz? Does that mod give you composite sync on the H or V line?

[donluca]

To test 480i material I need to hook up my Saturn OR my Wii... right now I can try hooking up my Wii with the Component cable (it's the only one I have unfortunately) and turn up Sync on Green and see what happens.

[BazookaBen]

Component and RGB output from my 201rxi look identical. A good thing for me since I prefer to use component from my PS2,PS3, and Xbox 360 so I don't have to mess with a sync separator.

[donluca]

Spoiler

Again, crappy phone camera

That's the first thing I had at hand with a somewhat dark background.

There's the famous "one line vertical wobble" Fudoh told about in several threads which goes away with the vertical shift that the 190xi doesn't have. Despite this the picture is crisp and from one meter of distance on a 14" it's almost unnoticeable.

I wonder if I can build a simple cheap circuit to shift the image one line down to get rid of this effect...

[BazookaBen]

You don't have anything low-res (240 lines) like Mega Man 9 or one of the Konami Rebirth games? You took a picture of a 480-line image, which will have wobble/flicker no matter what you do.

[donluca]

Unfortunately I don't have any at the moment, sorry!

The only thing I can do is running a pattern of your choice in Artemio's 240p test suite, I can do tomorrow if you wish!


Anyway, I wanted to sum up what I've discovered about the Extron RGB 109xi unit:

Cables and stuff are messed up.

The big Red, Green and Blue cables are the RGB lines, the white cable is V-Sync and the red cable looks like H-Sync.

The Extron will not accept C-Sync, I had to use an LM1881 to strip C-Sync and make separate H-Sync and V-Sync to feed the Extron unit or it won't recognize the signal.

Component works out of the box (you already knew that, though )

Picture quality is great, I believe it's even better than connecting your console directly to your monitor/TV.

[BazookaBen]

Unfortunately I don't have any at the moment, sorry!

The only thing I can do is running a pattern of your choice in Artemio's 240p test suite, I can do tomorrow if you wish!

I'd appreciate that! Try to get in close like I did with my picture above.

Just make sure when you do it, your Wii is running the test suite in 480i, not 240p, so we can tell how well the Extron does the coversion. 240p>240p won't really tell us anything.

The Extron will not accept C-Sync,

That seems weird, considering it is pulling C-sync from green in SoG.

[donluca]

I'd appreciate that! Try to get in close like I did with my picture above.

Just make sure when you do it, your Wii is running the test suite in 480i, not 240p, so we can tell how well the Extron does the coversion. 240p>240p won't really tell us anything.

No problem, it's that is almost half past midnight here and I've been working on this damn thing all day and am feeling pretty tired, otherwise I'd do it straight away.

That seems weird, considering it is pulling C-sync from green in SoG.

Well, that's kinda the point of this entire thread, lol

[donluca]

First of all, sorry BazookaBen, I completely forgot to take the pics because I got distracted by a strange issue I've encountered today while doing tests.

Anyway... today I finally put everything inside the Extron and the work came up really, really clean.
I've insulated/covered the LM1881 circuit with hot glue and so far everything works.

Spoiler

it's the thing on the left which is partially covered by cables.

I've removed ALL the cables that weren't used to keep it as tidy as possible.

Now, everything went incredibly good until I've tested my PAL Wii with Component.

This is the configuration:

Wii -> Component -> Extron RGB 109xi (with LM1881) -> Sony PVM 14M4E

It was flawless a the beginning in 480i until I went into the 240p test suite and tried 480i.

It worked good for a couple of minute and then I noticed that the part on top was distorted and after another couple of minutes the image started shaking up and down.
If I went back to 240p everything was good, but when I went back to 480i it would shake again.

However, enabling the DDSP (Digital Display Sync Processing, which means that the Extron unit doesn't do any sync processing) would solve both problems, the top most part deformed and the screen shaking, but that would kinda defeat the purpose of using the Extron, right?

I tried switching the output to Sync on Green but it didn't change the result.

This is pretty awkward as it was working great at the beginning.

Anyway, 240p is razor sharp with the Extron unit, better than connecting the console directly to the monitor.

I have to try hooking up my Saturn and playing a 480i title to see if the screen shakes. It might be something with the Wii.

I'll take photos of everything tomorrow and post here (maybe a youtube video too).

Thanks to everyone sticking with me through this

EDIT: ah, it might also be the cables I'm using to connect the Extron to the Monitor.
I'm using random RCA cables I had floating around with BNC-RCA adapters.
I'll try to source some good BNC cables and try again.

[BazookaBen]

My Extron 201rxi can shake depending on where you have the picture set with the V-shift.

Was it shaking before you modified with the LM1881?

[donluca]

Alright boys, forcing the Extron to output negative sync and setting the Vertical Sync width to Narrow (both adjustable via internal jumpers) seems to have fixed the shaking.

On the Wii there's still the top deformed, while on Saturn there's no deformation, here's a couple of pics:

Top deformed on Wii:

Spoiler

Pic for BazookaBen

Spoiler

As you can see there's a little blue halo on the left. But that might be my PVM, I'll try this evening on my BVM and see if it's still there.
I'm still using crappy cables too.

Still, with the Extron doing the Sync processing there's just a tiny bit more of shaking which is noticeable with still images.

I mean... with DDSP on or off I still have nice scanlines in 480i and the picture is still super crisp, so I just might disable the Sync processing on the Extron and call it a day.

I'll do further tests later and report back.

EDIT: there are a lot of cute little blue trimmers inside the Extron... I wonder what they're used for. Uhm... so tempting

Also, there are holes for what I believe it's the vertical shift.
I might try to hook a pot and see if it works.

[donluca]

Alright, two interesting updates on the matter.

I've played some Outrun online on my PAL PS3 connected via RGB Scart to the Extron (and then to my PVM) and I made two discoveries.

First, PAL PS3 will only output 576i@50Hz. Ugh.

Second, 576i@50Hz make an awesome, perfect stable picture through the Extron, both with DDSP enabled or disabled.


But I've run into another problem: when I used the Extron on my BVM, the Wii via Component in 480i made an image which was cut off at the top.

And it didn't help extending the V Blanking: even when put to the max (255) there was a part of the top of the screen which was still cut out. This with either DDSP enabled or disabled.

I MUST find a way to get vertical shift on this thing or it will be worthless since the BVM is my main monitor and the PVM will soon go to a friend of mine.

I'll keep you updated!

[BazookaBen]

Thanks for the test, sucks about the shaking, otherwise it looks good (no bleeding with adjacent lines).

As far as the distortion at the top of the picture, that's not a problem with me for most games I use ADSP on. I just adjust the picture upwards with my 201rxi, then shift the picture down in the game's options. Can't do this with Mega Man 9 though, so I just deal with the distortion. Better than playing it in 480i.

[donluca]

Little steps: after some brief research, it seems like the knob that controls the horizontal shift is a rotary encoder.

Looks like a simple device, I should be able to get one easily and hook it up and hope that it will work for the Vertical Shift without further modification, although I'm afraid there's probably a jumper to change somewhere on the board.

Curiously, the 109xi board has a lot of missing components which are marked on the PCB.
I'm making a wild guess here, but I think Extron used the same board for several devices to cut the production costs, which means that we could actually "upgrade" our cheaper device by fitting the missing components on the board.

I can clearly see other jumper and switches which are not connected, I'm wondering what they are for...

[donluca]

Yep, the Extron really really likes 576i 50Hz material.

The image is absolutely PERFECT, flawless.
Tested with PS2, PS3, Saturn and Wii.
On all these there's no shaking and the image is crystal clear, although the scanlines are thinner due to higher resolution.

480i with DDSP disabled makes a 2 line shake, I inspected closely.
I'm wondering... if I fail at finding a way to have V Shift on my Extron, is there a circuit which will allow me to shift down the image by two fields? Or even better by an arbitrary number of fields.

[donluca]

...and I failed.

Miserably.

Just to make sure, I used the same pot, I removed it from the H Shift and put where the V Shift was supposed to be and... nothing.

I've checked all the wirings, tried all the jumpers (even those undocumented) and made sure that all required components were there (and they were!) and I couldn't get it to work.

I'm absolutely sure this is a software lockout and can't be bypassed without dumping the ROM, modifying it and flashing it anew, something I'm unable to do, sadly.

Oh well... I guess I'll have an Extron RGB 109xi modified unit for sell and I'll go after another unit which has the Vertical Shift.