HDMI and RGB mods for different consoles

The price for the HDMI board will be below $100 hopefully.

There is still a big demand for the usual TV-out mod for the handhelds, but I have been looking into LCD replacements as well, which can be driven directly from the HDMI board, so it makes sense to include it anyway.

I'm sure I can make an LCD replacement mod for the Game Gear / Nomad / Lynx for a very reasonable price.

Also, I'm still testing a chip which can do up-scaling and output both HDMI and VGA / RGB simultaneously.
It should also lower the cost of the HDMI kits very slightly, and still allow an LCD to be driven at the same time.

 

I understand the concept of creating all these devices is exciting, but I think given the little amount of time you have to work on all these systems at once, wouldn't it make sense to concentrate on consoles that don't have a working well established solution first?

McWill's thread: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/233632-lynx-lcd-replacementvga-out-by-mcwill/
YouTube video showing the game gear mod in action:

His devices do have "TV out", in VGA mode. Yet, a lot of people opt to not install out-to-TV, including myself. I prefer the stock/unmodified look of my handheld console. Drilling holes into these gems gives me the shivers. I would also never use out to TV.

LCD quality that surpasses Nintendo DS has already been achieved by his solution and unlike the old GG "blue border" mods .. these are full screen, fully digital, and support a lot of extra bells and whistles. Modern LED backlit LCD included in $100 price (and his profit too!)

I would be interested in seeing mods for consoles that don't have anything available for them though.

 

I should upload some videos of me drilling holes in consoles.

Personally for the Game Gear, I did two separate units - One uses Tim Worthington's Game Gear TV output (I used an HD-15 connector) along with a 9 pin joystick connector for TV use. The second uses the McWill mod for the screen and leaves all extra ports (holes) off the stock case. So leonk - If you came over to my place, I would hide the TV out one and only let you see the McWill version to help preserve your sanity.

 

You figured a company spent millions of dollars in market research to make their new shiny toy appeal to the mass market; 20+ years later people collect said toys for nostalgia; but .. we know better! Lets drill into them! install an RGB port, HDMI, hell .. might as well install a female SCART port on the back while we're at it!

It's your console. Do what you want with it. Personally, all my RGB modded consoles and all my LCD modified handhelds all look stock. I'm OCD like that.

 

@leonk - I am concentrating on the Dreamcast as a starting point, but many of the other consoles are simply enough to mod.

The firmware has been done for a majority of moddable consoles / computers, I just need to make guides now for how to physically install the board etc.

I'm aware of McWill's (and others) mods, and I intend on doing my own LCD mod for the Game Gear, Atari Lynx, and others.

I don't really like "stepping on toes" if I can help it though, so I may only target the machines which don't already have a solution, like you say. The Atari Lynx could be a good choice, and it will of course be an all-digital LCD mod as well.

I have also given thought to all combinations of mods, so letting people choose exactly which ports they want etc. (if any)

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of putting too many holes in the older (8-bit, and early 16-bit) era machines like the Atari 2600, Beeb, Speccy, or even the Amiga, as there were far fewer of those machines released compared to newer ones like the SNES, Genesis, Xbox, Dreamcast, PS1, PS2 etc.

But, as you say, it is up to the owner whether they want to mod their own stuff. It's just sad to see big gaping holes cut into stuff (like in the top of the Amiga case, as is the trend at the moment for adding the LCD module for the Gotek USB floppy drives emulators.)

That's why I switched to a mini-HDMI socket instead of a full-sized HDMI socket, so the mod would be as minimal as possible.

btw, I'm not exactly sure why it was necessary to add external SRAM (or SDRAM?) to the Game Gear LCD mod board?
There are ways to expand the image on the Game Gear games without using an external framebuffer.

OzOnE.

 

You should ask McWill that question. I'm sure he has a reason for it. It could be because of the many different resolutions these has to support:

- game gear native resolution
- SMS native resolution
- LCD native resolution
- VGA out resolution

Full installation instructions for both GG console types can be found in the AA forum.

Before he did the GG, he did the Atari Lynx. I have one of of his earlier versions; it does not have switchable scanlines generation. But I find myself playing my GG with scanlines off. They're so tiny on that 3" screen.

 

I didn't realize that retrorgb has posted about his 2 LCD mods with some technical details. Here they are:

http://retrorgb.com/lynx.html

http://retrorgb.com/gamegearmcwilllcd.html