 Hey everybody, I'm Steve. Welcome back today. It's a little bit of a different setup. It's extremely cold where I live in Tennessee and that makes it very difficult to do any real CRT work or any circuit board work in general when you don't have central heating in your shop like I don't. But that's okay. There's still some things we could talk about. There's some projects that I wanted to go through and this is a good time to go and highlight some of those some of the other things going on in the CRT community that are important and definitely progressing towards a better position for many of us who've been waiting for certain things to happen in the CRT world of things, especially with some of these higher-end monitors, for example that only maybe support S-Video and Composite, but have the capabilities to do RGB, but just don't have the hardware installed in them. That's the project we're going to highlight today and one of the people that has done an incredible amount of work behind the scenes is Martin and he also goes by Scumlose. He was not only successful in reverse engineering, the BKM, Sony BKM129X, which is an RGB component card for the D-Series monitors, the D-14s and then the L-5s and L-2s. That was very helpful because that card has been more difficult to get over the last couple of years, but today's project is for the monitor that doesn't have the slot to actually add a card like that. We're going to go look at his project on a 20L1. So if you come across a 20L1, this is a model of PVM that supports Composite Video and S-Video only, you can add RGB to it to make it into a 20L2 using Martin's procedure that we're going to go through here in just a second. First off, I did make a post about this back when it was announced to me on January 11th and then I also want to look at an article on RetroRGB.com posted by Ronnie and this just kind of highlights a little bit more information on my friend Martin who did this reverse engineering and again it's a good kind of summary of the job. Of course we're going to link down here to Martin's specific page where he's done the write-up on here and go through this job in a little bit more detail just in case maybe you want to see a video format of this so we can kind of talk about how this procedure should go down and hopefully within the next six months to here I can find one of these versions of either an L-series or N-series and do this type of a modification to it to actually show you what that procedure is like in a video format. But for now we can take a look at what Martin has done and again here's the great write-up by Ronnie. I'll link that in the description. We're going to jump now over to the actual post by Martin which is down here under this and it's listed as a Sony PVM 20 L1 RGB mod and what we're trying to accomplish here is enabling RGB and this particular monitor uses a specific jungle chip this TDA 9394H that has the capabilities to inject RGB into that chip. It's just locked out generally speaking on these lower end L1 series monitors when they were in production. But let's say you want to do this project now and start and try to do it. Let's go walk through it. So first we're going to enable the RGB in the monitor settings before we even do any hardware modification on it. So enabling the RGB involves getting into the service menu and then going into the signal page and tabbing down to the system page and ultimately into this maintenance ID basically typing 111 once you get into that maintenance ID it should show zero like it does in this top picture when you first get into the system tab on the service menu and then put in the ones and it'll take you to a secondary tab that you can get into where you can go down to a design sub folder on there and if you look at the design sub folder you need to go down to the IE2 bit and the way to basically unlock that bit is to press enter on it put a 1 and then you'll be able to hit enter again and then activate that bit and then if everything was hooked up right now you said you'd get a nice RGB signal but it'd be a black and white. So this paragraph right here explains how the monitor kind of will only accept C-sync unless you build a RGB encoder amp on something like the SCART input board which will show in a second which I'd recommend just if you're going to try this mod go through and order the parts that we'll look at in a second but that's what this is explaining about how this but there's an additional option that you need to find which is just a couple down from the DES it's under the engineering tab and there's a comb filter setting on in that engineering folder and it needs to be changed to forced okay so this is a good thing to go in and check to see because he said there might be a possibility if you have a firmware before the 1.2 firmware on your monitor that this might not be on there but just go in and check before you could go and check both of these settings before you make the changes to see if they're there and if they're available or if you need to upgrade your firmware before even trying to do this mod but most likely the comb filter setting is there and it needs to be changed from auto to forced and then save the settings so make sure that you've got the again the two things that are important are the IE2 set to 1 and then the comb filter set to forced and that should enable you to have RGB as far as the software side is concerned in the monitor and now you can move on to hooking up the RGB and doing the hardware modification so what we'd first want to recommend is getting some of the parts that are listed for this specific job over here and this is again all by scum and martin it's open source and here's the OSH park order sheet for it you're looking at almost 16 under $16 us for this board and then the board does have some components laid out on it that you can build out of it so it's really easy to use this board to put in the proper resistors capacitors and anything else you may need to be able to go from scart into the jungle chip which you're going to hook up momentarily from now on to the actual jungle chip spots here so once you get inside the monitor you need to go through and do your normal things where you remove that outer shell by removing all the screws on the back plastic part as well as the side of the shell and then once you've removed that shell you'll need to get the circuit boards out so that means you need to discharge the monitor pull the main circuit board and then you'll want to locate this area where this actual jungle chip is located let's take a closer look at this image and see this is IC 001 it appears the first thing you want to do is locate the chip and then you need to locate these capacitors and they need to be removed okay so there's actually a list of the capacitors here that need to be removed and then this photo shows those four capacitors that were ultimately removed right there so you can see a nice close-up photo of that and then what you need to do is make wires to jump into your blue green and red signals and then this is your blanking signal and then martin needs to get ground from somewhere so he uses a ground pin that's up here on the monitor which is perfectly good to use and then secures it the cabling in place and once that is done you can run the cabling through like you would any other cabling along the side of the monitor now one other spot you're going to have to connect into this is the backboard where you've got audio in and then this is the composite in the yellow wire now the reason we're going to need those we're going to need some way to get sync okay composite sync and we're just going to tap into the composite sync or composite video signal right here for sync and then this will be our audio signal so that we can force those two things to be connected to our new input connection so you can use you know line B once you've done all this to actually use the use the video and audio signals all together and actually get the rgb signal on your screen synced now there is an awesome thing that he also created on here for the skirt head now you can do this in any other format you want if you just want to use b and c's and attach them to something like the back of the shell or you'll have to go in then and design something where you can add the resistors and capacitors that are needed to attenuate or attune that rgb line but this is a look at how martin had his and again that is the oge park designed board right there built out he's got really good instructions on here about it and then he's got a 10 pin connector and that 10 pin connector if we zoom down here that's what's coming out of the monitor so that's got obviously our red green blue our vertical sink our ground and then the blanking line and then the audio line and so it's a nice clean connector using that 10 pin i mean there's not 10 data lines on there but the 10 pin should be easy that way you can have a nice clean i really like the way he he's got designs right here for source files for the 3d print design on here for this coupler that he kind of made and housing for this scarred head so you just need the scarred head and then if you have access through to a 3d printer this is great or if you can get somebody to do this job for you that has a 3d printer that would be even nicer so hopefully one day we'll be able to get these parts in this monitor and get this job actually done but in the meantime let's just continue on this is the way again martin has his design he's you could go in here and even see which points are populated with what there's a resistor also that is a 1k resistor from blanking to ground that's in there in here that's important and then the scarred design i really like the way how it comes together obviously you're connecting your 10 pin in here like it is right here but the finished product looks amazing and so what i'm guessing is is this switch right here activates the input back here so if you still want to use this composite in s video in i'm betting it still works otherwise you put the monitor on line b on your settings and then you probably have this switch turned on where it's actually activated the inputs back here but at the end of the day here's the finished job obviously it looks really good and this is a 600 line tube on here so it's you end up with a really nice monitor you still do have geometry controls in this monitor so it has a full sub menu it's limited on the buttons on the front as far as like access to the monitor itself but that's pretty much it i just want to take one more second to to say how great it is to have people like martin still helping this scene he's way smarter than i am and there's way more about circuit board design and obviously signal how to get signals and manipulate them in the right way and manipulate these machines to unlock a lot of things just to highlight a lot again i'll put a link to these site of his he has many different rgb modding things that he's worked on for jvc monitors that have not got rgb already in them so if you come across one of those you can use the same kind of system and instructions some of these do involve an arduino device which again is something that i'm not too extremely familiar with but he does do a good job again about how you know telling you how to use this device or point in the right direction to figure out how to use them i do plan on asking martin to come on and do an interview and talk about some of the work that he's done and other things he may have coming down for us in this year next year whatever if he's still going to be working on projects as i have a suspicion that he is and just kind of pick his brain about what the process has been like what monitors if he ever runs in into any that the mods don't work on and because i always think that's interesting if there's anything that you try this on and it doesn't still work but anyway definitely go check out his work and thanks again to everybody for watching the video and let me know what you think if you think this job looks like something you're going to try definitely let me know how it goes and i will see you guys next time with some more retro content