 All right guys, there's a big important issue we need to talk about with the BKM 129x replacement clone cards for your Sony PVM D14 D9 20 L5 14 L5 or L2 series PVM that is this card right here and What is going on is there's been a redesign of this card for oh, I'd say a year or two now almost And the redesign originally looked something like this, but this is from my friend Martin aka scumlos and Today we need to look over his website because he had a very important update concerning this clone card and a mistake that he made Designing it and that's okay. Hey everybody makes mistakes. I know I make plenty of them so Not really sure what that was going on behind me but anyway, we're gonna go look at this now and take a closer look at what is going on here and There is an easy fix We'll kind of go through that for a second, but I just want to make sure that everybody knows the problem Now if you have an official 129x again, it looks like this from Sony. This is not going to be an issue for you This is just if you have one of these or Or maybe one that you designed on your own or if you've purchased any from any third-party seller please note Martin does not directly sell these these are sold through other sites and Thankfully this problem only affects a very limited Thing and it's the resolution once you get over 480p. So let's just get into it the problem is that when you're viewing 720p and probably 1080i that the 129x design has a low-pass filter using the THS 7374 chip. That's this chip right here and there is a low-pass filter on it and Martin when he designed it did not disable the filter now the filter does not do anything to 240p 480i or 480p It's only going to be 720p. So the reason this is kind of limited is this card only has a couple monitors that can even do 720p or 480p That it works with so the L2 series if you're using this with an L2 series You do not need to worry about this mod or this change. It will not affect your card in any way Only reason you would want to do this is if you're some for some reason using 720p and higher resolutions on either your 20l5 your 14l5 or your BVM D 14 or D9s and that's pretty much it now the other thing to notice is that's something where you're going to get squashed a squashed image Anyway, so your image is going from 4 by 3 down to 16 by 9 widescreen and also the L5 series when it does that it actually lowers the resolution already So it looks blurrier than if it was 480p most of the time That's a little trick that Sony did they they when they squashed it somehow they eliminated some of the TV lines of resolution and that Really can cause a blurred out messy image if you do not disable this low-pass filter. It just blurs it up some more Martin has been kind enough to show us how to make this mod and we're going to go through it All you need to do is locate this chip. It's labeled U2 Locate this chip and find this pin that I'm pointing at right here with my cursor that is pin 9 and there is you can see how there's a Spot here where there's continuity Going to this pin Well that continuity needs to be broken so what you can do is you take a scalpel or a very sharp razor blade and carefully sever that connection point right there on the actual board and then all you need to do is to deactivate it is To short that pin after you've Disconnected the solder or the connection right here. You just bridge it To the very next pin beside it not the end pin, but the very next bridge beside it or bridge it to that pin Now if we take a real-life look at this This chip is extremely small. It's on there. It's one of those tiny chips Right here that my fingers point out. I think that's U2 and so this is almost a microscopic level repair and It might be something that again, if you're not concerned with Using 720p or 1080i you do not need to worry about it This is only if you want to use those resolutions and you do use those resolutions on your 20 l5 your 14 l5 your d14 or your d9 and You want those resolutions to look? As sharp as possible Then you would need to do this modification now if anybody wants to Leave a couple of comments or someone leave a comment about if they want to see me do this repair I do have three of these different variations of this board in my shop right now and So we could go through and do a demo of how to do this little repair, but it's something that you definitely should note It's not a huge deal. It took a long time almost a year to even figure out what was going on with this and Bob from retro RGB picked it out He actually asked me if I had any thoughts on it and they already figured it out before I even got to Really dig in and test the boards that much beyond just I never saw any issues with of course 240p 480i 480p, but again, I didn't use 720p really much at all on The 20l 5 or 14l 5 or the d9 or the d14 because I think there are better Solutions than using those monitors for widescreen anyway I don't like to look at the widescreen on those smaller monitors in the first place So just do this small mod get it repaired and again, maybe we'll do a job on this one I do have a lot more other things coming up from Martin he's been doing some great things. I actually had some chances to work with him on another project And we've got even some maybe things coming. He looks like he wrote up something on the demystifying the 68x bkm and this is something I actually have not read of his So we'll see what he's got going on with this Very complicated. Wow So thanks Martin Maybe one time we'll have him on the show so you could talk about his this project other things He's been doing in CRTs in the last couple years and anything else you might want to know But that's what I would recommend if I get you do not Use this for the 720p and widescreen resolutions And you don't have the ability to do the repair or the tools. I wouldn't even worry about it, but Future versions of the card. I'm sure we'll have a fix to it, but if you did get any that aren't fixed that's That's gonna be an issue if you do use 720p or 1080i on those monitors. That's it for today. Thanks again for watching I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content