A600 Junior RGB to HDMI


The A600 Junior motherboard has some very useful improvements compared to the original Amiga 600 motherboard. One such improvement is a bunch of through-holes under where the RF modulator usually goes (and can indeed go, if you're that way inclined) that provide all the signals required by RGB to HDMI adaptor boards, and also 5V and GND for power:


The RGB signal through-holes are designed to take 2mm-pitch header pins, while the 5V and GND through holes accept the slightly larger 2.54mm-pitch pins, as you can see, here (credit: idoregesz.hu):


There is no universal standard for RGB to HDMI boards, so no adapter exists that you can just plug into the Junior's RGB pins.

I bought a basic RGB to HDMI board that looks something like this:


I then mapped out the flat flex connector pins on the Denise adapter board:
Now all I needed to do was get a PCB made that maps the Junior's RGB and power pins to these FPC connector pins. I went on easyeda.com and knocked up a simple design. A few days later, the PCBs arrived, and here's what I built:



And here it is installed:


The jumper wires are carrying the 5V and GND from the Junior to my adapter board, but it turns out that at this length they pick up interference that shows onscreen, especially with high-contrast graphics like white letters on a black background. Trimming the wires down to the shortest manageable length sorted out the interference.

At last, my A600 Junior has a pretty neat RGB to HDMI solution installed!

In case you want to try this yourself, here are some things that might be useful:
Note that the HDMI socket mount is not ideal for this purpose - a section of it needs to be cut out to fit around the Junior's RGB header pins. Also, the HDMI socket doesn't fit into the mount properly with this RGB adapter board in place - it's pushed out towards the back of the Amiga slightly. I'm planning another Junior build, and when I start that, I'll try to make my own modifications to the HDMI socket mount (originally by Teps71), specifically for the Junior.





Comments

  1. Hey Pete! That is an excellent solution for the rgb2hdmi. Ive build the same Amiga 600 Junior. Do you by any chance have the pcb and 3d print available anywhere? I my self got a similar one off ebay and its just not as tidy as your solution. Plus id love to not have to connect over the video chip :D

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    Replies
    1. Hi Christian! After your comment, I added a few links to the blog post, including the PCB gerber zip file. It's a pretty neat solution, though I do need to make my own version of HDMI mount specifically for the Junior. It's good enough for now, but not perfect. I also have a question for you - does your Junior play nicely with a PCMCIA CF card adapter? Mine appears fine, but when doing a large transfer (especially writing to CF (and faster CF cards seem to make it worse)), I see file corruption. I first noticed this when creating a tar file on the CF card (backing up a directory from DH1) - the tar file would seem to be created fine, but was actually corrupted. When writing files, the length of the file remain correct, but I can see when using a hex editor that certain bytes are zeros rather than the correct values from the original file. Using a slower CF card seems to help. Very strange!

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    2. Thank you so much for these! Im gonna give them a go right away. What thickness did you use for the pcb? I have not tried PCMCIA out yet as my card is still in the post but ill let you know as soon as i get it! Do you use any accelerator cards? I know the Furia is very particular about SD/CF cards and it can result in corrupted files.

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    3. No problem!

      I searched my emails and found the settings below for the PCB - I think it was mostly default/cheapest options. :-)

      Ah yes, I do have a Furia in my Amiga Junior. That reminds me...I did remove the Furia from it, and the PCMCIA problems went away. I also tried the Furia in a "normal" A600, and that didn't show any problems with file transfer to the same PCMCIA/SD. It's just the combination of the Furia and the A600 Junior that seems to be problem. Weird. I'll get around to trying to diagnose it one day. :-)

      Build Time: 3 days
      Base Material: FR-4
      Layers: 2
      Dimension: 24 mm* 17.9 mm 24mm* 17.87mm
      PCB Qty: 5
      Product Type: Industrial/Consumer electronics
      Different Design: 1
      Delivery Format: Single PCB
      PCB Thickness: 1.6mm
      Specify Stackup: no
      PCB Color: Green
      Silkscreen: White
      Material Type: FR4-Standard TG 135-140
      Via Covering: Tented
      Surface Finish: HASL(with lead)
      Deburring/Edge rounding: No
      Outer Copper Weight: 1 oz
      Gold Fingers: No
      Electrical Test: Flying Probe Fully Test
      Castellated Holes: no
      Edge Plating: No
      Mark on PCB: Order Number
      4-Wire Kelvin Test: No
      Paper between PCBs: No
      Appearance Quality: IPC Class 2 Standard
      Confirm Production file: No
      Silkscreen Technology: Ink-jet/Screen Printing Silkscreen
      Package Box: With JLCPCB logo
      Board Outline Tolerance: ±0.2mm(Regular)

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    4. Thank you for these! The boards and parts are ordered :)
      The furia really has been a love hate relationship. It has been working great with amiga os 3.1, but upgrading to 3.2.3 has been a rocky start. Just yesterday it resulted in bad blocks on my workbench partition and i had to reinstall. So yeah i cant say for certain if the furia is to blame but its known to be picky!

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    5. Ah yes, the problems with the Furia are what drove me to build the Junior in the first place - I thought if I could build a "new" Amiga, then that would rule out motherboard issues. I'm still on WB 3.1, and given the problems I've heard people having with their Furias and 3.2, I'll probably stay with 3.1 for now. My Furia was VERY unreliable in all machines I tried it in, but then Supaduper on the English Amiga Board very kindly upgraded the firmware on it, and it's been pretty bullet-proof since then (PCMCIA CF card problems aside).

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