I’ve received a whole bunch of RGB cables from the UK, so naturally I’ve spent the day playing around with the XRGB-mini Framemeister. One of the more interesting experiments involves my Sega Genesis Nomad, which is now connected through a EuroSCART adapter and looking rather lovely.

The colours and picture detail are fantastic. Just look at those Chaos Emeralds! This is a regular Nomad too, without any fancy screen upgrades or other modifications. It’s simply outputting video through the Framemeister.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had quite the same success with every console. The Mega Drive 2 refuses to give me any video with my current cable arrangement, and I’m beginning to suspect the LM1881N sync stripper has something to do with it.

The Saturn seems quite happy, while the Mega Drive Model 1 has been giving me a slightly jittery picture. It’s all rather dependent on which cable and console I’m using, so I’ve got a bit more experimenting to do.

My plan is to rewire another adapter so I’ll have one cable with a sync stripper and another without it. That should make it easier to work out which consoles are happier with which arrangement, rather than trying to guess what’s going on.

Naturally, while pulling one of the cables apart I managed to break three of the tiny internal wires. I lost blue video, ground and something else along the way, so out came the soldering iron again. Nothing like a little extra work when you’re supposed to be testing video cables!

One other thing I discovered is that Japanese Mega Drive cartridges fit into the Nomad. I hadn’t realised that, so there’s another little surprise from today’s tinkering.

For now, though, the Nomad is looking beautiful through the XRGB-mini, even if the other Mega Drives aren’t quite ready to cooperate. Fingers crossed I’ll have some good news once I’ve finished rewiring those cables.

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