Just some film from the cutting-room floor. I thought it never hurts to see what is inside a SCART-style connector and how the wiring is actually arranged, especially when you’ve had a few wires come loose and you’re trying to work out where they belonged. Not that anything like that would ever happen to me!

I’ve got three adapters here to compare. One is the original adapter supplied with the XRGB-mini Framemeister, which I’d already rewired for EuroSCART while waiting for the others to arrive. The other two came from sellers in the UK and US. They might all look fairly similar from the outside, but the construction inside is another story.

The UK adapter was probably the roughest of the lot, with a rather large piece of prototyping board used for its sync-stripping circuit. Several of the little wires came loose far too easily, which wasn’t particularly encouraging. Even the original adapter wasn’t especially impressive once I’d opened it up.

The US adapter was my favourite. Its sync-stripping circuit was assembled much more neatly, with a small, compact arrangement rather than a great big prototyping board. The connector had also been secured with adhesive, presumably to help keep everything together and reduce the strain on the wiring. It even had the longest cable!

My own rewired adapter was much simpler, without a sync-stripping circuit at all. That was useful for my setup because I was having some trouble with the Mega Drive 32X and adapters incorporating those circuits. I was tempted to rebuild the UK adapter to resemble the US one, although having another spare cable wouldn’t hurt either.

This is particularly relevant to the Framemeister because its supplied 21-pin RGB adapter uses the Japanese RGB21 arrangement rather than EuroSCART. The connectors look extremely similar from the outside, but the pin assignments are not the same. I’ve already covered the actual repinning work separately, so this recording is more about showing what is inside the different cables.

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