Wild Things PSone LCD to PC

Hi,

New to this forum but I will be a regular no doubt. First thank you to all the people for posting the info regarding the PSOne LCD mod, I think this is one of the best PC Mods/Car Mods to date and shout to Starfox for his write up.

Being impatient I bought what looked like a cheapy PSOne screen from eBay however it turned out to be just that... cheap. It's a Wild Things PSOne 4" LCD Monitor but the internal build quality is really bad, probably done in a sweat shop or a knock off factory. I don't know who the TFT is made by but it looks like a cheap build but sturdy and has three small pots for adjustment.

I want to wire this up but I don't know if it can be wired up via the method employed by Starfox and others i.e connecting it to a VGA cable as the board looks very basic in design compared to the Sony version (far less IC's). The back panel is similar to the PSOne as shown on Starfox's site however it has an additonal cigarette lighter socket and two Audio jacks (I think they are audio jacks only, not the Audio/Video as found on the official Sony ones). Looking at the back the circuit layout is very similar to the official Sony version which is why I am thinking it could possibly be wired up to a VGA cable but the board has a white label marked RGB so I am assuming the Wild Things board is RGB/Composite only?

The unit comes with two front mounted switches for power and one that lets you select game or AV input (this is a plus as I can use the switch to manually power on the device). The device also comes with the two speakers (which I am going to cut off as they are not needed) and seperate pots to control colour, brightness, tint and volume.

I would appreciate any input before I start to hack this to peices, if it can be wired up to VGA I will be happy otherwise I will go for the TV Out from a PCI ATi card (I am already running two monitors from my 9800 Pro AGP card).

I also have a spare RGB cable that was originally used for a graphics monitor (has VGA at one end and five BNC wires at the other end, Blue, Red, Green, Black V sync and Grey V/H sync) - would this be a good alternative to wiring up the PSOne screen rather than creating a cable from scratch?

For power I am using a hand built internal PSU to PSOne power connector, I bought a DC to DC cable from Maplins and a Molex extender (female, male, male) and connected one male molex to a female molex (single cable) that I had butchered so I only had the yellow wire and the black wire (12v + ground). I took the the yellow wire and fused it (can't remember the rating, it was the smallest I could find), I took both the yellow and black wires and soldered these to a female DC connector (from Maplins again) which has a nut fixing. I too a blank PCI slot cover and drilled a hole 10mm hole in which I mounted the female DC connector - so I had the following:

Female DC connector >>> Grnd Wire + 12v Wire >>> fused 12v wire >>> female Molex connector attached to a three-way Molex extension.

I took the DC to DC wire and connected this to the DC in on the PSOne monitor connector, hey presto I have 12v power and the monitor fires up! Later on I will remove the PCI plate (used for external connections) and route the power internally or take my next idea of ripping the guts out of a CD-ROM case and using this to house the circuit and power leads for the monitor.

Pics below to give you guys an idea of what I am dealing with (sorry for the quality, my digi camera is dead after my son decided it looked better in our fish tank so I am using the camera built into my mobey).

Thanks in advance,

Godz.

http://www.finalzero.com/images/psone/1.jpg
The Victim... my YY Server Cube will house the finished LCD panel

http://www.finalzero.com/images/psone/4.jpg
The contents of the box, mains power, cigarette power and the monitor.

http://www.finalzero.com/images/psone/5.jpg
A shot of the back of the Wild Things PSOne monitor.

http://www.finalzero.com/images/psone/6.jpg
The LCD screen inside its housing.

http://www.finalzero.com/images/psone/7.jpg
A shot of the circuit board, the chip in the top middle is surrounded by pots and resistors and I am assuming this is the RGB controller.

http://www.finalzero.com/images/psone/8.jpg
The guts of the Wild Things PSOne monitor.

http://www.finalzero.com/images/psone/9.jpg
The rear connectors, left black is power, yellow next to it is for a 12v cigarette lighter connection, a connector for the Sony AV lead, what is supposed to be a AV input from a DVD or other AV source and the right most connection is for Audio (head phones I think).

http://www.finalzero.com/images/psone/10.jpg
The two switches, left is power and right is for Game or AV

http://www.finalzero.com/images/psone/11.jpg
The LCD screen in all its glory, I gave it a good old clean so it would shine! You can see the invertor circuit attached to it.

http://www.finalzero.com/images/psone/12.jpg
The circuit board (sorry for the fuzzy pics) and as you can see its quite a basic board compared to the Sony one... the four pots, two blue pots for colour and tint and two wheels for brightness and volume. Those square white things were used to hold up the LCD screen away from the board inside the plastic housing... tacky design.

http://www.finalzero.com/images/psone/13.jpg
The back of the LCD.. see what I mean by cheap design, I think that foil stuff is to stop any interference.

http://www.finalzero.com/images/psone/14.jpg
The LCD in all its glory... you may have noticed I took the plastic screen that was mounted to the white housing and fixed it to the front of the LD screen.

Okay guys, think I found half the answer after finally finding M Pro's thread on this forum.

I have a pre-wired BNC to VGA Cable (these can be had from eBay or an good PC or electronics shop) which is exactly right as far as pin outs are concerned however because the Wild Things board is such a crap build there are no indicators as to what is pin 1 etc so I am taking a big risk by performing the wiring - I checked and rechecked as best I can but its still a risk so if anyone has come across the Wild Things PSOne LCD and modded it I would like to know the details please.

Cheers,

Godz

search all the post about this topic including the ones i did your questions were already answered there.


danon

Okay,

I think I worked it out, after having a good read through the gamesx.com site I found the pinout details that I needed to workout what wires where.

For anyone who has a Wild Things PSone monitor, please follow this guide:

1. goto gamesx.com Playstation A/V Pinouts

follow the two pics and workout what the pin arrangements are, on a Wild Things board its easier to work out the pin arrangements if you look at the image of the AV MULTI OUT connector (second image on right) and then get your Wild Things power board and look at the AV MULTI OUT connector.

You will see that the plastic connector is surface mounted and on the back has legs going through the board (soldered on the other side) - you will notice that the pin arrangement is inverted compared to the guide provided by Starfox, thats because the Sony version is not mounted in the same fashion as the Wild Things connector.

If you look at the guide on gamesx.com and then follow each leg to its soldered point you will workout which pin is what.

2. Below is a diagram I put together of the pin arrangement for the Wild Things version of the PSOne monitor:

http://www.finalzero.com/images/psone/04110603.JPG
Sorry for the crap quality but I have marked the pin arrangement for clarity, anyone with one of these monitors should be able to workout what I am on about.

http://www.finalzero.com/images/psone/04110604.JPG
Here is a shot of the AV MULTI OUT connector, I have marked the arrangement of the pins for clarity.

3. Follow M Pro's guide to wire up the the RGB VGA cable to the board.

That should be it, with any luck you should get an image, my initial image was surprisingly good if a little hazey but I have been tweaking the image via Power Strip and I found out the pots on the actual LCD front are used to control the image so a bit of tweaking here resulted in a slightly better image. I am not going to post any images just yet as I first want to workout what the correct settings are for Power Strip using an ATi Radeon, an ATi Rage Pro 128+TV OUT and a Matrox - when done (in a few days) I will post all the details so any Wild Things owners should have all the info they need to get going.

The only thing I need to do now is wire in the correct resistors to improve the RGB signal (I used a res that was near enough to what M Pro suggested).

Cheers and good luck.

Godz

Still no luck, I can get something but its not an image... all I can see are some fuzzy lines and at best a white image tilted at 45 degrees angle so I am assuming I have wired something wrong or I missed something.

I tried an old ATi Rage 128 Pro which resulted in some strange lines and streaks across the screen... I tried various timings that people have suggested but no luck. The Radeon gave me slight hope but all I could get was a thick wavey white bar across the screen, again not stable.

The Matrox is the only one I have not tried, its an old 16MB Matrox so I am hopeful I will have better results. Anyone who has used this mod (i.e using the RGB connection method) did you get an image first time or did you have to tweak the timings?

Powerstrip is odd, I have to reset all the config (deleting the pstrip.ini) in order to go back and create a custom resolution however I am unable to adjust the screen postion or size, everything is greyed out.

To make matters worse the damn printed board has lost some copper tracks that connect the soldering points to the MULTI AV OUT so now I have to resolder the wires to another point, guessing at best here as Wild Things have covered the important tracks with a black paint (possibly to stop someone duplicating the board?).

Any ideas?

*thanks Danon for the tip, I will look through your posts*

Hi,

another update and a plea for help.. I finally got Powerstrip to behave itself, turns out it was the graphics card's, I settled for a Matrox Millenium II PCI which supports C-Sync and after some persuasion went down to the required refresh rate.

I am not enitrely sure what is going on, the Wild Things board uses a seperate onboard on/off switch to switch on the LCD and takes a 12v standard DC input. When I connect the VGA cable to the graphics card all I see are red, blue and green dots either scattered around or after some tweaking in Powerstrip banded lines going across made up of red, blue and green dots. I read one of the posts on this forum that talked about not enough power and I am wondering if the LCD needs the additional +5v input as this would normally be provided by the PSOne console?

From what I can tell of the main board, it has a RGB controller chip so the output is definitely RGB, I haven't tested the composite connection yet but I am confident that will work okay. I want to know what other's experienced the first time they wired up the screen, what did you see if anything and did you experience similar visuals as to what I experienced i.e a garbled display or banded lines made up of red, green and blue dots?

Thanks in advance,

Godz

Look The psone is truly RGB BUT expects composite synchro signal.

Your VGA computer is sending spreaded H & V synchronization signal.
What you have to find is how to multiplex those two signals.

Second thing you need is one program able to adjust clock timings.
There's one better for the use you want (displaying wihtout having to play with) than powerstrip which is not it's first function.
Internet is wide and there's everything you need on it in the cas you don't find anything interesting here.

Consider more your psone display as a simple TV !
The thing you are searching is how to convert VGA to TV with a 50 or 60Hz refresh speed ;)
Why i don't give you links ?
Just because it will make you search and understand more than simply cut, paste and apply which will help you for nothing.

(sorry about my english).

Hey Dude...

I tried and tried to make a 4" psone screen from Interact work for weeks (ok...truthfully, only days)...Never got back any love! The real deal Sony 5" scrrens seems to work and one or two (very specific) off brands which actually have RGB seem to work.

Check out gamestop or electronic boutique (sp?) as the ones here near me have bundle deals for like $45-$55 with used psone and lcd and they are real sony.

For me, in the end I just thought I would save my pennies and get a real lcd from Xenarc or something, though I still haven't ;-)

Thanks guys,

Oracle, I understand what you are saying and yes I have learn't a great deal however I am confident that this screen can work as looking at M Pro's guide and the screen shots of this screen it looks very similar to this one.

I will give the RGB one more go but if I have no joy then I will settle for the TV out.

Cheers guys,

Godz

Ok ok i can't let you with no informations here's a link which is really worth and as i see that you dismantled everything and for the surviving of the poor screen
http://www.hut.fi/Misc/Electronics/circuits/vga2tv/

You will also find the needed software. Please take time to read informations there. You should find too a schematic which very simple, the only thing you have to change is the voltage of the nedded supply and lower it from 5v to 1v. If you don't, you are exposing at risk your display and / or graphics card. The Tv out is average but lower in quality than a correct RGB. ;)