ClearVideo - My take on the install
Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2023 11:00 pm
You can take the CHROMA&LUMA wires from this little board and run a SVIDEO cable. If you do that you wouldn’t have to modify anything on the board, but you would need to run a cable to the outside of the case somehow (drill a whole?). So I decided to do a little modifying.
I’m still trying to find the 5PIN DIN video connectors for the VIC. I think I found some (the 64s are easy to find). Knowing I could buy replacements, I decide to go ahead and modify what was originally on the board. The connector comes apart very easy, so I made these modifications:
1 - Remove pin 1, the 6V pin, no need to send 6 volts to anything by accident. It was only used for the external RF modulator.
2 - Remove the mother board connection for pins 4 & 5 by pulling them out of the DIN
3 - Ran the old pins 4 & 5 connections to the back of the DIN
The idea was that I would repurpose those pins (originally Composite Out and Composite-HIGH out) for the CHROMA and LUMA signals. I took the pins out of the connector and flipped them over, then bend the back ends (the parts sticking up used to go down into the motherboard). The idea was to bend them a little to get them to clear the white snap-on part of the DIN. This keeps the metal connecting pockets from extending as far into the DIN then they did originally, but there is more than enough contact and seems to work just fine.
This is what it looks like with the two wires running from the CLEARVIDEO:
I think this is a clean solution that would have no effect on system board. The original instructions mention cutting traces and removing components to allow you to feed the Chroma and Luna through the motherboard to pins 4 & 5.
With this DIN modification, to revert to the old video all you would need to do would be to remove the CLEARVIDEO board and replace the DIN with a complete unmodified version.
I’m still trying to find the 5PIN DIN video connectors for the VIC. I think I found some (the 64s are easy to find). Knowing I could buy replacements, I decide to go ahead and modify what was originally on the board. The connector comes apart very easy, so I made these modifications:
- VIC-20 Video DIN Small.png (19.88 KiB) Viewed 3302 times
2 - Remove the mother board connection for pins 4 & 5 by pulling them out of the DIN
3 - Ran the old pins 4 & 5 connections to the back of the DIN
The idea was that I would repurpose those pins (originally Composite Out and Composite-HIGH out) for the CHROMA and LUMA signals. I took the pins out of the connector and flipped them over, then bend the back ends (the parts sticking up used to go down into the motherboard). The idea was to bend them a little to get them to clear the white snap-on part of the DIN. This keeps the metal connecting pockets from extending as far into the DIN then they did originally, but there is more than enough contact and seems to work just fine.
This is what it looks like with the two wires running from the CLEARVIDEO:
I think this is a clean solution that would have no effect on system board. The original instructions mention cutting traces and removing components to allow you to feed the Chroma and Luna through the motherboard to pins 4 & 5.
With this DIN modification, to revert to the old video all you would need to do would be to remove the CLEARVIDEO board and replace the DIN with a complete unmodified version.
