In a previous post, I shared how I converted my PAL Nintendo 64 to NTSC. The problem is that my CRT TV does not support NTSC composite signal, so an RGB mod was mandatory. I used Tim Worthington kit version 3.0.
I’m not going to explain what is already on the official install guide, I’m just sharing my experience…
Overview
Here is the N64 motherboard with what is in the kit : RGB board and wires:
Video encoder
Soldering the wires on the video encoder (DENC-NUS here) is not that hard, but I recommend to put some flux before soldering as this prevent solder join that may not be visible when all the wires are installed. Also, I started to solder the wire on pin 12 in order to fix the ribbon cable before continuing with the 11 remaining ones.
The wires must then be soldered to the N64RGB board. I added some solder to each pad, tined the wires and soldered them on the pads. This step is of course easier than soldering on the video encoder chip.
Video connector
The signal processed by the RGB module must be sent to the ouput connector. Fortunately, the N64’s connector has all the required pins like the SNES, they are just not connected to anything. I used coloured wires corresponding to the video signal (Red, Green, Blue) and black for ground. Also, as I’m using a PAL RGB cable, I bridged JP1,JP2 and JP3.
Below is an overview of the motherboard with all video signals wired. Please, ignore the yellow wire : I tried to bring CS signal to the video output connector on pin 3 as advised on the guide, but with this wire, my TV was switching from 16:9 to 4:3 ratio automaticaly from time to time.
Controller port
With the version 3.0, the RGB kit allows to use the player 1 controller to reboot the console and to enable or disabled the “deblur” function. Even if this part is optionnal, I recommend doing it because the “deblur” is sometime better and sometime worse. You may find usefull to change it “live” while gaming…
Deblur : on VS off
As I said previously, the deblur function is not always better, at least on a CRT. Here are some photos with deblur OFF then ON. Take a close look at the text.
OFF
ON
OFF : look how “Trophy” seems smooth
ON : look how “trophy” looks blocky
OFF
ON
RGB VS Composite in video
These in-game videos has been made on a real CRT TV.
