Thinking of buying Framemeister, need help of current owners

[the_importer]

Hi there,

I'm getting really tired of using a CRT for my retro systems. I can't stand the never ending battle with geometry issues and frankly, it would be nice to play these old games on my couch in front of my 40" LED.

I was thinking of buying a Framemeister and getting some RGB cables to go with it. I'll start with the 5 retro systems I own that are already RGB ready (SNES, SMS, Gen+32X, PS1, Sat) and eventually mod my AV Famicom and PCE Duo. Before doing so, I do have some questions for which I hope someone with experience with the Framemeister can answer (I'm in Canada and all of my systems are either North American or Japanese):

1- I know that you can't mix Japanese SCART and European SCART, but what about using SCART switchers like the European Bandridge 5 way SCART splitter? If I use this, will I need to buy a modded Framemeister RGB cable for European SCART or can I still use the Japanese one that came with it? What about the cables for the systems, will I need to buy Japanese or European ones if I use such a switcher?

2- I'm guessing that if I want Stereo sound with my Genesis 1 + 32X combo via SCART, that I'll need to buy a modded stereo 32X patch cable, right?

3- Here's a quick schematic I did using icons from another forum (colors and models can vary from picture), can anyone find anything that could go wrong with this setup?

Thank you for your time

[Ziggy]

1- I know that you can't mix Japanese SCART and European SCART, but what about using SCART switchers like the European Bandridge 5 way SCART splitter? If I use this, will I need to buy a modded Framemeister RGB cable for European SCART or can I still use the Japanese one that came with it? What about the cables for the systems, will I need to buy Japanese or European ones if I use such a switcher?

Get the modified Framemeister cable, it'll make everything that much easier. You can easily mod the one that comes with the Framemeister. If you don't know how to solder, maybe you have a buddy that can help? Otherwise, buying one will just solve a lot of problems. The PAL SCART cables are just easier to get.

As far as switches go... I was looking into this myself. There's not a lot of options. Considering everything, I decided to just go without a switch. I'll just plug/unplug cables as I want to use the consoles. Aside from when I'm testing things out, I don't normally switch between multiple consoles in the same day, so it's not like I'd be constantly plugging and unplugging cables.

My only concern with this is that the mini-DIN connection on the XRGB (the RGB input that breaks out to SCART) isn't the most robust thing in the world. You don't want to be constantly be messing with that thing, it'll wear out. So I came up with the idea to just get a SCART extension cable. I'll need one anyway being that the SCART cables for consoles aren't long enough anyway (and they wont be for you either if your diagram is at least somewhat to scale). So for you I would say just run a SCART extension cable from your XRGB to a main point that all of your retro console's RGB cables can reach, then swap cables there. That's pretty much what I plan on doing. The SCART connection is pretty durable, so no worries of it wearing out from swapping it often.