Add S-Video to Sony HB-F1XD

Cool! Quite an improvement! How does it compare to RGB?

Good news, everyone! I opened up Sony HB-F1XDJ (MSX2+), and it also has CXA1145 video encoder! So you can add S-Video to Sony MSX2+ as well. But not to Sanyo Wavy 35J, it uses Motorola MC1377 encoder, which outputs Y inverted.

XAV-2s will produce a better picture, I'm sure. It uses CXA2075, which consumes a lot of power (compared to CXA1145 or CXA1645). But even with this mod you can work very comfortably in 80 character modes on TV.

Well, soldering is easy, if you practice and use right tools and materials. A basic soldering station is about 50US$, I use Solomon SL-20 and am relatively happy with it. Always have a wet sponge and clean the tip of soldering iron often. Never use solid flux, it's for violins, not for soldering. Use paste flux and clean leftover with alcohol.

Desoldering is pretty hard, and I try to avoid it. For most cases you can cut the pins for existing chip and then easily remove remaining stubs individually. Desoldering wick is great for clearing holes from excessive flux. Once you've desoldered a chip, clean PCB with alcohol. Alcohol is generally my biggest friend during soldering, without it everything would be greasy with paste flux

If you want to solder high pin density SMD components, you'll need a hot air soldering station. I bought a noname chinese station for 170$, but it's not too good. Any well recognized brand name hot air soldering station is very expensive, like 500-1000$. I can't afford that.

Another thing, after I solder I always check for possible shorts, just in case.

For a good fun project, where size and style doesn't matter too much, I highly recommend using DIP chips only, since they are very newbie friendly!

I'm pretty certain that's the same board that in my Sony HB-F1II MSX 2. I'll have to double check the chip to make sure it's a A1145. If it is I'll be doing this mod, I have no choice the composite video is out.

I'm decent enough at soldering, I'll be extra careful with this project though. Only thing is I don't quite understand how the transistors and resistors hook up. Could I have more information?