[lukevp]

It seems like this person is incredibly intelligent and resourceful. Why not just design a new PCB for this instead of modding one? Surely the component cost of 2 connectors and a little PCB could still be in the < $20 range and actually output good quality analog signals? $20 is the same as $3 if you’re also buying CRTs just to play Switch games. This is such a hobby level activity I’m sure people would love a kit + a guidebook, could even provide a 3d printed case.

[nomel]

I think you misunderstand the obsessive, blissful, motivations of a nerd. :)

I was like this when I was younger, where a goal like this would entirely consume me, regardless of practicality, and more of a "see if I can". Some of the best days of my life, where I was most alive, were those times of complete, detrimental, obsession. As I grew older, and patterned by employment, it slowly faded, and sometimes I miss it so much.

https://xkcd.com/356/

(funny enough, I was once nerds sniped about a grids of resistors, to understand PCB trace resistance better, for high currents, because an EE said my intuition was wrong. I made a paint program where you could paint/paste an image, with red being + voltage sources, blue being negative, and greyscale being resistance, and it would show you the current flow through whatever you drew. I was able to prove that my intuition was actually correct!).

[dylan604]

> I think you misunderstand the obsessive, blissful, motivations of a nerd. :)

Kind of the point of a board called Hacker News. Doing it yourself while someone else holds your beer is on a totally different level compared to someone buying something off the shelf at a fraction of the cost.

[sowbug]

Sometimes it's fun to mod something that other people can also easily buy and follow your mod recipe. It's more of a network effect than publishing Gerbers and a BOM.

For example, there are (or maybe were) lots of cheap LED controllers that use proprietary phone apps, but if you crack them open, you find that they're ESP-8266-based, and if you can find the right locations on the PCB, you can reflash them with WLED.

[nyanpasu64]

> I'm not sure where to source straddle-mount VGA connectors. Alibaba has a product listing that describes the same part found in my DAC, but has no pictures of the actual product.

> I also found straddle-mount VGA to break off the board easily

> All of this is possible... but it's a lot of work for an incremental upgrade that doesn't resolve the jitter and audio dropout problems. Compare this to the HDMI2SCART which required more manufacturing effort, but fulfilled a previously unmet use case; even then the author stopped selling them himself because he couldn't find a better source for chips.

[waffleiron]

To reduce e-waste? Not everything has to be optimised on time or money spend.

[actionfromafar]

Maybe the chips aren't available, or maybe they just wanted to tinker.

[dylan604]

As long as it was done in a weekend. Otherwise, they'd suck as a hacker as that seems to be the qualifying time allotted to be cool

[benj111]

Linux Torvalds?