I've previously blogged about Chinese SCART adaptors. These are very low cost adaptors which convert RGB SCART to HDMI, with two main variations based on their board labels: SCART+HD2 HDMI 2014/12/23 and SHD1000 V1.
In the comments, readers identified that the main IC driving these is the MST6M182 (specifically mst6m182xst-z1). After much searching online and a hint from reader mmuman I managed to track down the datasheet or at least one close enough.
Of note to retro-gaming and retro-computing enthusiasts will be the registers for de-interlacing, including options to disable it entirely (USR_INTLAC). I'm keen to hook-up a micro and start fiddling with registers, as I suspect these could be a very good low-cost option if adequate control of the images was possible
In addition, I've created a source repository to collect these datasheets. It's available at https://github.com/ObsoleteMadness/MSTAR_Datasheets. If you have any further datasheets, please submit a pull request, as I'd be happy to put them up on that repo.
Hi! Any on this? I’m trying to figure out what would be the best way to start poking around via the microcontroller (sending commands). RS-232 doesn’t seem to be available and according to a comment on the previous article, trying to read from it in a certain way causes the memory to be erased. Any ideas on this?
Hi JB. No updates yet, I haven’t had the time to hook it up. It’s definitely not rs-232, instead it’s likely i2s. There should be a pinout on the GitHub repo.
If you’ve got one of the cheap SCART to HDMI adaptors, there’s a little STM8 on the board so you could trace the pins from that.