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Thread: Replacing the Nomad screen

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    Great Puma (Level 12) jonjandran's Avatar
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    Default Replacing the Nomad screen

    Tired of that pathetic Nomad screen? Wish you had a nice new Lcd in there? Well now you can.

    First things first. Get rid of the old Lcd.
    Open up the Nomad. You will need a security bit for the bottom/middle screw. After you open the Nomad , pull the circuit board up and you will see the Lcd. Pull it of and then pull of the lcd cable attached to the main board.



    Now you just ruined your Nomad. Just kidding

    Here is the new Lcd we will be using :
    http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.20415
    It is $50 shipped.



    When we take it apart it will look like this :


    Now what you want to do is get out your hot glue gun and glue the new Lcd into place. Make sure you get it centered. be aware the Lcd hole on the Nomad is slightly slanted so the Lcd will be slightly slanted when mounted.



    Now it's time to solder the wires necessary to power the screen and get video to it.
    You will be soldering 4 wires. 2 grounds, power, and video. the 2 ground wires go to the same spot on the Lcd's board.



    Here is where the wires will be soldered to the Nomad's board :



    And some closeups :





    After it is wired you will want to mount the Lcd's board on top of the Lcd. I put a small piece of paper between them to protect against shorts. You can then hot glue the 4 corners to hold it in place. :



    Now put the Nomad back together. Make sure the wires are crimped anywhere, or in the way of the buttons.

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    Great Puma (Level 12) jonjandran's Avatar
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    Plug it in and see the new Lcd in all it's glory.




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    Great Puma (Level 12) jb143's Avatar
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    Pretty cool, I was thinking of doing something similar myself. I was thinking of tapping RGB but this looks much easier.

    Questions...It looks like your tapping the video signal off the video out port. How does this affect hooking it to a tv? Does the brightness knob do anything at this point? Do you disable the CCL high voltage? or is that on the Nomads LCD?...I can't remember. And the main thing...how does it affect battery life? I'd imagine it would increase it drastically if the new screen uses LED backlighting.
    "Game programmers are generally lazy individuals. That's right. It's true. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Since the dawn of computer games, game programmers have looked for shortcuts to coolness." Kurt Arnlund - Game programmer for Activision, Accolade...

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    Great screen replacement...I've been looking for a good size matching one for months....Questions though, how bad is the new LCD screen lag with the Genesis/Nomad low resolution (if most likely there any)?....
    ....Excellent clean job indeed..
    ...
    Last edited by ooXxXoo; 11-13-2009 at 12:04 PM.
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    Great Puma (Level 12) jonjandran's Avatar
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    It doesn't affect hooking it up to a tv. Just like using a splitter and running 2 tv's off one rca. Same thing.

    Nope brightness nob now does nothing. Doesn't need to because this screen is plenty bright as-is.

    The high voltage is on the Lcd so it comes off.

    Battery life is now terrific with a total of 230mA being drawn now.

    And there is no noticeable lag whatsoever anymore

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    Great Puma (Level 12) jonjandran's Avatar
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    Just wanted to post a pic of what the screen normally looks like with the regular Nomad screen:

    Last edited by jonjandran; 02-25-2010 at 04:02 PM.

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    Insert Coin (Level 0) gumbyandpals's Avatar
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    Have you looked into using RGB for the LCD? Is there any part information printed on top of the ICs that might give some information as to which pins output RGB (if I could find the datasheets)?
    My Feedback: http://www.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?t=117973

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    Great Puma (Level 12) jonjandran's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by gumbyandpals View Post
    Have you looked into using RGB for the LCD? Is there any part information printed on top of the ICs that might give some information as to which pins output RGB (if I could find the datasheets)?
    I guess I could try it , but composite looks so good, I really don't think it would be much of an improvement on such a small screen.

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    Do you know if there's any cheaper LCDs that work? Or has anyone tried one? I know I sound like a real cheapskate, but I do have several projects going right now, so the less I spend the better. I'll eventually do this, but I'd like to do it sooner rather than later.

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    Great Puma (Level 12) jb143's Avatar
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    $50 shipped seems pretty cheap to me. For my engineering senior project a few years ago we bought a composite LCD module(no case to remove, just the screen and circuit board) for $120. Looking for one now, it's hard to find anything in the $50 price range that can accept a composite or RGB signal. They're all just digital input that needs additional circuitry to work with a standard input.
    "Game programmers are generally lazy individuals. That's right. It's true. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Since the dawn of computer games, game programmers have looked for shortcuts to coolness." Kurt Arnlund - Game programmer for Activision, Accolade...

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    Quote Originally Posted by jb143 View Post
    $50 shipped seems pretty cheap to me. For my engineering senior project a few years ago we bought a composite LCD module(no case to remove, just the screen and circuit board) for $120. Looking for one now, it's hard to find anything in the $50 price range that can accept a composite or RGB signal. They're all just digital input that needs additional circuitry to work with a standard input.
    I sort of figured. But just for perspective, I bought a new 22'" LCD monitor for my computer a little over a month ago for $90.

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    You can get the same 3.5" on Ebay for around $30 shipped.

    This one also works just fine but you will have to find the pinouts yourself

    http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...fvi%3D1&_rdc=1
    Last edited by jonjandran; 01-20-2010 at 05:21 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by jonjandran View Post
    You can get the same 3.5" on Ebay for around $30 shipped.

    This one also works just fine but you will have to find the pinouts yourself

    http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...fvi%3D1&_rdc=1
    Thanks a lot. I noticed that the resolutions on the dealextreme unit are different than the one you linked on ebay- but I guess it doesn't quite matter? I looked around on ebay a bit, but only found one like the deal extreme monitor and it was $48 before shipping.

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    First rule of fight club......don't believe ANYTHING dealextreme says

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    Bump for an awesome (necessary) mod for the Nomad. I am not normally into modding, but this one is for an excellent cause.

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    Has anyone who has tried this had any display issues?

    For the most part it seems fantastic , but on Test Drive II the intro, car selection, course selection, and 'intermission' station screens and round scoring all exhibit severe graphics shearing off to the right hand side. Is this something that is a known issue?

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    Quote Originally Posted by remowilliams View Post
    Has anyone who has tried this had any display issues?

    For the most part it seems fantastic , but on Test Drive II the intro, car selection, course selection, and 'intermission' station screens and round scoring all exhibit severe graphics shearing off to the right hand side. Is this something that is a known issue?
    Sounds like the LCD screen you used doesn't care for the resolution that game is putting out. Doubt it's a Nomad issue.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Leo_Ames View Post
    Sounds like the LCD screen you used doesn't care for the resolution that game is putting out. Doubt it's a Nomad issue.
    It's the screen shown in this thread. I figured it's probably a resolution issue, but wanted to see if anyone else has noticed the same thing.

    Also I haven't exactly run through the entire Genesis library during testing and was wondering if other games that could have similar output might be affected...

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    Quote Originally Posted by remowilliams View Post
    It's the screen shown in this thread. I figured it's probably a resolution issue, but wanted to see if anyone else has noticed the same thing.

    Also I haven't exactly run through the entire Genesis library during testing and was wondering if other games that could have similar output might be affected...
    An easy way to confirm that it indeed is a resolution issue with the LCD screen would be to output the game to a tv. If the problem doesn't happen when using tv/out, then you can be certain it isn't some oddity with the Nomad hardware that causes it not to play the game correctly.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Leo_Ames View Post
    An easy way to confirm that it indeed is a resolution issue with the LCD screen would be to output the game to a tv
    Yes it does output correctly using AV out to an external display, so it's definitely some sort of limitation or something on the replacement LCD.

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