For a while now I wanted to connect my MiSTer to my B&O MX4002 CRT television. After deciding for the umpteenth time against ordering a VGA-to-scart cable from a dedicated MiSTer store because the shipping costs more than the cable itself, it suddenly occurred to me that I could try to get it to work with a cable from AmigaKit. Their shipping is much cheaper to my location than the other options.

So I ordered one and connected it and was disappointed because the image from the MiSTer was way out of sync. At first I thought it was because of my MiSTer settings, or even with the cable, because I read various reports on this cable. I tinkered around a bit with the settings and with the jumpers on the IO board, but nothing worked. This are the required settings in the ini file by the way:

• vga-scaler = off
• composite_sync = on

The other option was to mess with the settings on the B&O. I didn’t have reason to think they would be wrong, because my Nintendo 64 works fine on it. But it was worth a shot. I managed to get into the settings menu by pressing MENU 1 1 GO while in tv mode and changed the settings as follows:

• hfq = 26
• hph = 55
• ham = 22
• vam = 30
• vcs = 31
• vsh = 20
• vli = 20
• ewc = 16
• ewp = 20
• ewt = 48

I also connected the MiSTer to the second SCART input and I changed the settings in the SOCKETS menu (visible in the menu if you access it whilst in tv mode):

• PL (Power Link) = Off
• AV1 = V.TAPE-1
• AV2 = Decoder
• S-Video = On (because I have the N64 connected to it)

I can now access the input from AV2 by pressing LIST on the remote multiple times until V.TAPE2 appears and then press GO.

And Voila! A beautiful MiSTer image appears! Yes! The only thing is that the image doesn’t fit nicely on the screen and some shimmering is visible at the top and at the bottom of the screen. Oh, and the colors maybe can be improved. Further tinkering with the settings is required.

Because you can only change the settings in the service menu while in tv mode, you cannot see what effect changing them has on the display. It seems you can circumvent this by taking the following steps:

• connect the source to the 21-pin AV2 input
• go to TV mode
• access the MENU and choose SOCKETS
• change AV2 to Decoder
• press LIST on the remote until DECODER appears and press GO

But in order for this to work, you have to setup the remote to display DECODER in the LIST menu. I still have to do that.