13 Jan, 2010, Kjwah wrote in the 1st comment:
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So, I completed my vga cable I made out of a cat5e cable, an old monitor d-sub, solder/ing iron and my Xbox 360 core standard composite cable. It's my twist on an article I found on engadget. In fact, the only thing I used from there was the diagram for the 360 connector lol.

After doing this, I can play my games at 1280x1024(what my monitor supports lol 19 inchers are teh awesome).

Here's what it looks like completed. Also, if you're interested in doing this, I can dig up some links for you that I used to research what all the connections on the xbox connector.

Also, as you can tell from the picture, i still need to find housing for everything but I had to show it off. I'm so excited and I just can't hide it. If the picture is too big, I can just link directly to the image instead. let me know.


13 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 2nd comment:
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Quote
After doing this, I can play my games at 1280x1024(what my monitor supports lol 19 inchers are teh awesome).

The fun of building the cable aside, why did you need a custom cable to do this?
13 Jan, 2010, Kjwah wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
Quote
After doing this, I can play my games at 1280x1024(what my monitor supports lol 19 inchers are teh awesome).

The fun of building the cable aside, why did you need a custom cable to do this?


I don't own a television anymore and the store didn't have any of the vga cables. Not that I want to spend fifty dollars on vga cables for the 360. lol
13 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 4th comment:
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Oh. So you could have just bought one but didn't feel like ordering one from e.g. Amazon for ~$10. I was just trying to figure out if there was something special about the one you built (e.g. a special length, extra data, something-or-other). Still pretty cool though.
13 Jan, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 5th comment:
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Good call on using cat 5 cable. It wouldn't have occured to me, but the twisted pairs would probably give you less interference, if you wanted to make a longer one. :)
13 Jan, 2010, Kjwah wrote in the 6th comment:
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David Haley said:
Oh. So you could have just bought one but didn't feel like ordering one from e.g. Amazon for ~$10. I was just trying to figure out if there was something special about the one you built (e.g. a special length, extra data, something-or-other). Still pretty cool though.


Yeah, I could have got one for pretty cheap but I'm impatient and it's more fun to make your own.

quixadhal said:
Good call on using cat 5 cable. It wouldn't have occured to me, but the twisted pairs would probably give you less interference, if you wanted to make a longer one. :)


Yeah, I was a little worried about interference but I'll be redoing this with shielded cables and hopefully using a better soldering iron. haha
13 Jan, 2010, elanthis wrote in the 7th comment:
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David, sometimes the journey is more important than the destination. ;) I've always found it awesome when people make stuff, any stuff, even stuff they didn't strictly need to make. I envy them, honestly. Cool work, Kjwah!
13 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 8th comment:
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Hey now – I didn't say the contrary, in fact I said that already. I was just asking because it sounded like there was something different going on.
14 Jan, 2010, JohnnyStarr wrote in the 9th comment:
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Cool stuff, it reminds me of when I made my own RCA to S-VIDEO converter.
It was quite the "rig" but it worked!

Keep up the mad scientist stuff there kjwah!
14 Jan, 2010, Koron wrote in the 10th comment:
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Pretty sweet. It's funny how even someone with a high degree of software know-how can be completely clueless about esoteric hardware concerns. Congrats on not being in that group!
14 Jan, 2010, Kjwah wrote in the 11th comment:
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Koron said:
Pretty sweet. It's funny how even someone with a high degree of software know-how can be completely clueless about esoteric hardware concerns. Congrats on not being in that group!


Not sure if I'd go that far. The biggest problem with doing stuff like that is being afraid to try it. It's not that hard and it's pretty easy to get a grasp on if you're going hands on while learning the ropes. :) Though, I'm sure the little bit of schooling I did do in this area helped a tad. That was twelve years ago though. :p Gosh, I'm getting old. :/
14 Jan, 2010, Runter wrote in the 12th comment:
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Pretty interesting, but you couldn't find a cat5 cable longer than 6 inches? :)
03 Feb, 2010, backslash_x wrote in the 13th comment:
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Awesome job its true you can buy things like this everywhere but there is no challenge in buying stuff. you get a sense of pride when you make something and it actually works. and not explode.

But i do have a question i realize this is a rig to connect your xbox 360 composite cables to you computer monitor. But with a little redesign could this be used in reverse? Such as to make your computer appear on a TV with composite inputs. I imagine that it should not be too much different in reverse but then again I don't work with VGA all that often. I do know about tuner cards and thing for PC but i am thinking along the lines of a laptop that only has a VGA out port.

I would love the links you got the original idea from as well.
Any opinions or idea?
03 Feb, 2010, Kjwah wrote in the 14th comment:
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I don't think it'd be possible as the only reason this homemade vga cable works for me to run my 360 to my monitor is because the original connector for my 360 has all the connections to convert it to use VGA instead of composite for video display. This also isn't possible with new 360s as the wiring harness that plugs into the back of the 360 doesn't come fully wired/connected anymore.

It would be possible with the new ones if you pull out some of the teeth to put them where you need them but you also take a chance of ruining the harness doing this as well.

You could probably build a converter but after doing that, you'll have probably spent more on that then just buying cables to do it or buying a video card with s-video or something of the sort.
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