Shank recently shared a ridiculous-but-awesome project that puts a trimmed Wii motherboard directly on a 129x input card for Sony BVM & L-Series PVM monitors. This is essentially the same as plugging a Wii’s component video output into a monitor…but come on, how cool is this? It’s powered by the monitor, fully contained and utilizes Martin’s open source 129x replacement board to route the video output to the monitor. Check out the YT short, as well as a video Steve from RetroTech did about the project, plus a few more quick thoughts below the links:
View The Project Here: https://github.com/Shank-Mods/Wii-BVM-Card
More Info on the 129x Project: https://www.retrorgb.com/testing-the-bkm-129x-replacement-board.html
Dual-Input Version: https://www.retrorgb.com/dual-input-scart-vga-card-for-sony-l-series-pvms.html
I absolutely love this project and while it’s a bit much for most people to do, I hope it paves the way for similar projects. In fact, I’d love to see Shank and Martin’s work evolved into an HDMI input card for the same multiformat BVM/PVM’s! Imagine integrating an HDMI splitter and YPbPr DAC into a 129x card? That means you could directly connect any HDMI device that’s set to any resolution between 240p and 1080i, with output #1 going into the component DAC, into the monitor. Then, you could use the splitter’s digital and analog audio extraction…and even use the second HDMI port to connect to a capture card for streaming! While yes, you can easily do all this by just purchasing the adapters, wouldn’t having it built into the monitor be much cooler?
Thanks to Shank for continuing to innovate and inspire with these awesome projects!
