Hello again, everyone! It's been awhile since we've posted an update, but now that we've finalized things we can fill you in.
Over the last few months, we have been working to determine why some TVs appear more sensitive to sync jitter than others so that we might correct for this within our SNES & Genesis component cable circuitry. We had a hypothesis, but it took a while to gather the equipment and spend the time to actually prove it out before it was even possible to try to develop an efficient fix. We were able to confidently determine that the problem stems from some TVs not properly following specifications for standard definition content by triggering off of the wrong (rising) edge of the sync pulse. Those TVs that do follow specifications and trigger off of the falling edge don't exhibit any visual artifacts (horizontal "shakiness"), and those that don't follow specifications and trigger off the rising edge display varying degrees of shakiness. We plan to update our sync jitter page with a more in-depth explanation of our findings at some point.
After figuring out what was going on, we went down various paths of implementing an efficient fix to reduce the amount of jitter on the rising edge of the sync signal. If you've been following our progress since the Kickstarter days, you know that the constraints on this component cable project are very tight. In order to use our same manufacturing tools, the fix had to be small enough to fit within the same tiny circuit board area as before, and the test points could not move even a smidge so we could still use our existing factory test hardware. These are the biggest ones, but there were several others. After a couple months of design work, we were able to come up with an optimal solution that fit all our constraints. We had to quickly hand-build a small number of prototype circuit boards in order to re-verify the design, and we're glad to say that everything is working extremely well with the new changes.
OK, now that you've read the boring details, here's what you care about: as of today, we placed a purchase order for another batch of both the SNES and Genesis YPbPr component cables. We are not going to take any risks in predicting a timeline to much specificity, especially with Chinese New Year standing in our way. Our hope is to receive the next set of cables before Summer 2017 (possibly sooner depending on how things proceed), and will get them up for sale as soon as we can. The changes we've made to the design, as well as some additional steps in the factory process, have raised costs for us. Therefore, we expect prices to go up a bit as well. We're currently working on new pricing structures for our store to keep things as reasonable as possible while also allowing us to stay in business.
For those who don't want to wait that long, we are looking into another option for you. We have a very limited number of component cables in our "defect" pile that have various noncritical issues with them - some cosmetic, some with a broken stereo upgrade jack, etc.. But, as long as the cable tests okay otherwise, we are looking into options for selling these items prior to the next release. More to come as soon as we figure out how to proceed with that.
One more thing: while we've had some time to do work on the adapters for Sega Saturn, Neo Geo AES, and Playstation 1, we have a bit more work to do before we can finalize anything. We finally were able to find a source of connectors for all 3 systems (this took forever), so we should be in good shape once we determine that everything looks good with their design. This is the next phase in our work and we hope to be able to release some or all of these adapters simultaneously with the new component cable release. We then plan to move on to finishing development of a standalone Sega Dreamcast cable.
Lots of info there. Hope you enjoyed. Thanks for your support, as always.