Well, this mod isn’t any news at the time of writing. It has been done by many other modders around the world because it is really easy. Why: a) The nomad has an A/V Composite Video output by default, b) a composite input display made of cheap china crap is sold million times on ebay.
So why change the Display.. it is not that bad !! -> Yeah right, but there a two reasons to change it
a) your’s is defective and you want to play awesome games on the run
b) because you can !
I decided to make this mod because of my best friend mad.m whose Nomad had a broken Display. I took care of the Nomad which means, i put it into a box and stored it some time with all the other “i-will-do-this-tommorow” projects.
Yes and there it is, the bad conscience which forced me to research for possibilites to repair the nomad. And then i found tutorials how to do it,. Just buy one of this “car rear view camery thingies” from ebay, put this shit into the nomad and connect it with a bunch of wires and there you go.
Step 1: Find the right display
Well, this was the biggest challenge, because from 10 cheap chinese rear car camera foldable plastic display shit thingies 0 are working. So i was trapped in a “buy, try, return” loop for a certain time because many of them had sync problems or could not display ntsc in color etc…
Frustrated to the max i tried some mods like changing the Quarz, modifications to the video chip.. nothing worked,.. some links i followed for this:
Finally i found the right display. You will have to choose a display with the controller shown on the following picture.
Step 2: Disassemble the Nomad
Just follow the guides found on youtube how to disassemble a nomad.
Next remove the original display (yes i know this step hurts, especially if the original display is a working one..)
Congratulations, you have now successfully fucked up your nomad 😆
Step 3: Place the new LCD in the Nomad Case
There are many ways to do this, some glue the Display directly on the Nomad Case, others use the original white frame and stick the display on it. The best way is to 3D-print a frame especially for the display. At the time of writing and modding i didn’t even know that 3D Printers would exist in the future.
I decided to use the white frame which has to be adapted to hold the new display. The advantage of this method is, that you can disassemble the nomad because the display is attached to the mainboard with this method.
BTW, this only works if you do this on a wooden garden table while you backup some Commodore 64 Disks with a Hacked drive on your oldschool IBM Thinkpad DOS Laptop 😆
Step 4: Display soldering stuff
This is fairly easy compared to display mods where you have to solder each transmission line of the display to a motherboard. in this case we only need the video, power and ground line for the display. Don’t be stressed about the blue and yellow cables going to the power supply jack.. the nomad i used here was massacred by the guy who sold it to me in a bad way. I had to fix several things to get it back to life again.
Step 5: Reassemble the nomad
Reassemble, put sonic in the cart slot, start up this little beast and look at the stunning result
Original:
TFT Mod:
“Switchless PAL/NTS Mod”
Some of the PAL Games won’t start on the nomad. Therefore i decided to make a pal/ntsc switch. But i didn’t want to drill a hole in the nomad with an ugly switch comming out. There is a bettery way to do this by using the Mode Switch to temporarly activate the PAL Mode. Why temporarly ? You will have to do this only while the game boots up, after it startet you can release the mode button comming back to NTSC Mode.
http://www.gamesx.com/importmod/gen2nomadbutton.htm
Personally i like to use the Mode Button (The tutorial above uses the Start Button