Might as well add my experience.
So I got my DCHDMI (round #8) a while back and finally did the install 2 weeks ago. My board, 1.3a and orange see-thru flex cable. Also the WiFi antenna was smaller than in the install instructions/video. It was quite lightly packed but seemed to survive well anyway.
First I took my sweet-ass time modding the case. Others say that it looks perfect, like it came that way, but I’m not 100% satisfied. See, I had a DC case where the black drill hole guide wiggles. So I followed the instructions and pressed it down, drilled three holes, flipped it and pressed it down, drilled the two remaining holes. But, the holes did not line up horizontally. More like a “w” instead of “—“. This gave me a starting “border” that I felt came too low. If the two remaining holes had been aligned and higher up I could’ve left the bottom edge slightly higher creating a tighter fit. It came out really good all things considered though.
PS. Make sure your bottom shield (metal plate) is really, really flat (after cutting/bending off the piece). This will allow your DCHDMI to mount lower. Do this *before* expanding the hole too much in any direction. I used a hammer and a piece of wood.
Then came the soldering. For most of it I kept my iron at 330C. When removing the resistors, I used a slightly larger tip but otherwise a quite small pointy tip. I also used the larger tip for the high-heat ground area where you’re supposed to add some solder (I think I used about 420C here). Flux is a must, but I had a flux paste which does not immediately soak/spread out. This turned out to be non-optimal since I couldn’t properly see the pins/flex cable. But it wasn’t an issue in the end. First the audio contacts went well (edge of flex). Then the first side of the video DAC contacts also went well, I aligned it by pushing the flex against the edge of the pins, but I made the mistake of not ensuring the other side with fewer pins also aligned well. This had the consequence of the flex cable being slightly offset from those pins. Not by too much, but the contacts had to be made “/“ instead of “|”. Due to this also the resistor nearby those pins didn’t align properly. The biggest issue here is the increased risk of bridging two connections. Btw, I did spend time going over all those pin contacts, applying more flux and making sure everything makes a good connection, and verifying with multimeter that there are no bridges.
After those main points. The rest went pretty smoothly, although I struggled with the high-heat area (ground) a bit.
There are also three contacts on the bottom side of the mobo (for reset and controller buttons). Make sure you have good wire for this! I used some old wire I’ve stripped from a rj11 cable back in the day. It’s very stiff so I had to tape it down in a few places. I’ll probably replace those when I have the chance.
Also, be careful with the flex connector, I had never used one like this before and its was a bit hard to operate with one hand while holding the mobo in the other
...
Anyway, worked on first try (to my surprise) but I ran into some oddities (that I did not find documented anywhere!) that made me uncertain about everything being OK (especially considering the offset pins).
The issue was that when I switched to cable detect (no cable connected) the display image would “spin”, or flicker and move in the vertical plane so that it looks like its spinning top to bottom. It would keep doing this until the DCHDMI had fully started up. Maybe because it applies bob filter later? Anyway this is supposedly normal behavior. Can also be observed in certain resolutions in 240p test suite and tweaking the bob/passthru on either 480i or 576i in different combinations.
Another interesting tidbit was that I experienced complete WiFi breakdown with GDEMU + LG TV, whereas with GDEMU + 27” Dell display the WiFi worked OK. With GDROM it worked in either setup as expected.
I used VGA a long time ago, but only composite recently, so I can’t really compare, but I love love love the quality of DCHDMI! PS. My TV can render 960p, but it refuses to boot up on 960p, so if I power down in 960p, I’ll have to Left+Right+Start+Y+B to reset the resolution to get an image, then I can switch back to 960p. Could probably be solved in firmware to trick my TV (same with Dell display, btw).
So, that’s about everything I can think of for now, hope it can help someone
!