Herb, These are very good questions that deserve answers. I'll take some time this weekend to experiment and see what's up. I have a Sony-for-Sun monitor; I *might* have a CG6. At least the mode pins I can figure out. The monitor might be modern enough to show me frequencies on its OSD. Aside from VCF exhibits I find myself less and less inclined to lug around the original-equipment CRTs for these things, so it's relevant to my interests too. ;) -- Jameel On Fri, 26 May 2017, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Someone asked me, about connecting modern monitors to a SparcStation 2 with a CG6 8-bit color framebuffer. If you acutally have a VGA-type or LCD type *modern* monitor hooked up and running, please send me details.
Now - I know plenty about video and scan rates and fixed frequency monitors. I don't need lessons in wiring up 13W3 connectors, sync-on-green. I know about sense-pins or "ID pins" which tell these video cards, "I'm monitor X, change your video to Y". OK? I'm not asking to be "schooled" on the subject.
What I'm asking is what an electrical engineer would ask (that's me). What are the damn actual, real, video signals this card puts out? As in
mode X: (sense pins grounded) horizontal frequency ? vertical frequency ? frame rate ? if you want, "video frequency in Megahertz" which isn't useful
And yes, I searched the Web, and it was uninformative on "cold" searching. Active users of Sun may know where to go. Lots of links are dead, or under-informative, or lessons in video. My site has such lessons already!
What I did find, are references to Sony monitors sold by Sun for use, which are GDM-1662 and GDM-1962. I got what I *think* are Sony's fixed frequencies of use. I did not get the magic "sense pins grounded" on those monitors. I'll not quote here what I learned on those monitors, you can send that along if you wish, that will confirm what I found.
Here's a more general question, related of course.
Otherwise - people who ask me about monitors for old computers, ask for a magic box. It's variously called "a converter" or "frame buffer" or "adapter". they think it magically changes video frequencies, even stores a frame of video! But most don't; the simplest just rewire 13W3's to hook to HD-15 connectors, with some toggles for the sense pins. some may play with sync signals.
But...this is the year 2017, not 1997 or even 2007. There may WELL be "magic boxes" now, that have whole computers in them, that DO capture a frame and resend it. If anyone knows of one of THESE, which costs less than $100 - and it *works*, that matters for some reason - I'd like to know. IF it costs $250, that doesn't help - these are hobbyists asking, not video engineers.
Thanks. Sorry for the long post, but I'm not looking for history lessons or video-signal lessons.
Herb Johnson
-- Jameel Akari