Subject: Re: Big Screen
To: None <Yulim.Tan@scinfo.u-nancy.fr>
From: Michael J. Oehler <mjo@epoch.ncsc.mil>
List: macbsd-general
Date: 02/21/1995 17:54:57
Yulim (Snoopy) and others,

Have I got a story for you. I'm currently selling a 19" Sony monitor, $400US.
A deal at twice the price (the cheapest 17" I've seen was $660, MagVision.)
Or so I thought.

I spent a great deal of time researching its scan rates, and the common
resolutions/scan rates used in the Mac. I even got some help from Henry
Hotz (thanks) a few days back. He reminded me that some Mac's use main
DRAM and VRAM may not be applicable for your machine. 

With this information in hand, prospective buyers stopped by. All had
internal video. I had expected to select the desired "resolution and
associated synch" from the monitors control panel. Connect my large
monitor. And then restart. This is exactly how it works with my Lapis card.

Instead of a wonderfully large screen, I quickly learned about the Mac's
"resolution detection" and that I'd need an adaptor, eg, the liberty
adaptor, ($34 from MacMall). This adaptor supplies a "monitor id" for
single freq monitors, like mine.

-- DOES anyone know what these sort of adaptors do? --
Do they ground certain pins or strobe a signal on the
Mac's DB15  video plug? After looking at the pin out specification,
all pins where assigned to either RGB (3), RGB ground (3), H & V synch (2),
composite (1), some no connects (3), and misc. grounds (3). How's it work?

"Resolution detection" is a good thing. You would want newbies changing
there modes, restarting, and viewing an unsynch video signal. They may
not be smart enough to plug the old monitor in, boot from a floopy,
and change the monitor setting back. Does this make sense?

Anyways, back to my story. Even with such an adaptor, the buyers Mac's
(6100/60, II ci, ...) didn't support a resolution that would fill the
monitor. None where willing to spend the $300+ to buy a video card...
and then my monitor.

Bottom Line:
I own a Lapis 24. Focus still sells this card for the SE PDS, LC PDS,
and NuBus slots. This card has served me well! Never missed a beat
and has a kick butt DSP chip from AT&T in it. Even at 1152x870, the
refresh is spunky. However, an '030 at 16MHz isn't spunky. I wonder
if I should've bought and accelerator with built in video.  There are
a whole bunch in the MacMall catalogue. (plese, no upgrade vs. buy
new flames, trust me, I got the bills to know better).

Still trying to shorten my messages.
-Mike
Oehler@DockMaster.ncsc.mil