LCD screen in a Color Classic

[mraroid]

Sorry I called your mod an abomination. The panel you linked is 800x480, a wider aspect ratio than required for a Classic Mac. Gotta stick close to a 4:3 aspect ratio like 640c480, 800x600 or 1024x768 as you did for it to work. 9" diagonal at 800x480/16:9 may be almost as wide as the front bezel.

No worries.  It was not my mod.  I found that CC on ebay listed for over 2 thousand dollars and had to post it.  I have original Sony CRTs in both my CCs.

But I am interested in that technology and want to learn about it.  BTW, the main TV in my home is the last HD CRT that Sony made.  It will do 1920 X 1080 and not even a OLED screen can match it. 

mraroid

 

[just.in.time]

What an ugly, ugly mod. The Trinitrons in these systems are great, no need to ruin that with crappy LCDs. I don't think any modern tech, high quality panels are made in 4:3 anymore anyways.

The display panel used in the iPad 2 should be pretty good for a project like this, and was 1024*768.

Personally, I'd never do that type of mod to a good condition system (electronically working or not).  However, I have a CC that took one hell of a beating during shipping, causing several stress cracks, and with a CRT that has some bad hot spots from magnetic exposure.  On that particular unit I wouldn't be opposed to doing a mod similar to this.

But wow, that price.  For the asking price, I'd expect that microphone issue to be fixed and integrated internally, along with the wifi solution being internal.  Otherwise the work looks decent.  Idk about asking price decent, but decent.  Everything is secured down and the keyboard soft-power still works despite a modern PSU.  If I built the same thing, but with the notes I mentioned fixed, then I'd probably expect offers around the 800-1200 range.  However, I also value my time highly and I expect that took many hours to build.  So I guess I wouldn't do something like this to sell, but rather just for myself as a keeper as I'd probably want more money than it is worth on the eBay market.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

PowerCC/TAKKY should be done with a 6360/6400/5400 Alchemy architecture logic board. Check the mess the 50MHz Gazelle architecture incompatibilities introduced with FireWire and USB PCI bridges that the TAM gang goes through. :   GazelleCC, just say no!

Alchemy maxes at 800x600, so LCD Portrait PowerCC/CD TAKKY. [}]

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IIRC I've seen an 800x600 LCD on eBay that would work. Any other res from a PCI vidcard for an availabel right sized LCD might work, depends on the orientation. MacPortrait only works with onboard video. Portrait could keep side openings stock width, droopy drawers work for me. Grafting the low end of a 580 would simplify things immensely, stereo feets and all. One of the things I hate about the CC is the Espresso curve infestation between the feets for the mono speaker.

edit: Painting the hybrid's plastics, joints and Bondo to match a nice USB KBD/Mouse combo in black goes without saying.

 

[Franklinstein]

One of the things I hate about the CC is the Espresso curve infestation between the feets for the mono speaker.

That little indent/divot thing in the front of the CC is either an air intake or useless design flair, not a speaker grille. You'd think it would be but no, the speaker lives behind the floppy drive, firing out of the unit's left side.

Unless you're also replacing the analog board with a higher output one from a 5XX series machine, you really want to keep a Takky's power draw on the low side. For me that means a 6500 board with max RAM, a USB card, maybe a CS II Ethernet card, and a low-power hard drive or flash drive. No G3 upgrade, no crazy multi-function PCI cards. 

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Could be for cooling then, forgot about the holes in the side. Like I said CC's not my thing. CRT is good at 640x48 for a TAKKY Video Input Card sans

tuner, but dreck for anything at all at standard res my book.

This thread's about LCD in CC anyway, so A/B not required, lots of cubic available to put an ATX PSU where the CRT used to be. [}]

 

[Gorgonops]

It will do 1024 X 768.  After I started looking around, I found many more 10.4 inch screens of various costs.

This would probably be the ultimate monitor for a Color Classic-based case mod. It's 9.7 inches instead of 10.4, which makes me wonder if it would fit in the existing bezel opening without trimming. The downside is it's DisplayPort only and requires a fairly modern video card to drive, so it'd only be a practical choice for a mod that utilizes modern guts and only runs "Classic" software in emulation.

Personally I don't think the trimmed bezel looks that bad. Largely the reason why I think that is because the CC is a kind of weird, awkward thing anyway... but, yeah, I don't think it really makes it look any worse.

 

[Gorgonops]

Is there a similar LCD monitor anyone here would recommend that would fit optimally within the bounds of a regular 9" compact mac? I've got a nice new Macintosh Plus case that I intend to use for this purpose...

There are 8.4" 4x3 ratio panels that will pretty much do the job; technically you'll have to trim the bezel a little to keep the edges from getting cut off but it'll still look mostly original. Said panels are available in resolutions up to 1024x768, but 640x480 and 800x600 are more common. Here's an ebay link to an 800x600 with a VGA board for a reasonable price.

The drawback with this size is that most of the panels for sale are old stock and therefore often use CCFL backlights instead of LED, and they also often have the more awkward wide bezels/mounting plates that newer LCD panels don't have. That particular one I linked to, for instance, might have case interference problems on the one side because of the width of the mount.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

This is the first one I've seen that really appeals to me, but not for a CC in my application:

9.7 inch 1024*768 4:3 LCD Monitor Display Player 720P HD for Raspberry Pi 3 Xbox

They must interpolate and letterbox 720p?

 

[Gorgonops]

They must interpolate and letterbox 720p?

They probably just say that because its vertical resolution is > 720p. Presumably when playing videos using its built-in media player (at least it seems to have one, the listing is of course a *little* tricky to interpret) it tries to preserve aspect the aspect ratio, in which case I'd assume it would actually display a 720p resolution widescreen video at something like 600 pixels tall letterboxed.

This eight inch one is actually pretty cool if it's as advertised, and would probably be better for a Compact Mac conversion than the last one I linked. Claims to be IPS with an LED backlight. The thing I vaguely worry about, though, is if the actual resolution of the LCD *is* 1024x768 or if that's interpolated on a lower res display. I've seen that on some of the cheap small LCD monitors before, IE, they claim one resolution but the panel is actually lower.

(Edit: ... man, that's actually cheap enough I'm sorely tempted. I have a broken Commodore PET monitor I could build a whole computer into with that...)

 

[davidg5678]

The previously linked 9.7 LCD is the exact same panel that is used inside of the iPad 3 and iPad 4 and can be purchased on eBay for as cheap as $20. This will need a driver board which costs around $40. The results of the iPad sized LCD in a compact mac can look pretty decent. http://osxdaily.com/2010/06/20/mac-plus-ipad-case/ --This is not a color classic, but the screen size is still the same.

The addition of a Raspberry Pi running an emulator and an ADB to USB adapter could make a pretty interesting machine. The driver boards make use of HDMI which probably could accept an actual machine's input with the correct active converters.

This would probably be the ultimate monitor for a Color Classic-based case mod. It's 9.7 inches instead of 10.4, which makes me wonder if it would fit in the existing bezel opening without trimming.

 

[Gorgonops]

This is not a color classic, but the screen size is still the same.

If you watch the video of the guy docking the iPad inside the modified case you will see that a significant border is hidden when doing this with a compact Mac case. (The overlap is looks to be close to half an inch.) I don't have a compact Mac sitting out to measure, but the hole in the front of my Apple IIc's 9" monitor about eight and a half inches diagonally, so if you don't want to deal with "overscan" an eight-inch panel would probably be a better choice for a B&W Mac. 9.7" *might* work in a Color Classic, though? It'll be close.

(I wonder if anyone makes a driver board that works with the "retina" iPad Mini displays.... probably.... yeah, it looks like it.)

The driver board on that bundle Adafruit sells is just DisplayPort and doesn't seem to have much in the way of scaling capabilities, I'm curious how well the "generic" HDMI one off eBay works (there are also ) and how it handles smaller resolutions. (IE, does it always scale to fill the whole panel, or can it be configured to leave a border? If you could run a custom resolution like 1920x1440 centered on it then it might not matter if some of the edge gets covered up...)

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

They probably just say that because its vertical resolution is > 720p. Presumably when playing videos using its built-in media player (at least it seems to have one, the listing is of course a *little* tricky to interpret) it tries to preserve aspect the aspect ratio, in which case I'd assume it would actually display a 720p resolution widescreen video at something like 600 pixels tall letterboxed.

Yep, the numbers come out to 10s4 x 518.4 pixels if I did them right and the pic shows something like that in the listing.

What's that squiggly thing, an antenna? LCD is perfect but the controller board is far too wide for my purposes.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The previously linked 9.7 LCD is the exact same panel that is used inside of the iPad 3 and iPad 4 and can be purchased on eBay for as cheap as $20. This will need a driver board which costs around $40.

Pretty cool, found a more expensive one, but with the specs:

    Brand New iPad 3 & 4 LCD Screen Display Replacement
    9.7 inches (~65.1% screen-to-body ratio)
    2048x1536 IPS LCD
    OEM - Grade
    Non-refurbished replacement part $39

Driver board you linked is only 72x51x9mm so it's about as good as it gets for me, despite needing to use a VGA to HDMI adapter. 1024 x 768 should be sharp as a tack scaled to 50% native for those LCDs. Board supports 1080p and 1920x1200 which would be the other two resolutions I'd want. Thanks for the lead on this.

 

[pizzigri]

So I am resurrecting this because i am hugely struggling in repairing a CC because of the unobtanium Flyback transformer. Most of these are dying and replacements are impssible to find. It's actually easier to find a second CC and use the AB parts - so that's what I did. I will receive a CC from which i can use hopefully the parts to repair mine. So now I found this and want to make a second CC, using the unusable shell of the donor machine... to do that, I found a 8.4" 800x600 Industrial LCD screen for cheap (50$) that includes the screen, all driving electronics, and a standard analog VGA input. This is it:
https://gvision-usa.com/pdf/K08AS-CA-0620.pdf
What I need is to connect the LB harness connector to the VGA input... and replace entirely the original AB with a 5-12V dual supply from MeanWell with a keyboard power on mod i already built for the Q700 - basically doing the same as i already did.
Anybody can help me here?

 

[pizzigri]

I figured out this, first the pinout (from PowerCC for Takky mod) of the AB connector, to the DB15 pinout of the VGA - would this be enough? And do I need to map anything else out?

Composite signal output pin 9 to VGA Pin 13
GND pin 10 to VGA pin 5
Video Signal Output(Blue) pin 11 to VGA Pin 3
GND pin 12
Video Signal Output(Green) pin 13 to VGA Pin 2
GND pin 14
Video Signal Output(Red) pin 15 to VGA Pin 1