cheesestraws
Well-known member
At @Trash80toHP_Mini's request, a thread about the HDMI scaler I found myself using to do vintage Mac stuff on a modern screen. It works, at least for me, really well and I'd recommend it to other folks as well. It is also not *that* expensive.
The model is Extron RGB-HDMI 300 or 300 A. I spent about £55 on mine from eBay UK, second-hand of course. At time of writing the cheapest on eBay US looks like about $35, so I may have slightly overpaid, but most seem to be $70ish. This, for me, is pretty reasonable given that I am going to use it a lot. The usual chancers are trying to sell them for hundreds, and I get the impression this may have been quite pricy new. A number of the cheaper ones don't seem to come with a power supply brick. Do not be put off. It just takes 12v, and the pins at the back are helpfully labelled with polarity, so I just knocked a power cable up with a couple of female header cables and a 12v power supply from the random wires drawer.
It has a VGA-style input at the back. I say VGA-style because I tried it with traditional Apple resolutions and it worked fine, as well as with PC resolutions. In fact, it seems remarkably un-picky. My Quadra is using a standardish 10-dip pin adapter pretending to be a 21" screen at 1152x870, and all I needed to manually set was the number of horizontal pixels in total and in the active area, and tweak the phase knob until it stopped shimmering.
A feature I suspect will be useful for many people is that you can set the image size and position on the output, it doesn't just automatically fill the screen. So, if your screen's native resolution matches one of its output resolutions, you could set the output size to the same as the input size and center it in the screen, and you would get 1:1 pixels where 1 Mac pixel is 1 on-screen pixel. My own screen does not have a native resolution matching any of its output resolutions, so I can't speak to how well that works, but it is possible.
In terms of output, it will output up to 1900x1200, but my screens are 16:9, so I ended up using 1920x1080. This isn't the native resolution of my screen but even so the result is pretty decent (I suppose the screen must also have a reasonably decent scaler).
Here's a photo.
The model is Extron RGB-HDMI 300 or 300 A. I spent about £55 on mine from eBay UK, second-hand of course. At time of writing the cheapest on eBay US looks like about $35, so I may have slightly overpaid, but most seem to be $70ish. This, for me, is pretty reasonable given that I am going to use it a lot. The usual chancers are trying to sell them for hundreds, and I get the impression this may have been quite pricy new. A number of the cheaper ones don't seem to come with a power supply brick. Do not be put off. It just takes 12v, and the pins at the back are helpfully labelled with polarity, so I just knocked a power cable up with a couple of female header cables and a 12v power supply from the random wires drawer.
It has a VGA-style input at the back. I say VGA-style because I tried it with traditional Apple resolutions and it worked fine, as well as with PC resolutions. In fact, it seems remarkably un-picky. My Quadra is using a standardish 10-dip pin adapter pretending to be a 21" screen at 1152x870, and all I needed to manually set was the number of horizontal pixels in total and in the active area, and tweak the phase knob until it stopped shimmering.
A feature I suspect will be useful for many people is that you can set the image size and position on the output, it doesn't just automatically fill the screen. So, if your screen's native resolution matches one of its output resolutions, you could set the output size to the same as the input size and center it in the screen, and you would get 1:1 pixels where 1 Mac pixel is 1 on-screen pixel. My own screen does not have a native resolution matching any of its output resolutions, so I can't speak to how well that works, but it is possible.
In terms of output, it will output up to 1900x1200, but my screens are 16:9, so I ended up using 1920x1080. This isn't the native resolution of my screen but even so the result is pretty decent (I suppose the screen must also have a reasonably decent scaler).
Here's a photo.