My SE/30 has a RasterOps Colorboard 264 in it, which is lovely, but it's not without its caveats - it does not seem to have any monitor-presence detection, and just presents a 640x480 screen whether there is a monitor connected to it or not. This is a bit annoying, since I don't always want to use an external monitor with my machine, and find my cursor disappearing off into a great big void. It's even more annoying if I accidentally leave the Colorboard set as the main display, because then I can't switch it back without connecting an external monitor!
On a clean install of System 7.1, the Colorboard's display is inactive until I open the Monitors control panel and click on the external display, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to undo this action - once the display has been configured, there seems to be no way to deactivate it again. Am I missing something here, or is the assumption simply that you'd always have a monitor attached to every graphics card? (not unreasonable back then, I suppose, but a bit inconvenient now!)
I was thinking about rigging up an external switch to allow me to disable the Colorboard's declaration ROM if I don't have an external monitor connected, but before I do something as drastic as that, I thought I'd better check that I'm not just missing something obvious. It's been a long time since I've played with the Classic MacOS in any serious capacity, so my memory is a bit rusty.
On a clean install of System 7.1, the Colorboard's display is inactive until I open the Monitors control panel and click on the external display, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to undo this action - once the display has been configured, there seems to be no way to deactivate it again. Am I missing something here, or is the assumption simply that you'd always have a monitor attached to every graphics card? (not unreasonable back then, I suppose, but a bit inconvenient now!)
I was thinking about rigging up an external switch to allow me to disable the Colorboard's declaration ROM if I don't have an external monitor connected, but before I do something as drastic as that, I thought I'd better check that I'm not just missing something obvious. It's been a long time since I've played with the Classic MacOS in any serious capacity, so my memory is a bit rusty.