External video hacking - recased SE or no?

[CJ_Miller]

Since I bought an accelerator and it came with an extra SE logic board with a DPD card, I have been trying to figure out what to do with this whole setup. Since this is nearly a complete system and uses an external monitor, perhaps I am better off not squeezing it into my SE? It is not really so "compact" anymore if dwarfed by a 19" DPD. Anybody out there have experiences with 68k hackintosh in nonstandard cases? Could be easier, but also easily ugly. But might allow me to do something creative.

And on the video end of things, what kind of monitors do people recommend? I have heard that old NEC and Sony multisyncs are handy, but there are hundreds of models from those companies so it's tough to discern which are the earlier varieties. The only monitors I have which are old enough that I would suppose might be worth hacking on to old Macs are an Atari ST monitor I never use, and the wife's PCjr. I need to go the garage sale route here, because shipping would be too costly, especially for some heavy thing which might not work in the first place.

Anybody know if a Lapis DPD does greyscale, or monochrome? And speaking of monochrome, any opinions on color usability? Macs are obviously B&W, but my first computer experiences were green through the family VT180 terminal, and I liked it, but it was only for text, not graphics.

Is that the time? Gottoruntowork!

 

[H3NRY]

For the SE's standard built-in video, a PC monochrome compatible monitor was usually used with the horizontal sweep circuit adjusted to run at the Mac's higher frequency. As for the 2-page display card, that will depend on the card. There were a lot of different monitors and setups used, and back then there were no multisync displays. Everything was single frequency, and each model had its own frequency. Probably the best bet is to find a 9-pin to VGA 15-pin adapter (assuming the video connector is a PC-style 9-pin) and a multisync VGA monitor and just see what happens. If it doesn't work, then you need to see what the card is putting out with an oscilloscope and find or modify a suitable monitor.

For instructions on modifying a PC mono display, see the early Mac hardware repair manual posted on 68KMLA. I built a couple of 68K Hackintoshes, one with green CRT and one with orange, and both worked fine. I liked the larger 12" screens.

For a look at a 68K Hackintosh made from a PC chassis, small switching PSU, RAM upgrade, and SCSI upgrade: http://web.me.com/henryspragens/stuff/Slide_Shows/Pages/86_Hackintosh.html

 

[CJ_Miller]

Nice work, H3nry! I am surprised that I don't see more hackintoshes of such a kind. Great presentation and music, also!

 

[Gorgonops]

Probably the best bet is to find a 9-pin to VGA 15-pin adapter (assuming the video connector is a PC-style 9-pin) and a multisync VGA monitor and just see what happens.

I'm surprised those adapters seem to be so easy to find as I'm pretty sure Multisync monitors stopped supporting the TTL video standards (MGA/CGA/EGA/etc) somewhere around 1991 or so. I've owned two NEC Multisyncs: an oddball "Multisync GS", a grayscale version of the original Multisync, and had a 9 pin connector on the back. (It of course required a 9-to-15 pin adapter to connect to a VGA card.) I also had a "3D", which had a captive 15 pin VGA cable but *allegedly* could take an adapter on top of that to interface with TTL video cards, but I never used that capability. The thing I believe that *all* the "Old School" Multi-mode Multisyncs had in common however (whether they were made by NEC or a competitor, like Mitsubishi with their "Diamondscan" line) was that there was a switch on them somewhere that selected whether the video used analog or digital signaling. (It was a big obvious slide switch on the older Multisync, while toggling the "mode" button apparently did it on the 3D.) A little Googling suggests that the 3D was the *last* Multisync to support TTL. That could be wrong, but I doubt the capability extends much further.

I suspect you're asking for trouble hooking up one of those nine pin adapters to a newer monitor lacking that switch and feeding what's *probably* a TTL signal into it.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

OK, this must be the umteenth time I've intended to scan/copystand-shoot my old Radius Propaganda collection.

In answer to looks: a Radius FPD or TPD looked irresistible to anyone shackled to the SE/Periscope for getting design work done back in the day. Any close approximation won't look any sillier (though a bit less droolworthy) today as part of a collection than when that setup was the "to die for" DTP setup" back in the Aldus PageMaker era.

 

[Osgeld]

I have one of those aicent multisync monitors with a bank of dip switched and a atari style toggle switch going from rgb to ttl (its green n fuzzy but...)

I just want to chime in and say be careful blindly hooking up TTL output to analog monitor inputs, most monitors should be protected but ntsc signals are max 0.7v, VGA is max 1v, ttl on the other hand is 5v and can source a decent amount of current, so there is a good chance of frying something

 

[Gorgonops]

Something I found interesting... if you Google for "TTL EGA LCD" you'll find that there actually are quite a few companies selling LCD panels with special controller boards designed to handle TTL input. They're "breathtakingly expensive" compared to VGA monitors of similar panel size (starting at around $400 or so for a 12") but oddly that's quite a lot cheaper than digital input CRT monitors cost back in the '80s, particularly when inflation is factored in.

Just another note, since it was unclear to me whether the original poster was asking about a monitor capable of handling a compact Mac's video output or the output from some sort of "dual page" monitor card: A digital-capable Multisync like an NEC Multisync/II/3D should handle the Mac motherboard video acceptably, as it's about the same scan-rate ballpark as EGA, but I dunno about a dual-page setup. Depending on the pixel resolution and whether it uses interlacing or not it might require too high a scan rate to work with those monitors. (3D topped out at IBM 8514A-compatible 1024x768 interlaced@44hz.) Of course, a dual-page monitor card might output an analog signal, in which case you might be able to use it with a higher-frequency VGA multisync with a cable adapter, so... knowing the specs of the original monitor would help you a *lot* here.