My screen is blue (Radius Pivot SE/30)

[Bendix]

I found another pic of JT737's card on the bay and a pinout of a female db-15 connector. From these two and 9166188's table above  I gather, that I have to solder red and green to pin 2 and 5 of the db-15 connector, right?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Haven't tried it yet, but I'll put at least a sawbuck down on the bet that it'll eliminate Portrait/FPD stretch.

 

[Bendix]

So I did and it worked.  :b&w:

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Glad to see the BSOD died away and went to pure grayscale, nice job. I fiddled a bit with that scaler today:



View attachment 35250

 

[Bendix]

Guys, it must be possible to convince the Pivot SE/30 Card, that it is connected to a landscape radius pivot monitor at boot time, i.e. displaying something like 864x640 on VGA. I found these two thread with a Radius Pivot IIsi card, indicating, that connecting pins 4 and 10 on the pivot side might do the trick. @Bolle, what do you think, might this work with our SE 30 cards?

 

[Bendix]

Forgot two things to mention: That looks absolutely great, Thanks ,Trash80toHP_Mini, for the Scaler Pics!

And I did like JT737 did and bought 2 Micron VRAM chips on ebay.de for 6€ (+1,10€ delivery!) and now I enjoy luxurious 4 bit gray scale, an update that Radius charged 150$ for back in those days. For future reference, the name of the chips is

Micron MT42C4256Z-7 256Kx4 70ns PZIP-28

 

[Bendix]

1 gnd

2 red

3 csync?

4 sense0

5 green

6 gnd

7 sense1

8 blue

9 gnd

10 69hz vsync

11 gnd

12 64khz hsync

If this (above) is the pivot SE 30 pinout, then l connecting 4 + 10 like with the Pivot IIsi (below, quoted from the above mentioned WTB: Radius Pivot IIsi cable thread) is obviously nonsense, since with the Radius pivot SE 30 only 4 is sense and 10 is 69hz vsync.

If you want to build a combo video cable and VGA adapter with a hard-coded 832 x 624 sense code (which seems to be the highest possible Pivot resolution that's also supported by modern LCD monitors), here's the pin mapping:

CODE: SELECT ALL
PIVOT   VGA

1,6,13  4,5,6,7,8  VIDEO GND
2       1   RED VIDEO
4,10    NC   PINS 4 & 10 JUMPERED TOGETHER ON PIVOT END OF CABLE
5       2   GREEN VIDEO
9       3   BLUE VIDEO
11     11     C & V SYNC GND
12     14     V SYNC
14     10     H SYNC GND
15     13     H SYNC

But what if I were to connect sense0 and sense1 (pin4 and 7)? Could this lead to the desired permanent landscape mode in the SE 30 pivot?

 

[Bendix]

Last night I tested connecting sense0 and sense1 (pin 4 and 7) with no effect at all.

So can we conclude, that only connected to an original Radius pivot monitor the monitor can do it's magic during rotation on some sense lines on the card (which we do not know) and there is no way, to simulate this with, say a switch, and all we pivot SE/30 owners have to live with the stretched portrait mode on modern vga tft displays, except for those, who own the HDMI scaler?

End of story, hmm?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I set a VGA adapter to run my IIsi Color Pivot in landscape mode at 16" resolution. Give that a try. IIRC BMOW worked out the signalling and we figured out a way to mount a ball switch adapter to a pivoting monitor  .  .  .

After searching back through 24 of the 39 pages of Hacks:





Info you need starts about here:



With the ball switch (replaces what I'd assumed to be a mercury switch) trick you should be able to automagically start up in either mode? When the card detects the setting for either at startup it should work? Still fuzzy on that, but have doubts we'll get pivoting on the fly up and running. But SoftPivot(?) might find the way? Dunno, still asleep.

If you have, or anyone else has found related threads to add to my list, PLEASE do so.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Another cup of coffee later:

OOPSIE! found BMOW's victory post:

View attachment 20313

 

[Bendix]

Thank you so much for digging out that old thread! Will browse/read through it more thoroughly in the next couple of days. From what I have read so far I understand that ar least some radius software is needed in order to leave the 1152x640 resolution and get 640x864 or 864x640. Do you have an idea, where I can get that software and which version I would need for my grayscale radius pivot SE 30?

 

[Bendix]

But no matter which dip switches I choose on my vga adapter, I always end up with a resolution of 1152x864 like Bolle. Is that due to a lack of radius drivers or a problem with the vga adapter? 

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I had no idea any Pivot card might be capable of outputting anything more than 832x624@75Hz in 8biit)16" Color (Fixed Res Mac Monitor Standard) and I don't think what you guys are seeing is real, I'm guessing that's a readout of the way the monitor is (mis)scaling the card's output to full screen and that very strange number reportage is a red herring?

What are the native resolutions of the panels you guys are running?

And you're welcome! Eventually search will turn up links to URLs that actually load. Still figuring out the symptoms to do a report. All my bookmarks to older threads are broken ATM and recovering the URLs from Properties (Firefox/Win10) erratically works with Google. Building a new links network seems to work fine.

edit: still AM fuzzy in PM mode. : What resolutions are the Pivot Card versions supposed to output? I'll let you search through the Pivot Q&As if you've not yet done so.

 

[Bendix]

Well, I think the original resolution of the radius pivot SE 30 grayscale is 640x864/864x640. The Eizo Flexscan L885 in the pic has a native resolution of 1600x1200 px.

 

[Bolle]

I am not sure it's possible to output something else without having another oscillator on there to get the pixel clock right for whatever resolution you are aiming for.

At least there is a spare open socket for another crystal so there must be a way to select that one for the pixel clock.

I didn't look into it any further yet to see where the sense lines go to and how the frequency selection works though.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I'll put off my IIsi setup's teardown/SE setup for a bit if there's something you'd like me to test with the scaler. The portrait image above was obviously not the card we all have for SE/30. That's my SuperMac Spec/8 SI outputting Apple Portrait resolution. So far my testing has been on my 42" 1080p TV, I'll hook the scaler up to one of my UltraSharp MultiSyncs for testing the GS Pivot SE/30. That should display anything any card can throw at it. First up will be Portrait straight off the IIsi Vampire Video.  [}]

edit: on second thought, maybe I should drag this crap out to the living room and run it on the MAG Innovision CRT that has a Resolution/Sync Rate readout panel. But the 21" MONSTER is a PITA to rotate into Portrait mode. :

 

[Bendix]

If you look at this post of bigmessowires‘ and his following one in the same thread, you will find that he was stuck with the 1152 resolution at a time and finally solved this with a) the right drivers and b) grounding the right sense pins of his card. So I thought the same should be possible with the pivot SE 30 card, too. Bolle has posted here, which pins are sense pins (4+7), so grounding those would mean connecting them together and then to for example pin 1? And which software would we need?

 

[JT737]

Hey @Bendix!

    All I did was take the Red pin-which is position 2 on the board connector, and the Green pin, which is position 5 on the board connector (Counting off from right to left in this picture) and connected them to the Red pin on the VGA connector (which is pin one) and the Green pin on the VGA connector (which is pin two.)  And then I hot glued them in place, for good measure!

Hope this helps!