On 7/10/2014 10:31 AM, J Harton wrote:
Best of luck with your "new" mac.
The mac-vga adapters do work quite well. I've used mine with my LC II,
and powermac 6100. Any old CRT/LCD with a vga port should work fine.
That said, my 19" samsung monitor (~2004) doesn't like it. So, try to
find a monitor that's (at least for LCDs) around 14"/15" or less and
that supports at least a minimum resolution of 800x600. If it's a
widescreen or has a dvi port it may not work at all since it simply may
not support a low enough resolution. VGA/DVI adapters don't have any
fancy circuitry (as I understand), so if you have a dvi only monitor
that fits the other criteria you could try it (although you'd need a
vga-dvi adapter). Also, some adapters have a bunch of dip switches, and
unless it's comes with a reference sheet like mine did (and maybe even
still) you may have to fiddle with a number of different configurations
of the switches before you find one that produces a sharp-ish display
without any horizontal or vertical wobble. The refresh rate that the
monitor supports may also be an issue. I assume that anything that
supports 60hz+ should be fine.
There are two main types of DVI port. One has both analog and digital,
the other is only digital. Both can also have one or two digital monitor
output in the one port. A DVI port with analog is easy to identify by
the + shape slots at one end. The digital only ones don't have that.
I don't know of any monitor that combines the analog VGA *input* into a
DVI connection.
Older Macintosh computers expect to have various pins connected together
in the cable to detect which resolution to set the video to. Back when
printing for newspapers and other graphic arts was 72DPI, Apple printers
were 72DPI too, so they wanted what was on the monitors to be exactly
the same size as print. (I suspect that instances of people holding up
printouts to their screen to compare the size were very rare.)
Thus Apple made each size of monitor only support a single resolution,
which is why the 12" color monitor and the Color Classic are 512x384
instead of 640x480, which would be higher than 72DPI at that screen size.
On Macs without built in support for multi-resolution monitors, you need
to buy or build an adapter. Some adapters have switch settings to make
just about any multi-resolution monitor work with any Mac that has the
large 15 pin connector. Some adapters only have settings for the older
fixed resolution monitors.
Search the web and you can find diagrams of how the sense pin
connections work, and from that you can easily solder together a single
resolution adapter.
Somewhere out there, there should be information on what old Macs have
built in video with multi-resolution monitor support.
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