Apple II Digital RGB Card & Sony PVM-14M4U NTSC/PAL Monitor - Works!
atfphot...@gmail.com
So I've been fighting away on my IIe to get GEOS to work with an RGB
card. It hates the Taxan/Video 7 cards and I haven't been able to try
an actual Apple II Digital RGB card because I lacked a monitor.
I then realized I have film production monitors sitting on my shelf
that take every sort of connection you can imagine. This particular
monitor is not a new HD model but standard NTSC/PAL 4:3, 16:9, etc. A
Sony PVM-14M4U monitor with BNC & svideo ports.
I found a Apple RGB monitor cable that is the standard Apple RGB
connector with four bnc connectors on the other side. When I ran the
cable from the Apple Digital RGB card to the monitor and switched it
on, whammo! Rock solid image. GEOS works great with the Apple II
digital RGB card but not with the Taxan/Video-7 cards.
On the Apple card it appears as perfect text in double hi-res mode
(guessing) while the Taxan makes it look like it's in some sort of low
resolution color block mode and you can't ready anything.
I'm just happy I can use the Apple Digital RGB card now with the Sony
PVM-14M4U. Sweet!
You can find those monitors on ebay but they aren't cheap as they are
still in common use for post-production work.
They are also heavy.
Best!
ATF
MdntTrain
Would you describe how this works, connecting the digital card
directly to the analog BNC inputs? Or how you connected it? Isn't
the RGB card putting out R-G-B-I, and the Sony BNCs would be R-G-B-
Sync?
Thanks,
jS
atfphot...@gmail.com
Hello!
ACK! I spoke too soon. I have a perfect image but the colors are off.
Grrrr. So close!
I hooked up the Sony monitor with a 19 pin Apple RGB to four bnc
r,g,b,external sync cable to the Apple Digital RGB card (made by
Video-7 for Apple). When the machine is flipped on the Transwarp logo
comes up looking perfect.
Next the machine pops up the Apple // logo but it's pinkish/red.
However when the software loads (I tried a few titles), I thought the
colors were correct. Turns out I am daft and didn't remember the
proper colors. I tried some old titles like the Newsroom, which I
thought looked fine until I hooked up the composite and they were
wrong.
I took some shots of the cards and the problems with GEOS and the
Taxan/Video-7 cards;
http://www.atfphotography.com/apple_rgb/index.html
Well.. damn!
Sugggestions?
Fun with video.. bleagh!
ATF
Knut
no, see below.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> jS
>
> Hello!
>
> ACK! I spoke too soon. I have a perfect image but the colors are off.
> Grrrr. So close!
>
> I hooked up the Sony monitor with a 19 pin Apple RGB to four bnc
> r,g,b,external sync cable to the Apple Digital RGB card (made by
> Video-7 for Apple). When the machine is flipped on the Transwarp logo
> comes up looking perfect.
>
> Next the machine pops up the Apple // logo but it's pinkish/red.
> However when the software loads (I tried a few titles), I thought the
> colors were correct. Turns out I am daft and didn't remember the
> proper colors. I tried some old titles like the Newsroom, which I
> thought looked fine until I hooked up the composite and they were
> wrong.
>
> I took some shots of the cards and the problems with GEOS and the
> Taxan/Video-7 cards;
>
> http://www.atfphotography.com/apple_rgb/index.html
>
> Well.. damn!
>
> Sugggestions?
>
> Fun with video.. bleagh!
>
> ATF
I used my card with a CGA monitor up until yesterday. It does RGBI and I realized as much... the RGB
card outputs is XRGB and decodes into the NTSC colors. What I did was to translate the colors from
XRGB to RGBI with a GAL16V8. It has 3 translation tables and here is my choice.
"XRGB" Color RGBI Color
0000 Black 0000 Black
0001 Magenta 1000 Red
0010 Dark Blue 0010 Blue
0011 Purple 1010 Magenta
0100 Dark Green 0100 Green
*0101 Grey 1 0001 Gray (dark gray)
*0110 Medium Blue 0011 Bright Blue
*0111 Light Blue 0111 Bright Cyan
*1000 Brown 1100 Brown
1001 Orange 1001 Bright Red
*1010 Grey 2 1110 White (light gray)
1011 Pink 1011 Pink/Bright Magenta
1100 Light Green 0101 Bright Green
1101 Yellow 1101 Yellow
*1110 Aquamarine 0110 Cyan
1111 White 1111 Bright White (white)
"XRGB" directly connected IGBR to bits 8421 would yield
0101=Brown should have been Gray 1
0110=Cyan should have been Medium Blue
0111=bright gray should have been Light Blue
1000=dark gray should have been Brown
1010=bright blue should have been Gray 2
1110=bright cyan should have been Aquamarine
This swapping helps a lot but you need to use all 4 bits. If you use an analogue RGB monitor instead
and connect only 1,2 and 4 to R,B and G respectively you are even worse off. Then you need to also
do some mixing, like it is described in the Marcorlandi document, for example.
Knut