DEC Rainbow 100+ Plus

YEs, you can use both the mono and colour monitors on the 'bow, but you need a special cable (and specialk programming?) Let me explain. The colour video card outputs _4_ video signals, which I call R, G, B, Mono. The 'Mono' signal is mixed with the text video from the 'VT100' circuit on the 'bow mainboard. This is the composite video signal that's sent to the VR201 (yes, you can use a mono monitor with the graphics card) The standard colour monitor is a sync-on-green TV rate analogue colour monitor. The standard cable connects it to R, Mono, B (to the R,G,B inputs on the monito), the 'G' output of the colour card is not used. This means you get green text from the mainboard circuit, and colour graphics. You can make a cable to connect a mono monitor to the 'mono' signal and the colour monitor to the R,G,B signals. You then get the mainboard video on the mono monitor only (along with grpahics, if you program the CLUT correctly), and colour grpahics on the colour monitor. I can send you details of the cabling if you want it Be warend that the real VR241 is a horrbile thing. It's actually a Hitachi chassis, complete with the well-known thick-film circuit in the vertical deflection stage. The PSU is plain crazy, the chopper is driven (indirectly) by a windign on the flyback (line output) transformer. So for the PSU to run, the horizontal deflection circuit has to be working properly. To get it started, there's an astable multivibrator o nthe PSU board that is disabled shortly after power-up, but which gets the chopper going for long nwnough that the delfection circuits can rattle into life. Debugging one of thise is 'fun' for suitable values of 'fun'. Just about all the likely-bits-to-fail have to be working before it'll do anything at all... -tony