11 Jun
2006
11 Jun
'06
11:19 p.m.
Wait--you had to buy a modulator for the CGA.
When I saw the 80x25 text
display of the CGA (on an IBM monitor), I decided that color wasn't for me.
WHY?
It has a phono jack on the outside for NTSC; just connect that to a cheap
B&W CCTV monitor.
It ALSO had a 4 pin (minus one for keying) berg plug on the inside that
This was, of course, also used to connect the internal monitor of the
PortablePC.
was exactly right for a SupRMod][, but why degreade
the signal by RF'ing
it, and then tuning it back in?
IIRC, you could turn off the colour subcarrier, etc using a bit of one of
the output ports (I think this was done in Mode 2), this was worth doing
if you used a mono mnonitor. And I seem to rememebr you could get an
extra 4 colour palette on the RGB (DE9) output if you did this.
-tony
One thing that held the wholesale adoption of
color back was the generally
lousy quality of the CRTs available at the time. Most were designed for
broadcast viewing and had a very coarse dot pitch which made things like
text unpleasant to read.
B&W was substantially better. (Mode 2)