Quoting Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org>:
Bob wrote:
On Fri, 13 Oct 2006 13:43:42 +0000, Jules
Richardson wrote:
That's interesting, though. IBM must have
believed that the 5150
would be a global product and I'd expect that was the plan all along
- so why put circuitry on there for one market only?
I do not think there was ever was a PAL version of the CGA card.
Correct.
It wasn't really a problem, you bought a complete system with monitor. It was
no different from buying a system with TTL, Hercules, EGA, PGA, or later VGA
monitors. For the very few applications where we need to connect to a TV or
video recorder etc we'd just have to get a PAL card with composit output or NTSC
to PAL conversion hardware.
Reminds me of the AppleII, I once bought a Euro-Apple motherboard from a surplus
place (late 70's I think), it had PAL onboard instead of NTSC (never released to
the market I believe). Trouble was lots of add-on cards wouldn't work with it
(from memory 80column video, CP/M and Flex add-ons) ... so I sat down with the
schematics (supplied) and compared them with those published in the AppleII
manual (yes every manual had the schematics in a foldout inside the back cover)
and hacked the motherboard back to a standard AppleII.
It worked ;-)