Dave,
If the internal screen is fine then the syncs are
at or close to the
proper frequency, so any problems are going to be around the NTSC
modulator, which would be fun to debug without a scope...
I do have a scope- poking about down in the chassis is difficult- I don't have
an ISA extension card. The composite trace drops down to the back side of the
A trick there is to solder short wires onto the points you want to
monitor, plug the card in, and then probe the free ends of the wires. But
this is only useful if you know what points are likely to be of interest,
which you presumably don't
card, comes up through a resistor, goes to the
light-pen header, through another
Are you sure it's the light pen header? The IBM CGA card has 2 header
plugs on it, one fo the a light pen, the other for a modulator. The
composite signal goes ot the latter.
resistor and vanishes into the middle layer. I could
start just prodding with my
meter to see where it re-surfaces... but, well, yeah. A schematic would make
that easier.
Have you looked at the IBM CGA card scehamtic? Could any of it match up?
The compostie video circuit for the IBM CGA card consists of :
A shift register (1.5 'S74) to produce the various pahses of the subcarrier
A 'LS151 mux ot select the corect phase based on the colour to display
4 buffers (half a 'LS244) to buffer the following 4 signals : Composite
sync *which is not simply the sync signals from the 6845, there;s quite a
bit of logic in the way, however this logic is also used for the outptus
on the DE9 socket, the compoite sync signal is effectively the XNOR of
those 2 outputs) ; blanking ; intensity (I bit); and the output of the mux
The outputs of those buffers go to a resistor netowrk to produce the
composite signal
Which is then buffered by a 2N3904 emitter follower.
There are no capacitors in the signal path on the IBM card.
Assuming the Compaq card did work correctly at one time (this is not
_certain_ of course), it would appear the fault must be around the
reistor network/emitter follower stage (assuming that's what was used).
Tracing that out shouln't be too hard.
-tony