Re: Apple IIc --- output options

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article fxg@imib.RWTH-Aachen.De (Felix H. Gatzemeier) writes...

>I recently bought a IIc for cheap money and am now trying to get it to work
>with a TV set, with little success. Since there was no paper about it, I can
>hardly make out what all those icons are trying to tell me, so I'm somewhat
>lost.

    Well looking from the back of the case, going from left to right,
the IIc ports are as follows:

 DB9 = Joystick/paddles or mouse
DIN5 = Serial port-2 (usually for modem)
DB15 = Video expansion port (requires adapter box, except for LCD)
 RCA = NTSC composite video out
DB19 = 5.25 floppy drive (UniDisk 3.5 as well, with newer firmware)
DIN5 = Serial port-1 (usually for printer)
DIN7 = 12 volt converter (for IIc "power brick" or battery)

>If I plug in the usual antenna cable to the Cinch plug in the case, I get no
>signal at all. That's not that tragic, it expect it to deliver some US-type
>video signal (what's it called? PAL? Or was that the european one?), and I'm
>using it in Germany.

    As mentioned above, it supplies an NTSC video signal. On a North
American or Japanese television set (or VCR and other video devices)
it will hook in directly and provide color video. That is, assuming
you have a composite 'VIDEO IN' input. I suppose an NTSC->PAL type
converter would be required here.

>So I use that converter/adaptor box that gets attached to the video port,
>covers that cinch thing and offers two new ones --- both labeled with monitor
>(?) icons, one with overlapping circles (would that mean color?). With the
>circled plug, I get no signal at all, with the other one just a very poor
>image: shifted up, wavey, blurred horizontally, stripes on the background.
>Just enough so that I'm able to make out that the ting is apparently working,
>because different disks result in different images.

    Sounds like you have the RF-converter adapter for the IIc. I may
be wrong, but I thought Apple produced a separate NTSC and PAL version
of that adapter. I've personally never seen one myself, but it just
plugs into the Video Expansion Port and acts as a radio frequency
modular for a TV set. Here in North America, those usually operate
where you must set the TV to channel 3 or 4 (older ones used channel
33 or something up in the higher frequency bands).

>So, what I'm wondering here is: Is this a sign of a hardware defect? Is there
>some kind of trickery in attaching a IIc to a `modern' (i.e. no dials to turn)
>TV set? I have an old Orion Monitor dusting away in the corner that might
>accept TTL or RGB signals (now that's some description) --- how picky is a IIc
>with general monitors?

    Well you can connect a IIc to a digital RGB display (CGA/TTL)
but it requires a special adapter box plugged in, once again, to
the Video Expansion Port. The "Video 7" adapter was one such
device. Sorry I can't be of more help, I'm not that familiar
with PAL video.

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca