Re: re 5.25 drive

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

Slick <PAYSlick_RCBD@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Someone said at a computer store that I could use my IIGS's AppleColor
> RGB monitor with a new Mac, but that I would only get thousands of
> colors instead of millions. Was the salesperson mistaken, or did he
> confuse a different type of AppleColor with the one hooked up with my
> Apple IIGS? (real question)

They were mistaken.  Apart from one rather obscure case, you cannot use
a IIgs monitor on the Mac.  The IIgs monitor is not able to support the
higher scan rates required for high vertical resolution.

(It is apparently possibly to hook the IIgs monitor to a Mac, _provided_
it is a NuBus machine with one of Apple's original video cards.  This
would give you a 640x400 interlaced mode, which would look pretty awful
IMHO.)

There is a possible reason for their confusion: at least one of Apple's
early Macintosh monitors was ALSO called "AppleColor RGB" (I think it
was the 12 inch monitor).  Confused?  You will be...

However, there is no excuse for claiming that the monitor would only
"support" thousands of colours.  The number of colours is determined by
the computer video circuitry and the amount of video RAM.  It just ends
up producing a finer resolution in the voltage output to the monitor for
each primary colour.

(This differs from digital RGB monitors, as used with the Apple ///, and
more common on the //c and //e - all of these support 16 fixed colours.
This is similar to CGA on IBM compatibles.  EGA provides 64 fixed
colours, but VGA and later standards use analog RGB, so they have no
inherent limit to the number of colours.)

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand