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Haul of interesting Apple II cards for cheap, including TTL RGB card?

VERAULT

VERAULT

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Jan 30, 2012
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Location
Connecticut, USA
I bought an original 1982 board model non-enhanced apple IIe which was supposed to be non-working for a really fair price. Reason I bought it was all the cards it came with:
An Echo Plus Speech synth card by Street Electronics Corp 198420200630_134230.jpg
An DRUM-KEY Drum Synth Card by Peripheral Visions Inc. 1984 20200630_134300.jpg
Apple Mouse interface card 20200630_134248.jpg
Paddle Adapple Combo board for hooking up #2 joystick 20200630_134423.jpg
Standard Disk II interface card (no photo needed)


But here is one that really has me intrigued. Its is a Kaga-Taxan RGB II-B card model 410-07 from 1983. From what little I can find this is a digital RBG card capable of sending utilizing digital rgb monitors.
20200630_134554.jpg The video out cable has been sliced to I need to find the pinout and make a new connector.
20200630_134633.jpg The red soldered wire on the card runs to a connector that is plugged into J13 pin 2 (which is usually for the video modulator)
2 wires coming off of cn3 are soldered to legs 7 and 8 of an 74166 on the logic board at location F5.
at IC5 on the card which is a 74LS74AP someone has crudely soldered on pin header to leg #11
20200626_212013.jpg
CN2 on the card has no cable and only pins 2 and 3 as if pin 1 was omitted or removed.
cn1 on the card is the video connector with 5 wires
there is a 3 pin jumper which lets you set either II or IIe (its set to IIe). The card is in socket 7. The only fingers on the edge connector are 19,23,24,25,26, and 35.
The only mod to the board besides the wires running to the 74166 is that the X7 jumper pads on the logic board have been bridged ( I always wondered the uses of all those X jumper pads)20200630_142140.jpg

Id really love to try and get this card working on a digital RGB monitor so any help or knowledge on the card would be appreciated.

The kyboard also has key overlay stickers as seen here:20200630_143635.jpg
With those stickers, the drum and speech synth cards and the RGB card I really wonder what the use of this machine was.
By the way, the IIe works just fine. Dont know why they said it was non-working.
 
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My understanding is that the Taxan card you have is Analog RGB, so you will need a IIGS monitor (however the red and green pins are swapped, if you plug it directly into the IIGS monitor colors will be wrong because of this). Obviously any analog RGB monitor will work, but the cable will be even more different.

Manual is here:

ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/documentation/hardware/video/taxan_rgb_interface_card.pdf

It says to turn your Taxan monitor to mode 2, which is Analog/Linear RGB:

https://archive.org/details/TaxanRGBVisionColorMonitorOwnersGuideByKaga/page/n1/mode/2up

Looks like one of the earliest examples of an analog RGB monitor, outside of NEC corp.
 
I think the overlay stickers on the keyboard were for Quark WordJuggler, a rather nice little word processor program.

Cheers,
Dave
 
rpiguy2 said:
My understanding is that the Taxan card you have is Analog RGB, so you will need a IIGS monitor (however the red and green pins are swapped, if you plug it directly into the IIGS monitor colors will be wrong because of this). Obviously any analog RGB monitor will work, but the cable will be even more different.
Click to expand...

The are not analog, they are definitely digital RGB.
 
Certainly the manual for the IIB seems to suggest its analog (or more accurately it states using a TAXAN RGBvision monitor, the monitor should be in mode II which, the monitors manual states enables linear RGB signal levels of 1.0 ~ 2.0 Vpp and no intensity signal)

Nice :)
 
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I found a couple loose sources online that label it as digital rgb. Reading about the monitors shows they display in 3 modes, (2 of those modes are analog and digital RGB). But Is the card digital RGB?
 
VERAULT said:
I found a couple loose sources online that label it as digital rgb. Reading about the monitors shows they display in 3 modes, (2 of those modes are analog and digital RGB). But Is the card digital RGB?
Click to expand...

As I said, the RGBvision monitors mode II appears to be analogue and the manual for the IIB card states that the RGBvision monitor should be in mode II, suggesting its analogue.

But, I have never seen either :)
 
So you have it confirmed working on digital RGB? See I am getting conflicting answers. I have read it is digital RGB as well.

Now I'm curious. If I would to make an adapter cable to connect to a digital RGB monitor what monitors are supported? Can I use one of my IBM 5153's? Should I instead go for the commodore style round din connector? or db9? The only monitor from taxan I found online was this one but I am guessing it is not correct. https://www.ebay.com/i/184025469533?ul_noapp=true
 
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