kyodai
Experienced Member
I was gifted a nice IBM Portable clone (probably a Taiwanese product) today by a workmate.
It has an internal CRT that is powered by a cute Hercules card via DE9 (No surprise).
Well now we were talking about monochrome monitors and none of us really knows too much about them. We understand that Hercules, CGA and EGA all used TTL CRT displays and DE9 connectors. So the idea that the displays are compatible arose and we were curious if the HGC card could be replaced by a CGA or EGA card.
From my research on wikipedia i learned that HGC is compatible with MDA - no surprise since they use the same resolution and hercules was meant to be a replacement for MDA to display graphics. So I am 99.9% sure MDA and Hercules cards could be swapped.
One sentence from Wikipedia kept me from trying anything with this wonderful computer:
So obviously i don't wanna destroy the display.
Does anyone know more about the compability of these old TTL monochrome displays?
There's some adaptors to connect a modern display to an old HGC/CGA/EGA card - but is there also something to do it the other way round? WOuld be cool to have some VGA card in that machine and see the output on the monochrome display. But i guess that isn't possible or doesn't exist?
It has an internal CRT that is powered by a cute Hercules card via DE9 (No surprise).
Well now we were talking about monochrome monitors and none of us really knows too much about them. We understand that Hercules, CGA and EGA all used TTL CRT displays and DE9 connectors. So the idea that the displays are compatible arose and we were curious if the HGC card could be replaced by a CGA or EGA card.
From my research on wikipedia i learned that HGC is compatible with MDA - no surprise since they use the same resolution and hercules was meant to be a replacement for MDA to display graphics. So I am 99.9% sure MDA and Hercules cards could be swapped.
One sentence from Wikipedia kept me from trying anything with this wonderful computer:
Even though these all use the same DE9 connector, the displays cannot all be interchanged and monitors or video interfaces may be damaged if connected to an incompatible device using the same connector.
So obviously i don't wanna destroy the display.
Does anyone know more about the compability of these old TTL monochrome displays?
There's some adaptors to connect a modern display to an old HGC/CGA/EGA card - but is there also something to do it the other way round? WOuld be cool to have some VGA card in that machine and see the output on the monochrome display. But i guess that isn't possible or doesn't exist?