Hi,
what a shame! sorry to hear it. Definitely NOT hopeless though. All depends on your electronics confidence but it's nearly always worth at least a basic investigation before giving up. Personally I would try it.
EGA and VGA work a bit differently so I'm not sure there can be a universal rule here. Unfortunately
as far as I know there is no absolutely standard colour code for VGA wires. (no idea for EGA). I assume you don't have the existing one. However...
- EGA is simpler and ought to be easier
- it's worth taking the backs of the cases off (if they have been powered up recently they can retain dangerous voltages, but if not they are usually fine) and looking at where the wires go into the board, because sometimes the wire attachment points have names/labels (in which case it's straightforward to fit a new cable) and sometimes they have an arrangement that is easy to relate to the plug arrangement (ie same shape, or are in a line numbered 1..9 or 1..15 which corresponds to the pin numbering). Only if you have NONE of this info do you start needing to trace where things go on the circuit.
- it's usually easy to identify the ground wire and that can help you decipher the rest (because you know which pin it's meant to be)
- identifying which wires are the synch wires and which is which is pretty critical. If you swap over a colour the result is weird but not likely to cause burning
- sometimes the main r, g, b wires on VGA are a different wire type than the others (with their own screening)
- sometimes r, g, b wires have corresponding colour codes (eg I've seen cables where they're all white with a stripe of the relevant colour) which makes it a bit easier
- I have no direct experience of EGA, only CGA and VGA. However it looks like EGA ONLY has ground, h and v sync, and digital colour signals so as long as you can find the ground and sort the sync out, the remaining pins are sending comparable signals
- VGA has both analogue signals (for the picture) and digital (for variations around digital identification/communication of setting info with the card) so there are quite a few more things going on on the VGA cable and it may be harder to figure out. The one time I had to worry about this I was lucky and the arrangement of the board made it clear.
Good luck!
